Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys

There is plenty to detach from in our culture today. If we don’t, we are sucked into a never-ending spiral of other people’s drama. It’s difficult enough when we create our own drama, which so many of us do, especially when we have been through relationship or family trauma.

How do we pull back from this constant drama? In The 10X Mentor book, Grant Cardone says to be so busy with positive things and people that you just don’t have time to interact with them much anymore. He talks about giving someone 5 minutes…that’s all you would have time for. I love this approach because though we definitely don’t want other people’s circuses or monkeys, we also want to give them a chance to grow and change their minds about things. What seemed true to someone in the past does not in any way decide on what realizations they might have today. We are all shifting and growing all the time. When we’re not, we get stuck on that giant Ferris Wheel that breaks down with us and our monkeys on it, and when it starts up again, it never stops. It doesn’t let us off, we have to climb down off of it as it’s still going in order to save ourselves.

Interactions with people caught up in their own Ferris Wheel nightmare will happen and we must prepare and strengthen ourselves to meet the short lived challenge. To do this, if we know we will see a Ferris Wheel Person today, we can mentally prepare ourselves by pretending that 

we were a different person watching the scene. This will take all the buttons that they normally press out of the emotional wheel. We can pretend that we are a very neutral police officer who has seen it all, and just simply listen and watch them. When we do this, it will be far more difficult for them to press those buttons of ours and we can spend less time. When they push that ‘feel sorry for me’ or that ‘how could you do this to me’ button, if we are pretending to be someone else who is a neutral party, it will be far easier to not get caught up in the reactive state, but instead step into a conscious state of awareness. Centering ourselves in a compassionate understanding, helps to diffuse any extreme attempts at even more drama from the Ferris Wheel People and is so important for us to understand not only what they are going through, but the Ferris Wheel ride that all those with a past of trauma have taken, including ourselves. After we have left and even days or weeks later, when we feel those emotional buttons that they hit pop up again, we can play the same neutral party role and diffuse the situation for ourselves as well. 

We deserve happiness. We deserve peace. We deserve respect. We must learn how to take these things for ourselves, and to put ourselves in healthy situations in order to attain that. Surely it’s not to be found at the Drama Circus.

~Janice M. Burke