Next time one of your friends starts talking to you about another friend, you might just ask, “What would you like from me? How can I help you with this?” If they just want to vent and complain, then I would back away from the conversation because it’s just not going to make anyone’s life any better.
People “triangulate” when they bring a third person in the middle of their conflict in order to relieve their anxiety, not to improve the situation. Sometimes people allow themselves to be triangulated because they like the feeling of being included and needed. But triangulation usually involves taking sides and doesn’t end well. Listening to complaints is draining and fuels negativity.
Dealing with triangulation and dealing with derogatory gossip have much in common. Here are some ways you can respond:
1. Have empathy for the person being talked about. Take the other person’s side and play the devil’s advocate.
2. Respond with light-hearted humor.
3. Avoid getting in the middle. “I think it would be more effective if you talked to him about how you feel, rather than to me.” Or “I care about both of you and think it’s best not to get in the middle.”
4. Focus your attention on why your friend is preoccupied with talking about your other friend. “Why are you obsessed with Amanda? Maybe it would be better to focus on your own life.”
5. Be direct. “I’m uncomfortable listening to all this negativity about someone who’s not here to defend himself.”
6. Help your friend improve the situation: “Can you think of a diplomatic way to talk to her directly?” Or “Have you thought about how you may have participated in this situation?”
Part of friendship is helping with dilemmas, conflict, and relationships. However, if someone is not attempting to gain insight and improve the situation at hand, then that person may simply be using you to vent and avoid the difficult task of self-awareness and growth. In situations of attempted triangulation a friend should speak up and challenge the other person to be the best he or she can be.
“I am separated from my husband because I have reasons not to trust him. Also, despite my complaints, he is online texting with WhatsApp all the time, even when he wakes up in the middle of the night and while he’s driving. Yet he never texts me or lets me see whom he’s chatting with, and he doesn’t have a job.”
Secrecy and social media
Clearly there are several issues at play here:
1. Your husband is addicted to WhatsApp.
2. He has lost interest in you.
3. Worst of all, you are losing your self-respect in this relationship.
1. He is addicted to texting.
Texting can become a real neurological addiction, which is pursued despite the harm it causes to yourself and those around you. Jeanene Swanson writes in “The Neurological Basis for Digital Addiction”:
“So what happens is, you hear a sound [alerting you to an incoming text message], and your brain says, ‘There might be something good there, I’m going to check it.’” At that point, the mesolimbic dopamine circuits are activated, and a small surge of the neurotransmitter is released in the brain. “What you’re getting addicted to is the dopaminergic hit. With texting addiction, there is an added element of waiting for a response,” Karter says. “It is the anticipation that hooks us.”
Your husband’s texting addiction is the number one preoccupation in his life. There may be others but he has not shared them with you. He is allowing this addiction to destroy his relationship with you, and he is endangering others by driving while texting. The time consumed while “chatting” is preventing him from otherwise honoring his primary relationship and getting a job.
Given that he does not admit that he has a problem, I don’t think he will change any time soon.
2. He has lost respect and desire for you.
Your husband isn’t interested in texting and chatting with you much because he knows you are always available, and he is annoyed with your complaints. He is on the defensive with you. Even if you didn’t complain, he would be more drawn to texting with others because of the anticipation of receiving responses from people who are more fun and not in constant pursuit of him.
I recommend that you stop complaining and that you stop or greatly limit your relationship with him. You should pull back from someone who treats you with indifference and with much less interest than he has in his ether-based paramours.
3. Loss of self-respect.
A loving long-term relationship requires that two people cherish and nourish the relationship. Your husband is not nourishing your relationship. Continuing to pursue him despite his indifference toward you is a turn-off to him and is causing you to lose self-respect.
You need to stop obsessing over his texting. Instead you need to invoke the self-discipline needed to move beyond a man who is living for his addiction. Don’t let the fear of being alone misguide you. As long as that fear persists, he has no need to accommodate you in any way.
Rather than focusing on him, focus on your own challenge, which is to avoid wasting your time hoping for an addict to change his ways. You could say something like, “I’m so sorry but I’ve lost respect for you and recognize that your online relationships are more important to you than our relationship. I want to be with someone who wants to do something with his life, and puts me and our relationship first. I wish you the best of luck.” I would then move on with your life.
If you stop all contact with him, he may start contacting you more, which might please you temporarily. But don’t expect too much because he will probably go right back to his addiction to more “exciting” cyber interactions. But you will have regained your self respect and your life!
