You can tell a ton about the emotional and social health of a person by how they go about getting what they want and frankly I guess we could say

You can tell a lot about your own social and emotional health if you take a minute to evaluate how you go about getting the things you

want from other people. I can admit sometimes I don't like what I see when I put

myself to this test but here's how it works. Healthy people will tend to do the

thing where they have the thing that they want or they want to achieve something relationally and they're like, hey, I have this thing that I want and here's why and this is the role that I would like you to play in that.

And then they give you the respect of saying,

no, that doesn't make sense for me,

or okay, sure, or let me give you a counter-proposal.

Unhealthy people, including unhealthy versions of me, don't go through the front door.

We go through the side door with gimmicks and manipulation and games because we're almost afraid

to admit what it is that we actually want to get out of the situation.

So because we know that if we expose our motives and our end game and what we're going for that we'll be told no,

we instead use emotional

gimmicks to make other people feel guilty or we will assume the role of the

victim to try to get what we want through pity or we will go with parallel truth, stuff that parallels

truth in reality, but it's actually fiction, it's just very, very hard to detect. We will go with all kinds of biased ways to torture reality

to work people around to get the things that we want. And it's gross, and when you catch

somebody doing it to you, you just feel sick and used and blah.

And also you feel a little resentful toward the person who did it.

And when you catch yourself doing it, or let me put this differently, when I have caught myself doing it, it's one of the most disappointed in myself feelings

that I ever have. If I have something that I want that is so dark or problematic that I don't want to tell the people I love and need to work with in order to get it, then I shouldn't want that thing.

But hey, we're human, so you've been there, I've been there on the giving end on the receiving end

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