Receiving the Silent Treatment

At some point in our lives, I’m sure we have all received the silent treatment from someone. It’s possible we might not have even known we were receiving it.

As children, it’s common for us to fight and argue and say things like, “I hate you and I’m never going to speak to you again.”

When we grow up, we may not sound so childish or use such childish words, but we still often give the silent treatment to others. We don’t broadcast to the world that we aren’t speaking to that person, but perhaps we make it clear to that person that we are angry. We might even go so far as to tell that person, “Don’t call me anymore.” And then the silent treatment begins. Whichever side of the silent treatment we are on, it can be hard.

We know we are receiving the silent treatment when the other person was clearly angry with us, whether or not he tells us that he will no longer speak to us, because the person avoids us in public and does not answer our phone calls or reply to our emails.

And then there are times when, “What happened?” might be our response. We might think we are good friends with a person. We might spend time with him or her, have lunch, share our secrets, and then one day, the person becomes unresponsive. We call but there’s no answer. We leave a message and wait for a callback. A day or two passes. “Maybe she’s just busy,” we think. A week passes. “Maybe she didn’t get my message,” we think, and although we are surprised she did not call that entire week, we call and are discouraged when we have to leave another message. It might take two or three more calls that are not returned before we come to understand that the relationship is over.

In dating, the silent treatment is often used to end a relationship. We go out on a nice date and think it went well; the other person says he or she will call, but we never hear from that person again. We don’t know why. We assume that person does not like us, but for whatever reason, the relationship is clearly over.

Notice I just said, “We assume that person does not like us.” But is that true? Can we know that’s true when the person is giving us the silent treatment? No, we often don’t know why someone decides to end a relationship. We don’t have to blame ourselves when it happens. It takes two people to have a relationship, and if the other person cannot at least tell us why the relationship ended, then that person has his or her own issues with setting boundaries, being honest, or simply confronting a problem.

Sometimes, the silent treatment results when a person doesn’t know how to respond. At that time, the person becomes frozen or simply afraid to respond, and often, he is afraid of his own feelings, or she might simply be afraid of hurting our feelings, so nothing is said.

 Sometimes, the silent treatment means the person who is non-responsive is not trying to be mean but simply has to work out something for him- or herself. When that is the case, we can let that person go gracefully. We don’t have to write demanding letters or leave tearful voicemails. We simply accept that for whatever reason that person has other things going on now and does not need us in his or her life, and truthfully, if that’s the case, we don’t need that person any longer ourselves. We can choose still to love the person if we wish; we can hold the person in a golden light and imagine him or her as happy and fulfilled. And then we go on to find our own golden life. Sometimes, silence really is golden because it works things out for us in ways words cannot.

When Politics Make Us Forget the Big Picture

The other day, I was reminded again of how lucky I am to live in the United States. It’s easy for us all to become cynical lately with all the political mudslinging and arguing and antics we have watched from the candidates currently running for president. It’s easy to think our system may be broken or badly in need of reform, but the truth is that for all its faults, the system still works very well.

I recently was talking to a woman who was an immigrant to this country. She came to the United States as a young woman following World War II. She saw her family driven from their home by German soldiers; she knew poverty and loss. She commented that when people ask her today how she made the big adjustment to living in the United States, she simply tells them, “I get down on my knees everyday and I thank God that I live in this country.”

In other words, we don’t have it so bad. If we spent a little while living elsewhere, we might then realize how good we have it. After all, even with all the political mudslinging, we don’t see a revolution happening. We don’t see guerilla warfare or people being killed in the streets. Even some years back when the Republican Party tried to impeach President Clinton, it was primarily a polite process. There were no people in the streets fighting, no tanks trying to gain control.

That said, we do want our politicians to work together. Some of you are going to think this is a crazy thought, but wouldn’t our elections be better if all the candidates got together and talked about why they thought the other candidates should be president? Each candidate could tell us what he or she liked and respected about the other candidates, and then the voters could determine who should be president based on who received the most glowing reports. Doesn’t that thought feel better than our current process, which often results in our trying to pick the lesser of two evils?

