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Undervalued Underlings

17/12/2014

I wrote the following many* years ago, and in view of what’s happened since then, it was very interesting for me to read it. I didn’t publish it at the time, but I've corrected that since then:

Do you ever have the feeling that you don´t get enough appreciation? Such a feeling is easy to get.

For instance, you work for someone for many years and he never ever tells you how much you mean to him as an employee, or how useful or good your work is.

Or you are a parent and a partner for twenty* years, and everything you do is taken for granted. Or, even worse: not only don´t you get any recognition, but you only get criticism. This is wrong, that’s not perfect, such should be improved, so is not up to scratch. Effort doesn’t seem to count. Industriousness, steadfastness, loyalty and integrity aren’t recognised. But people do stumble over your weaknesses. They do manage to find fault with anything you do that isn´t quite perfect. And there is nothing to balance out their criticism.

Who can live like this? Not many people. Not all their lives, anyhow. Some can take it for a while. Some will hold on to the little good they have, for some time. But eventually everybody needs respect.

Everyone needs appreciation. All of us need recognition. Every human being needs a compliment now and then, and some appreciation.

When my first child began to talk, I quickly found this out. If you only exhort and chastise a child, it has a negative effect. Whenever she would do something wrong, I would tell her off, and I would tell her that she was naughty. After some time, I noticed that she began to ignore my instructions. She would start doing things she shouldn’t, things she knew were not allowed, even in my presence. I didn´t understand. So I asked her why she did it, since I had told her many times she shouldn’t do that. And she replied: ‘I am naughty.’ Apparently, telling her that she was naughty whenever she did something that was not allowed, had finally convinced her that she was naughty in nature, and that there was nothing to be done about it. I quickly changed course and started to take a positive approach, which soon paid off.

We all need to hear something positive now and then. Everyone needs a pat on the back. All of us need to hear we are needed, that we are sweet, that we are good – any compliment that we deserve. With just criticism, there is no balance, there is only negativity. And negativity is the most destructive element in any relationship, be it a marriage relationship, a work relationship, or any other relationship.

* I wrote the above in 2003. I’d been married for over twenty years then, and worked for the same boss for 15 years. Both did what I described above: they undervalued me (and that’s the understatement of the century), and were a source of constant negativity for me.

Shortly after I wrote this, my boss retired and was replaced by someone who did show appreciation now and then. Almost immediately my health improved, as did my enjoyment of my work.

Eight years after I wrote this, I divorced my wife. And almost immediately my health, happiness and general feeling of well-being all improved.

Makes you think, doesn’t it.

I Said When

17/12/2014

First published in 2010. This blog post describes what went wrong in my first marriage.

(Disclaimer: Everything described below, is of course just my personal view, it’s how I felt and experienced it all myself. But there are at least two sides to each story, and this is mine, and mine alone. It’s not meant to be accusatory in any way: Everything that happened to me, after all, was in fact facilitated by me, or was at the very least allowed by me. It’s only meant to be a description of how things have been for me, which doesn’t mean that other parties may not have experienced things completely differently.)

When you’re pouring someone a drink, you may invite the other to tell you when he has enough by saying to him: “Say when.”

In Regarding Henry, Harrison Ford’s character, Henry, is a successful lawyer at a big law firm. When he gets shot in the head, his personality changes drastically. Finally he finds that he cannot bring himself to work with ruthless lawyers anymore. After he makes that decision, his secretary — who used to pour his drinks extending exactly that same invitation, “Say when” – asks: “Mr. Turner, what’s wrong?” And Henry replies: “Well, I had enough. So I said when.”

Sometimes it’s hard to know when you should say when. Take marriage, for instance. (There’s a reason why I’m using that as an example, and that reason should become clear quite soon, so do read on…) You marry someone because you’ve fallen in love with them. At least I hope that was the reason. But the trouble with falling in love, is that it makes you partially blind, somehow. I suppose you could say that you’re probably not just in love with a person, but also with being in love, because it’s such a great feeling. Anyway, you fall in love with someone, and if the feeling is mutual, there may come a time when you decide to marry. Or move in together, or whatever — but in my case it was a decision to marry.

