How to avoid becoming a cynic and keep faith in people?
We all have accumulated a lot of questions to ourselves and the world, with whom there seems to be no time or not to go to a psychologist. But convincing answers are not born when you talk to yourself, or to your friends, or to your parents. We started a new regular section where professional psychotherapist Olga Miloradova will answer pressing questions. By the way, if you have them, send to [email protected]. In today's release - the question of our readers Angelina.
How to avoid becoming a cynic and keep faith in people?
Modern society, especially if you are in the midst of careerists, quite tough and cynical. How to maintain the credibility of people, if it seems that everything they do or do not do is solely for their own benefit: flattery, artificial smiles and compliments, likes for those who benefit, and not for those who genuinely like them? Do I have to play by such rules in order to achieve something?
Olga Miloradovapsychotherapist
Perhaps the answer I start with the end of the question. On the one hand, we all want to be accepted, recognized, sometimes it is so scary to stand out from the crowd. Surely everyone has a story about a classmate who was too different from the others, and so he got all the vile nicknames and bruises. And if you were on this side of the barricades, along with the crowd, then you shouted, just not to think that you, too, are not like that or sympathize with the white crow. Or maybe you were it, who knows. One thing is certain: if you have so far carried the question of whether you need to merge with the crowd in order to be successful, then you can only be congratulated. While you can. In one way or another, you have kept your own boundaries, have not lost yourself, your characteristics and your otherness.
How to live with this personality? There is such a term coined by Paul Goodman: creative adaptation. In contrast to passive adaptation to what is happening, it implies a variant of interaction with society, for example, with the same aggressively cynical working environment, in which a person adapts his behavior to the environment, but only to the extent that he is able to maintain harmony with the world and yourself. At the same time, any relationship is a two-way thing, so a certain adaptation of the environment to our behavior also occurs. That is the answer - yes and no. It is necessary to change and adapt, but it is equally important to keep your “I”, your borders.
As for faith and trust in people: you voiced everything. You do not believe or at least do not trust those who are hypocritical and duplicitous, and why should you trust them? Such people play games, games in the classical sense of Bern, and not vulgarized by the masses, where the game is an operation with a hidden motive and benefit. The game in this sense is pathological in itself, although it is the game mechanisms that are often used, for example, in sales. But even if your career dictates you the manipulation of clients, then you do not have to continue all this with colleagues. Moreover, if you still expect that in this world you can trust someone, then, accordingly, this someone must trust you. And here without any games.