Toxic Personality Week, Day Three: The Drainers

Day Three of Toxic Personality Week and we are on a roll! Can you feel the negative vibes absolutely melting and morphing into positivity? Woo hoo! Let's keep this one simple shall we?

I love your hair! Where did you get it done? Oh yes...I used to go there until I found a much better place! Of course it costs a fortune but I'm worth it. Yours is nice too.

I have been struggling all day with this. I am actually feeling completely emotionally drained. Each time I try to write out specific examples from my life, as I have previously in my series These are the Toxic People In My Neighborhood, I just stare at the screen, my lower lip trembles and I want to go in the bathroom and cry. I had wanted to post this at 11:00 a.m. but here I am at my laptop at 8:15 p.m. finally pulling it all together. This is the effect of The Drainers.

The phone rings at 2:30 a.m. and it's your friend who has just:
Broken up with a boyfriend/girlfriend or taken their pet to the vet emergency room or lost their job or had a bad dream that reminded them of some crappy childhood memory.

And they are calling you because:
They are sad and need someone to talk to; or they have run out of their prescription anti-depressants and are contemplating suicide and you are the only person in the world who can convince them that life is worth living, or they have just taken a handful of speed/snorted a few lines of coke and are flying on high octane and want to convince you to jump in your car right now and go to Vegas.

You are at a party and:
A friend comes over to tell you that you look really great and asks where you got that fabulous dress/handbag/date. You open your mouth to answer and she launches into a rapid fire description of her own dress/handbag/date. She then leaves the party with your date because she thought that they might be soul mates and she knew that you would want her to be happy.

You arrive for a meeting and:
The co-worker who promised to print and make copies of a report that both of you worked on (and will receive credit for) shows up at the meeting without the report. When you ask her why she didn't bring the copies she laughs at your "faulty" memory, insists calmly that she never made any such promise and tells the now laughing room full of people that you would "lose your head if it wasn't attached."

How to Deal with The Drainers
I think that there is really only one thing that works with these people. Give until you feel good and not until you hurt. When you identify The Drainers in your life be insistent on your boundaries and relate with them much less often if not at all. And as I said on Monday, "Increase your Capacity for Pleasure and Decrease your Tolerance for Pain. And as I said on Tuesday, "Walk away people. You gotta walk away."