Resource or friend?

Resource or Friend?

Many people are users, are ambitious and don’t even know it. This is true in business. You align with a boss, become a boss’s favorite in order to gain favor for yourself. You may in fact not even realize you are doing this or you may not even realize you don’t even like the people you align with and that you are only aligning with them to gain power, prestige, or perhaps even a sense of “self”. People who use others, some are born this way (and it can be seen in their Life Charts) and some were taught to be this way by the way they were parented, and some are “meant to be” this way, in this lifetime as part of their soul evolution. Using people can be benign and it can be harmful and hurtful. Using people, and allowing yourself to be used (sometimes it is mutually beneficial) and can be a personal choice unique to each relationship and each situation. Being aware of your choices, being self-aware and mindful allows you to make choices rather than making unconscious decisions that can hurt others and give you the reputation of being a “user” or “taker” or in business talk opportunistic or ambitious.

If your Life Path is one of power and money and “using” people as resources you can own that and live it with integrity and honesty. If you are using people because you are wounded (from childhood parenting) can “destroy” another person without even realizing the damage you caused. You will not only be unconscious about your actions but you will be unable to apologize, work it out, make amends or perhaps to even see what your decisions, actions and behaviors are costing other people as well as yourself. Unhealed wounded people always see themselves as the victims even when they are the perpetrators. They will often if not always withdraw from a wound they have caused refusing to stay present in the relationship and work things out, claiming that you bringing up their misdeed is causing them so much pain, they now have to leave or isolate. Say for example I hit you. You tell me this is not okay I declare I am emotionally hurt by that statement you just said and now I become the victim with hurt feelings even though it was you that got punched. Now I will cause you further hurt by leaving the relationships and blaming you, claiming you are the one causing the greater pain by bringing up what I did—punching you. It is quite an effective strategy. In fact to an unaware caring person, a completely effective defense system that allows perpetrators, users, opportunists, to continue to operate with no accountability or apparent consequences. I say no apparent consequences because wounded people who act as perpetrators who continue to use people will internally build up years of self-hate and self-loathing. They will learn they cannot be trusted with others or even with their own self, and that their actions harm others. And then they have two choices. The first is to continue to hide and work even harder to disguise themselves by creating an ever more “seamless” public presentation (covert aggressors/narcissists). Manipulation of public presentation will look like “I am a humble human” and will mock up Buddhism or Christian or shy and agreeable, or charming. It can also include learning the art of love-bombing, handing out meaningless complements like heroin to cultivate pleasant responses and to disarm other people so the perpetrator will not be held accountable for their “occasional” (but really happens all the time) misdeeds. After all they are such a “nice person” surely they didn’t mean to take from you, take advantage of you, or discard you as soon as you become an inconvenience or question behaviors. And the second choice is to decide they do not like who they are and what they do, and choose to have the courage and discipline to learn new behaviors and take the risks of actually trying out new behaviors to change how they interact with others.

How do you recognize users? This is challenging if you do not read energy, if you do not have a Spiritual Practice, a Path, not crystal shopping or lunch with tarot cards. Users are charming, humble, interesting, flirtatious, and can be sexual and all have learned to seduce and charm others by giving complements, being “very agreeable” and very effectively use the language of recovery, psychological and/or new age jargon to be very “believable”. They are masters and have to be in order to “get” others to “give” to them. This is true both for conscious and unconscious “users” and “takers”. When you realize someone is a taker and a user you need to step back and listen, listen very carefully to the words between the words reading “between the lines” and feeling the energy of the person when they are talking, not just listening to their content. Ask a lot of questions (as neutrally as possible, like it is small talk) and don’t react to the answers. They will take cues from your reactions to either people please or manipulate, or both. Say nothing about doing this or they will up the game of seduction be it consciously or unconsciously. Watch their behaviors and actions, scrutinize, and don’t make any excuses for their choices of behaviors, lack of integrity and ethics. Don’t just watch their behaviors with you, watch them around others and again, listen. Listen to what they describe they do (actions and behaviors) when you are not around. They say they are an artist or poet. Do they paint and write in their free time, do they talk about it? They say they love nature and gardens. Listen to their stories of how they spend their free time and is it in nature or in the garden? People who misrepresent themselves (either unconsciously or on purpose) will create stories and only over time will those stories fall apart as you see, observe, and experience their inconsistencies. And remember, if they feel too good to be true, they are, no matter what some astrologer or new age guru tells you is “meant to be”. Take time. Wait and see. If it is “meant to be” there is no harm in using time to observe and learn. How people are, is how they are for now, and you will not be the exception in their life. Work with “what you see (and experience with them) is what you get” until you actually see or experience other behaviors. Do not create friendships or relationships based on someone’s potential.

How else will you recognize users? Again, carefully observe their behaviors and reactions. You set a boundary, make a correction, ask to be respected by them and they either attack or leave. Sometimes people do need to step back to regroup before responding but that is different than leaving. All of the above will be taken by a “user” or “taker” as criticism and/or an attack and if they do not leave they will now be wounded, so wounded that they expect you, the one who just got trampled on, to take care of their wounds. “Users” and “takers” will work against you behind your back, they will never talk to you directly to solve problems and keep the relationship with you alive and healthy. They may tell you they love/like you, but watch the timing of when that happens, there is always an agenda. And they will never make amends other than taking some actions that are not inconvenient for them in order to keep their connection with you alive because you still have something they want from you: attention, skills, power, influence, recognition by association, the list is long.

If you get hurt by a user/taker, don’t feel bad, they are prevalent in society in this era. It happens with friendships, coworkers, bosses even family members. Opportunistic associations are the norm in this era and people more consider what they can “get” by being (acting like) “a friend” or at least friendly to this person than looking for heartfelt sincere connections and the morals and ethics of using people is gone. It is now called networking or even your “community”. Learn from your hurts. Tighten your boundaries and work on your observations skills. Don’t look for amends or sincerity and if it comes, look for a hidden agenda and see how you might be “valuable” to the person by putting yourself in their shoes for a bit. Then if you want to “barter” for “friendship” you can still do that, with no illusions. Using each other in a mindful conscious way while enjoying each other’s company is normal and is typical with for example co-workers, supervisors and staff, and even in some friendships. This is conscious choice.

If you come to realize you are a user and a taker be straight forward about your expectations when you interact with people. Consciously barter, set limits and explore boundaries. A good analogy would be the sex industry. You hire an escort, a call girl, a rent boy and you are clear it is not a romance or love affair. People do this to have an amazingly good time with no strings attached, being honest and having integrity and ethics about the relationship and all the interactions involved. You can set limits with your relationships. Have friends that are for movie going only, eating out only, hiking etc. Then don’t give them the impression you are “besties” or that you will “be there for them”. And if you do have a best friend, be sure to tell him/her that you consider that person a “bestie” and explain and explore what your concept of a best friend is because people have very different ideas and expectations when it comes to relationships. If you are a user and a taker and you hate yourself , you will not be able to be honest and carry out these kinds of conversations and negotiations until you heal. If you come to realize you are indeed a narcissist (not a sociopath, or a malignant narcissist, those folks are untreatable) you will have some very heavy lifting to do in order to change your behaviors and become a decent human being. While you are a work in progress, tell others and ask them to help you set boundaries and to help you make good decisions so you can behave with integrity. Make it an open conversation, like alcoholics in recovery do when they tell people they are a recovering alcoholic and ask others to support them in sticking to their commitments regarding recovery. Take the shame out of it by making it okay to talk about all of it.

Journey On
Dr. Marie: MarieFeuer.Org
Classes and private work. In-person and remote online/video
Life Path Healings, Yucaipa CA 92399