Why Some People Are Drawn To Misery
Takeaway: If you aren’t careful, suffering and misery can become a part of one’s core identity, and that is a hard cycle to break. That is why some people always seem drawn to drama and behaviors that actively work against their best interests—anything else wouldn’t feel real.
Why Some People Are Drawn To Misery
A Facebook friend shared a post from another source that said the following:
Some people want to be miserable.
They refuse to fix manageable problems because they would rather get attention from having that problem and thoroughly enjoy other people scrambling to fix their issues.
We all know people that just seem to attract misery into their life. There always seems to be some drama they are dealing with, some issue they find themselves in the middle of, and some reason to be unhappy about the world.
However, the above explanation for this behavior is wrong.
It’s easy to assume others’ behavior is intentional. I mean, we think about our behavior before we act, so it makes logical sense to attribute the same thought processes to others’ behavior.
Therefore, if their repeated actions are constantly putting them in positions to be miserable, it must be on purpose. Right? they clearly get a sense of joy out of being the victim.
This doesn’t tell the full story.
As it turns out, we’re actually all pretty bad at understanding, in the moment, why we behave in certain ways.
This stems from the fact that most of our behavioral decisions are driven by automatic thought. Our habits, and patterns of past behavior, more often dictate how we react in situations than any rational thought processes.
In general, people don’t want to be miserable in the sense that they get some sick and twisted pleasure out of it.
Rather, it’s that being miserable and suffering becomes ingrained as part of one’s identity, and when that happens they don’t know how to be any other way. In this situation, being anything other than unhappy doesn’t feel real.
Being miserable becomes their comfort zone.
So, whether consciously or not, they perpetuate the same behaviors and beliefs that allow them to stay within this comfort zone.
Now, this is a very different perspective, but one that allows us to have more compassion for the people who constantly seem to struggle in life. And for these people in particular, perhaps more compassion is what they need to see that life can actually be pretty great.
You can never go wrong showing more compassion for others.
~ Coach Alex
Spot on.