Tips For Dealing with Negativity
“Negativity is infectious.”
If there’s one thing I learned from years of working in customer service, it’s that most of the time, the way people treat you has absolutely nothing to do with you.
People often internalize negativity, reliving it, letting it fester, until eventually, they push it back out onto people around them. It’s a real bitch, but that’s how the infection stays alive.
When you experience negativity, you get the choice about how to handle it. You can internalize it or neutralize it.
I used to internalize it. If someone treated me poorly, I’d assume it had everything to do with me. I’d relive it, stew over it, get angry about it, and then treat myself badly until I was numb. It never resolved the negativity or the experience. It just crept back up day after day until eventually, I let it out onto someone else.
That was an ineffective strategy.
These days, I know that the way people behave is outside of me and has nothing to do with me.
Still, when emotion is tied up with different people, like a lover or your mother, sometimes having emotions as a result of someone’s negativity is simply unavoidable.
That’s when the work comes in of grounding and centering yourself in the present moment.
You can’t control the actions of others, but you can control how you show up day after day, and how you treat the people around you.
Negativity is infectious. You can do the active work to stop the spread. Fuck, we’ve all had practice with that this year.
If there’s anything you want to talk about regarding your life, negativity, breaking bad habits, etc, you can email me at andee@getthefuckoff.com
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