Your Daily Polyamory Blog for Navigating Life, Relationships, and More
It’s funny. When I talk to other adults who were as abused as children, many of us have encountered a similar phenomenon.
People who find out about our past telling us, “I never would have guessed. You seem so put together. So mature. Like a person with your shit together.”
When someone would say something like that to me, » Read more
As I mentioned in an earlier installment of this series, researchers previously went to work to determine personality traits that could predispose individuals to difficult antisocial behavior. And in the process of this, they identified three culprits — Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy — a combination that they named “the dark triad.”
This research took place in the early 2000s, » Read more
Could certain personality traits be an early warning sign for antisocial behavior? Some researchers certainly thought so and went to work on determining precisely what those are.
After years of study and experimentation (and some rigorous back and forth as experts questioned one another’s findings), patterns began to emerge.
And one of these discoveries was the dark triad of personality traits, » Read more
How we see ourselves and how others see us are often very different things.
Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingraham created an exercise called the Johari Window (named by combining part of both of their first names, Jo + Harri/Hari) that can help bridge that gap.
In the Johari Window exercise, participants pick words from a list of adjectives that they feel describe their personality. » Read more
Once upon a time, in the magical age of 2003, singer Barbra Streisand was very upset about something. That specific something was the fact that photographs of her Malibu house were on the Internet.
It didn’t matter that the original context of the photograph wasn’t even sensationalistic. Streisand’s home was instead simply one image in a collection of 12,000 photographs of the California coastline as part of the California Coastal Records Project, » Read more
While I’m a generally sunny person with a positive temperament, I’m not immune to sadness. Self-doubt.
The timing of these slumps can be rather unpredictable. But the negative thoughts I experience? Well, those tend to fall into a few very predictable categories.
And when I’m down on myself, there’s one line of negative thinking that I tend to encounter over and over again: I start to think that no one likes me. » Read more
It’s one of the unfortunate realities of interpersonal communication: The way that you talk to people in healthy situations will cause major problems when you’re trying to talk to someone stuck in unhealthy dynamics. That’s because manipulative people with toxic personalities will hijack normal conversational maxims and norms and exploit them to their own ends. » Read more
If someone does a favor for you, you like them more, right?
But what about the person doing the favor for you? One would expect that you risk making that person feel put out, surely. Inconvenienced. And they might hold having done that favor against you.
But curiously, researchers have found that they don’t. » Read more
As I wrote in a previous post, perhaps the biggest lesson of all in child development is that the first year of so of our life is a radically important time for us emotionally. While we continue to learn about trust and social relationships over the course of our life (and experience another notable period of turbulence at puberty), » Read more
There’s no way around it: Being ghosted sucks. Rejection can be difficult enough even under ideal circumstances. But add in the ambiguity of not hearing back from someone? The days or weeks of wondering if they’re just busy or freezing you out?
Well, it can hurt a whole lot worse. » Read more
