How to Deal with Being Ignored I want you to come along with me on a little thought experiment here: Remember a time you felt ignored. You reached out to someone. You made a legitimate request, you even tried to be entertaining or funny just to perk their interest. You were in no way rude or pushy, and tried to give that person adequate, if not excessive time to respond. I don’t know about you, but this can get upsetting after a while, and especially if it happens with multiple people in quick succession. Now, coming from my own experience, I know that there are a few different reactions/responses. You may only be fine with using one, or may use some or all of them in different order due to some frustration: 1.Just keep non-intrusively and periodically checking in with the person. 2.Tell them off in some way. 3.Ignore the person’s antics and focus on others. 4.Cut them off: you de-friend them on facebook, take their number out of your phone, etc. So, what’s the best strategy? I can tell you I have tried all of them. #1 can get the person to respond, so long as this person has due diligence and values you as a friend, as a potential job candidate, or something else. It’s a good habit to get in the practice of, not to be annoying or pushy, but just to be persistent and at the same time polite. #2 will more than likely backfire, unless that person really sees value in you. For example, a family member who understands that they are not being fair to you, or a true friend, or in lesser relationships, but only on the condition that you have a certain level of value to them. Often, they will respond because they feel guilty they neglected you, and got caught up in extenuating circumstances— family emergencies, sickness, being ‘too busy for their own good’, and generally just caught up in other things. If they don’t value you enough, they will further relegate you to someone they don’t care about enough to respond, and continue to ignore you. If they care, and they are indeed busy, but are stressed out or upset about their state of affairs, watch out! They may project it onto you by taking your brassy approach personally, and thereby verbally pounce on you. That’s relational chemistry 101: mix two volatile people together and you get an eruption. This person may really not care about you the way you think, and this will be proof that you need to cut ties. They may react because they resent you and are projecting that resentment onto you. Which brings me to the cutoff strategy, #4. It’s drastic, but sometimes it is necessary. The great thing about friends, and basically any relationships beyond coworkers and family members, you have a choice who you want to interact with and who you don’t. Even if you are at a party with someone you don’t like, you have the right to ignore them or to limit your time with them. At the same time, if you get into the habit of cutting people off, you may develop a reputation for being oversensitive, divisive, and generally dramatic. This is not attractive, and in fact, coming from my experience, you will actually attract more of this drama. That’s because you will be conditioned to react in this way every time someone ignores you. It may bring up deep-seated emotions, times you felt betrayed or rejected, and you resent it. The verb ‘resent’ comes from the old french verb ‘ressentir’, ‘sentir’ meaning ‘to feel’, and ‘re’ meaning ‘again’. You are literally refeeling the same pang of emotion that comes up every time you are ignored. I know that no one likes to feel ignored, I certainly don’t, but some people are better at dealing with it than others. We need to be loved and feel a sense of validation from the time we are born. Otherwise, we develop neuroses, complexes, negative thought-patterns and general patterns of behavior that can at times be destructive. We want to burn bridges because we are trying desperately to control what pain it is that we feel. We think that if we isolate our feelings to those we are most comfortable with, that we can feel safe. I hate to break it to you, but at this rate, prepare to be ignored more and more. Today’s fast-paced, competitive working world, coupled with family responsibilities, intimate relationships and technology and media inserting itself wherever consumerism creates a desire or need, people are inundated with demand pulling at them from every end. Couple all these responsibilities with the fact that people are becoming simultaneously more depressed and narcissistic. To put it in laymen’s terms, people are more despondent, complacent, and selfish today than any other time, and if we look at how rates of these conditions have risen in past decades, the trend shows no sign of slowing down. You have no other choice than to become a more forgiving person. Don’t take shit so personally. People will continue to disappoint, but the quicker you can let it go, the better. Some tips to do this: 1.Focus more on yourself. 2.Cultivate relationships with people who DO respond and reach out. 3.Take a neutral stance towards those who don’t respond. 