Every tribe, no matter how small or isolated.
Sure, it might not always involve black cloaks, living in a castle and turning into a bat. But every culture has myths and stories about human-like creatures that suck your life energy right out of you.
That’s because it’s a universal human experience. There are emotional vampires in every society… and even in your life.
So watch out!
Characteristics of an emotional vampire
Do you know somebody who’s always negative?
Somebody who’s always complaining?
How about somebody who never shares much positive emotion, and is always looking to join in on other people’s fun and bring them down?
Quite simply, do you know somebody who drains your energy, whenever they’re around you?
Yes? Then they’re an emotional vampire.
Sure, we can all sometimes be a bit negative or draining. But emotional vampires are people who are like this all the time, 24/7. They just suck life energy out of people, and they don’t even realize it.
And other people will subconsciouly start avoiding them, even if they can’t quite figure out why.
Could… *gasp* you be an emotional vampire?
Before you shout “NO”, get all angry, close this webpage, and lose everything you could learn here… I’m not suggesting you’re a full-blown emotional vampire.
There’s a very good chance you’re not. Emotional vampires usually don’t read personal development blogs.
But we all sometimes act like emotional vampires. Even I do, and I’ve been aware of this for years.
Here are some emotional vampire behaviors you want to avoid:
- complaining
- shooting down ideas without giving them a good thought
- asking negative questions (”Why can’t we ever do this?”) instead of solution-oriented questions (”How can we most easily do this?”)
- making comments just to make other people feel bad
- saying bad things about people behind their back
Are you doing any of the above? That’s fine, we all sometimes do. But now that you’re aware how it affects other people (hint: they hate it), please stop.
The next time you catch yourself doing anything remotely emotional-vampire-ish, stop, and do something constructive instead. You won’t believe the difference in your relations with other people.
How to deal with emotional vampires
The first way to deal with emotional vampires is simply to tell them how their actions affect you. Some vampires CAN change, you just need to point out they’re doing something wrong. (There’s a whole art to helping other people change. Here’s one quick tip – go from the “Here’s how your actions make me feel” angle, not the “you suck and your actions are evil” angle.)
I’m big on changing the world, so I hang out with entrepreneurs and creative people a lot.
But while preaching open-mindedness and aiming for big goals… often when a friend came with a huge out-of-the-box proposal, my immediate reaction was “No, that wouldn’t work”, even without considering it. Thankfully, I had one friend who called me on this. I paused to think, and realized I WAS acting like an emotional vampire.
Nowadays, I always bite back my initial knee-jerk reaction. Because you know what? The initial “Nonsense!” reaction is very often wrong.
If the vampire is too close-minded to change when you point out their flaws… there’s nothing you can do for them. You can’t change somebody who doesn’t want to change.
Instead, get the emotional vampire out of your life.
Sometimes you can just ignore them and they will fade away. Sometimes you need to actively tell them you don’t want to spend time with them anymore.
Sure, it hurts at first. But it’s much better than spending your life with emotional vampires around. It’s like tearing a band-aid off in one quick jerk, instead of the drawn-out agonizing process of pulling it off slowly.
Have a fabulous vampire-free day!
This guest post was written by: Vlad Dolezal, the creator of: Fun Life Development (Blog).
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