S2 EP246 – Are You a Trash Can for Others’ Negativity?

Transcription:

Hi everyone! Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. Many of my clients tell me that their partner, or their parent, or their adult child, or their friends call them or get together with them primarily to complain. They feel dumped on, and they don’t know what to do about it. This is what I’m addressing today, along with helping you become aware if you are also a complainer.

My client Carmen, told me at the end of one of her sessions, “I’m no longer willing to be a trash can for others’ negativity.”

“Wow!” I said, “I’m delighted to hear that! And I love that metaphor!” which is where I got the title for this podcast.

Carmen is a lovely, warm, intelligent and compassionate young woman in her late 20’s. Coming from a very narcissistic mother, Carmen learned early in life to be safe from her mother’s anger by listening to her complaints and other forms of negativity. She learned to put aside her own feelings and be a mother to her mother. Of course, no matter how much she gave to her mother, it was never enough. It wasn’t until Carmen started her Inner Bonding work that she discovered what narcissism was.

Early in our work together, Carmen realized that most of her friends were just like her mother. “I sit and listen to them complain or listen to them brag. They are never interested in me at all. If I say anything about myself, they always bring it right back to themselves. Why are so many of my friends like this?” she asked.

“Because” I said, “you are willing to listen without speaking up for yourself. There are many self-absorbed people, narcissistic people with entitlement issues, who just love it when someone is willing to listen to them. As long as you are willing to listen to their complaints and other forms of negativity, and support their self-centeredness, they will continue to do it.”

“But if I speak up, I won’t have any friends,” she said.

“Well” I said, “you might not have many friends for a while, but eventually you will find new friends – people who care about you like you care about them. When you are willing to care about yourself instead of putting yourself aside, you will attract people who care about you. But this will take time. You need to be willing to lose others rather than continue to lose yourself. Do you think you are ready to do this?” I asked her.

“Yes!” she said. “I don’t want to be a trash can anymore. I don’t want people dumping their negativity and complaints onto me anymore.”

How do you feel inside when you allow others to dump their negativity – their complaints, their anger, their self-centeredness and sense of entitlement – onto you? If you really look inside instead of ignoring your feelings, you will discover that you feel really lonely with these people. There is no mutual support, no sharing of love, no mutual giving and receiving. You give and they take, and you end up feeling drained and lonely. Yet you hang in there for fear of being alone with no friends or no partner.

If you are really honest with yourself, you will find that it’s not worth it – that you deserve better. 

It takes faith and courage to speak up for yourself. It takes courage to say to your friend or someone else who is dumping their negativity onto you, “This doesn’t feel good. Whenever we are together, you complain or talk on and on about yourself. You are rarely interested in me, and this is no longer okay with me. Either this needs to change or I don’t want to spend time with you. It’s not fun for me and I just end up feeling used and drained. Are you willing to talk about this with me? I’d like you to help me understand this.”

When you become willing to speak up for yourself with an intent to learn, you will discover which of your friends are really friends and which have been using you. Some people may say, “I’m so grateful you spoke up. I didn’t realize I was doing this. I want to stop, and I would appreciate you pointing it out to me next time I do it.” Others will go into denial and say, “That’s not true. I listen to you all the time.” Others will just get angry and go away.

It’s a great way to discover who your friends really are!

However, in order to have the courage to do this, you need practice having compassion for your own feelings, rather than just compassion for others.

One of the most important jobs of the loving adult is self-compassion – for your experiences, feelings, and needs. Yet it never occurs to many people to choose compassion for themselves.

With many people, the wounded self is in charge much of the time. When safety is your highest priority and your intent is to have control over getting love and avoiding pain, you are operating from your wounded self. Your wounded self generally abandons the inner child by ignoring, judging, or numbing your own feelings and needs.

When your intent is to control, which puts your wounded self in charge, you might find yourself being compassionate toward others’ feelings and needs while not even being aware of your own – caretaking others in order to get their approval and hoping others will then attend to your feelings and needs. This is when you are allowing others to use you as a trash can for their negativity and complaints.

Any time your attention is on others while ignoring yourself, your inner child will feel abandoned.

You might think that your feelings of abandonment are coming from others not caring about you, but feeling abandoned is actually coming from how you are treating yourself.

