Traps
- Thread starter Jammer
- Start date
У нас в России есть пословица: "хоть горшком назови, только в печь не сажай". Так что, пусть говорят, что хотят.
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
No one else can make you something unless you accept it.
If I tell you you hate red-haired people, do you?
If I tell you you are weeping with sadness at the loss of your pet rock, are you?
If I tell you you hate red-haired people, do you?
If I tell you you are weeping with sadness at the loss of your pet rock, are you?
Exactly. That's why people set traps. They try to trick people into accepting something. For example they might say, "what a beautiful gay". You can be beautiful if you accept that you are gay. When I say things straight, and do NOT set traps, they say I am boring. I cannot win. Either I trick people into accepting what I say to them, or I am boring.
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
Why do you need to "win"? Why do you care if these people call you "boring"?
Are you really boring, or are they just trying to get you to agree to play their game by their rules?
Do they decide who you are?
Are you really boring, or are they just trying to get you to agree to play their game by their rules?
Do they decide who you are?
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
Pinball1970
Valued Senior Member
Meet different people.
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
No, you're just a bit deaf. What they actually say is "What a beautiful day."
But you have a point in that some people do set traps, though it may be subconscious or else mere clumsiness on their part. I'll give you an example. An ex-girlfriend of mine, now married to an old friend, has a tendency to do this. I visited them a couple of years ago with my son, a university student, who has long hair, sometimes done up in a man bun, and a small beard. This woman at one point commented to me, out of the blue: "Now you know, if you had had a daughter, what she would have looked like." This struck me as mildly offensive on about 3 levels. (1) It suggested my son looks effeminate, (2) It suggested any daughter of mine would have masculine features and would therefore be ugly, and (3) It suggests she is living in parochial little 1950s timewarp in which it is somehow shocking for a student to grow his hair long. (She, my old friend and I were all at Oxford in the 1970s, when everybody had long hair, so WTF?)
What possible polite reply could I give, in response to this annoying statement? It was a trap. In the end, I opted to allow my annoyance to show and asked why she was trying to wind us both up, to which she responded: "Now, I can't say anything right, apparently", as if it were somehow she that was the victim of my unreasonableness, rather than the aggressor. We quickly laughed it off and moved on to other matters, but it gave us both a reminder of why we broke up romantically all those decades ago, and why I could not possibly have endured being married to her! (We remain good friends, I hasten to add, but there is always a tiny bit of tension below the surface.)
She used to say this sort of thing and it often went down the wrong way - and she still does it. I have no idea if she even knows what she is doing. Does she just blurt these things out without thinking, out of mental clumsiness? Or is it intentional, to get a rise out of someone? Who knows?
My mother also used to say provocative things to get a reaction. Maybe that's what makes me sensitive to it. I call it "spin", as in spin bowling in cricket. However only very few people of my acquaintance deploy "spin" in their social conversation. I suppose I tend to avoid those that do, just as I avoid people who are permanently facetious. (It has certainly been feature of all the girls I subsequently went out with that they did not deploy spin.)
So as others have already advised, the remedy is to have a wide enough circle of contacts that you can focus on the ones that bowl at you straight, without spin. (The Dutch are very good from that point of view, by the way.)
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Avoid manipulative people if you can't resist them.