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."

Toxic Personality Week, Day Two: The Blamers

blame (bleym) noun
blamed, blam·ing, blames

1. To hold responsible.
2. To find fault with; censure.
3. To place responsibility for (something): He blamed the crisis on poor planning.

Sometimes it's cute, like when my friend's 3 year old was cleaning her room and knocked over the glass of water that she had put on the floor. The kid knows that mom has a rule - no glasses on the floor. Mom knows that the glass will go unnoticed and eventually get knocked over. So it was kind of cute when the kid kicked the glass over and yelled at mom, "It's your fault! That wouldn't have happened if you hadn't made me clean my room!"

Not so bad, right? Not so horribly abusive. But this attitude can be toxic to the person on the receiving end of a blame tirade, whether The Blamer is a child or an adult. And when the same thing happens on a global scale it brings countries to war, "You made me drop a bomb on you because...," brings society to chaos, "You made us tear gas you because...," and rips relationships apart, "You made me cheat on you because... ."

I think that it is harder to identify The Blamer as a toxic personality (TP) than yesterday's featured TP, The Shamer. When an authority figure places blame on you and it feels bad you might want to complain but don't because you might be accused of shirking responsibility or of just not being tough enough. Society encourages you to be tough, to be oriented on pain as a vehicle for personal growth and achievement because after all, whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger - right? This seems like such a backward idea to me, but that's a rant for another day.

The Blamers seem to have the idea that they should be able to float through life untouched by pain. They resent the downs in life, believing that someone or some event is preventing them from being up. Silly silly people. By refusing to embrace the experience of being down they never really fully experience being up. By insisting on Blaming others for the things that they are unhappy about they never take real responsibility for themselves and their actions.

And so in the spirit of placing blame on others I shall point the finger at: Toxic Personalities Day Two: The Blamers

I know what I said. The high level executive who would slam his fist onto the board room table during weekly progress meetings and yell at everyone in the room that he absolutely did or did not say whatever was the opposite of what everyone in the room heard. He would insist that they were all conspiring against him, and had gotten together behind his back to lie about the projects they were assigned and their deadlines. He would insist that people had made promises to complete work that had never been discussed and that deadlines should have been met that were never on any calendar. He also would insist that he had never made any of the promises about his own work that everyone heard him make. By the time I quit that job (to spend a month in Amsterdam - but that's another story) I didn't know if I was coming or going.

But it's not my fault - God must hate me.
The ex-boyfriend who thought that being happy was a sign of being shallow and that the pain of chronic depression showed his true depth of character and is what made him a true artist. I dated him for 4 years and when I finally left him it was like I hadn't felt the sun on my skin in that long. Look I feel for you, I do. I get it -- it's hard being you. I just don't care so much that I am willing to lose myself in your misery. Not any more. It is easy to whine about how hard life is and it is hard to find the good when you feel like crap. Listening to you whine about your problems brings me down, which I suspect is your ultimate goal. A discussion on the existence of God as metaphor, metaphysical being, or myth is a conversation for another day. Today I am going to tell you right to your computer screen face that God is not holding a rain cloud of despair over your head. Really. It just is not happening that way.

No one understands how hard it is to be me!. Why are your problems so much worse than everyone else's? Because they're yours that's why. Things are tough all over and you are not the only one who thinks the boss is a terrible manager, or a manager who thinks that your employees don't work hard enough. Or that the bus driver is rude, or your parents didn't get to know the real you. Your parents did the best they could and maybe their best was crap -- I believe you when you tell me that you had an unhappy childhood or an abusive husband, or any other really horrible life experience that might have come your way. But you don't have a right to force your self-pity on anyone within earshot. Save it for therapy.

When The Blamer is a child. It has to be said -- people we are raising a generation of whiny brats and this is a much bigger threat to the future of our country than our waistlines. Manufactured victimization does nothing for our self-esteem. I'm gonna let an expert say it, "Charles Sykes argues that educators' emphasis on egalitarianism and building self-esteem have caused an eroding of true learning in the American classroom." A Nation of Victims.

This goes for adults tooI am a fat woman. I am not thin. I do not blame my mother's encouragement to finish everything on my plate as the reason for my being fat. I have a thin friend who felt guilty as a child for not eating more and she forced herself to eat as much as she could to please her mom. Her mom would pinch her tummy and tsk and say, "too thin" with a sorrowful expression on her face. My grandmother would pinch my tummy and say "zaftik" with a sorrowful expression on her face. Regardless of the outcome in our comparative weights these women who loved us were not abusive.

How to Deal with The Blamers. The idea that life would be peaches and cream, butterflies and sunny days, a non-stop Gershwin romantic musical if only someone else hadn't rained on your passion parade is beyond ridiculous. I believe that my life is absolutely perfect. A perfect life consists of joy and misery, loving myself and having low self-esteem, feeling pretty and feeling ugly, physical health and illness, sharing laughs with friends and fighting with someone I love. Life is an enormous menu of experience available to me at all times and I want it all, even the bad stuff. Walk away my friends, you gotta walk away.

These are the toxic people in my neighborhood.

Celebrating Toxic Personality Week

What do you mean you've never of TP Week? Didn't you get the memo?