It’s unlikely Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney will start singing each other’s praises, but we can try to find good in them ourselves. Rather than disliking a candidate because we don’t agree with him on an issue, let’s be grateful for all the issues we do agree on.

Let’s start with gratitude. Let’s start with the politicians we dislike or feel indifferent to and find ways to be grateful for them. For example, we might say, “I am grateful that Barack Obama is asking people to be tolerant toward gay people,” or “I am grateful that Rick Perry believes in the power of prayer.”

If we come to appreciate our politicians, we will start to see what is good about them, and perhaps that will filter toward focusing on what truly matters; it could help to unite rather than divide us. We can’t expect one politician to do the job of bringing people together; we all need to work toward that goal.

De-Clutter Your Life, Part 2

Last Monday, I talked about de-cluttering our lives in terms of stuff. But it isn’t just knick-knacks, paper, and old clothes that clutter up our lives. Sometimes it’s activities, and yes, even people.

Although it may seem overwhelming at first, it’s actually easy to de-clutter stuff compared to people. We can’t just throw people away, and we certainly don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. We may not even have anyone in our life we want to throw out, but we may find we are overextending ourselves, allowing other people’s wants and needs to fill up our personal time and space so we feel the need to de-clutter them.

If we are not getting enough fun time, down time, or time to ourselves, we may need to de-clutter. We may need to look at our schedules and decide just how much we really can do so we don’t feel overwhelmed by what is cluttering up our lives. It may mean leaving a group or dropping out of an activity, or simply doing less with a group.

Another place in our lives that might be cluttered and out of control is our time spent online. We may want to think long and hard about why we use the Internet. What is the reason why we have Internet service, and are we using it for additional purposes beyond that? Perhaps we have Internet service for work and not to socialize, but we find ourselves being pulled into socializing with it. Especially if we are trying to promote our business online, it’s easy to get caught up spending more time than we want on Social Media sites. We might go on Facebook to see whether people are “liking” our blog, only to end up commenting on our old college roommate’s pictures of her grandchildren. One aspect of Facebook I’ve had to set strong boundaries with is the chat feature. Chats can take a long time and you never know when someone is going to want to chat with you. If you are only going on Facebook for five minutes to post something, turn off the chat feature so you don’t get caught up in a half-hour conversation.

Email is another way people can clutter our lives. I have found that sometimes if you email someone back, he will keep emailing you immediately, and if you reply right away every time, you’ll end up spending all day emailing. When possible, limit yourself to one email per friend per day. And don’t feel guilty not commenting on everything people forward to you. While you want to be friendly and you certainly don’t want to lose friends, you also don’t want to spend an hour looking at photos of sunsets with inspirational verses just to be polite when you’d rather spend your time doing something you would enjoy more. After all, if you are polite, the person will think you really want to look at all those photos and keep sending them.

Setting boundaries with other people so our time does not get cluttered is not always easy, but we can set boundaries with ourselves and stick to them. For example, we can tell ourselves we’ll be part of the group, but we won’t join the group for coffee every week after the meeting; we’ll only go the first week of the month. Or we can decide we will schedule in thirty minutes a day for online activities, but we won’t allow ourselves more than that.

Setting boundaries with ourselves for how much clutter we’ll allow into our lives will help us weed out the activities, people, and relationships that really matter to us so we have more time to enjoy them and more personal space and time so we feel healthy and happy.

Learning to Trust Again

Your girlfriend walked out on you. Your husband cheated on you. Your best friend told your deepest secret to everyone. You were betrayed and hurt, and you vow never to trust anyone again.

It happens to all of us that someone breaks our trust. Now and then our trust is broken by a really good con-man, someone whose intention is to hurt us, to steal from us, to get something from us while not having our best interest at heart.

Most of the time, however, when we have our trust broken, the other person did not do it necessarily with the intent to hurt us. Yes, the cheating husband should have known better and his behavior may well be unforgiveable, but if you look closely, you’ll see that the warning signs not to trust him were always there. When you were dating, you saw his roving eye; you always feared he might cheat on you; you knew he had cheated on one of his past girlfriends, so why did you let yourself get into that situation? He says he never meant to hurt you, and he probably didn’t; he just has a weakness that makes him unable to be faithful. And you don’t have to hurt yourself by putting up with that weakness.