Often, in addition to ignoring your feelings – ignoring your inner child, the wounded self will judge your feelings. Self-judgment is a form of control. The wounded self believes that if you judge yourself, you can get yourself to do it “right” and then you will get the attention and approval you seek, or at least avoid another’s anger or disapproval. The wounded self is always focused on getting love, compassion, connection, attention, and approval from others, or avoiding anger or disapproval, and it uses self-judgment in the hopes of becoming “perfect” enough to have control over getting what it wants from others – listening perfectly, being the perfect partner, friend, parent, son or daughter, colleague, and so on.

When you open to learning about loving yourself – when loving yourself and learning about what is loving becomes your highest priority – you stop ignoring, judging, numbing yourself, or giving yourself up and expecting others to give you what you are not giving to yourself. It’s when you choose love rather than control that you start being able to feel compassion for yourself.

It was because of her Inner Bonding practice and learning to have compassion for herself that Carmen was able to speak up for herself with the people in her life. While it was hard for her to discover how many of her friends really didn’t care about her, she felt so much better being with the few friends who did care, and for no longer being a trash can for others’ negativity

Compassion, like love, peace, and joy, is not a feeling that is generated in your body.

These energies are what spirit is. When your intent is to learn, your heart opens and the love that is God is able to enter. Compassion is not an experience we create; it is an experience we open to. When your intent is to love yourself, you will begin to feel compassion for yourself.

This is what our inner child really needs. When you are truly compassionate with yourself, you will find that you no longer need or seek approval and attention from others, so you are no longer willing to give yourself up to avoid disapproval and rejection. When you are able to have compassion for your existential feelings of life – your sadness, sorrow, loneliness, grief, and helplessness over others – as well as compassionately learning from your wounded feelings of anxiety, depression, guilt, shame, anger, and so on, your inner child feels loved, seen, acknowledged, understood, and valued.

I find that when I move into compassion for myself when others are complaining, angry, blaming, distant, needy, or going on and on, I can easily discover the loving action in the moment toward myself and them

Compassion for myself brings great clarity, safety, and a deep sense of self-worth.

Instead of trying to get others to change so that I can feel safe and worthy, my safety and sense of self-worth comes from my own loving actions toward myself and others. This may sound simple, yet it is often difficult to remember to do in the moment. Most of us are so used to responding from our wounded self to our painful feelings of loneliness and helplessness, such as giving ourself up or getting angry or distant, that we completely forget about compassion for ourselves. I have found that the more I practice compassion for myself throughout the day, the more I am able to remember to open to compassion at those times when others may be dumping their negativity onto me.

You cannot abandon yourself and be in self-compassion at the same time. The two are mutually exclusive. Therefore, the quickest way to move out of self-abandonment is to invite compassion into your heart. Compassion fills emptiness, pacifies fear, soothes anxiety, relieves depression, creates inner safety, and opens the door to the peace and joy of making yourself matter, and of taking loving action on your own behalf.

You don’t have to spend any energy seeking compassion from others. It’s right here for you, as available as the air you breathe. We live in an ocean of love and compassion. All you need to do is open your heart to it through your intent to be loving to yourself.

Complaining is a way of life for some people. It was certainly a way of life for my mother. I don’t remember a day going by without her complaining, endlessly. I don’t think I ever heard a word of gratitude out of my mother’s mouth. No matter how good things were, she would manage to find something wrong. No matter how perfect I was – and God knows I tried to be perfect! – she always found something wrong with me, as well as with my father.

Over the years of counseling others, I’ve noticed that some people start every session with a complaint. They can’t seem to help it. Like my mother, they are addicted to complaining. 

Why do people complain? What is it they want or hope for when they complain?

People who complain are generally people who have not done the emotional and spiritual work of developing a loving, compassionate inner adult self. They are operating as a wounded child in need of love, attention and compassion. Because they have not learned to give themselves the attention and compassion they need, they seek to get these needs met by others, and complaining is a way they have learned to attempt to get this. They use complaining as a form of control, hoping to guilt others into giving them the attention, caring and compassion they seek.

