Isn’t that Dale Carnegie?
Yes, yes, indeed you’re right, it is Dale Carnegie.
I opened this thread thinking the OP was a real asshat, but then I read it. You sound almost exactly like me, Stinkpalm! If someone expresses an opinion, I almost automatically take the opposing side, regardless of my own opinion. I don’t like being disagreed with, yet I’ll disagree with nearly everyone. This seems senseless, on inspection, but I can’t help it. I, too, am highly introverted, and very passive-agressive. And like you, I grew up in a difficult environment, though I’d prefer not to go into details, yet. Thank you for starting this thread. I’ll look into the suggestions presented herein as well. 
One of the big eye openers for me was that I found that on a few message boards that I post on I had really turned people off on me by argueing everything all the time. Derailing every thread that I thought was"stupid" or “pointless” or in which I thought people were being “dumb”. I rarely ever do this on the SDMB because I would get owned on here by the big brains. 
It was wierd to hear people on a message board saying the same things about me and my issues that people in RL have said, and they haven’t even met me.
I am a person who really seperates my RL from the internet and I don’t get worked up over peoples opinion of me on the net, but when people who haven’t even “met” you have the same issues with you that people who have met you say, it is a signal that it is time to make a serious change.
I have been at this for one day and have barely interacted with anyone, but it is already challenging me. I am forcing myself to stop negative and critical thoughts about others as soon as they enter my mind. Things I see on TV that normally aggravate me are just as challenging to correct my thoughts about as RL. I figure I need to try to move all negative emotions out of my life as best as I can right now, at least until I know I can deal with them appropriatley.
Yep. That is me to a T. Even when I agree with someone I will argue and opposing side. I guess just so they can’t be “right” or “the smart one”. I dunno. It feels like something I cannot control. It happens on its own. It really pisses people off too.
Alot of times when something good happens for someone I stiffle my congrats and feel jealous or something when I shouldn’t. I don’t want to be like this anymore. I like when people praise me and I should be just as willing to praise others.
Almost exactly the same reaction here, too. I’d guess our upbringing has much to do with this. At least now I know I’m not alone here.
Stinkpalm - try walking around with a pencil griped between your teeth. this will:
-
Activate the smile muscles in your face that trigger endoprine release in the brain, elevating your mood.
-
Make you look goofy, which is good, because it’s hard to look like and asshole when you look goofy.
-
Make you take yourself less seriously. In my experience, people that are really prickly (assholish) are afraid of being made to look foolish, or made to look like they aren’t in total control of the situation. The old “pencil in the mouth” trick generally makes you look foolish, but in a good way.
Basically, lighten up.
Also - as to acting the part. One of the tips that therapists give to persons that are severely depressed is to “act the part” of a happy person. Get up. Get dressed. Go out. Generally, when the severly depressed person does this, they will experience positive side effects making them want to do it again - it’s called behaviour therapy. Train your behaviour to be what you want it to be, and eventually, cognition will follow.
Good luck. Now go get that pencil.
Good for you for wanting to change! To be honest, I have dropped friends for this kind of behavior. A little bit of arguing can be interesting, but people who do this constantly just wear me out. Next time you’re in a situation like this, try drawing the other person out to get his/her views and really listen, instead of spending the time formulating arguments against their position. You can learn a lot.
Good luck to you.
Stinkpalm, first and foremost, please listen to lovejoy. Most self help books and the like are too often smarmy loads of bovine excrement. That said, I’ll recommend one of the only books I’ve ever seen that had the least value to myself or anyone I know.
Forget about such drivel as “Chicken Soup for the WHATEVER.”
Please try “Escaping the Hostility Trap.”
Author: Layden, Milton, 1912-
Title: Escaping the Hostility Trap / Milton Layden.
Pub info: Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice-Hall, c1977.
This book is left out on tables throughout the entire laboratory complex of SRI (Stanford Research Institute), one of the most prestigious scientific facilities on our planet. The books are all stamped with an imprint mentioning how you must feel free to take it home, share it with all your friends and not care if you ever bring it back.
It is one of the only self-help books worth more than kindling that I have ever read. If you wish for diversity, please examine “Type A Behavior and Your Heart”, plus its sequel. Otherwise, do not listen to any of these touchy-feeley @ssholes. Anyone who will tell you, “It’s for your own good…” is someone you need to run from at warp speed.
[Hammer]
Trust me, I know what I’m doing…
[/Hammer]
Stinkpalm, start with a new user name maybe? Something a little more positive. My husband used to have the user name “Asshole.” The he changed it to “A Soul.”
Don’t pass up the information on assertiveness quite so quickly. You seem to have learned to be passive or aggressive but not assertive. Here is a brief explanation of the differences:
For some odd reason, I really liked Zenster’s reply… (thanks, Z!)
Now if I could only get my best friend to read this thread without him knowing that I think he acts like an asshole… (all that stuff about nonverbal signs of dickheadedness - the crossed arms, facial expressions, etc., fit him to a tee.)
drpepper was right about How To Win Friends … by Dale Carnegie. It’s an old book, but people haven’t changed since then. It’s still in print; I saw it in Waldenbooks two days ago. You’ll learn how pointless and frustrating some of your habits are. To yourself, that is, aside from how irritating they may be to others.
Go to your favorite video store and rent… no; buy Harvey with Jimmy Stewart. Watch and learn. Jimmy Stewart’s character, Mr. Elwood P. Dowd, is many things (polite, gracious, charming, kind) but he is certainly not a jerk. Crazy? Maybe.
