the right question



http://www.bonesigharts.com/store/good-friend

This week I have had three separate conversations with three unrelated people – and to summarize, each woman is struggling with a “friend” who is critical and negative within a relationship that was best described (in our mutual assessment) as toxic.

My question for each of them was why there was a question about it in the first place.
Seriously.
Stay with me here……

To my way of thinking, life it too precious and short to work that hard at holding onto a relationship that is that painful, stressful, non-supportive and/or disempowering.  That forces us to change or compromise who we are in order to get along and play nice.

I’ve been in those kinds of relationships. The ones where I constantly walked on egg shells, edited what I talked about, downplayed my happy, minimized my good, dimmed down my light, and filtered each word before it came out of my mouth, measuring it’s potential to ruffle, rile or incite the other person.

And still, even with doing all that for the sake of keeping the peace, have them pissed off at me for reasons I never could fully understand or avoid.

Bleck.

I am reminded of a story from my counseling days of a woman whose husband wanted eggs for dinner – one fried and one scrambled. So she prepared the eggs as he requested and set the plate down in front of him. He stared at the eggs before glaring up at her, saying with disgust and disdain, “try again dumb-ass - you fried the wrong one.”

There are some people in the world for whom nothing will ever be enough. No matter what you do or don’t do; say or don’t say. You will (in their mind) always fry the wrong egg.

It is said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results and enabling is creating a comfortable environment for unacceptable or unhealthy behavior.

Why keep going back into the kitchen to start over – taking the same container of eggs out of the fridge; putting the same frying pan on the burner and thinking (hoping) this time it will be different?

Why do we so often feel obligated to put up with others’ meanness - justifying and making excuses for their unwarranted and undeserved bullying and abuse?

Instead of simply walking away.
Rolling up the welcome mat.
Drawing the shades and putting the “gone fishing” sign up in the window. 
Planting our feet and saying,

I am sovereign and being in my inner sanctum as a friend is a privilege.

I deserve to be surrounded by people who love me and cherish me and think I’m all that plus a little bit more, and I will not settle for anything less than that.

Why?
Because we don’t believe it ourselves.
And that's really sad - for a whole lot of reasons.
But most especially because we can’t attract to ourselves what we don’t have within ourselves.  
We can’t.

I speak from experience.

So for me the important part of the conversation isn’t about how you can get along with a critical mean person and maintain a friendship/relationship that feels toxic more often than it doesn’t.

Nope.

It’s about why you think you have to.
Or need to.
Or want to.
Or should.

It’s about whatever it is inside yourself that keeps you settling for less because you don’t believe you deserve more.

That’s the question to ask and where the change begins.

Well....at least it was for me.