4.DO NOT dig up old feelings or memories every time it happens. Regarding #1: this is your life. When someone ignores you, do something good for yourself. This will counter the negative feelings that may come up, and you focus on the only person you can control: yourself. You CANNOT and will never be able to control other people. Find ways to keep busy and do things on your own, make commitments to yourself before committing to others if you are starting to become downtrodden about it. It’s inevitable that sometimes the outside world can be disappointing. So cultivate a rich inner world, become independent of others. I am not asking you to become a self-absorbed, solipsistic/narcissistic loner who lives in a private fantasy land. But take the time to take care of yourself. If everyone did that, they wouldn’t be running around stressed out with millions of obligations, ignoring people hither and thither because they double-booked their lives. And that would mean LESS people being ignored, and a better world would result. But for now, you have to start with yourself. Secondly, it is good not only to cultivate a good relationship with yourself, but to keep those people around who do make an effort. Have gratitude for these people. Celebrate and reward them for being such wonderful friends. They don’t ignore you, they reach out to YOU. This may be a time to recognize where you tend to ignore others. Some of my best relationships now are with people who I felt were of lesser value than me and who I therefore had ignored. They were less popular, not as attractive, or the relationship brought up certain insecurities for me. I let my reservations and judgments go, and I valued the fact that these people made an effort. They are now some of my best friends, and in my humble opinion, some of the greatest people I have ever known. On the contrary, I let go of people who didn’t make me a priority. This shift in who I kept contact with did wonders for my self-esteem. Some people simply aren’t worth it. Relationships are two-way streets. I like to think that people have relevance in my life so long as they are willing to prove it. Otherwise, I’m indifferent. Which brings me to my third point: it is all about not learning not to take things personally. It’s been said that 95% of the time, people are not ignoring you because they mean to. We all get distracted, and we all have to prioritize what is urgent and what can wait. It’s a survival mechanism within us all. Essentially, it’s fight-or-flight at work in today’s world. On that level, we are still, in some sense, animals. While we may have moments of transcendence where we put ourselves before others, human beings are still not there yet. It’s better to cultivate a sense of neutrality or indifference towards being ignored instead of reacting either way. If you are not attached to the person responding, you won’t be overly pushy, risking being ignored further or being hissed at. You won’t react and say something harsh or unwarranted. When that happens, it’s easier for the ignorer to blame you for everything in the situation, and consequently you will be the one who feels bad, not them. This reaction may cause a momentary sadness or a prolonged period of depression, depending on how you weigh it in your mind. Either way, telling someone off never makes matters easier, and even if the person does respond and feel guilty, they will however consciously or unconsciously label you as dramatic, and may ignore your desperate attempt at contact the next time. The fourth and final point demonstrates our need to rationalize our emotions and ‘psychologize’ why it is that we feel what we feel. You may need to go down this road initially to figure out a little bit about who you are and why you react, but it’s not a good idea to keep dredging up painful moments every time you feel slighted. If anything, I encourage you to take the time to feel the emotions of the event as best you can, to release them in writing and by crying them out, and then moving on. This does two things: it releases that emotion so that it can no longer attach itself to other events. Secondly, writing it down allows you to say that you’ve told that story, you now know what it means to you and your life and how it has made you a stronger person, how it helped you compose your value set, and what you learned about human nature. It is now literally and figuratively a closed chapter in your life, and you can make snap decisions without having to relive the trauma of past experience. It has meaning, but only enough for you to act in the moment without holding on to it like a dirty security blanket. This is not to say you will not feel disappointed or upset when certain people ignore you. But, it will be easier to let go of because you aren’t attaching present events to ones that serve to bring up pain, and may cause you to react more abusively toward yourself or others. Think about it like this: your auto insurance company will raise or decrease your premium depending on the amount of accidents you have had. But every time you get in a fender-bender, they don’t say, “We have to compare this one to your last collision to see if they match up.” There is no inherent value in that. It’s all evaluated on a case-by-case basis. And if you treat each event of being ignored like that, you won’t attach any unwarranted emotions to new situations. You will have learned from the past enough to take the right course of action. And you will be stronger for it. At the end of the day, we have all been ignored—and boy, do we know what it feels like. It may be getting worse because people seem to be increasingly distracted, but that doesn’t mean you can’t change how you respond. When it comes down to it, you need to love yourself enough to be able to let it go. Forgiveness always makes life easier. Believe me, I’ve had a hard time with this, but only with enough dedication and self-reflection have I learned better ways to deal with it.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 15:45:37 +0000
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