So here you are, at twenty-three years of age, and what do you know? Nothing! So you marry. And you try to make the most of it, having accepted the notion that you have to work at a marriage to make it work, that relationships aren’t easy, and there has to be both giving and taking in order to achieve balance in the relationship. So you give a little, and a little more, and a lot more, and you don’t even notice that there’s hardly any balance — in fact, that over the years there is less and less balance in the relationship. Because both partners seem to be forgetting that if there has to be giving and taking, each of you has to do both! But it’s just a situation that grows bit by bit, until you’re so used to it that you don’t even notice anymore how lopsided it’s become. You don’t even notice that the situation is getting you really down. That the way you’re being treated is eating away at you on the inside. That the manipulation you’re subjected to because your partner has an irresistible urge to make you do what she wants, not what you want, is frustrating you endlessly.

Ironically, people around you have seen it. They’ve wondered for years and years how a relationship could become so unbalanced, and how you could survive in such a climate of manipulation and even blackmail. But you’re blind to it yourself, you’re completely submerged in an environment with a partner who says you have a disorder, and even when that is proven to be untrue, she still attacks your most noticeable traits, putting you down, stomping on you. You reach a point where you’re so down on yourself that you hardly have any feelings of self-worth and self-confidence left due to constantly being put down, and combined with the rest of the ever present negativity this brings you to the very brink of not seeing any point in living anymore.

And then, one day, it’s as if you wake up from a long, long emotional coma. You look at the world, you look at other people, you look at yourself and your partner, and suddenly you realise that all is not well. You realise that there are things that are very fundamentally wrong with your life and your marriage, and you take a long and hard look at the question what can be done to improve it. And although you do see your own failings, you realise that there is more, that other aspects of your relationship are totally wrong.

But now that you’ve woken up, now that you’ve looked up from the deep valley where you’d ended up, you’re seeing the peaks — and you see the light at the end of the tunnel. And although you were in a deep pit of despair, you’ve spotted the ladders that have been handed you, and you climb up out of the misery, towards the light.

You start improving things, giving up self-sabotage, getting rid of excess body weight, getting rid of unhealthy living habits. You start to get a grip on your life, becoming efficient, getting healthy. You start to ignore old hang-ups and start doing things you never even dreamed you’d do, but which turn out to give you joy and pleasure.

But with all those improvements, you start to leave your partner behind. She can’t understand any of these changes, and especially not why you don’t want to be manipulated anymore, why you’re not a fellow victim of negativity anymore, why you’re making your own decisions and taking your life into your own hands. She blames (because improvements do have to be blamed on someone, after all, right?) the people around you — your family, your friends: they must have caused this, because you are just not yourself anymore, and that must have come from somewhere!

Showdowns are the result, in which attempts are made to reverse the developments. In fact, your partner at one point claims that everything was better a year ago, and if only you and she could go back to that time, then all would be well. But you know that things were NOT better a year ago, you know that they were all wrong, all upside down and inside out! You were living in your own personal hell a year ago — your close friends and relatives could see that, and finally you saw that as well. And knowing this, you can’t go back.

You know that if you want to be true to yourself, you have to continue doing what you’re doing. You’re finally experiencing some joy in life, be it within the limitations of an unbalanced relationship, and you can’t let go of that joy, you just can’t. So you make it clear what it is that you need in order to make the relationship work and stay in it. Unfortunately, this is not received well — not at all well. And after having been blackmailed with the threat of divorce for some 26 years, and now again, you realise that the time has come to reverse roles. It's the only chance you can get to be happy.

