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Old Jul 08, 2011, 12:38 PM
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Open Eyes Open Eyes is offline
Legendary Wise Elder
 
Member Since: Mar 2011
Location: Northeast USA
Posts: 23,288
Well, that could be your response palemoss, "Thats cool, whatever but thankyou for all our fun conversations." And that way you are not only telling him that you are ok with it, but you are consciously telling yourself. And that is important for you to recognize. You cannot spend your life wondering if you did something wrong and second guessing yourself. But you can leave open bridges to others offering an opportunity for them to possibly overcome their issue and move foward.

People often play these funny games of "she walked away from me and now I will show her how it feels". It is a wasted effort but it is an effort on his part to gain a type of self esteem. I call it fools gold thinking. As it is a selfish way of thinking, often unconsciously I might add, and does not lend to any real openness of perhaps you are considering that he was perhaps worthy of continuing a relationship.

People make a great mistake of acting on their sense of self esteem too quickly. They choose the path of protecting their damaged self esteem by just punishing another person or discontinuing interactions with another person altogether. So there is no true gain in learning new ways to exchange interactions with that other person.

Ofcourse I am not promoting a continued exchange with someone who is obviously damaging and useless to relate with. But there can be prideful exclusions that only result in discouragement to establishing better confidence and self esteem.

You opened a door and he closed it. So, don't spend time in wondering what you did wrong, but you could leave the door open to perhaps him realizing that he really hasn't gained anything.
If anything you could consider how you left the relationship with him, you somehow burned a bridge, learn from that and next time consider the other persons feelings when you do move on.
It is a part of growing and learning how to interact with others. You are bound to make mistakes and so are others, but you can learn from that and develope better skills. The ability to interact with others is about learning how to develope the skill to do so. If a person spends all their time thinking that they are always going to fail somehow, than they are never going to learn. You are learning each time you interact with another person.

One of the things that I try to do is if I say something that someone dislikes and I do not know what it is, I do appoligize and make an effort to find out what I did that presented that effect.
I may or may not get an answer. But if I do get an answer I consider it and I stop and think about how the other person was effected by what I said. That is when I have an opportunity to learn and so does the other person. So I really try to leave a bridge open if I can for an opportunity for both me and that other person to learn from each other. It doesn't always work and I have learned to accept that. But there have been times when I have learned something about my own behavior that I can improve. As all people are truely unique there is always room to learn and expand our abilities to interact with others.


Open Eyes

Last edited by Open Eyes; Jul 08, 2011 at 01:17 PM.