Maybe It’s Not About You
Sun., January 12, 04:51 PM
No matter how good a lesson plan you have, there are times when something comes up to pull you off course. This certainly wasn’t meant to be the next post about “thinking tools.” I’ve just read a few diaries recently that made me think we need this.
When you are working very hard, often at more than one job – and you must count being a mother or housekeeper or wife among those jobs – it is very easy to feel responsible for everything around you. You miss some detail and your boss or your spouse rants and raves until you feel as if you’ve stolen all their money for your own benefit. Yes, sometimes you really dropped the ball. Sometimes it’s a problem you can correct, and sometimes you can only say, “I’m sorry, I can’t undo it, I will try very hard not to do it again.”
Some people are very good at railing at you when they know they are to blame. There also exist bosses who seethe and fume like a volcano, and it has absolutely nothing to do with you or the current situation. The first time such a thing happened to me, I ended up saying, “I’m very sorry, I’ll never do it again, but I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
It seems that there a lot of people who release their tempers at the first available target, whether or not that’s the cause of their suffering. One such bully I worked for routinely soothed his misery by passing it on to those around him. Once I figured out his game, I derived great satisfaction in responding very calmly to whatever he said, while he waited for me to become upset. I never did, and he just got more and more frustrated. I can be very malicious behind my polite exterior, but his ego was so big he never understood why he couldn’t evoke tears. (From me, of all people; I have been known to cry over rocket launchings – successful ones!) I don’t know whether the other women continued the attempt to break the vicious circle; it certainly was vicious.
You may also encounter the “professional victim,” the person who doesn’t say anything beyond “I’m unhappy,” and you start wondering what you did to make them so sad. (Supposedly this is a female behavior, but I know plenty of men who do it.) This is the time when you have to back off and look at the whole picture. If you’re lucky, you can see what his problem is, and then you know it isn’t your fault. I talked to Son-in-Law for more than an hour yesterday, before he began to tell us just how he had spent his afternoon – and what hadn’t worked – and just what pissed him off. And it had nothing to do with me, or with his wife, or with any other individual, unless you want to carry it back to the assembly line that made the object he had bought…
The point of all this is that none of us should walk around automatically blaming ourselves. You handle your responsibilities to the best of your ability. It is not your job to repair the whole world. Try backing off and using a few what if’s to analyze the whole situation. Don’t let anyone talk you into thinking it’s about you, and don’t fall into the trap of getting dramatic and wailing “it’s all my fault!” It isn’t, y’know. Sometimes it isn’t all about you.
