Dangers of Ambivalent People in your Life By Katherine Lightwood
Dangers of Ambivalent People in your Life
By Katherine Lightwood
And the sad thing is we never talk about this. This adult friendship issue is the next frontier of talking about how do we court friends. How do we build a friendship which is not romantic? How do we break up with a friend when the relationship is getting toxic? And the biggest thing that happens with friends, especially in my case, is that they do go stale.
And there are people I am sure you all can think of in your life, those who make you feel bad about yourself but somehow you have given them a license to criticize you. And that criticism comes in the disguise of 'constructive criticism' or 'I am your friend and I have right to pick up on your mistakes' kind of thing. And the thing is that you don't realize it how much it can affect you until it is too late.And I think that those are the kind of friendships that really drains you. And these are called ambivalent relationships.
So, toxic people, I get it, I understand that we all want to get rid of those people and that is very obvious. But the real danger I think is in ambivalent relationships. In this relationships, there are people where either you don't know how you stand with them or you don't know if you really enjoy hanging out with them. And those are the ones that take most energy than those toxic ones. Because they tend to creep in and stay in. Think about this if you have toxic persons then boundaries are easy. If they ask you are you willing to hang out or not you can simply say no to them. But if an ambivalent person asks you out at a birthday party or asks you to work on something with them, it will suck will mental energy. And if you are an introvert like me, your energy is finite and so is your mental space.
And this is something I didn't realize until much more recently. I thought mental space was endless. You can learn and think forever, but actually, we only have a certain amount of mental time for every day. And if we are dedicating that precious time trying to figure out if we did something wrong or if we said something that will hurt anybody then it would be a terrible waste of mental energy. And that's why I think ambivalent relationships are more dangerous. And for me personally, it's very very hard to put that level on them that who is toxic and who is not. And the most tricky thing is that even though the person may not be toxic at first but you never realize they can evolve to be a toxic person in your life.
And lately, I started asking one simple question when I get lost in this dilemma. And that is 'Are they really happy for me?' and if the answer is 'no' then I start to cut them from my life because of my own sake. And if you are ever questioning that then it means they are never truly happy for you. And that's the only thing you have to ask yourself and it might be a very inconvenient truth at first.
You see, you are very emotionally safe with your enemies as their criticism can never affect you, but you are very emotionally vulnerable with your friends or loved ones. If an ambivalency is created there, and they start to break you down then it is a really messed up situation. And you really need to get out from there as quickly as possible. And in this situation you are like, you sit in bed and rerun all the things that they have said, you will worry about all the things that could potentially happen. If you are with someone and they are either not mean well for you or planning to take a swipe at your neck. And you can somehow smell that threat and even though consciously your brain is checking if they said or do anything wrong but you intuition does tell you if anything is going wrong. And that's what keeps you up at night.It's your conscious brain battling with the unconscious part of your brain.
So, that was my thought of the day. To see more posts like this make sure to visit our main page and facebook page. And do not forget to visit our institute's page to know more about graphic design, 3D, animation courses and other awesome stuff. Till then good day to you.
Katherine Lightwood
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