Why Do We Let People Make Us Feel like We Don't Belong?

I am primarily the one who always thinks it's ME...something is wrong with me, I'm too old, or too fat or not attractive enough or have bad luck or I'm too boring, or too quiet or not quiet enough...the list of reasons I give myself is endless. Have you felt this way your whole life or has recent turns of events made you feel this way? For me it's been all my life.

I think part of it stems from your family and as much as we don't think there's "politics" at home there really is...this I feel is the first flavor of politics every child experiences...this politics along with our personality and disposition makes us react a certain way. The relationship we have with our parents and siblings, and only children are impacted also, but for them they either get too much attention or too little attention growing up. The way our parents treated us is a form of politics. Having two children myself, I see how I treat each child differently because of their personalities. My one child does as he's told, so I tend to give him more tasks, and when he gripes that he doesn't want to do them, I punish him. Where as the other child usually tells me what he does and doesn't want to do and because he knows how to buttery me up, I am happy for whatever he does and don't ask him to do more. The other child is not as affectionate and doesn't know how to buttery me up, so he ends up getting the shorter end of the stick...once I realized I was doing this, I felt it was an epiphany. I then began to reflect on my own childhood and that I was treating my one child as I was treated by my own mother because I was the child that did as I was told, because I didn't have my mothers "good" side. My sister on the other hand was not asked to do as much as me and what she did do she was praised for it...Had I not realized what I was doing to my own children, I would not have begun to understand the problems I could have inflicted on his self esteem and designed placement in life, but was it too late? Could I have already taught him how his life would always be? All I can do is change my ways in hopes that he will realize he has the ability to be liked for who he is and just for what he does or doesn't do.

Whether it be helping out at school, and trying to fit in with other parents who don't work who are milling about the school every day and have all the teachers and the principal in their pockets, skewing all the opinions their way on every event. Or at work with busy body individuals who pose as your friends; "wolves in lamb clothing" as I like to describe them, in order to find out stuff about you or what you know that's going on in the office, so they can go back and use it as small talk to spark conversation with the bosses, and/or any environment where they can be very vocal with coworkers and use information to persuasive people to their side. These people seem to be everywhere and they seem to be able to rally everyone towards their cause...this always puzzled me how this works. I find that when I encounter these types of people, they are initially likeable and seem to be so willing to be your best friend...when you do befriend them and perhaps share some tid bits with them, they turn on you and stab you in the back and a lot of the time we don't even know it until it's too late or worse, we don't want to believe it because we like them too much...it's a losing battle and honestly I am so tired of it...but how can we escape it?

No matter where we work, where we go, 90% of the time we find these individuals who seem to be our nemesis'. I don't know any other term that would describe them. I usually like to describe the relationship as two backward magnets pointing at each other...if you have ever felt that negative energy of each magnet when pointing at one another, they push against the other magnet...that's the feeling, and as nature shows us, it cannot be changed. It's like oil and water...they will never mix. So what do we do? The only thing to do...try and combine forces to co-exist.

How many of us perform a self-reflection at the end of every day? It's kind of like a personal "spell check"...how often do we think the work we've just written or typed up is perfectly spelled and grammatically correct, only to run that spell check and find that there are things we missed? More often than we'd want to admit. It's hard to self reflect. Sometimes we don't want to believe that perhaps we were unfair to someone or that we shunned a fellow coworker out, or that we ourselves repeated something about someone else and even worse, not know whether that scathing information was even true...The fact is, if more of us would go through the self reflection process at the end of each day, the less we would see sad and unhappy people in the world, or at school or wherever we are. Perhaps, if we realized that we have the ability of making someone smile or cry inside we would do better at what our actions are towards them.

In conclusion, we will never escape encountering the wolves in sheep's clothing, nor nemesis that appear out of nowhere. We can, however, learn to take our own path by doing the right thing and showing everyone that we are open to new friends and don't discriminate against anyone for being unique...don't be a follower, be a leader. These people want everyone to follow them and if you don't like what they represent, then lead and have conviction and confidence in what you believe in. Eventually, you will have followers too. At the worse, you have your own company and at least you can count on that.