[Arwen]

I just read an article by Martha Beck about why holding some grudges is a good thing. Here are a few excerpts from that.

"My favorite therapist taught me something I call the "three strike" rule: If you not only have a bad experience with a person but also hear worrisome reports about that person from three totally unrelated sources, you need to carry a protective grudge that says, "I don't quite trust you." "

"According to Martha Stout, PhD, an expert on sociopathy who taught at Harvard Medical School for more than two decades, the key to recognizing sociopaths is that they consistently mess up other people's lives while actively soliciting pity. Most people don't want to be pitied, but sociopaths adore it. If you consistently feel pity for someone who causes you many problems, develop and bear a protective grudge. Now."

You can read the whole thing here,.

She also linked another post about friends and how to let one go if they aren't good for you here.

So what do you think? Have you ever held a grudge? Ever had to let a friend go because they were toxic? Ever had to tap dance around someone because they were in your circle of friends somehow?

How do you do it gracefully? How do you do it without turning it into a community/family/friends free-for-all?

I'm here to tell you that I've let people go for their toxic-to-me behavior but I've also been the one let go.

That's right. My emotional craziness was too much for more than one person and they walked away from me. I felt like they were the worst people in the world. They didn't understand the pain I was in. They didn't understand how badly someone had treated me. The list goes on and none of it includes me taking ANY responsibility for my words and actions.

It took me a long time to figure that out. I slapped on a few band-aids. I decided they must all be wrong. It took me doing some long and very hard soul-searching to realize that **I** was the problem, not them.

Luckily for me, I have renewed friendships with most of them after proving to them that I have changed. That I am not longer doing everything I could to create drama that centered around me so that they would rush to my side.

It's hard. It's hard to realize my own behavior created my isolation. That my own actions were driving people away. That I was not loveable in that crazy, drama-filled world where it was only about me.

So anyone else here ever been the releasee as well as the releaser?

For me, because I've been the one to hit emotional rock bottom and lose some very dear people in my life, cutting someone else out is difficult to say the least. I know how it feels. I honestly don't want to do that to another human being.

But that three strikes rule mentioned above? That hit home for me. I've been known to give people ten strikes including several opportunities to really hurt me. I'm trying to unlearn that one.