When it's all Painful - Relationships

I spent last weekend with a large group of people.  During that time I had opportunity to interact with 22 people for many hours.  Personalities are interesting. I met a woman about my age who has been widow for two years.  How that has affected her.  In another case a couple who's son was injured badly and are very bitter.  Bitterness has poisoned their life.

Life isn't about what happens to us, but about our reaction to it.  One woman I met in her late 40s looks 70 because of the bitterness that has consumed her.  Everything is someone else's fault.  She is always the victim, always right, goes off on everyone.  Volatile.  Believes that if people would just listen to her life would be perfect. The life she has today is exactly as her words have constructed.  In turmoil. The classic toxic person.  A Poster Child for James Allen's essay, "As a Man Thinketh".

Unfortunately if you are married to or live with someone like that, there is no escape short of the drastic actions of the courts.

Proverbs 22:

24Do not make friends with a hot-tempered person,

do not associate with one easily angered,

25or you may learn their ways

and get yourself ensnared.

What is interesting is the children I met of these people are often more kind and loving.  They have had to develop personalities capable of working around the toxicity.  The cycle of personality is often that a passive parent produces aggressive toxic children and the aggressive toxic parents produce more tolerant and passive children.  Every other generation extremes.  Unbalanced.

I wish it weren't so.  I wish well balanced people would produce well balanced people.  Sometimes it does.  Not often enough.  I look at my own life and wonder about the result of what I have produced in offspring, in work, in relationships, in families, in leadership roles.  I have not been good in this. 

It took 3 days to detox after last weekend.  It shouldn't be like that.  Life is too short.