Life without Drama

Personal dramas are created when the parties involved feel so sure that they're entitled to their negative interpretation of one another that actions such as cutting people off, breaking up, or being disrespectful, harsh or maybe even cruel, are warranted.

What is surprising though is that not much is actually needed to convince people they are entitled to their negative interpretation. People always feel they are, of course. But that's the point, they *feel* they are. Emotions become part of the decision. Frustration, anger, confusion, sadness, pride--it's not always an obvious emotion. But an emotion and a few bits of evidence are not sufficient to make an informed decision.

What the emotion does is fit with a particular interpretation of the evidence, and THEN cause that interpretation to become rigid (because emotions are hard to overturn). One is stopped from easily seeing *different* perspective (including more true perspectives)

Actually almost nothing warrants a negative interpretation. It's always good to err because you'll learn more being open to positive interpretations than the other way around. Negative interpretations are a bit of a full stop.

On maybe an implicit level the idea behind this process is that we sometimes should cut people off, break up, or be disrespectful, and being entitled to a negative interpretation tells us when to do this. So if we never let ourselves have negative interpretations we might end up 'being walked on' or harmed in some ways. But this way of thinking ignores how easy it is to get along with people if you try to. One can take up ideas like 'not taking things personally'.

We simply don't need to ever be disrespectful to people to not be victimised. We can not be victimised by our positive attitudes. And as for breaking up and cutting people off, this is something we should rarely ever do. People should be able to drift apart mutually if they so wish. But in general, relationships have a lot of knowledge to them, and we should only ever put a stop to them if absolutely necessary. Where 'absolutely necessary' here means 'when the other person has destroyed the relationship' and there is now nothing that could be done'. And where 'absolutely necessary' DOES NOT mean 'my negative interpretation tell me to end the relationship.'