How Your Actions Make You Lose Friends & Become Powerless
Why people scare you & how you can transform into a social butterfly
Open Peeps - Illustration by Pablo Stanley (blush.design)
It’s been a hectic week. I have been troubled by a backache that refuses to go away. It has made me miss my morning runs. What’s worse it makes me uncomfortable, so I am not able to sit for a period of time to write. On the personal front my son starts his school (we do that early in India; he is just 2 ½). You know how mothers are put through the wringer more than the kids? It makes me feel so vulnerable that I might just write about it someday.
In the meanwhile, here is today’s edition.
You will be amazed at how scared all of us are of our actions alienating other people.
They are regular people just like us. With the same humanness. Yet they inspire terror in us, make us want to run, take cover, disappear into oblivion, anything but face them.
You will also be amazed at how much what I say here rings true.
All of us, you & me, are feverishly attached to things that don’t belong to us.
Yet we defend them with our honor. These are our beliefs. Our parents & teachers become our gatekeepers & feed into our minds the things they believe in. We lap them up. We believe in the same things to find meaning. We believe to belong. Our beliefs help us cling to our lineage, our ancestry & our institutions.
Most of our beliefs are in reality, illusions. But we see only the illusions clearly, never seeing life as it actually is.
Our mind uses its beliefs to survive people.
This is how I think it works.
Our mind is not able to understand others so it makes a mental model of them.
And then we believe that our mental model is real. We fail to see other people as THEY are. We see others as WE are, through our mental models of life that we form as children. We see most people in black or white. They are either angels sent to guide us or demons sent to destroy us.
We live in a make-believe world where we birth our inner voice. And everything someone says or does becomes about us.
This is how angels become demons.
When we hear this make-believe voice, we think it is ‘me’ when it is actually an illusion at best & an obstacle at worst.
The voice tells us two things that cause maximum damage with people:
1. We are not enough, so we need validation from the world to become enough. This thought makes us needy. We feel we don’t deserve others’ kindness.
People are dangerous & they will hurt us. So, while we appreciate those who treat us well, we let fester the feeling that they are kind for a selfish reason.
We are caught in the loop of low self-esteem & fear of others’ intentions. We don’t draw boundaries in a kind compassionate way. We let them invade our private spaces. But we feel sore every time a violation occurs. Now doesn’t that just reinforce our belief that people are dangerous?
This has happened to me time & again.
I shut up then blow up
This is probably the way it is with many of us. Our anger festers until one otherwise fine day we cannot hold it in any longer. We retaliate. Our retaliation is typically an overreaction of rage. The target of our retaliation is surprised & hurt. They cannot understand our reaction. In their world their action was not so big a deal.
We lose friends in this pattern. We are unable to trust anyone. We cannot be trusted in turn once our pattern of ‘shut up & blow up’ is revealed for the world to see.
Unlike what Dale Carnegie’s ‘How To Win Friends & Influence People’ says we cannot just be ‘nice’ to people all the time.
We have to work on our inner demons to see other people as they are- just human.
You have a weapon.
You know that no one else sees reality as it is. Everybody suffers in their heads plagued by illusions & delusions. If a person is mean, angry, vengeful, unethical or evil it means they are suffering more in their head than others.
We can treat them with compassion for the suffering they are going through. They think their distortions of reality keep them safe when they actually just keep them from being happy.
A simple tool you can use to handle tough people is to take deep breathes. When you breathe slow & deep you relax & connect to your peace & wisdom. Your voice slows down.
The Indians call this distortion of reality, the dream like state of our existence, ‘Maya’.
For most of us life is not a dream but a waking nightmare we need to step out of, to find to peace & joy.