How about your friend who told your secret? What indication did this person give you to make you think you could trust her in the first place? How long was she your friend? Long enough to know you could truly trust her? Had she ever told you someone else’s secret or gossiped about other people to you? Did she have anything to gain by revealing your secret—maybe nothing more than the thrill of popularity when she told everyone the secret, or the adrenaline rush of getting to gossip about you?

Yes, these people betrayed you, but only because you betrayed yourself by trusting them. The person you shouldn’t trust is yourself, and yet, not being able to trust yourself is the scariest of situations and one we don’t want to follow.

We can learn to trust others again when we learn to trust ourselves. We need to set firm boundaries with ourselves not to tell secrets to people until we are certain they will not betray us. We can do that by testing them in small ways with little things to see whether they break our trust or not. We can do that by observing how they treat and talk about others. We can also pay attention to our own behavior; we can ask ourselves whether we are being the kind of trustworthy friend we want others to be toward us?

We can learn to avoid situations where we might break someone else’s trust. We walk away or change the subject if someone tries to gossip with one of us about a mutual friend. We avoid being alone with our friend’s attractive spouse, whether it’s because we might be tempted or because he has a roving eye. We do not make excuses when our boyfriend doesn’t return our calls or claims, “She’s just a friend.” We learn to trust our instincts and our intuition rather than pretending to trust others to make them feel good.

The most important person in our lives is our self. That is the person whose trust must not be broken at any cost. Be the friend you need to yourself first by being trustworthy. Learn to trust your instincts, and in time, you will learn to trust again and find that you now attract trustworthy people because those who would betray your trust realize they can’t betray you any longer, whether they want to or not.

Boundaries with Money in Business

Money is always a touchy subject. It is hard for many of us to set boundaries with money just with ourselves, so it is much harder to set them with others, but if we don’t learn to set boundaries, we are going to end up “shortchanged” in the end.

If we are in business, it’s imperative we set good boundaries with money, which means being careful in regards to extending credit and making loans. We may actually be better at saying, “No” to people in our personal lives—friends or family members—about lending money, but we have a harder time doing it with clients or business partners.

For example, we may own a company where we allow payment plans. Many a company has gotten itself into trouble with “Buy now, pay later” plans or simply offering services with monthly payments, which can result in clients falling behind on their payments. Customers may default on payments, often for understandable reasons such as illness or a lost job, but other times, people do so because they overspend and don’t have control over their own finances. In these cases, we do not have to make those people’s problems our problems.

A fine line exists in these cases between kindness and cruelty. We can extend credit and payment plans, but we need to be clear upfront that if the bill isn’t paid off in a reasonable time based on the payment plan set up, that we will send the customer to collections or shut the power off, or the person’s business will no longer be wanted. Customers who repeatedly abuse a good situation by paying a little to string you along and then wanting not to pay the next month or paying less than they owe is not fair for the company. As a business owner, we have to think about our employees and our own time and wages that are affected if not hurt by such behaviors from clients.

In time, we should learn not to put ourselves into situations where we will end up extending credit and where our own financial welfare will be at the mercy of a client who fails to be financially responsible.

We must be careful upfront who we do business with, whether it is partnering with another company, having a business partner when we begin the company, or dealing with clients who will not pay cash upfront. Too often, a business partner ends up paying all the bills because another partner failed to be responsible, or spent more than he had, or just walked out on a commitment.

We hear people say things like, “It’s just money” or “Money isn’t everything” or “Don’t let money ruin a friendship,” but the truth is that money is a lot to people. It is what keeps food in their stomachs and a roof over their heads, and it is something we all fear not having. Don’t let the fear of making someone angry keep you from making a good business decision around money. If the other person can’t understand why you need to set financial boundaries with him and he gets angry, then he isn’t a person you would have been fortunate to do business with anyway. And if you had done business with him and had a problem with him, then down the road, neither of you would have been happy.

I am not advocating holding the purse strings tightly. I am saying that you need to use your best judgment before you open them. Setting boundaries upfront regarding money with yourself and your clients and customers will save you numerous headaches in the long run.