How to get people to give a shit about me

[TeeZee]

Hi. For most of my life most of my friendships are initiated by me. If I don't do the upkeep, I never hear from people. Just last week I sent out invites to 2 separate people, and neither returned my message. I am hurt by this and want to cut them off, but then I have fewer people in my life which is worse. These people seem to enjoy my company when we are together, and aren't abusive nor toxic in any way. I guess I could pretend I don't feel hurt and continue pursuing the friendship, or try and "call them" on it, to which they may just say they never got the message or were busy. How do other people keep their friends interested in them? I'm not a doormat and am generally pretty fun, so am totally confused by this. I know many people who are annoying, boring, or totally self-absorbed who seem to have lots of friends. Do I just keep searching and searching for people who are more considerate or accept the inconsiderate ones as they are?

Thanks,
T

[manuel_moe_g]

Hello TeeZee,

Wish I could help, this exact thing has bummed me out too. The only advice I can give is to not give in to the part of you that says "that is not fair!". This "that is not fair!" feeling can push you into a solitary jail cell of resentment.

Sorry I am not qualified to give help, but just wanted to write that I honor your pain and you definately don't deserve to feel inferior. Wishing you all the best, we are all cheering for your very best today and tomorrow!

[justdom]

I also wanted to say you're not alone in this. I still don't know what the solution 'should' be, but I know it's tough. I do find 'icing' people out does more harm to yourself, and they're none the wiser for it.

[MissingHiker]

I understand how you feel. I go through the same thing with people.

One thing a very great therapist once told me about meeting people is that people actually want from others is for us to be a Witness To Their Lives.

I used to, when meeting someone somewhere or meeting a group, because my self esteem was and is so low, I needed to give them some reason to want me around.. that I needed to provide some entertainment or information right off the bat to "sell" them on me.

What my therapist said is that people have a whole headful of things they want to share, and they want someone to share them with. So, when encountering people, I knew, I started to just throw out a "hi" or "hello," and then stand quietly, and engage them in whatever was on their mind. After a few minutes, then I could toss out that thing that was on my mind that I wanted to share.

The quiet approach isn't great in meeting people the first time, but it actually was helpful in strengthening the relationships I had with the people I knew.

Everyone today is walking around on information overload all the time because of facebook and twitter and text messages and a 24 hour news cycle and the rest of life's bullshit that doesn't mean anything, but they all think it does. Standing quietly maybe is a refreshing change for people? I don't know. I wasn't properly socialized growing up, and do not have the instinct that others have in managing relationships. It's like learning a second language for me,

I feel for you, I know it's hard. We just have so little control over life events, people's opinions, people's likes and dislikes... the technology we have lends us to think we have control, but it's insidious because it's an illusion. People will form opinions about us sometimes based on things we aren't even aware of... things we had nothing to do with. Sometimes if someone doesn't respond to us right away, it could be because of other things in their lives we don't know about.. it may not be about us, it could be about them.

It is scary to feel that you're losing people, but please be open to the possibility that.. maybe you aren't, it just seems that way.

[algernon]

Hello!

I see my own experience in this topic thread.......

That therapist with the "Witness To Their Lives" statement is most agreeable with what I understand, the latest example of which is from a book I've half completed called, "The Lost Art of Listening" by Michael P. Nichols. Nichols explains that we all have the primary need to be understood when we speak and speaking is the inseparable component to listening. The trouble of course is found in an array of deficiencies relative to the process. Thus, we learn what they are, practice the solutions and see what comes.

As a trucker and not a therapist, I cannot see excusing poorly committed friends beyond the limits of healthy personal boundaries. Social mores provide a stage of measurement for our relationships and I think a total absence of response to even an informal invitation gives a key indication of what that particular friendship will deliver as time passes. Exceptions always happen and judgement is your call. The main thing is that you pass the self-compassion/rational thinking test.

Choose neutrality if that's best. Yay or nay is not the only choice. I think the worst choice is often one that haunts the mind and neutrality is most likely free of guilt and decision remorse. It was a BOOST to my improved mentality when I read that I can choose to be neutral in many social judgments.

Constantly we must learn about ourselves and what works best for us. This will become more self-evident as you age. Time changes us and many of our views. This is as pure and natural as the dew upon my fading daffodils.