Complaining is a “pull” on other people. Energetically, complainers are pulling on others for caring and understanding because they have emotionally abandoned themselves. They are like demanding little children. The problem is that most people dislike being pulled on and demanded of. If they are not caretakers, giving themselves up and allowing themselves to be trash cans for others’ negativity, they will likely withdraw in the face of another’s complaints.

This is what my father did. He withdrew. He shut down and he was emotionally unavailable to my mother as a way to protect himself from being controlled by her complaints. Of course, he didn’t just do this in response to my mother. He had learned to withdraw as a child in response to his own mother’s complaints and criticism. He entered the marriage ready to withdraw in the face of my mother’s pull, while she entered the marriage ready to make my father emotionally responsible for her. A perfect match!

My father’s withdrawal, of course, only served to exacerbate my mother’s complaining, and she constantly complained about my father’s lack of caring about her. Likewise, my mother’s complaining served to exacerbate my father’s already withdrawn way of being. This vicious circle started early and continued unabated for the 60 years of their marriage, until my mother died.

While my parents loved each other, their ability to express their love got buried beneath the dysfunctional system they created. Unfortunately, this is all too common in relationships. The most common relationship system I work with is where one partner is pulling – with complaints, anger, judgments, and other forms of control – and the other is withdrawing.

A person addicted to complaining will not be able to stop complaining until he or she does the Inner Bonding work of developing a loving adult part of themselves capable of giving themselves the love, caring, understanding, and compassion they need. As long as they believe that it is another’s responsibility to be the adult for them and fill them with love, they will not take on this responsibility for themselves.

Our inner child – the feeling part of us – needs attention, approval and caring. If we don’t learn to give this to ourselves, then the wounded self will either seek to get it from others or learn to numb out with substance and process addictions. If, as a child, a person saw others get attention through complaining – as my mother did with my grandmother – and if complaining worked for the child to get what he or she wanted, then it can become an addiction. Like all addictions, it may work for the moment, but it will never fill the deep inner need for love. Only we can fill this need for ourselves, by opening our hearts to our source of love. Only we can do the Inner Bonding work of developing a loving adult capable of opening to the love of spirit and bringing that love to the child within. People stop complaining when they learn to love themselves and fill themselves with love.

While you might find yourself giving yourself up when others are dumping their complaints and negativity on you, do you sometimes do the same with others who are giving themselves up to you? 

How often do you find yourself feeling negative or expressing negative thoughts? Why does the wounded self keep putting out negativity, even when you might be trying so hard to stay positive and connected with truth?

There is a good reason for this. The energy of our ego wounded self comes from having control over getting pleasure and avoiding pain, which it tries to do through various forms of self-abandonment – especially self-judgment. It believes that if it judges us enough, we will do what we have to do to get pleasure and avoid pain. It becomes addicted to the negativity of self-judgment as a way to control.

The wounded self gets its energy – its very life – from negativity.

Without negativity, the wounded self does not exist. At those times when you are very connected and “in the flow,” the wounded self is not functioning – but it doesn’t like not functioning. So it will start in with its litany of negativity, complaints, and self-judgment whenever it can. At those times that you are not consciously choosing to connect with your higher self, or when an outside situation triggers an old fear, it can easily move in.

For example, you awaken in the middle of the night or the early morning. You try to go back to sleep but suddenly a negative thought pops into your mind:

“Oh my God, I’ve made the wrong decision, and now it’s too late. This is going to be a disaster.”

Or “I’ve got to find a way to earn more money.”

Or “I will start my diet in the morning.”

And so on. You are off and running, filled with anxiety before you can stop yourself.

Or someone important to you is dumping their complaints and negativity onto you, or they are angry, distant, or unresponsive. You feel a pang of anxiety and then your wounded self gets going:

“I’m trapped, again.”

Or “This person doesn’t care about me.”

Or “I must have done something wrong again.”

Or “He or she doesn’t find me attractive anymore now that they’ve gotten to know me.”

Or “I’m going to end up alone.”

Or you think that your boss has been ignoring you, and it’s so easy for the wounded self to take this personally:

“They have discovered that I’m inadequate. I’m just not good enough for this job.”

Or “I don’t have enough charisma. I’m too quiet. They don’t like me anymore at this company.”

