So. I’m struggling with a friend at the moment. Struggling to respond kindly instead of feeling annoyed every time she shares a story with me. You see her stories follow the same basic structure. There’s an event or a situation. It/he/she was/is wrong, and her intervention fixed it. The result? She was right!

Do you have people in your life like this? How do you handle them? You see I’m determined not to be dismissive. Determined to push past that feeling of rolling my eyes and feeling annoyed.

This person is a wonderful human being and spirit. That’s the kicker, if she stopped ending each conversation with the incessant need to validate her righteousness, I’d probably be more likely to listen more often. What she has to say has a lot of value and wisdom, but what tends to ruin it for me is the tail end of each conversation. It negates the value of what she actually has to say.

This brings me to my next point. Value. Through my practice of being a  healer, I often find that when we humans don’t feel that we have any value, we often behave in certain ways that will validate our existence. These are some of the behavious I’ve noticed along the way.

– We will undermine what another person has to say

– We put the other person down for expressing ideas we don’t agree with

– We always point out what’s wrong in a situation external to ourselves

– We dominate conversations with experiences of our triumphs

– We negate the other person’s point of view

– We undermine the other person by sharing their ‘failures’ with others

– We bully others that aren’t as outspoken as ourselves

– We make conversations centre around us or our achievements

Have you noticed that I’ve used the term ‘we’? At some point in our lives I believe we all do this. I also think that at some point we also need to choose to be right, or choose to be happy.

The concept of feeling valued is a huge one. The value we place on ourselves will be mirrored in terms of the money we earn, the people around us, where we live, where we work, what we do for work and how we are treated.

Despite manifesting abundance in our life, if we truly believe that who we are has no value, many of us have a predisposition to validate our existence, either by needing to be right, or by ‘one upping’ the other person.

Have you ever been around someone that could never be happy for you with your story? Instead, they share a similar experience about themselves, but go one better than you? Welcome to the world of one upping. According to Psychology Today, one upping is a mammalian survival strategy. “The mammal brain releases serotonin when it’s in the one-up position because that promotes survival in the state of nature. The serotonin feels good, which motivates a mammal to seek the one-up position again.

On the flip side, one of my colleagues who has been a kinesiologist for a long time says “There comes a point where you often wish you were wrong about some of your patients, especially with serious issues such as cancer and serious drug and alcohol addictions”

As for me and my friend, I’m currently taking the lighthearted approach when the inevitable telling of a tale rears its righteous head. I tell her that even if she’s been wrong, I’d still love her. I did it a while back and she looked at me blankly and stated “But I WAS right.”

Sigh.