Difficult Behavior and Mind Maps

Dec 7, 2021

Navigating difficult or triggering behavior in others is much easier when you create an accurate mind map of a person.

When you can anticipate how a person will engage, you’re less likely to be caught off guard, and can stay grounded and choose to respond from a centered place of integrity.

The problem is often that we construct narratives of a person that are inaccurate.

Between a mixture of our own projections and the ways that some intentionally mislead to maintain the image they wish to be seen as- we create narratives of a person that don’t actually fit the behaviors they present us with.

When we aren’t looking at a person as they truly are, we’re likely to be caught off guard even if a person has repeatedly shown you their patterns and intentions towards you.

We react, sometimes attempting to shame or control (or perhaps internalizing and shaming ourselves), rather than either choosing internal boundaries that we can keep to protect ourselves, or setting clearer external boundaries to reshape your dynamic with them.

To create dynamics in which you are better able to respond from a grounded place, you must be willing to ditch narratives that are either rooted in fantasies of your own, or rooted in protecting yourself or that person from having to witness their unfair, unkind, cruel, or careless behavior towards you.

You need to be willing to see the person they are, exactly as they show themselves- not just the mask they would like you to see.

And as scary or offensive as it may seem to get radically honest about the uglier sides of the people we’re in relationship or community with, I actually believe that this approach opens up the possibility for maintaining resilient relating far more than the alternative.

There is no need to go nuclear, no need to demonize or cast out (unless the danger is truly that severe), because the danger of relationships like these are that they create imbalanced power dynamics where you are subject to the whims of another.

Take your own power back, and that dynamic changes.