I have decided to address the issue of toxic people in my life as a lifetime project. We all know these people personally. We have worked for them, dated them, and are related to them.

So get ready because this is Toxic Personality Week here at A Celebration of Curves. And because I celebrate not only the curves of our beautiful bodies but also the curves that life throws our way, I'd like to identify these people in my life and do my best to see the good in them. I figure it can only make me stronger.

I used to be surrounded by toxic people. I believed that because there was so much wrong with me God had sent these people to point out on a daily basis how insufficient I was as a human being. Gross right? I believed that I deserved the pain of toxic relationships. About 10 years ago – when I turned 30 – I took on a personal pledge to Increase My Capacity for Pleasure and to Decrease my Tolerance for Pain. This has been the single most impactful decision I have ever made in my life and continues on a daily basis to guide me.

I have compiled a list of the types of toxic people that we all encounter and I'm going to share with you how I have chosen to deal with them. Since I have a lot to say on the subject of toxic people I decided to make this a 5 part series.

Today – The Shamers, Tuesday – The Blamers, Wednesday – The Drainers, Thursday – The Gossips, and on Friday my personal greatest nemesis – The Devil’s Advocate or as I prefer to call them - Those People who Argue, Ridicule and Compete Merely to Put You Down and Prove that they are Better. Grrrr…they really burn me up. But for now…

Toxic Personality of the Day: The Shamers

Shamers are obvious from their Judging and Criticizing:
"I wouldn't have done it that way."
"Do you really want to wear that?"
"Let me tell you what's wrong with your idea."

I have known many men and women who think that they would “help” me by pointing out all the things about me that they thought could be improved if only I could be convinced to make a few changes all thanks to their “constructive criticism.”

Shamers Really Do Want to Improve You. The boss that would stand over my desk lecturing me about calories, carbs and the spiritual purity that comes from eating a purely organic vegetarian diet and how totally super it would be for me to realize that I wasn't happy - how could I be since I was fat - and I wouldn't even know how miserable I had been until I lost some weight and improved my skin by buying incredibly expensive veggies and skin care products from New York City's most expensive markets. Honestly! Did she even know what she was paying me? Not much I can tell you that. All while I scarfed down a sandwich in between answering her phones and picking up her dry cleaning. Maybe she didn't know that I knew all about her cocaine habit. By the way - I eat lots of vegetables and my skin is absolutely luminescent.

Shamers Who Are Bigots. The boss who actually stormed over to my desk one day red-faced and shouting so loud that people came out of their offices to see what was going on when she found out I am half-Jewish. I had told a funny Christmas story about my grandparents (which I will tell as a special Christmas Eve post). When she asked if these were my Greek grandparents, I told her that no - my mother’s parents were Jewish. I didn’t think anything of it until the next day when she threw a hissy fit first thing in the morning saying that she had been up all night wondering what else I had lied about and accusing me of being a "secret Jew." I told her that it was no business of hers who my ancestors slept with, picked up my personal items and walked out. She screamed at me in the hallway until the elevator came saying that "people don't like to surprised with a thing like that" and that I had better admit what I was for my own good or "someone might come after you." I asked her if she would feel more comfortable if I came to work wearing a gold star pinned to my shirt. Then I flipped her off and left the building. And she never paid me for my last week of work.

Shamers Who Just Want to Help. The boss who hated my curly hair because “it always looks so messy and everyone is just going to think you got a perm." She decided to help me because I was single and obviously the reason why I couldn't get a date was because of my hair. Excuse me but it just so happens that I couldn't get a date because I was much too busy being consumed with self-loathing at the time. Pretty easy to do with a boss like you. Every day she would come and just look at me so sadly. "Please see a hairdresser. Really, if you would just take a little time in the morning and blow your hair straight and wear a little makeup...it's not like you're that unattractive. Really, it worked for a friend of mine. She started fixing herself up and now she's engaged." Listen up people - my father is from Greece – where people have curly hair and my mother’s family is Austrian, Russian and Romanian – places where people have curly hair, not to mention all the other nationalities that have DNA containing the possibility of curly hair. So the hair – yeah I’m keeping the curls. And for your information they are bouncin' and behavin' and my husband loves them.

The co-worker who thinks no one else can do his/her job. Let's get this straight people -- you are replaceable. You are not the only person who is capable. You can take a lunch break. The company will not fall apart if you step away from your desk. Loudly bragging about how much you are needed does not convince anyone that it is true and pointing out everyone else's mistakes (real or imagined) does not magically hide your own. You are not making friends and one day someone is going to get back at you. Interrupting people to explain to them that they just don't really understand things, publicly ridiculing other's ideas and making derisive comments about someone else's personal matters, ignoring boundaries for the sake of "helping" someone with your superior insight only makes you the most loathsome person in the office.

How to deal with The Shamers. I remind myself that the only people who constantly point out someone else's "faults" are people who are overwhelmed with their own. These people have such low self-esteem that they never really see you at all. All they see is something that they don't like about themselves. I imagine how hard it must be to wake up every day constantly worried that one day someone will see through their clever facade and see how horrible they really are. they aren't willing to work on themselves and are using other to non-confront their own fears of fitting in. And then I am thankful that I have learned to like myself enough to enjoy people.