Life changing true stories told to encourage, empower and inspire us!

Bookmark and Share

"Fill your mind with light, happiness, hope, feelings of security and strength, and soon your life will reflect these qualities." ~Unknown

Email me anytime: coreen.velvetoversteel@gmail.com

"The Greatest gift that you can give to others is the gift of unconditional love and acceptance!" ~Brian Tracy

All post and stories are the sole property of Velvet Over Steel aka Coreen Trost. I write and create post in order to help others, so share as you want. I just ask that you link back or give VOS credit. Some of the stories are going into a book in progress. Thank You ALL.. for your support and help!!
"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader." ~ John Quincy Adams

Saturday, February 4, 2012

Stop Justifying their actions...it only enables them.


"Truth never needs to Justify itself." ~Glenn Curtis Maddox 

Stop justifying what someone else does.  When we do this (and we all do at times) we're actually just making excuses for their behavior, actions, in-actions and the choices they're making in their life.

Justifying or making excuses, doesn't help anyone in the long run.  Only enabling them to continue what they're doing; keeping them from taking responsibility for their own actions.

Those actions or lack of action, behavior and/or choices can go two ways.  They can be someone who for example be: manipulative, unstable, irrational, or dishonest.  Or they can be the person who puts up with a toxic person or situation.

Either way; it's that person's choice and they need to take responsibility the role they play.  Justifying either behavior, only enables them to continue to make excuses and push blame away from themselves.

I have justified actions and enabled a friend more than once over the past few years.  Believing that I needed to help them because I understood, and had great empathy because I'd been in a similar situation once.  Only recently have I realized that I've probably done more harm than good.

It's certainly OK to offer help and friendship to someone; however if they don't change their situation or circumstances, I feel it's best to step back.  Sometimes we're too close to someone and want to believe they need us, that we don't see the situation realistically.

After being honest with myself; I could finally see that I was justifying their choices and making excuses for their choices, behavior and not being honest.  So many times I thought they were getting stronger and closer to choosing a better life.

I now know that a person being treated badly, must also take responsibility for allowing it or for staying in a toxic situation; before they can move on and finally allow themselves to choose happiness over misery.

Justifying their actions only seemed to give them a 'free pass', enabling them to escape any responsibility for their own in-action and choices.  I now feel I've allowed them to use my friendship and support as a sort of ER whenever their wounds are once again torn open and they need another band-aid to stop the oozing and numb the pain to get them through... until the next time things fall apart or are unbearable; then returning for another band-aid... over and over again.

Even blog post that I thought were bringing strength, hope and direction seemed to have been nothing more than a type of Prozac to comfort them temporarily.  Once again to only get them through another day or week.  Not all that I'd hoped I was doing for my friend.

At least now I know the truth and realize my mistakes.  After these recent revelations, I've significantly changed how I handle people and will view friendships from now on.  My focus is still on helping others through my writing, blog and interactions; however I've learned to set boundaries earlier and move on without regret.  Once again, you can't help someone, who's not ready to help them-self yet.      
"Every reason they give is a cognitive distortion."  But they rationalize their actions to cope with the situation they find themselves in.   
These rationalizations are cognitive distortions that allow them to act on their impulses, and there are as many rationalizations as there are manipulated, manipulators, abused or abusers. ~Sarah Paquette
Manipulative People: Confessions of a Covert Aggressive Personality Disorder

Stop Explaining. Stop Justifying. Stop Talking. Boundaries Are Upheld With Action

I know the following quote is harsh; yet it is so true...
"Hitler's dictatorship rested on the constitutional foundation of a single law, the Enabling Law." ~Alan Bullock

3 comments:

  1. Sometimes we have to ask ourselves why we justify someone's actions - what need in our self that fulfills. At other times I've justified someone's actions to their accuser (not in front of them mind you!) in order to hopefully provide a greater understanding, empathy or compassion between two people. Needless to say, the accuser had their mind made up, the other person labeled with permanent ink and never wanted my input, my different perspective. Another closed mind. All I could do was pray that someday they would see the truth about their own judgmental attitude, while calling someone else manipulative or other labels.

    Relationships are never easy, but it always takes two to make or break it. Very interesting topic!

    ReplyDelete
  2. The widespread pessimism caused by psychologistic biodefaitism is a serious problem for preventing human-made forms of apocalypse. It is important to spread information about science proving that pessimism wrong. For instance, although there are cases where identical twins raised separately behave very similarily, there is also cases where the identical twins behave very differently. This discrepancy falsifies any claims of a generalizable "nature/nurture ratio" or fixed "learning windows". As shown in metastudies by Kurt Fischer and Christina Hinton in "Mind, Brain and Education", the key to miraculous recoveries after brain damage is a tolerant environment. Why it is? Consider the fact that intolerance causes social pressure to blame on others and justify one's own actions. Blaming on others leads to paralyzed action both by waiting for others to do something and by generalization to one's own behavior in the form of blaming on "instincts" or things like that. Justification of course paralyzes self-correction by removing any insight that something has to be corrected. So anything that causes social pressure to blame and justify leads straight to the end of the world unless abolished very soon. And since decisions top-down are practiced through threat of punishment (which obviously creates social pressure to blame and justify), the opposite way (bottom-up) is the real solution. But for it to be feasible, information about science debunking psychologistic biodefaitism must be widely spread. See Pure science Wiki.

    Martin J Sallberg

    ReplyDelete
  3. The link to Pure science Wiki is http://purescience.wikia.com

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for stopping by! I would LOVE your comments!

LinkWithin

Related Posts with Thumbnails