Why is it that I can’t handle disliking someone? I am beating myself up like crazy today over this issue with Puppy’s ex. I’m looking at the situation like crazy trying to figure out how I might be wrong. Maybe she is nicer/better/whatever than I am giving her credit for. Maybe I am just flat wrong. Puppy likes her, why don’t I? I think I want to turn her over to japlady so that I can have validation for my feelings. I hate feeling this way. I hate feeling like my dislike of her is insufficient.
I do this with people on a regular basis. I hate feeling this way about anyone. I can’t give myself permission to dislike anyone. I think it eats me up inside to feel dislike. It is as if I feel it makes me a bad person to not like someone. I still feel bad for disliking my father. I kind of think that I treat my feelings as if there is only a certain amount of room inside me for feeling at all. If I waste that space on dislike, then it is a bigger chunk of me that is unavailable for liking someone else. But I don’t seem to be able to not dislike some people.
I hate rejecting anyone on any level. It’s a boundary issue and I don’t know how to fix it.
Hate, like love, is potentially infinite. Though, like love, it gnaws at your schedule. Love and hate are infinite, time available to express them is not.
The trick, then, is not to let dislike/hate take up time on your schedule. Living well is the best revenge, partially because it’s also the cheapest revenge.
Sweetness, people in general and women in particular are conditioned to be pleasant. You’ve had a lot of training in “making nice” – and as you’ve mentioned your boundaries are not always as rigid as they ought to be or located in exactly the right place.
You need to give yourself permission to dislike her. You and puppr are two different people, and you don’t have to have the same circle of friends. That is OK. Really. As long as you acknolwege the issue and move on, I don’t see any real issues.
There is a scene in a book called “The First Man in Rome” that might apply here. Sulla lives with (and has a sexual relationship with) two women who share a house. One of the women has a nephew who HATES Sulla and his relationship with the women of the house. The two men argue all the time, and the women side with the nephew most of the time because he is sneaky and sly. The nephew is the aunt’s heir, so when he insists on moving into the house, Sulla bails on a long trip. . . only coming back when he knows that the women will be thoroughly tired of the nephew’s carping and poor manners.
You don’t have the luxury of leaving on a long vacation, but you do have the ability to remove yourself from her presence. If she doesn’t have you to goad, she will more readily show her slimy side to puppy – after all, there is a reason she is the EX girlfriend and you are the CURRENT girlfriend.
I think a piece of that merits repeating. He’s living with you. If there ever was any competition, you’ve already won.
I think there’s a difference between failing to care for someone, (not liking), and actively disliking. I think it’s perfectly ok to fail to care for someone.
But actively disliking someone… Well, when I do it, it’s usually because there’s something else going on. Typically, I’m reacting to a projection of my own shit. Although occasionally, I really do find myself defending my life and my relationships from bull-in-china-shop interlopers.
It’s alright to NOT like someone.
It’s not the same as hating them, judging them, or being nasty to someone. You just don’t LIKE them. And that’s fine. It’s what you do with that, that matters. At least that’s how I see it. I don’t like lots of people, but am still pleasant to them. Hell, I don’t always have a good reason not to like them. Sometimes I just don’t. On the rare occasions that someone really bugs me, I avoid them, and if neccesary ask them to leave me be. But, you need to value yourself enough to allow yourself the right to NOT like someone. You are too important to suffer fools or people who make you unhappy.
Re: It’s alright to NOT like someone.
Ditto that – you’re not going out of your way to actively make life hard for her (or puppy).
And you already had a boundry set, that puppy knew about. This was testing a theory and it proved that your limit was sound.
Yes, it’s a good & grand thing that folks who are close to your SO are close to you, but that’s not always the case. I have a close friend (or 2) that my SO just doesn’t care for.
I wish I knew how to make it okay for you to be fine with not liking someone, to make your personal self-worth not dependent on that outer crap that we’re taught.
~hugs
Usually when I dislike someone, which is not often, there is a damn good reason even if I don’t see it right off. Many times it is because they often have an inability to be empathetic in a true way. These people don’t always show their stripes right off, but after a bit of my giving them more and more of my time because I don’t understand why I don’t like them, it comes out when they do something nasty and they just don’t care about what they have done.
It happened to me with Morgan, where Seana liked him and I kept feeling like I ought to, but my instant gut reaction just did not trust him and I didn’t know why. She kept saying I was being silly so I tried to make it work… And then it turned out that he later began saying horrible things about me behind me back and around that same time he began doing things that could only be said to be deliberately sadistic….and then, because I still failed to cut him out of my life and I kept trying to make it work, things got a lot worse.
Lesson learned? Trust your inner warning system. 95% of the time it is spot on. If you cut her out and it turns out that it was that 5% error, you can generally repair it later. Cover your butt first. You don’t have to like her and you don’t have to be around her.
Trust your instincts sweety, don’t explain them away.
That said, I’m probably the wrong person to ask. I dislike people quite frequently, if I’m honest. I also beat myself up over it, and often second guess myself and end up regretting it. I could name SOOOO many people that I knew I didn’t like, and then gave them a chance to show me otherwise and they did nothing but confirm my first instincts.
I will however, keep plugging away at it and see if the theory holds true when I start valuing my own needs. I hope to be able to shift some of the energy I waste being frustrated (and write those people off sooner) so that I have some space available still in my brain/heart to take care of me too.
Keep in mind I don’t ALWAYS validate, remember a conversation about a certain ex girlfriend we had on a treadmill over a year ago? And how much you hate when I do that?
Not saying I won’t in this situation just that I might think there’s more going on.