Are You Addicted To Your Own Drama?

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- Graham’s StoryI suffered from a chronic lack of self-confidence right from early childhood through most of my adult life. I am a sensitive person and was deeply traumatized by the never-ending conflict and hostility in my parent’s relationship. My mother was, and still is, the dominant force in my family of origin. Highly intelligent but emotionally withheld, she was always quick to criticise and would never back down in any of the petty arguments with my father that characterized their relationship. He, on the other hand, was relatively passive yet and was often driven to explode with frustration due to his inability to express his emotions or to handle my mother’s frequent put-downs. She would berate him saying “You stupid creature; why can’t you just tell me what you’re thinking!”, not realizing the irony behind her nagging criticism. Our home didn’t feel like a safe or fun place to be much of the time. My two elder sisters both dealt with this in their own way, leaving me feeling excluded and abandoned a lot of the time. My sensitivity in this situation was always invalidated, caused me a great deal of grief and felt like a genuine weakness. Ironically, my parents…
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- ConfidenceConfidence, or more precisely self-confidence, is an awareness that you have the ability to rise to whatever challenge life throws at you. It is the single most important asset that a man can possess, because it determines how you respond to challenges that impact how well everything else in your life goes. Great challenges always involve great opportunities, but it’s only through having confidence in yourself that you are able to see and take advantage of these opportunities. Confidence is partly general and partly contextual. You might feel confident about your ability to drive a car, but not so confident about your ability to play a guitar… especially if you’ve never learned. But an innate sense of self-confidence will make it much easier for you to learn to play a guitar, because you’ll feel more positive about the likelihood of success and less worried about failure. Every skill that you acquire has the potential to build your self-confidence, and this general sense of confidence begins to spill over into other areas of your life. We start out in life by inheriting the confidence of our parents, plus or minus a little depending on our personality and individual disposition. Lack of…
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I’m sitting in a Youth Hostel in Melbourne, Australia where I’m staying for a couple of weeks while visiting the Melbourne International Comedy festival. I’ve just had breakfast and am sitting near the kitchen area chilling out before heading out for a day on the town. While I’m not one to eavesdrop, I can’t help but overhear snippets of the Skype conversation of the woman sitting next to me.

And what I hear is: drama. Drama, drama, drama. “She did this”, “he did that”, “she said this”, “she said that”, “She thinks I’m a bad influence”, “they don’t like me”, “she hated it”, “it sucked”, “it was awful”…

Ok, you get the idea.

If there was heaps of space, I’d simply move and get away from the negative energy; but it’s pretty crowded this morning, and the conversation reminded me how easy it is to get addicted to our own drama, and the dramas in other people’s lives around us.

Now it would be a different story if the woman was debriefing about her emotions regarding the drama she’s describing, but I’m not hearing many words from our emotional vocabulary like “sad”, “angry”, “scared”, “happy”; nor phrases like “I felt …”, “I feel…” etc. This isn’t entirely surprising in a society where most people have never been taught how their emotions work.

Expressing emotions while telling a story releases the emotional charge around what has happened (or is happening), liberating us from any pain we’ve experienced and allowing us to move on from the drama.

On the other hand, blaming, judging, externalising, projecting and making unpleasant experiences wrong just sets us up in an addictive cycle of drama. I don’t like being around people who are stuck in drama, so I’m gonna go now. I need to get out of here for my own sanity!

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Categories: Mindset

Tags: dramaemotional intelligencestory telling

Graham Stoney

I struggled for years with low self-esteem, anxiety and a lack of self-confidence before finding a solution that really worked. I created The Confident Man Program to help other men live the life of their dreams. I also offer 1-on-1 coaching via Skype so if you related to this article contact me about coaching.