Circulate in the right places for friends and lovers.(I recently wrote to a new forum member that I volunteered for four years in the local hospital which was a DANDY place to meet people socially) Realize that your needs in these matters are just as important as any other persons' needs. Identify your comfort and discomfort aspects. Risk a little rejection of expectations and accept others with the practice it takes to make it easier the more you do it. I credit Albert Ellis with this instruction as it sits in my mind, but it's ancient advice I'm sure.

Activity helps mental distress and gets the brass ring, even if a slow go.....just go.

Think about friendship with unusual people, age disparate for example, or with a neighbor never discovered beyond the cursory wave. These efforts build a solid base for social behavior and even worldliness. I became socially (and civically) rewarded when I started attending council meetings here in town. I grew from that. Yes, I know council meetings are not for all people!

Self-esteem (candidly mentioned in this thread) is largely held now in psychology as being over valued, a misleading approach, this based on the premise that if someone is not an aspiring champion with a maximum thrust of bulletproof resolve, then he/she is a POS. Universal acceptance of self is a concept in the REBT structured by Albert Ellis and would be worth the time to consider as brief as it takes via GOOGLE-rama.

[MissingHiker]

Algernon your post is most meaty and insightful. I absolutely agree with everything you said and your citing of neutrality particularly resonated with me.

Because we live in an unprecedented age of information flying around, i think its too rigid to judge people on single oversights. We humans just have too much information, and thanks to facebook too much information that's potentially about us, to digest and process, and so some incoming data will always just fall through the cracks. It is important for us to acknowledge this possibility, and not take it personally when we dont hear back from people, even those who are close to us. We are all fallible human beings, that is inherent to human nature, and overloading us humans with information just makes us more fallible. So when we are slighted, we should be more open to filing those incidents under "neutral" as opposed to "bad" or "invalidating." Life is chaotic for all of us, and in this new chaos of tmi, we should all expect to catch a little unintentional shrapnel, and remind ourselves people have more going on than they can mange, and not feel invalidated. Even though we do. And we all need validation. These days its going for a premium!

But algernon you were also right about rYepeated offenses indicating what that relationship might bring in the future. So we have to strike a new balance.

Personally, for me, that balance is something i can't see because i was smothered growing up, so i smother others unintentionally. I have worked on that, and found getting off facebook was helpful, i think by putting less information in my head, since i'm prone to overanalyzing whatever is there.

I understand that limitation in myself and have given myself permisson to work around it, and live around it, until i can discover its source because only then will i be able to understand it and in doing so disarm it.

I realize i am missing out on some aspects of life but i rationally realize i am taking the best of an array of bad options in the interest of giving myself time and space in the hope to one day be more comfortable in social situations.

[algernon]

HEY MissingHiker!!!

Thank you for the credit! And to you my deep Beatles style bow for walking away from Facebook! That's mental health stupendous indeedee.

I'm a Bookface person. My age is entered deliberately wrong and privacy settings are a notch under maxed. I have an "ethnic" name that is on par with something like, "Steven Taylor" for commonality so I'm buried in the human Bookface wasteland. I have 30 friends now, up about five since my high school reunion (class of '72) three weeks back. It's wild Fookbase, it is.......shit, even the fricken New Jersey State Police has a Bookcase page......the NJ STATE POLICE!!!!! It's like an Internet inside the Internet and I don't know if it's true that modern American employers are demanding CASEBOOK passwords from their employment applicants now, like I read in some petition signing request just today.........

None of this is consistent with mental health well-being MissingHiker!!! Cell phones with cameras including videos, everybody captured.....endless passwords and everything else info-overload you have a solid awareness of........

We have the "duck-lips" face pose and that new photographic standard, posing with the cell-cam in hand, in the mirror for a self-portrait cell-cam included. At age 57 almost 58, I'm NEUTRAL!!!!!! (IT IS SUCH A PISSER TO SEE ALL THIS!!)

My deal is getting a new job so I'm home more than away instead of vice-versa......at my age the monkey-mind dialogue is not kind at all regarding this ambition. Presently, I have this big grin because the issue of new employment is presently in another universe. Klinger from the TV show M.A.S.H. had this comfort thing he said to "Radar" who was worried to shit about something nasty coming up in a few days, "(relax)........things don't happen 'til they do." That simple line I never forgot and it capsulizes everything I trust in psychology centered on CBT/REBT and meditation/mindfulness.

