Do you have people in your life who seem to just suck every square millimeter of positive energy out of you?  Dementors if you will.  Those people whose mere presence can make you feel about 10 notches lower on the happy scale.  Who can take you from a sense of elation to a sense of utter desperation.  Who complain about everything from world hunger to a sunny day, such that you lose track of the complaints that are justified and the complaints that are useless.  Who will take your best day and make it their worst.

We've all got some Dementors in our lives.  I've got one or two, that's for sure, and recently I've made it my mission to figure out how to best deal with these types of people.  At first I tried confronting the behavior.  Stating outright how a person's behavior was annoying (more eloquently stated of course) with the hope that I would ultimately train them out of it.  That didn't work, because my Dementors were so stuck in their own negativity that they didn't see the favor I was trying to do for them.  So then I tried to ignore them, those Dementors.  That worked okay for a while. It made me happier, but it made the Dementors unhappy.  They're unhappy enough without me ignoring them.  They need someone to listen to them.

Most recently I've been trying something a little different.  I listen carefully to the Dementor, acknowledge what the Dementor is saying, then decide for myself what I want to do with the information they've given me.  For example, if the Dementor is complaining about a sunny day, I say "sounds like you don't like the sun very much." Then I decide for myself how I would like for that information to effect me.  In the case of this particular Dementor, I like the sun very much.  I grew up in the North East where we don't get much sun.  I cherish the sun, so I would just brush the comment off with an understanding that it's simply the Dementor's nature to be negative.

What this all really comes down to is the fact that no Dementor can determine the way I feel or think.  No Dementor has any control over my life.  I control my life and my feelings and my thoughts. I can decide to be happy or sad regardless of the information that other beings (or people) are feeding me.

My choice is happiness.

Keep on thinking,
Josie