During the past year or two I’ve formed numerous relationships with people and communities that has taught me some significant things about myself. Mainly my unconscious people pleasing behaviors and suppressing my emotions. These have manifested in various ways but the reoccurring theme is giving repeated chances to people who have proved they don’t deserve such.
Longtime online friend returned to gaming two years ago and I was excited to receive him. Within six months said person showed multiple red flags and wasn’t the same person I knew from more than a decade and a half ago. He had in that time cheated on his wife, gotten divorced, and had toxic relationships and seemed determined to remain single for the time being. His victim mentality and entitlement weren’t obvious at the start but manifested themselves within half a year.
Said friend made bigoted remarks about women and gay men. i.e. They’re emotional. Even though he raged for three days straight over a broken laptop key. They could only talk about themselves and made no effort to get to know anyone. Moreover the people he seemed to gravitate towards were all bros in their 20s when he was in his late 30s. That emotional gap attested to his immaturity. He also raged at me for not playing enough with him, especially after I told him he should do some gaming by himself to improve his skills. He said, “I needed to teach him” thereby assigning all the responsibility onto me.
He indirectly apologized after the first rage incident that I forgave but six months later did it again, blaming me for his own performance in the game. I subsequently told him “good luck” and “if everyone becomes a bad guy in your stories, you’re the common denominator” set him off. He cussed me out and wished some vile things on me. As an online friend who I talked to twice in a decade, that type of toxicity felt disproportionate to reality. I know more about his life than he did mine and I only considered him a casual online friend. He also tried to manipulate and triangulate ingame relationships, casting himself as a victim, by implying no one wanted to play with him. Even though the specific instances this happened were when someone needed to go to bed at 11 PM and another time I wasn’t able to game with him.
A player who needed significant help and was banned from the community I was in. I stood up for them and was outraged that people avoided her instead of directly communicating with her. She joined another community I was in and began consuming goodwill and resources: asking for help over mundane issues, badgering community leaders with DMs, never improving or accepting boundaries. Within months she had exhausted the patience of everyone around her and was banned from the new community. I subsequently found her blog where she lamented being ghosted by friends and mistreated for more than five years.
It was incredibly astonishing her blog repeated the same pattern: friends blocked or distanced themselves, without her ever putting the pieces together. I ultimately called her behavior weaponized incompetence. I have never met anyone who used inaction and complaints as catalysts for social interaction. It was eye-opening. She told me something along the lines of, “I grant benevolence to those who extend grace and understanding to me” to which I replied, “I don’t want your benevolence, either show some improvement or fuck off.”
Later I wrote a reply on her blog saying she had a victim mentality and learned helplessness. I pointed out her MDD (major depressive disorder) might be related and how she should develop some insight with a therapist why she repeats the same dynamic with everyone she meets. She called me a creep and blocked me. But within six months I now see her actually playing the game and doing group content and succeeding.
A older female community leader from the last gaming community I was in. I admired her style and her grating personality. Ultimately she was also banned from the previous community for cursing the leadership out after multiple interventions. During the period before her departure I asked her to give it more time and promised her I’d leave and join her community if it didn’t work out. Two months later I followed her to a new community she established and started leading community game nights.
At first her orange flag behaviors I attributed to personal quirks but after eight months and talking to other people I put the pieces of her behavior together and realized a lot of it stemmed from insecure leadership. The arrogance, inability to admit wrongdoing, dismissiveness and avoidance, unsolicited advice, and subtle negging and put downs all suddenly made sense. I stepped down leading for her community after she blamed me for their member number attrition. I was literally responsible for her server doubling in size and she had the audacity to blame me for why the server wasn’t growing faster.
In all three instances I unconsciously stepped up for people who never asked or solicited my help. My contributions then went unnoticed and taken for granted, ultimately resulting in the same individuals blaming me for their issues. I see now that is a type of emotional manipulation to trap and extract more resources i.e. free labor. Once I stepped back their natural baseline was exposed.
This subconscious people pleasing behavior stems from my dysfunctional family. I apparently gravitate towards stepping into a role to make myself indispensable to people to prove my worth and desire to get the recognition and thanks that I didn’t receive from family.
I now am able to see these behaviors more clearly as well as call it out when my family employs toxic dynamics. In turn that has reduced my reactivity towards them. I suspect that after decades of being told emotions were inappropriate and repressing them I am finally seeing their value and discerning people with them. I need to trust my intuition more when behaviors seem questionable instead of justifying other people’s behaviors. Because when I start making excuses for them that they haven’t done themselves, I’m giving them a free pass to act like asshats.