I quit TV in 1987, cable TV.......that's kinda like dumping FOotBOoK, no?

MissingHiker, I'm really UP that you like the choice option of "neutral" too. It took a brief book passage to place the simple concept into my pocket.....how humbling life will be. A remarkable chat room friend said that learning can only take place during humility.

Humility (adjectival form: humble) is the quality of being modest and respectful. Humility, in various interpretations, is widely seen as a virtue in many religious and philosophical traditions, being connected with notions of transcendent unity with the universe or the divine, and of egolessness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humility

[BecomingKind]

The only thing I can add to this thread is this;

Don't assume people don't give a shit.

But what exactly could they do differently if they did give a shit? Often it's a matter of just not knowing what to do.

[MissingHiker]

Becomingkind... Very true, we often can have specific expectations of what signals mean "give a shit" and if we dont get them we feel invalidated. I know i've done this, and i'm trying to move more towards deeming social cues "neutral" versus good or bad because people may not mean anything when they seem to be blowing you off. I know for me, i assume i have accidentally sent those signals myself... I'm sure i have. Sometimes i cant even remember what i was talking about 15 minutes ago, and i'm sure i cant be the only one.

Algernon!! U totally made me laugh! Yesss... I have only recently discovered "neutral.". Growing up, there was a lot of extreme thought. Everything had to be rated "good" or "bad." in fact it was worse there was a lot of "outstanding" and "horrible". People, restaurants, celebrities, buildings, cars, clerks... Everyhing was rated and judged, and i carried this behavior into my adult life.

Well i then got this great therapist who introduced me to "neutral" a few years ago. Really most things are neutral. Most people are actually just neutral. They dont deserve any further thought or analysis, they are just there. And thats ok. To most others, i am neutral. They find me neither good nor bad and thats ok.

Neutral is also liberating because it requires no action. Good and bad things need fixing or commendation or some kind of attention or energy in some way and we humans just dont have that much to expend.

Neutral does not come naturally to me, but i'm working on retraining my mind to file things there, and so my downtome is slightly more peaceful, with fewer things to re-analyze and re-rate and re-process at the end of the day, which is something i used to do waaaay too much. Much energy wasted. But we can only know things when we know them. And what was klingers quote? Things dont happen til they do. Thank you for that algernon i'm putting that in my toolbox!!

[BecomingKind]

I'm thinking about this.

Part of the reason socializing can be awkward and draining is that you find it impossible to relate to people so you fake enthusiasm and suppress your needs. The content and purpose of people's interactions just doesn't seem relevant, but you feel you must try to experience something.

I wasn't properly socialized growing up, and do not have the instinct that others have in managing relationships. It's like learning a second language for me,

Not becoming properly socialized is probably a symptom of something else - some earlier trauma.

The critical point that seems to cause long term social problems is the ability of relating to other people being disturbed before adolescence, when many relationship and social skills are experienced and learned. The early experience of relationships seems to create models that all future people and relations are fitted to. My experiences made it very difficult for me to trust girls from age four (?) and up. That distrust and awkwardness then set the stage for the experiences in adolescence.

We experience relationships differently, and we have different needs from relationships. I don't think some people lack a certain instinct, it's just the auto-pilot programs are different depending on the experiences.

After a few repetitions these models and patterns become wired into the brain. I think the real reason for "down time" and "depression" is the brain attempting to rewire itself to create a world-view that it can work with. Hence, the feelings of sickness, long sleep, and the need for good metabolism to prevent waste chemicals from accumulating. These down-time episodes follow experiences which somehow challenge beliefs or prejudices.

I think it's possible to force anyone into depression by forcing them to deal with prejudices and false beliefs, to the point where they can't function without their brain trying to rewire its structures.

I'm not talking about behaviour-patterns. I'm talking about beliefs. The risk with entraining certain behaviours is that it might not change the problematic beliefs, which then creates conflicts when the brain tries to reconcile its experiences into a cohesive world view. "I have the skills to maintain relationships, and I also believe women are inherently untrustworthy."

When I see a bird, my spine tells me it can fly. When I see a woman, my spine tells me she's untrustworthy. Intellectually, I know it's not true. I usually adjust my world-view to "not caring" but it's against my human instincts, which is to relate to people. The few glimpses I have had of what it feels like to trust someone were euphoric.

I thought I was going to say something different, but I lost that thought.