Unfortunately, we all have to deal with them, people who talk about us, people who make comments about us. It’s something we can’t help, we can’t stop the words coming out of other people’s mouths. We cannot control what they say. With the Internet, people can hide behind a computer screen and post anonymous comments on a blog or forum about someone they don’t like. People can attack other people through Facebook or social networks. It seems that they are all judges. It seems like everyone is pointing fingers at someone else, we have to walk through life dealing with constant judgments. Someone is always finding fault with something you do, the way you dress, the way you talk, the way you carry yourself. Sometimes it can seem like you do everything you can to appease people, you can help them, do them favors, try to be nice, take them places and no matter what you do it seems like you will never earn their favor or their respect. Sometimes it seems like you can do a lot for someone and if you don’t do them that favor they turn on you or bring it up when you least expect it.
There are times when someone might make a comment about you and you don’t know how to respond at the time. Your brain is still trying to process what was just said about you. Did I just hear what I thought I heard? You could tell this to yourself. Often it can be something derogatory directed towards us or someone we know. We feel the offense, the disrespect, the anger, the frustration, the pain, the pain, the fury, the shame. Often this can happen when we are alone or with a group of people at a social gathering. Many times when someone embarrasses us in a social gathering it is worse, the embarrassment is greater, we have to try to save face, the Chinese call this mienzo (saving face), if we do not respond quickly and correctly just know that everyone who They were there who saw what happened, they are going to talk about us. We are afraid that this small incident may arise in the future. People are going to talk about what happened and we’re going to listen to it for days, weeks, months, possibly years to come, it’s never going to die.
Later we may think or dwell on what the person has told us, we may go home and think about it, it may eat away at us, we may dwell on what the person said, it may cause us emotional pain. feeling furious, angry or even thinking about taking revenge on the person we feel has hurt us. I myself have had to deal with this in the past, the flood of negative emotions can eat you up from the inside. You might even contemplate hurting the person or doing something to win them back.
Maybe you did something unintentionally and meant no harm with your actions, maybe according to you it wasn’t a big deal, but the other person didn’t see it that way and now you’ve been scolded for it, even if you made a mistake in judgment that we’ve probably all made. committed in the past. Now you have been reprimanded, scolded and now you feel that people will continue to judge and belittle you. You stop at what they might be thinking, you start contemplating in your mind what they might be thinking, how you think they see you. I myself have run scenarios in my mind about the conversations I thought they might be having, trying to analyze every single thing I said, said, or could have said. It’s easy for someone to tell you not to take it personally, but if someone says something derogatory about you—for example, calls you an idiot, or a parent says you’ll never amount to anything—it’s hard not to feel offended.
How to overcome and treat the problem
First of all, you need to understand that you can’t stop people from talking, gossip is part of human nature, many people including myself have a high degree of self-sufficiency within them. They feel that they are always right and it hurts their ego to think that they are wrong. Nobody likes criticism or disrespect. We all crave praise, love, warmth, acceptance. We enjoy being around people who give us these positive emotions, make us feel like a winner. We constantly talk to these people and go to them for support, we feel that we can trust them and tell them anything. These people make us feel opposite emotions to the people who criticize us.
The first thing we have to do is get to a point where nothing said, written, or mentioned about us bothers us. If you let everything people feel and say about you bother you, then you are actually giving them power over you. You are letting them take away your joy, your satisfaction, your pleasure. You are letting what they feel and say about you dictate your direction in life. We can’t control what people say, but we can control how we react. We can control how we respond in a professional or non-professional manner.
Keep in mind that negativity only leads to more negativity, and positivity leads to more positivity. If you respond negatively more negativity will come. If we can show people that their comments don’t bother us, that their words don’t affect us, that they’re not going to upset or anger us, their words immediately lose power. You have to work on building an armor, a force field against negativity. It may take some time, some work, some practice to do this, but over time it can be done.
