patterns

teasing them out, teasing them out...

drawn to unresponsive people

learning to resist needy/clingy/ungiving people

Unresponsive: To me this is someone who initially acts friendly toward me, as if there is something they like about me; but when I approach them in turn, they seem unresponsive. Suddenly whatever interested them no longer interests them.

Weirdly, what I think about this pattern is that the people who act this way initially saw me in the 'one-up' power position, and they approached me because they wanted something from me, and thought I could help them. When it turned out I couldn't help, or didn't want to help, they lost interest. It may be something as simple as allying with me because I seem to have some power and influence (I'm thinking particularly of times when I've been concertmaster of an orchestra).

I think I frustrate these people because I refuse to abuse my 'power'. Often as not I'm unsure as to why I've been put in that position in the first place, so I don't take it for granted - it always seems likely to me that something so fickle can just as easily be taken away as given. So I try not to attach too much importance to it, but just to do the job as well as I can for as long as I have it. Often I will feel relief when my lack of enthusiasm ends up losing me the un-sought-after position, because then I'm no longer expected to do whatever it is they thought I could do in the first place, no longer expected to jump hurdles I can't even perceive, let alone know how to jump properly without getting hurt in the process. Sometimes I just walk around the hurdles, ignoring them altogether, as if I don't know what they're for. This annoys people no end (smiles with amusement to self). I don't know why they bother - the hurdles are unnecessary, they're - what are they for, anyway? I guess I've never really understood, I just know at a gut level that they're arbitrary and meaningless and people put them there just to see what will happen. Usually they don't think that you'll just walk around them, though. They expect you to have some kind of reaction.

And then the needies: The needies are ok with me in concept, because as far as I'm concerned we're all needies and clingies at some point - that's just the nature of any creature that has needs.

The trick is when needs and power plays get tangled up, then people who crave power figure out ways to get their needs met that don't interfere with their desire for power. So it appears that they don't have any needs; the truth is that they've just been tricky enough to get their needs met secretly, while nobody was looking. One problem with this approach is that it begins to appear, fairly quickly, that these 'powerful' people not only really don't have needs (which makes them even more powerful because people without needs can't be easily manipulated), but the people around them begin to believe the story and start blaming themselves for having needs. They blame their needs for their lack of power, and get the cart firmly entrenched in front of the horse.

Our whole culture operates this way right now, as I've tried to explain a thousand times already: Our hyper-individualism is held up as the 'right and proper' way to be, making it invisible that no man is an island, and enforcing the Emperor's New Clothes perception that all these folks are autonomous and self-sufficient when in fact they're all entirely dependent on a massive, complex set of support structures that have become entirely invisible because of how we think about things.

In other words, framing is everything. The way we describe a thing tends to become the thing itself over time.