Another group of difficult people

The only way to really know is if Azul is finding our input helpful and if anything shared fills some kind of need that has been nagging.

That can contribute to how your sister turned out. Often with narcissistic parents, they don't recognize the child's need to have their OWN identity. The child MUST be an extention of them. This can create an offspring that is the same and may develop strong narcissistic traits. And, ofcourse they consider anyone who doesn't view the world the same way, have the same opinions they deem that other as "a difficult person" and "it's always that other person's fault" not theirs. And ofcourse the ongoing need for "drama, drama, drama". Without it, they are literally "bored".

That is what my brother said to me, my sister's life has been basically about creating and engaging in "drama". It's VERY negative and emotionally abusive and manipulative and controlling.

@Open Eyes , I appreciate your story so much because of how you handled it, how you taught your daughter to handle it, etc! These are the types of difficult people I am not sure how to handle. The ones who want me to agree with them, even when I disagree. The controlling ones. I would LOVE to be able to say "well you know, I disagree." Or "I think this instead". They take it as a personal offense and attack though. With people like this I really just keep my distance. A distant family friend is often saying negative things about ppl and just expects I'll go along with it "Or else," right? someday I'll get the guts to talk civilly yet very assertively to her. In the meantime, I keep my distance.

Thanks for sharing The Trauma Triangle. I have witnessed behaviors from other people online and irl along those lines.

Being completely honest here, I myself probably exhibited some of those behaviors and thinking patterns before I went into recovery (for mh). Though I do hope I did not hurt anyone, I most likely did. I got hurt a lot, too. I was more reactive at times, than anything else, and while I have a strong moral compass, and often said "I'm sorry I said that," I am just glad I got help.

Don’t worry, please. I’m learning a lot from all of you. And I think you are doing a great effort to understand me.

I wouldn’t want any of you to feel uncomfortable by expressing ourselves in a thread whose main goal was an open dialogue.
I’m not looking for support in this thread, but insight and dialogue.

I’m afraid I’m reading slower than I thought.
Hope, you don’t take it into account.

I am glad you found it helpful WovenGalaxy. I think it's important to think about how involved you are with the individual. If it's just a distant family friend, then maybe it's not worth your effort. If they play their games with you directly, then stand up to them and don't let them know they can engage you like that.

Don't be hard on yourself, if you went through a period where you struggled badly, maybe you did react, you are human, we all are. The thing is you have taken steps to pay attention to your behaviors and improve on them in healthier ways.

I don't nail it perfectly all the time, no one does.

Tisha, apart from the politicians who seems to catch a virus as soon as they get a responsibility charge, I don’t use to complain about people. Only do it when I feel myself insulted or see something that can affect a third person. Thus, when I have a thing with someone or the behaviour of a person, I wonder why, why it does trigger me so much.

Your psychiatrist pretty much does what psychiatrists here do, too.
But, I would attend to another if you feel you are not gonna trust him or get along with him. I always felt very uncomfortable with those psychiatrists I went and show himself cold as ice. Only trusting meds, don’t say a word about what the meds I am being prescribed are for. Nothing about the diagnosis. At least a “it’s still soon to say it, I need more time”.
Surely, you’re psychiatrist is a good doctor but if you don’t feel comfortable with him is better to attend to another. It’s important that the patience is at least, considered as an adult person, the one you give the information they need.

Wow! Wise words. You sounds as a very great person.
You also brought a point, the need to distancing yourself in order to be more able to help the person.
I’m afraid that I invest too much by wanting to help others that I feel myself insulted when they receive an unfair treatment or better said, with what I think it’s an unfair treatment.

Sometimes, a person can be on the difficult side simply because of how their brain is wired. So, it's not always something intentional on their part. I learned a lot about that not only from my own child that has dyslexia, but by teaching children that had that, and adhd and were on the mild autism spectrum. Unfortunately, when I was a young child many of these children were considered dicipline problems and intead of being helped they were treated badly and often punished.

Ride the river, but at times the ride can get really rough and rock your boat where you hang on for dear life and can get soaked. Keep moving with the river as it's not always rough, there can be some nice moments with it too.

In any case, you don’t sound now as a person who is stuck in the past. You seem very open to grow now.