Martin Luther King Jr., Lebron James, Barack Obama and many other successful people have had mud thrown at their names, defamatory and derogatory comments, statements and posters made about them. Despite the attacks they had to keep working, keep advancing towards their goal, towards their objective. It’s not always easy sometimes, but we can’t let anything someone else does or says affect us to the point of stopping us from pursuing our goals.
Often people are jealous of the favor they see being given to you, when you succeed at something or maybe because you got a promotion at work and they didn’t, someone put their trust in you and someone else feels that favor should have belonged to them They should have received what you have, the promotion should have been given to them instead of you. It is the favor bestowed on you that makes them spiteful, hateful, or envious.
Build a good defense
Learn to put your walls. If you have a strong wall, a strong inner wall if someone comments on you it’s like throwing a rock at someone and it bounces back, if your wall isn’t strong the rock will penetrate you and hurt you. You can’t stop people from throwing rocks, but you can deflect them. Remember if someone’s intention is to agitate you, make you angry and don’t get angry, they have lost and you have won. Power is taken away from them. His aim is in vain.
Change your approach. Shifting your focus and concentrating on something more positive can help you forget about the negative incident, comment, or opinion about you. Try reading a book that uplifts you, try learning a new skill, study, do something constructive. Keep positive thoughts, when you go home try not to think about what has been said about you. Watch something or read something uplifting.
Choose your circle of friends carefully. “You’re known for your association, show me your five closest friends and I’ll show you who you are, if you don’t want to be that individual you know what to do.” Sometimes avoidance is unavoidable, we have family members we live with, co-workers, supervisors we have to deal with, people we come across and it seems their only purpose in life is to stir you up. Avoid them when you can, but it is important to monitor and control their response, if you respond in anger you will only make the situation worse, sometimes avoiding or walking away is the best solution. But often it is necessary to do everything possible to remove this person from your life, to disassociate yourself. Let them know how you feel and walk away from them, I know this is hard but you will find yourself free from the worry and stress we are putting you through.
Doing favors or trying to appease them won’t work. I can remember once there was this kid, I never met him but his family was pretty good, from what I heard, I was with my cousin and his friend one day and they were both talking negatively about this kid. They said he would always spend money on them, try to do them favors, buy them food, and yet behind his back, we’re talking about him like he’s stupid. I wish until today I had been able to meet that person, I wanted to tell him the truth and I wanted to treat him. I felt that what we were saying about him was wrong, here was someone who was doing them favors and yet they talked about him like shit. He made me angry, but I never talked about it. While I know he may have been trying to buy friends and whether his family was okay or not that wasn’t the problem it was the main one if you don’t like this person that much then don’t accept favors from him. You can’t buy true friends, they’ll be there rain or shine, trying to win or buy someone’s favor won’t work.
Handling negative comments on social media
The last thing I want to touch on in this article is social media. I have been on Facebook since 2008. I may have more friends than others and fewer than some. It is not a big thing. I have never had a problem sharing my photos. of my trips with people, I don’t worry all day about who is looking at them, what they say. Every once in a while there might be a photo someone took of me that I’m tagged in that I might not like very much, maybe my facial expression wasn’t to my liking. Maybe they caught me at an awkward moment. I’ve never had to deal with many derogatory comments about myself, however I once did. One person posted a comment about me saying how dumb I look in a picture, he said I look so stupid and called me dumb-dumb. My first thought was retaliation, how dare he, who is he to judge me. So I retaliated, responded in anger, said something slanderous about him. Having thought about what they told me and what I had responded to them, I realized that there was a more constructive way to handle the situation. I went back and deleted my comment and reported the comment and asked for it to be removed. The comment was deleted and I never communicated with this person again. Do not respond if someone says something defamatory about you. Report it, it makes the other person look bad and his account could be monitored further. In other words, they will do more damage to themselves if they continue with their actions. If they continue to make negative comments to you and others, and if enough people report it, they risk having their account banned.
Remember that what matters most is how you see yourself.
by Andre Lezama