Take note, we are what we tolerate.
“Be careful what you tolerate. You are teaching people how to treat you.”
Unknown
Feels like a strange thing to say, because it makes it seem like everything that happens to us is somehow our own fault. So let me be clear what I’m not saying is we reap what we sow.
Tolerance however is a strange notion, so familiar yet so alien. We go through our whole lives tolerating things it just becomes the norm. So much so that we stop seeing it as something we tolerate & just accept it as a way of life.
When we’re children, dependent on where we are in the pecking order we tolerate so much without realising it. Our parents having a favourite (even though they may not say it out loud, we know); wearing hand me downs while our older sibling gets everything new; one sibling getting more attention than the other, the list goes on & on.
As we migrate to adults, we just start accepting patterns of behaviour, after all we’ve been doing it our whole lives, but we never stop to think, whether our tolerance is destructive to our happiness & the part we are playing as enablers.
Think about it…You’re single & ready to mingle.
You meet someone that you think could be worth investing your time in. You start off communicating on a daily basis, in fact the messages are bouncing back & forth like a great Federer Nadal tennis match. You talk for some time & start to get excited about meeting them.
You finally meet up, as first dates go it was pretty good. After the date they message checking you got home ok, want you to know they had a great time & can’t wait to see you again. You think, well this one was clearly raised right with impeccable manners.
The next day, radio silence, a few days pass & nothing. You send a playful message, which usually takes them less than 5 minutes to reply. 6 hours later nothing. You head to bed & hear a ‘ping’. You check your phone, law & behold there’s a message from your date, so nonchalant. Sure replying 10 hours later is perfectly normal, you’re not into playing games so you reply back. They take another day to respond. You know there’s been a shift in the pattern, but you continue the communication in the same vein.
What you don’t realise is you’ve inadvertently set the standard, a tone for what you will & won’t accept. What you haven’t considered for a split second is at a time when everyone puts their best foot forward what the other person has actually shown you is their feet will never match your pace. At arguably the most exciting time of a relationship they’ve demonstrated their inability to walk side by side & more importantly their lack of desire to do so. Seems they like trainers & you like shoes 😀.
Then there’s your relationship with your friends & family.
Are you that one friend that is always there for your friends? The one they turn to for advice & support? Yes you are, but although you know they’ll always be there for you, unlike you they’ll never recognise when you need the help.
There will be times they want to go out & even if you really can’t be bothered, you make the effort, yet they don’t think twice about cancelling on you. The first time they cancel you put it down to ‘something came up’, but after the third or fourth time you have to accept that you have allowed this behaviour & because you’ve allowed it, it will continue.
It doesn’t mean they care about you any less, it’s just that you didn’t think you were important & you let them know that’s how you feel through your continual acceptance of them cancelling on you.
Then there’s you work life.
You work harder than anyone else & you produce twice the results any of your peers do, yet you not only take home the same wage as your counterpart they also get more help than you. How is that fair you think? It isn’t, but you already know that, yet the pattern continues, why?
Because once again you are the one that set the tone. You demonstrated that your capacity to work was more than someone else’s & you never asked for help. Instead you missed lunch & worked for an hour longer than your colleagues because you didn’t want to let anyone down or be seen as a failure.
You could argue that it’s your boss’s responsibility to see the strain they’re putting you under, but they don’t & how can they? you never let on that you are stressed or over worked.
This pattern of tolerance is created by us, by our need to be accepted, liked & loved coupled with our inability to say no. But we fail to realise that we can be accepted, liked & loved by setting clear boundaries. We don’t always have to be people pleasers, who knows we may even gain an additional level of respect if we actually did this.
So the next time he waits a week before he calls, your friend cancels on you (again) or your boss gives you yet more to handle – step back, think about whether you’re happy with the situation & if you’re not simply say no.
Set your boundaries, make it clear what you will or won’t tolerate. Simply say…
Sorry I’m not interested in being 1 of 5 women (or men, it can happen the other way round too) you’re juggling. I don’t want to just be an option in your life, so I am removing myself from the equation.
Oh, you can’t make it again because you’re hungover despite having our catch up in the diary for over a month? No problem. Shall we reschedule? No, I don’t think so. I’ll be in touch with you, when I’m free & if that works for you great, if not I understand. If my friendship was important enough to you, you’d make the time & me a priority.
I’d love to take this new project on, but my hands are full as I already have 10 that I’m working on, but I think there are probably others that only have 1 or 2 that should be able to help.
None of this makes you selfish or aggressive, you’re just starting to put yourself first. We shouldn’t just tolerate something because we think that’s what we should do. Learn to have some respect for yourself. After all, if you can’t respect yourself enough to set clear boundaries how can you expect anyone else to do it?
It’s been a while, but i couldn’t stop reading the articles back to back. Toxic relationships can ruin you & the narcissist… he will always love himself more