This from the book The Wisdom of the Enneagram (a book about personality types. I am a type 2 with a 3 wing for those of you keeping score): “journal about your people-pleasing.”
O.K. I’ve done some of this already…”mining” people for their approval etc.
But the questions in the book were pretty specific and centered on HOW I people please.
It’s the “Special-Friend-Thing” I guess. I try very hard to reach as deep into someone’s “self” as I can. I use my intuition and mostly, I guess, my own experience…or more accurately my own willingness to speak something out loud that I KNOW is a universal experience. This has the effect of making me look wise, or insightful (which is good) but the jack-pot is: the other thinks I know THEM….when in reality I simply know human-nature pretty well. By virtue of my understanding of them – I am now not just valuable, but “special”.
I don’t always have to SPEAK something to a person to let them know that I “know” them. A well placed touch – even a moment of silence can have an effect over time. The book talks about flattery. Most people are hip to flattery, so I look for the things that would not appear to be flattery. Things that are in short supply in our culture. Examples would be: Manners. Chivalry. Listening.
Sometimes I feel like I could be a TV psychic. I did a couple of cold readings at a church service once to demonstrate how it’s done. I’ll bet with some practice, I could make money at it.
It’s just a two step process and the rest un-folds on it’s own:
1) Identify people’s pain.
2) and then just touch it.
Don’t poke it. Touch it. Speak it out when no one else will. Then they will surrender their affection. You don’t have to take it, and you don’t have to work really hard at it.
Shit. I’m Ted Bundy.
I’m serious. I can see how this kind of thing when pushed, or allowed to slide farther down the road could easily play itself out in profoundly evil behavior.
The other word that comes to mind is dis-arming. I feel like I can walk up to very tense people, touch them very gently but intentionally and get them to relax their grip on their weapons.
But it’s only because I live in a culture full of very tense, defensive and needy people that any of this “works”. I’ll bet it wouldn’t work if I lived in Tibet J
I’m a ringer. King Shit of Turd Hill.
UN-tangling all of this from the GOOD that is contained it…the part that can actually serve others is going to be tricky….HAS been tricky.
I’m thinking that silence and solitude are the key. If I limit my capacity to “touch” others…I can’t use them.
A sin of COMMSION requires OMMISION…maybe I need to omit contact with others in some measured and reasonable, but effective way.
______________________________________________________________________________
I have left these thoughts almost entirely over the Christmas holiday. I must not let them fade.
Silence is somehow the answer.
To speak only when told to speak by the Holy Spirit.
To be still as a default posture.
“I am still, until told to be otherwise. I am an object at rest. Un-animated through self, but only by the unction of the creator. The battles that I fight, are not fought BY me, but THROUGH me. I am a tool. A talking horse. A Narnian horse.”