The Mental Emotional Health Blog

Here’s the difference between mentally preparing and worrying:

• Mental preparation is decisive and active. You think about options or situations ahead of time and decide how you will handle them. You resolve something here.
• Worrying is indecisive and passive. You also think about options or situations when you worry. But you don’t make a decision on how to handle them, and then the situations happen to you.  Worrying does nothing to resolve a concern or problem.

Even if your preparation turns out to be incorrect, at least you will not have wasted time as much time worrying.

A previous post here at MentalEmotionalHealth.com was entitled, “How To Accept Compliments” . That was mainly intended for people who might need to think of themselves more positively.

Today, I’ll take that a step further. In a relationship or friendship when one person compliments the other, there is an under-appreciated need to accept the compliment. This isn’t for the receiver, it’s for the giver.

Typically, when a person says something nice about someone else (especially someone close), the giving of the compliment is either ignored, minimized, dismissed, or reinforced. If the pattern is established that the receiver will almost always use the first three, and usually won’t reinforce the giving of the compliment, then the giver will tend to give less compliments over time. That and the giver gets more frustrated.

Compliments really are free most of the time. But even if there is some ulterior motive like you’re being set up or manipulated into feeling good about yourself, what’s wrong with that? If you suspect manipulation, accept the compliment first anyway.

If you want to feel better about yourself, acknowledge and accept nice things people say to you. You are not bragging because you are not making anything up or drawing attention to yourself. Someone else is paying positive attention towards you. That’s nice!

If you want to see your relationship/friendship improve quickly and feel more comfortable, acknowledge and accept compliments more. By offering a little positive reinforcement, you’ll both feel better.

In a previous post ( http://mentalemotionalhealth.com/2009/05/27/toxic-personalities/ ), I offered a couple brief thoughts and a link to an article about toxic personalities and I wanted to follow up on the subject today. 

One of my loyal readers is Cyndi, and she had a great comment on the post: “Ah, but what if they are unavoidable, like your spouse or your child? Learn to set good boundaries, I guess!” (It might also be a sibling, co-worker, or boss.)

That is exactly what to do when you deal with someone who is manipulative, overly dependent, or just emotionally draining and you can’t figure out why. Set boundaries. Be assertive. If someone is pushy and you set a polite boundary such as “Please don’t talk to me that way”, it might feel like you are being uncaring, rude, or maybe even mean. (Actually that would be another sign someone is having a toxic effect on you, if you ask politely and their reaction causes you to feel that you were wrong to set an appropriate boundary.)

Every person deserves to be treated respectfully, and it’s too bad some people don’t practice it often enough. But by setting good boundaries and drawing an appropriate emotional line, you can protect your feelings, energy, and relationships. Hey, it’s good to feel empowered!

I would estimate in my practice that at least 50% of my overall time working with adults as therapist has been offering advice on how to deal with, or helping “clean up” the emotional messes inflicted on my clients by, toxic personalities. Some people are just chronically not nice.

So in my almost-daily skimming of a few sites for good articles, I ran across this one from Shine (Yahoo): 8 Toxic Personalities to Avoid by Brett Blumenthal (I also recommend her blog at Brett’s Blog ). She does a nice job of being specific and explaining why each personality is toxic.

Knowing what to avoid successfully in life is as important as finding your direction and purpose.

Have a great day everyone!

Devin

When you remember and use your strengths, your weaknesses become secondary.