"Biting Back takes a compelling look at self-care, setting boundaries, and protecting ourselves from friends, loved ones, enemies, and sometimes even ourselves. Written in a page-turning and warm style, Claudia’s refreshing addition to the self-help shelves offers empowering solutions to effectively remind us to stop inviting troubleinto our homes and souls." -- MELODY BEATTIE, NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF CODEPENDENT NO MORE































Friday

Vampire Or What?




My neighbor? My spouse? My coworker?

God knows it can be ickity-ick-icky trying to figure out whether those are vampires in our lives or not. We tilt our heads and adjust our perspective a thousand times, trying to decide: are they malicious? Are they trying to drive us nuts? Who knows? It could be they're just birdbrained!

Is our neighbor just so dumb that she can't take a hint?
Is our spouse just so distracted that he doesn't know how hurtful his words are?
Is our coworker just such a bonehead that she doesn't know when to shut up and get back to work?

It can be hard to tell sometimes. And tiring! With all our justifications, rationalizations, equivocations and plain old benefits-of-the-doubt in the way, how are we supposed to know who's who and what's what? We don't want to rush to judgement, right?

Right. So what's a Slayer to do?

But you guys know the answer to this one: We check our wounds. We stop looking at our vampires for the answers, and start looking at ourselves. After all, when a dog bites us, we don't look at the dog to try and figure out whether we've been hurt or not, we look at the wound.

The same goes for our vampires. Again and again we find that our best diagnostic tool turns out not to be the one we use on our vampires, but the one we use on ourselves.

Whew and thank goodness, too -- because that other method requires a lot of mind-reading ability for one thing. And that's not even practical... right?

Right.

Next Time:
Diagnosing Our Wounds

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh, wow. I never even thought of that. Makes diagnosis a lot easier, huh? Thanks, slayer.

Anonymous said...

Oh I'm so pleased to see you here, Anonymous! And I'm glad to hear you this way is easier.

Me too! Me too!

jjdebenedictis said...

I'll chime in to that; the dog-bite analogy is an extremely good one. Am I bleeding? Then I've been bitten.

I always love it when someone points out an obvious fact that most people (me included) are mostly blind to. This is a great insight, Slayer! :-)

Anonymous said...

Ahh, JJ! You've arrived! So good to see you here. And yes, the dog bite seems to work pretty well for me, too. It's so easy to fall under the thrall of a vampire -- they are so fun to watch and talk about that we forget to look at ourselves. Tricky creatures, aren't they?

Jaye Wells said...

Excellent point, Slayer. Thanks for the insight.

Anonymous said...

Is that my writer-pal, Jaye? Thank you, Ma'am.

Jaye Wells said...

Tis me! Thank you for the linkage. I added yours to my list, too.

Anonymous said...

bj

Anonymous said...

Good words.