I had an interesting conversation with my mom today about the way people allow others to treat them. There's an employee at my mother's job who drives her up the wall with incessant questions and a need for constant attention all day, everyday (and that's not an exaggeration at all). Recently, he received a pay raise that now puts him at a higher salary than her and her response to this was to tell him she cannot be his go to person for questions anymore. He needs to learn how to figure things out himself and earn his own paycheck. Has this stopped him from continuing to seek constant guidance? No. He still does and she still helps, even though she can't stand him. She does this because it's just the kind of person she is. Sometimes she has a hard time saying no to people or cutting them off when they've more than earned it (yet cutting people off for minor offenses came easy to her for a long time). This is where she and I differ considerably. I'm loyal to a fault, but if you give me a reason to cut you off, I guarantee you won't know what hit you. My BS limit goes for miles but once I'm done, I'm done. My mom made a comment today about how people treat you the way you let them and, both consciously and unconsciously, they pick up on what kind of treatment you will allow by seeing how you deal with their crap. Most people do this subconsciously, we file away how ish went down in the back of our minds and only revisit it when more ish goes down. But some people are fully aware of what the score is and often pull up the receipts of the past when it suits them.
An example of subconscious filing can, or at least should, be found in most of the people in your life, particularly the ones closest to you. You love and care about each other so obviously you've had fights in the past that you've moved on from. You remember what went down, or maybe you don't, but you most likely remember the resolution and ultimate outcome. An example of this in my life would be when Agent W and I have had past tiffs or gotten on each other's nerves. This very rarely happens, but it has in the past and almost every time we retreated to our separate corners and let some time pass before picking up and continuing on with our friendship. It could just be my bad memory, or it could be that I value the friendship more than I value being in the right, but I can't tell you what many of those disagreements were about. All I know is they gave the blueprint for how we handle it when ish hits the fan, and neither of us let it spiral into anything nasty. We both know somewhere in our twisted little brains lies the record of what went down and who was in the wrong, but we don't care. We both felt the other heard our personal view of what happened and that was what was important. I didn't realize how much I value the subconscious filers until a certain ex came along. In fact, I remember telling Agent W during one of my rants about the ex that I no longer knew where the boundaries were between the two of us, particularly when we fought. When I have a disagreement with anyone in my life, I know what lines not to cross and when I need to walk away, and I know what shouldn't come flying out of my mouth during the argument. I'm usually VERY good at censoring myself in the heat of the moment (not so much the other 99% of the time, ironically). But with her, it was no-holds barred, smackdown fights where we both said stupid ish we shouldn't have. And I felt bad about my part in it for a long time. Yeah, I refrained from being mean a lot longer than she did, but I should've never stooped to her level at all. And neither of us should've allowed such treatment from anyone in our lives. That situation was a nightmare of my own making in that I let her do all that ish to me. I let her treat me like dirt. I let myself get turned inside out by someone who took note of every little slight and saved it for the perfect moment, the moment when she could hurt me with it the most. And that's what a conscious filer does. She remembered everything I told her, good or bad, vulnerable or angry, and she threw it back at me when it furthered her cause.
For reasons we may not always understand, a lot of us continue to allow sub-par of flat out awful treatment towards us from one person or another. Maybe it's someone you're in love with, maybe it's a friend who can't get their ish together, maybe it's even a family member. But I've found most people have been involved in this kind of negative treatment loop with at least one person, at least once in their lifetime. And it can be a hard habit to break. Sometimes you just care too damn much to walk away. Other times, you just get used to it and you get too caught up in it that it doesn't even occur to you to slow it down and demand better treatment. And we should all be doing that, really. We should all demand the highest respect and best treatment from the people in our lives. Everyone has problems, but no one has the right to take their problems out on anybody else. Nor should any of us readily accept someone not treating us the way we deserve. But that's part of the problem, isn't it? We don't always have the best view of ourselves or the highest self-esteem. It's a vicious cycle sometimes. But as one ex so eloquently put it on Instagram today, "Happiness is a choice". I find that I'm the happiest when I have people in my life who treat me well. And those are the only people I will allow from now on.