There is a reaction of disbelief, despair, anger, and denial. And accusation. Especially the denial is obvious. Of course it isn’t the unbalanced relationship that caused you to make this decision, it has to be something else. Oh, got it: you must have fallen in love with someone else, it must be that person who kept handing you ladders to climb out of your pit of despair. Yes, that’s it, that must be it, because it can’t be anything else, can it? Surely you’re cheating on your wife, and that explains why you want to get out. You must be going through a mid-life crisis or something. Yeah, right. Dream on…

Wouldn’t it be nice if it was just a mid-life crisis. Nothing a motorcycle, a sportscar or a toupée couldn’t fix, right? And wouldn’t it be nice to know that once you started living alone, you had a lover. Sadly, the truth is that it isn’t like that at all. I happen to be a loyal and faithful man. But I suppose denial is an easy way of avoiding the truth, because they who deny the truth, don’t have to face reality.

And my own reality is that I now know what life should be like, and I can’t bring myself to go back to the misery I was in.

So I said when…

(This is the best description of what was going on in the relationship: link. If you recognise my description above at all, you may benefit from following this link and reading the explanation.)

Confusing Networking

17/12/2014

In this day and age we use cyberspace for so many purposes. The World Wide Web is not just the biggest source of information you can imagine. It offers much more than that. We order things online. We send and receive e-mail. We make webcam calls and participate in video conferences. We listen to internet radio stations.

And last year I added another aspect to my social and professional life by joining networking sites. Professional online networking hasn’t really been a necessity for me so far, so to be honest I haven’t really put that much effort into it yet. I’ve started doing it, but with restraint, so to say.

But social networking took off a lot faster for me. As soon as I discovered that it’s a good way to find and keep in touch with old friends and acquaintances, I was sold on the concept. The invitation to Facebook came from an old friend in another country, and I thought it was a good idea. One doesn’t easily drop by in person, living across the border somewhere, so online is THE place to do one’s socialising in such a case.

I soon found droves of hobby friends, relatives and old acquaintances. It’s funny how adding friends to your list on a social networking site can have a snowball effect. It’s nice to share bits of information with everyone. You can get all kinds of reactions, and quite often people make me laugh – something I really needed at the time, but who doesn’t need that now and then, right?

But social networking can be very confusing. Although it’s nice to be able to look at pieces of people’s lives, you can see things you don’t understand. Take long-lost aquaintances, for instance. You may have found them on the Internet, but that doesn’t mean that you’re automatically up-to-date with their lives. After all, what they post is usually from the current phase of their lives, and their profiles don’t give you a full personal history.

So when someone you haven’t seen for many years says: “The baby woke us up early today”, you may think: “Baby? What baby?” Other people on the person’s friends list respond to the post and you’re beginning to suspect that they know something you don’t.

Someone you added to your friend list because you share the same hobby, may say “I finished my woodworking project today”, and you think “Woodworking? You mean to say that there are other hobbies out there besides photography? And that you practice one?” Makes you think, doesn’t it.

Or a very old acquaintance you haven’t seen in almost thirty years says he wishes he was back in his own country so he could enjoy the kind of breakfast he was used to, and you think: ”Eh? What is he doing in another country? How did he get there? When? Why?” The info he gives on the Net gives you more questions than answers.

You get friend requests from people that make you wonder how they came to feel that you qualified as a friend. People you have never met, for instance. The other day I got a friend request from someone who has exactly the same name (first and last) as my son. Although the name does look familiar, as it would, obviously, I really don’t know him. Why would I want him on my friends list? It would only be confusing.

Even some of the relatives on my list make me wonder about their posts. I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t really know much about the kind of life many of them currently lead. I see them discussing things that I don’t know anything about, and that in many cases make me wonder if I should have known about it.

The snippets of information people post about their lives can be rather confusing, sometimes.

Oh well, I suppose you can’t expect them to tell you their life story to get you up to speed first so that at least you will have some idea as to what they’re on about.

But confusing or not, I do like this social networking somehow. It’s not the most essential addition to my life, but definitely a nice one. I am interested in the people I know, so it’s good to see what they’re up to. And I have found that if you’re having a hard time with something in your life, there’s always someone around to make an encouraging remark. Often not more than a single sentence, but it can be helpful nevertheless. I like to use social networking to make me feel good, and it works. It does mean I have to block or remove the negative ones from my list to achieve that, but I suppose it’s not just farmers who have to separate the chaff from the wheat…

Undervalued Underlings

I Said When

Confusing Networking

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