Feeling anger and acting out anger are two very different things. When you feel anger it is usually a signal that some harm is being perpetrated against you or others. However, when you let anger take over, it is no longer an effective way to deal with the harm being done. In rare highly-dangerous situations, expressing rage can be an effective means of scaring a person or an animal away. Yet even when it is effective, you want to be able to consciously choose when and how to express anger.
When anger takes control
The problem with letting your anger take control, rather than viewing it as a signal, is that anger destroys the ability to think rationally, to get along with others, and to find solutions. A single moment of inappropriately expressed anger can destroy an evening, a relationship, or your job. You can undermine a lot of effort and history when you let it drive your actions.
If you’re bound up with dissatisfaction, frustration, or desire for revenge, acting out your anger will not help. It can lead to distraction, accidents, and destruction. It can lead to outbursts, hostility and regret. It can also lead to the loss of reputation, the ability to have positive relationships, and the ability to help others and to participate in the community. Alternatively, anger turned inward can lead to depression.
Cultivate patience
The best way to learn to deal with angry people and your own anger is to cultivate patience. To communicate effectively with another person, you need to wait until neither of you is consumed by anger. Take time to find out why someone else is behaving poorly or treating you unfairly. Take time to understand what underlying values you seek to re-establish in your life and your relationship. Only then can you figure out the most effective way of dealing with a bad situation.
Anger can be overwhelming. So it requires a lot of effort to develop self-restraint and composure. When someone is angry with you, it is important to respond with compassion or at least neutrality, rather than piling your own irrational behavior onto theirs. Patience does not mean accommodation. It means taking the time to understand the situation and the people involved before taking appropriate action from a place of inner strength and calm.
Ask questions and listen until the angry person calms down. If you can’t take being around someone who’s angry, tell the other person you need some time to calm down and think about the situation. Then go for a walk, breathe deeply, and take the time you need until you can gain a wider perspective about the situation.
Cultivate patience with yourself as well as others. The result will be a feeling of equanimity and core strength, which allow for the most effective problem solving and the least pain in your life and in your relationships.
People often assume that they know what another person is thinking — and most often those assumptions are negative and wrong. “Mind-reading” causes people to become defensive and avoid sharing their thoughts. It pushes people away because it feels intrusive to be told what they’re thinking.
Self-fulfilling Prophecy
Mind-reading is usually a result of your own fears. When you allow your insecurity to take over, you’re likely to scare people away, which is not a good way to promote dialogue. Moreover, when you project your fears onto another person, those fears are more likely to become realized – a self-fulfilling prophecy! If you repeatedly proclaim your worry that another person doesn’t like spending time with you, you create the very situation you fear, because you become less enjoyable to be with. Our perceptions have a tendency to materialize.
Dialogue
While part of you may feel worried and insecure, there is probably another part of you that wants to have an honest dialogue and is hopeful and curious about what the truth might be. Mind-reading assumes that you have all the information, which is rarely the case. To have a real dialogue, you need to focus on the other person and find out where they are coming from. Only when the goal is to gain understanding and not to assign blame can you find out what’s really going on.
To get truthful, relevant information, you have to engage others so that they won’t get defensive. Otherwise they’ll attack back, withdraw, or twist the truth to avoid your negative judgments. You have to ask questions in a way to get them to talk openly. This requires being able to actively listen without being reactive. Connection
If you lose your connection, the other person is likely to go into a protective mode, which puts a stop to openness. You need to keep a connection to convey your desire to be understanding.
1. To avoid implying blame or self-pity, it helps to use a tone of voice that implies honest curiosity.
2. The best way to get information is to ask open-ended questions that get the other person to describe his or her side of the story. Open-ended questions include where, who, how, what happened. Beware of “But why did you do that?” because it sounds accusatory. When people feel blamed, they’re likely to skew the information to boost their self-esteem and avoid incrimination. It’s better to ask how something happened, followed by, “what happened then?”
3. Avoid leading questions, such as, “You’d rather work than spend time with me, right?”
4. Avoid “yes or no” prosecuting-attorney-type questions, such as, “Just answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ — did you even think about calling me?” Even police investigators have moved from methods of cross-examination to open-ended questioning.
We are more likely to discover the motivation of the other person when we use compassionate curiosity rather than aggressive interrogation. Also, we are likely to find that others’ actions usually don’t stem from intent to harm us. From a position of compassionate understanding, we can then continue the dialogue and express our own desires or intent to change the situation.