First, after reading all your replies
I want to thank you all of you for your replies. For all of your interventions. Each one counts a lot.
No matter one of them might trigger me, or I disagree with. Each one is worthy because it comes from a person who took the time to read my post and did their very best to understand the topic.
Thus, I have learnt a lot so, I can’t be more grateful.

The article about the triangle is very interesting. Thank you, O.E. I think it explains and clarify a lot many behaviours.
And for me, it makes a lot of sense. I guess, a person traumatised plays one of the roles more often than the others. I don’t know if you can give me an insight in this sense.
In my case, I see the abandoning authority ( pointed in the article as the fourth role) is the one I tend to repeat and I now see where it might come from.
An authoritarian and controller father while the other caretaker, my mother, kept silence. That is what makes me being so much protector and caring and even, to the extreme, kind of a justice warrior for the ones I think as sufferers. Although this last role may be the rescuer.

Very good Azul, that is part of why I felt that posting the trauma triangle might help when feeling frustrated or even triggered. Often this originated in one's childhood experiences. It could be that as a child you watched your father be controlling with your mother and it upset you and you felt you had no voice in that dynamic. That can be the root that leads to one's social anxieties too.

From what you have shared, you can get triggered when you see exchanges that remind you of what you had no way of stopping when you were a child.

What would you consider an abandoning role you might play?

I tend to be very sensitive when someone is being bad treat. I take it personally. I defend this person and in these cases, I even can forget about my own social anxiety to stand up for this person.
I understand it’s a pattern I have to take care of because maybe, what I’m seeing as a mistreat, it isn’t. That’s why I say that take it to an extreme, it could be pretty harmful and wrong.

I don’t want to do what my mother did, I mean, washing her hands on me.

(((Azul)) you know what? I can totally relate to what you are saying. I also get upset when I see others being hurt. I would have to say that is a huge part of my ptsd challenge too. That is why I shared the story about that trainer and what he said to my daughter. Yet, not just her but the other students he was teaching at his barn. It was a situation that I had to pay attention to, it would define a great deal to my daughter about how to handle anyone who chose to threaten her that way. It was a VERY challenging situation because I could not do that for the other children. YET, the only thing I could do is set and example for those other children in showing them how to walk away from a person that is controlling like that.

When it comes to a toxic controlling person like that, they WILL look for ways to hurt you both covertly and oververtly. He made it a point to tell other trainers that I left him because he refused to have sex with me. He wanted to figure out a way to say something about me that was bad and put himself in the victim role so these other trainers would not take on my daughter as a student or me as a customer. He wanted others to think that I was the difficult person and the problem, and that HE was innocent and tried to work with my daughter. Ugh, he was short and fat and gross, nothing I would even remotely be attracted to and I would never choose to go after a married man or choose to cheat on my husband either. And what is very challenging about that is there is always going to be individuals that WILL BELIEVE him too. There are always individuals that will choose to believe a toxic person when they engage in their smear campaign.

When I met this man and decided to have him train my daughter he seemed VERY NICE and attentive. He seemed knowledgable and capable. I had no reason to think he was toxic UNTIL he showed me that side of him. He used that trauma triangle to control and deceive, not just adults but also children which is the worst sin IMHO. And the truth is that all he cared about was standing out, being some kind of big and best and he did not care who he used to attain that goal of his. He was a male version of a "drama queen".

It could be that is how your father behaved, and your mother ended up allowing him to have that kind of control. And what you witnessed as a child created your own trauma triangle where you want to see healthier interactions take place.

Sometimes a child will grow up experiencing a father that has no emotional control. And a mother that somehow puts up with it. They may even have a better relationship with the mother, yet the mother can be at times demanding in her own way. This dynamic can lead to that child being drawn to drama unknowingly and address it with a more methodical answer, "do X,Y,Z. And they are not all that good at handling the emotional but instead "do X,Y,Z". This kind of individual will go to other challenges but hate to present their own. Typically, the reason that happens is because they never really developed any comfort when needing themselves. Their relationship style is very different and they find it much too hard to dwell in any victim role. They will often tout how certain toxic people are no big deal to them. And part of that comes from what they witnessed and had to learn to deal with in their own relationship with their parents. And possibly being in different environments too. This can come from someone who's father was in the service and they grew up moving from one location to another "army brats" are what they call these children. Often there is a different kind of knowledge and adjustment skills in this kind of individual simply because they grew up in a more nomadic lifestyle.

