Elizabeth Flygare, "Teach people how to treat you."
1. That love is not a zero-sum game. Love multiplies; it’s not one pie that has to be cut into pieces and divided up. You don’t have to take some of your love away from one person in order to give love to another; you can give each person (and each pet!) ALL YOUR LOVE. If parents could explain this to their kids, maybe using circles to illustrate, perhaps there wouldn’t be any of that “Mom and Dad love you MORE” type of sibling rivalry. It took me until age 67 to learn this very simple thing about life, and I got it from a sermon in church last Sunday.
The rest of my list comes from a meeting with a licensed clinical social worker:
2. Do not give overwhelming emotional responses to people you don’t know well. Pay attention to who the recipient is before you disclose the personal. Otherwise, you are putting that person on the spot and creating a very uncomfortable situation, and you come off as insecure and immature. The recipient will have no idea how to respond, and the response might be very hurtful. Example: You belong to a group that meets regularly, and you feel rejected by the others. You tell a random person in the group - someone you barely know - “Everyone here HATES me!” What is this person supposed to say to you?
3. That if someone is trying to hook you, scapegoat you or otherwise push your buttons, step back and ask yourself, ”Is this my shit—-or your shit?” Think to yourself, ”Does this person KNOW me?” They may very well have no idea what you are about—this is covered more in the next point:
4. Realize that abusive remarks often come from people who are remembering past unpleasant encounters with you, or old patterns that you exhibited that invited the rib jab. More often than not, people refuse to see positive changes in others; their default is to hang onto stereotypical attitudes.
5, I have come upon the knowledge that there are often times when one simply has to walk away from the toxic past, move on and seek the positive - and maybe end up with a lot of new friends. (Consider those who “knew you when,” yet remain in your life and have your back. Those are REAL friends!)
4. If you have had these issues and are now working toward growth and positive change, it will become easier to tell the difference between your baggage and that of others. Tell yourself: “The more I believe in who I am as a person, the less I will be a target. If I still find myself getting gaslighted or hooked (we all do), I don’t have to take the bait, because I am learning a skill set that will teach me how to respond to such treatment, and how to avoid setting myself up for more.”
That, my friends, is a combination of one wise lesson and some good cognitive behavioral therapy, all in a span of three days.
