A holistic guide to dealing with emotional vampires


Filed Under Relating to People | Sep 1, MDT 12:43 pm

Stopping emotional vampires I paint emotional vampirism with big, broad brush strokes. Most folks place vampirism under very tight constraints. I prefer treating the issue holistically — the people who leave us feeling drained are part of a larger system, and to effectively deal with them, we have to deal with the system that they belong to. That we belong to, actually.

We’re all members of a shared reality; we’re all subject to the same physical, natural, and psychological laws. The emotional vampires we meet are nothing more than the emissaries of these laws. This might seem like a silly distinction, and yet recognizing it can be incredibly empowering.  When you realize that it’s not the vampires that are the problem, but the laws of nature that allow them to exist, you’ll finally be in a position to really put an end to the energy leaks in your life.

It’s not enough to deal with the vampires — you got to deal with the circumstances that brought them into your life and the conditions that made you vulnerable to their presence.

Your vulnerability here is something that is uniquely your own.  Different people have different impacts on each other. Someone that leaves me feeling weak might leave you feeling empowered — and there’s rarely a simple reason behind these different reactions. Not only that, but these personal reactions are easily modified by circumstances.  Your diet, sleep schedule, personal hygiene, health, the environment your in, your recent personal history, all of these things can alter the way the people in your life make you feel.

Since no one has, as of yet, figured out all the rules and laws which govern our behavior and feelings, I can’t quite offer you a silver bullet for your problems. What I’d like to do, instead, is offer you a way of looking at them, a way that will let you avoid vampires and lure angels.

The key here is vulnerability. Knowing what you’re personally vulnerable to will allow you to make better decisions on how to live your life, on who you want in your life, and under what conditions you want to deal with the people you’ve let in.

Since we’re all vulnerable to different things under different circumstances, this will require a great deal of research and experimentation. Here are some tools and exercises that can help you map them out.

EXPERIMENT:

Steve Pavlina has pioneered the 30 day exercise. Basically, you spend thirty days trying something out to see how you react to it. It’s a methodical way of testing different lifestyle changes, and it can help you suss out what energizes you and what doesn’t.  You might find that a better diet might ward off vampire attacks, or starting an exercise regimen, or saying no more often. Once again, different things work for different people.

The Zenhabits forum is an excellent place to share the progress of your experiment. They have forums dedicated to monthly challenges, where people post about new habits they’re trying to acquire.  You don’t have to keep the habit at the end of it; after all, perhaps it just doesn’t suit you. Be open to failing.

BE MINDFUL:

You want to become more sensitive to your body and the messages it sends you. There are many ways to go about doing this. Keeping a journal can help you focus your attention.  Don’t be fooled, either — the things you choose not to write about are just as revealing as the things you do choose to write about.

Writing down your dreams will help you pinpoint your anxieties. Writing down your moods will help you understand what influences them.

Track your moods — find out what influences them.  Follow fluctuations over the course of the day and try to understand what causes your feelings to go up and down.
Throughut the day, practice remembering. This is a trick that people learning how to lucid dream often do. They’ll pause at random times throughout the day and recall everything they’ve done since waking up. This helps you become more attentive to your surroundings. Your flexing your attention muscles.

Meditate. Quiet your mind and listen to your body. Words have a nasty tendency of clouding out subtle messages. Turn down the volume on a regular basis.

Master your imagination.  Try image streaming — it’s a brain exercise that involves describing the images of your inner mind out loud.  Once your comfortable streaming, learn about submodalities. The better your ability to recognize the elements of your internal imagery, the more capable you’ll be to master that imagery.  Knowledge of submodalities is incredibly powerful. For example, I rid myself of panic attacks with that knowledge.

COMPARE:

Borrow someone’s head, and look at the world through their eyes.  Explore why you experience things one way and they experience things another way. Consider the emotional vampires in your life. Look at the world through their eyes, then look at the world through the eyes of someone who gets along well with that same vampire. What are the differences and similarities in your points of view?

Speaking of points of view, know how to juggle them. You can look at things from a first person perspective, through the eyes of a third party, or from a floating and detached position. Different perspectives will open up different trains of thought and different lines of action.  You can compliment these three perspectives by placing them at different points in time and in different areas of the world. Consider one of your emotional vampires — imagine looking at him through the eyes of a mutual friend, now imagine that this viewpoint is taking place during the American Revolution in some small rural town. Next, imagine that it’s taking place two years ago at your house. Change the local to Tokyo. Our perspectives are intimately tied to time and space. Understanding how the two influence your relationships might prove to be rather useful.

You might also want to consider some best practices. Find a list of people who have exceptionally healthy relationships with all the people in their life; people who simply don’t seem to deal with any vampires at all. What seperates you from them? Can you learn any lessons from their example?

GET ANALYTICAL:

Write up after-action reports whenever you finishing something.  Do a SWOT analysis for your personal life. Measure everything and anything. You don’t have to be anal retentive about it; you’re trying to find out what patterns rule your life so that you can break free from them.

Learn the meta-model. Really learn it. Understand how to break your own experiences down in terms of the model. Learn to recognize the things you delete, distort, and generalize. It’s impossible to be analytical without appreciating the extent to which you filter out the world around you. The meta-model is perhaps the most succinct analytical tool you’ll find for pin-pointing flaws in your world view.

Become familiar with common logical fallacies. Recognize when people use sleight of mouth patterns. The better you are at understanding how people deceive each other and themselves, the more accurate your analytical efforts will be.

You don’t have to do all of the above. These are simply starting points that you can take. However, by experimenting with the way you live your life, you’ll determine what your vulnerabilities and strengths are. By increasing your mindfulness, you’ll have a better idea of what to experiment on. By filtering your experiences under a variety of points of view, you’ll get a better idea of  where you are, which will make it easier for you to get to where you want to go. And finally, by breaking down your experiences into more precise chunks, you’ll be much less likely to get lost in some experiential funk.

Emotional vampires are part of a larger system. I’ve provided you with a few tools to help you determine where your strengths end and the blood sucking edges of that system begin. Hopefully, you’ll manage to shake yourself loose from those people in your life who are dragging you down.

Related posts to A holistic guide to dealing with emotional vampires