So, part of thinking about this trauma triangle that's helpful is how different individuals use it based on their personal history. This tends to lead to different ways of interacting socially that is always going to be present when dealing with a lot of different individuals interacting with each other ESPECIALLY on a site like this one.

What I TRY to do myself when I get triggered and I do and have gotten triggered, is discover what the triggers mean to me personally and work on whatever it happens to be that I too engage my own trauma triangle reacting to often "unknowingly". When I joined PC it certainly was not at a time in my life where I was in any way at my best. Quite honestly, I was genuinely struggling so badly with ptsd and VERY confused by how it was challenging me and often crippling me.

I am learning that in my own trauma triangle, I witnessed a lot of abuse as a child and I felt like I had no voice or any way to stop it. I could not understand how anyone could feel good about hurting someone else. What I tended to do is observe the abuser/controller and see how their behaviors hurt others and I constantly think to myself how I would NEVER be that kind of person that would hurt someone else like that. I hated it then, and I hate it now. However, the one thing I did want to learn is the "why" behind these mean behaviors I witnessed. That is why this trauma triangle is help to me, because it's something that different individuals actually engage in ways they learn to navigate to self protect. Yet, also as a means to control too, control in some VERY unhealthy ways.

My dad was a very insecure person, kind of dependent, and he indeed had a very authoritarian and judgemental mother. So, in the end, even when I was the one who face to him more when a kid, I was the one who better understood him when I grew up and did therapy for my issues. Because I was very alike him.
He had a very nice bottom after all. But, he surely was trying his best by repeating his own triangle roles patterns.

You did it so well when facing to the situation your child lived with this trainer. He did the worst an adult could do, to pay their insecurities on children by controlling and making them feel scared. It happens a lot, more often than we want to believe with adults who deny themselves to grown up. He’s a very dark person. Hope, he learns to be better.

I would like to thank you for your support and your insight. Like you, one of my main goals is to understand the why and what’s behind these behaviours. So, yes, I also wonder why I feel triggered and at the same time, also wonder about what’s behind a person’s behaviour. Because in the end, none of the behaviours are strange to us.
In my introduction to this thread I confessed that I felt triggered and I behaved very bad with a user here ( I mean, I pissed her off on purpose). So, I’m very grateful for the replies here and what I have learnt.

I think you have expressed a deep need to understand how different interactions trigger you and how to manage it better when you see certain things and get triggered. This site exposes people to be able to view all kinds of interactions in different forums. It can take time to get used to that and be able to see comments and reactions that you may not agree with and would address differently. It can be a challenge, yet also be educational too. And the truth is, not everyone "nails" it when addressing a challenged individual. There are also different ways to address a challenged individual. What has to be considered it their cultural influences too.

((((Open Eyes)))

The thing is that I’m a pretty reasonable person, my problem is that many times, I still react without taking the time to think and consider the differences you have pointed out. Now, I know why. I know why I react and act more unconsciously that is, when the theory about the triangle’s roles makes sense.
Yes, I wouldn’t make a distinction between online interactions and irl interactions. At least, not in my personal case. What triggers me here, is the same I saw triggered in my off-line life. And I think this is a good site to learn.

YES!! I am glad you were able to make this connection. That in itself can be empowering personally. And the reason I felt the Trauma Triangle could be helpful is it can help someone think about how they themselves may be engaging it unknowingly. We all have our own personal baggage, and often how we interact can have a lot to do with that personal baggage that we may not realize. The cultural aspect of communication is important to consider too. Also, the generation a person happens to be important as well. It can actually cause problems if someone is interacting with another individual expecting them to react like a pier when that may simply not be the case. I tend to ask the person's age from time to time so I can take that into consideration when I reply to their situational challenge.

Very truth, indeed. It’s very empowering because it helps you to know yourself better, and at the same time, know the other person.

I have to confess that I have a deficit in what interacting with people has to do, you know...because of my social phobia, the good news is that I’m ready to learn and be better.
Thanks a lot!

Phobia is fear, it doesn't mean a person can't do something or isn't smart or good enough. I have found the children that were often the most afraid of getting on my pony to ride it ended up being the ones that actually liked it the most once they got past that fear (phobia). That is actually why I liked working with young children because if they learn to conquer their fear (phobia) early enough it helps them in so many ways while they are growing and developing into adulthood.

I also worked with kids. I’m now retired because of my social anxiety but I do understand how gratifying your job may be.