Once the wounded self gets going, it can go from one negative thought to another, gaining energy for itself with each false belief. The worse you feel, the more the wounded self is in control. The wounded self feels safe when you decide that all these negative thoughts are the real truth.

The quickest way to move out of your own negativity and into the loving adult, so that you can either stop abandoning yourself by giving yourself up, judging yourself, or dumping your complaints on others, is to invite in compassion for both your wounded self and your inner child. Embracing your wounded self with deep compassion instantly moves you out of self-abandonment and into connection. When you choose a compassionate intent to learn about the false beliefs of the wounded self, you immediately shift your energy from negative to positive. The more you do this, the more the loving adult is energized, and the less you will complain or accept another’s negativity.

If, every time you feel any negative feelings, you immediately open to compassion and learning about the wounded self, you will discover that the controlling energy of the wounded self gets less and less. At some point, it doesn’t have enough energy to self-abandon.

One of the main choices you can make to stop complaining is gratitude. Gratitude creates a feeling of happiness, and happy people don’t complain!

Have you ever known a happy person who wasn’t grateful, or a grateful person who wasn’t happy? While we cannot always just choose to be happy, we can always choose to be grateful, which results in happiness.  So in a roundabout way, we are choosing happiness when we choose to be grateful.

If you are with a complainer who is dumping their negativity on you, you might want to interrupt them and ask them if there is anything they are grateful for. That might change the dynamic.  

There is always something to be grateful about. You can be grateful that you are alive and have opportunities to learn and grow and share love. You can be grateful for the sun, the rain, the snow, the beauty of nature, the green of grass, the glory of trees, the color of flowers, the presence of animals, the food you eat. You can be grateful that you have the technology to hear this podcast. If you have health, you can be grateful for your health. If you have a partner, children, a home, a car, a job, you can be grateful for them. You can choose to be grateful for all the big and little things in life, each and every moment. The more you choose to notice what is good and beautiful, the happier and more peaceful you will feel.

On the other hand, there are always things to complain about if that is your choice.

Instead of noticing the beauty of the flowers, you can complain about having to water them. Instead of being grateful for the opportunity to be alive, you can complain about how hard it is. Instead of being grateful for the sun, the rain, or the snow, you can complain about how hot it is, how wet it is, how gloomy it is, or how cold it is. Instead of being grateful for the food you eat, you can complain about how hard it is to cook it, or how expensive it is to buy it. Instead of being grateful for your health, you can complain about your weight. Instead of being grateful for your partner or your children, you can certainly find endless complaints about them. The more you complain, the more unhappy you will feel. It is not the person or the situation or the event or the past or anything else that is causing your unhappiness or others unhappiness – it is your choice or their choice to complain about it instead of discovering what is wonderful about it and being grateful for it.

At any given moment, we all get to choose which part of ourselves we want to express – our ego wounded self or our heart and soul. If you or others decide to trust your mind over your heart and soul, you will likely find yourselves noticing what you don’t like and complaining about it in order to attempt to control it. 

Your soul self, the aspect of you that is connected with your higher source of love and truth, lives in the present and feels grateful for the opportunity to express love and appreciation for all that is.

The really great thing is that given that we are beings of free will, we get to choose to who we want to be, each and every moment, and so does everyone else. You also get to choose who you want to be and what would be loving to you when you are with someone who is using you as a trash can for their negativity. You can give yourself up, get angry, join them in complaining, or you can have the courage to speak your truth and take loving care of yourself. 

I hope you choose to learn and practice Inner Bonding so you don’t allow yourself to be a trash can for others’ negativity, and you don’t use others as a trash can for your negativity. I hope you learn to choose love and gratitude and bring yourself joy!

I invite you to join me for my bi-monthly masterclass and receive my live help, which you can learn about at https://innerbondinghub.com/membership. 

And, I invite you to join me for my 30-Day home study Course that teaches Inner Bonding: “Love Yourself: An Inner Bonding Experience to Heal Anxiety, Depression, Shame, Addictions and Relationships.”

And you can learn so much about loving yourself, creating loving relationships, and healing from my newest book, “Lonely No More: The Astonishing Power of Inner Bonding” and from our website at https://www.innerbonding.com.

I’m sending you my love and my blessings.