Staying Close to Your Own Story When other people try really hard to recruit you into playing a supporting role in their personal dramas, you have the right to remain in the audience. Many people, in the face of insults, criticism or provocation feel the irresistible urge to play best supporting lead in the offending person’s drama. I know that for those who know me my dispassion can be disconcerting. However, for me it’s about keeping relationships as safe as possible even when the other is doing their best to take emotional hostages. Here is a story. I walked into one of those tiny repair shops to witness a customer, in what psychologists would describe as a narcissistic rage, biting off the heads of the owners about the outcome of a repair job that they had undertaken. The owners were trying their best to stay composed and prevail upon the raving egotist that they had advised him categorically not to repair the item because they did not expect that the outcome of the repair to be satisfactory and in any case it would be cheaper to purchase a new one. Drunk with his outrage and inability to control the situation through threat and intimidation the customer could simply not hear it. Eventually he left. The shopkeepers were clearly on the verge of post traumatic stress from the incident and started to do a trauma debriefing amongst themselves while I was standing waiting. I thought I would help them along so that I could get what I needed, as well as the fact that I cannot stand to see people that upset. I said to them simply “Consider that you had only five minutes of that man’s inner world. He lives with the person that you just experienced his whole waking life.” Their laughter soon turned to thoughtful compassion as they also realised that this was not about them, this was not about the issue at hand, it was about the customer’s way of being in the world. Because our participation in the creation of our world is opaque to us, we do not realise that what we experience in life is ourselves and nothing else. Where we place our attention, how we choose to construe events and the emotions that those choices evoke in us are all our own personal creations. Herein lies the key to personal happiness. We can decide what type of world we would like to live in and then start focussing our attention on the elements that we wish to make up our world. These elements are the themes of our thoughts, our values and being in relationships with the type of person that we would want to be a primary influence in our personal experience.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 20:04:03 +0000
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