Therapists
Have you ever found yourself all of a sudden the guest of honor at celebrity roast special. Sometimes that is what it is like being a therapist…. or husband… or wife… employee… boss…. or you name it…
What do you do? You probably know that being defensive is not going to work. But how can you sit there and listen to all of this stuff (it is worse if some of it is a distortion of things that you know are true) without getting defensive.
We find it to be very helpful to imagine that the person sitting across from us is talking about someone else…
Then we go one step further and imagine ourselves sitting beside that person, looking over (at ourselves) and we can then, mentally, get into the spirit of the roast.
Mind you mostly what we do is say nothing (someone who is really angry, whether for just cause or not, is not likely to take kindly to the victim of the roast actively making fun of themselves). But the whole process is a lot more bearable when we do this mental jiu-jitsu.
And how about folks who post endless blogs… how annoying is that?