Do's and Don'ts for Difficult People Wanting To Change Part I: Interrupting

I actually published and sold the following article on a writing website. I'll break it up into several posts to make for easier reading. They reflect negative behavior and thought patterns that were part of me since I was a child. Born with clinical depression, I felt bad from as long as I can remember. My personality formed into a judgemental, self-centered, self-absorbed, difficult, argumentative, nasty one; simply because I didn't know how to feel good. Once the medication was in place, I realized that the damage was done, and I had to undo it. That's the tricky thing about mental illness. It can be treated, but how do you treat what it results in?

This article is meant for people who are on a quest for self-improvement and fulfillment. These dos and don’ts can improve one’s life immeasurably. They can be useful for anyone wanting to change their negative behavior patterns for the long term to find greater satisfaction in their personal and work relationships.

People growing up in an unhappy home, those fighting emotional afflictions, and those whose life experiences are negative from childhood can “learn” to be unhappy early on. When a person feels badly from early childhood, their personality and behavior patterns are born out of negativity. This can make for a child learning to grow up as a selfish, judgmental, self-absorbed, over-reactive, manipulative taker, rather than an empathetic giver who has healthy boundaries.

It often isn’t until one has that “ah hah” moment that they really start to get it about life. This can be brought on by losing friends, alienating family, losing jobs, and problems in love relationships. If people can begin to recognize all of the ways in which they may be alienating others around them, they can begin to undo these behaviors. This article is a how-to for improving one’s life for people who feel that they are repeatedly banging their head against a wall.

One of life’s lessons is about interrupting. People who interrupt are often viewed as impolite, but interrupting sends a deeper message. When we interrupt someone, it’s as though we’re saying that what they have to say isn’t as important as what we want to say. Interrupting also creates the impression that we didn’t listen to or even care about what the speaker was saying, because we were concentrating on and preparing whatever we said that became the interruption.

An alternative to interrupting might be to make a mental note of what we want to say while we are actively listening. It should be simple enough for us to remember, but not so complicated that it affects our ability to listen to what the person is saying to us. If visualizing a magician’s hat will help us remember to interject at the appropriate time because the conversation is about a costume party, then we should use that visualization. It should be a quick mental note so that we can resume concentrating on what the speaker is saying.

If what we have to say is important enough, it will stick with us until it is our turn to speak. If we lose the thought, it will likely come back to us shortly. We should not sell the person who is speaking short by interrupting or by not fully listening to them. We wouldn’t want our points of view to be disregarded, so it’s important to not disregard theirs.