It seems like some people just like to complain. No matter what you do, you cannot make them happy. From trivial mistakes to great blunders, they do not let go of a single opportunity to tell you that you’ve done something wrong.

These types of behaviour are really just displays of low self-esteem. These may even be the victims of the world trying just trying to help themselves feel better.

It is very difficult to have and maintain a relationship with such people, because they find it difficult to utter a compliment and maybe even struggle to tell you that they love you. It often just seems like they don’t appreciate you no matter what you do. I’ve even heard people describe them as misers when it comes to giving compliments, and even sometimes in receiving compliments.

These people are also game playing as this is what they are actually doing – playing a psychological game that has only one objective and that is to confirm for them what it us they have already decided about themselves and/or about others.

So if they want to believe that nobody can do anything as well as them or that they are the only ones who know how to do anything at all, or that they themselves are pretty useless but in order to try to feel a little better about themselves they have to bring you down, so that you are then too busy thinking about what you might have done wrong so you don’t discover it’s actually more about them, it’s this that sets the game in motion.

Confusing?

When you try to look at it logically it is. But when you are responding to something you decided on when you were three or four years of age then it makes perfect sense to the unconscious part of your mind that has been harbouring that belief and playing it out again and again making the belief stronger and stronger with each experience which again simply re-confirms those tired old beliefs.

The Answer to the Game – Get off the Merry-Go-Round

So how do you deal with these kinds of people and with this kind of twisted logic? It’s simple really. You take a position of care for the other and assertiveness for yourself. You must also be in tune with your own vulnerability which might mean that sometimes you need to respond and that sometimes it’s better not to.

This doesn’t mean that you have to roll over and accept what is being said but you must respond thoughtfully or else you can start to feel like you’re on a merry-go-round that is never going to stop.

It is important though to keep in mind that sometimes the complainer will ‘up the ante’, so to speak, and serve you more of the criticism  to get the desired outcome, the ‘payoff’ as we would call it in game theory.

The bad news is that if you give in and accept the complaint or criticism as true there is only one of three outcomes possible. These define the outcomes of extreme games and end up in the courtroom, the hospital or maybe even in the morgue.

It might begin somewhat innocently and then escalate until it seems that there is no going back. For example, if you think you can just tell the complainer they are wrong in some matter, or they need to change their attitude the reply you get might be: “I do not need you, if you do not want to be with me you can leave”.

From here it’s likely to become a fast ride to no-where!

So until next time – Relate with Love