I am not exaggerating when I say that my life was changed by the following line:
Elwood: “My Mother used to say to me Elwood, (she always used to call me Elwood); in this life it is important to be either ‘oh, so smart’, or ‘oh, so pleasant’. I have tried smart. I can recommend pleasant.”
[I know, I know; you'll get to the video store and some other *sshole will have rented it!]
Best wishes with the new persona – it’ll work and you’ll enjoy it.
I, too, am a former asshole who has reformed. I did it by sheer determination- I stopped saying bad things about people, I stopped myself from thinking mean things, and I decided to become interested in what people had to say. I stopped assuming everyone was lying, started really caring, and stopped giving a shit about little things that threw me into a rage.
I read “How To Win Friends…” and thought it was complete stupid bullshit. Now I try to live by what that book says. I re-read it at least once a year to stay on track.
It helps if you have someone to work with you and point things out as they happen. One thing I’d never noticed is that I scowled all the time. Now I make a point of smiling more often (a lot), and it’s a natural way of being. I chose to be a happy person and now I am.
I do not know if your problem requires psychological help or not, so don’t take this as gospel- I’m just saying what I did. Today people hear stories about how I used to be and absolutely do not believe them, but they are (I’m ashamed to say) true.
Good luck in your journey- it’s really much better on this side.
Stinkpalm, I would just like to congratulate you on making this life-changing effort to find the “kinder, gentler” you. Not only will you benefit, personally, from these attitude and behaviour changes, but the other beneficiary will be your daughter! As she grows, she will look to you for examples of how to respond to every aspect of life, and believe me, the smallest of gestures or tone can make all the difference in a child’s perception of the world around him or her and how to cope with it. You are doing her a BIG favor with this! And one way to keep yourself on track with this change is to think of your daughter every time you feel yourself reverting. Do you want her to grow up seeing her daddy angry, belligerent and argumentative, or would you rather give her a happy, fun-loving and kind-hearted father who people genuinely like and respect?
There’s been plenty of good advice in this thread already, so without repeating any of it, I’d like to offer one more suggestion. You mentioned that you have a hard time congratulating people for their accomplishments or wishing them well, and your concern with attempting to “fake” it is that it’ll “look” fake to the recipient of said gesture. But you have to start somewhere, or it’ll never happen. And if you start “IRL” and get too many confused reactions, it may (as it has apparently done in the past) turn you off the process and leave you back at square one.
So how about starting somewhere where people can’t “see” you and post some congrats or well-wishes right here on the board?! You could welcome slice to the boards, or ask Scylla if he’s gotten over his cold yet. You could wish Spavined Gelding a good trip or congratulate xgxlx on getting accepted to college. Just a thought on a way to make a somewhat less stressful start on your endeavor.
Best of luck and a hearty pat on the back to ya! Good job!
First, I think it bears repeating, Stinkpalm, that you deserve many congratulations for making such a lucid and clear headed decision to change.
I found myself in a similar situation a few years ago, and it came about at work: although I thought of myself as a relatively decent guy, I was shocked to learn during a performance evaluation that several co-workers had complained to my manager about my behaviour being “assholeish”. This being a large company, in relatively good times, I was sent off to take an “interpersonal efectiveness and listening” course.
- “Great, I thought, I’m being sent off to the course on how-to-play-well-with-others with a buch of socially disfunctionnal geeks…”*
:mad:
**Did I mention I was really pissed off and humiliated at being sent on this course? **
Anyway, it turned out to be one of the best things that happened to me. I turned out that there was a buch of things I was doing that was really annoying people. Small, “personal style / body language” things, like standing too close to people when speaking with them and making them feel threatened*, talking loudly and speaking like I was the ultimate authority on something instead of tempering my statements with softeners like “I think…” “What about…” etc.
At first I thought it was stupid, and a cop-out by the course writers, but Mrs. Trupa suggested I take it like adapting to the weird idiosyncracies of the culture, like not blowing your nose in public in Japan (considered equivalent to farting) and I went along, mostly out of curiosity. It made a huge difference for me; people who had been really hostile started being nice, inviting me for lunch, and taking what I said more seriously.
The point is, yes, there is one, that these little habbits were sending out all kinds of signals I wasn’t aware of, and that even small changes like that can make a large difference in ways people percieve you.
Perhaps, if you work in a company that offers training, you can find such a course. You may consider asking those close to you if there are any mannerisms that you have that can come accross as confontational or hostile.
It sounds like you are already on the way to making some important attitude changes. Maybe the above will give you some ideas on small things you can implement right away.
Best of luck to you.
*About standing next to people in an upright discussion, try this little exercise with a buddy you get along with, and with a friend of the opposite gender (men and women react differently). Start with each of you about 15-20 feet apart facing each other in a hallway. Begin slowly approaching your friend as you talk to them about anything harmless. Ask them to tell you to stop when they feel you are close enough, and when any closer would be uncomfortable. You may get a surprise at how far that is, especially the taller you are.
And people wondered why I never had anything nice to say about co-EE majors…and Purdue was in the middle of nowhere!
Enjoy the irony!
You’re most welcome luv.
I thought I’d step back in and reaffirm a few things being mentioned here.
First off Stinkpalm, having the courage to do something like this means you have the remaining willpower to follow through on changing yourself. Self-change is about as easy as pulling teeth through the @sshole. That said, it can also be one of the most rewarding things you will do in your entire life. So, good on you that you had the guts to do this.
Next, as Zoe mentioned, drop the intentionally offensive moniker. Such in-your-face stances may be a thread running through your life, I do not know. Like the old saying goes, “Accentuate the positive.”
Try starting with something simple. Like, going out of your way to compliment at least one person each and every day. Don’t give false praise, people know it instantly and it won’t do you any good either. Be sure you mean what you say and make sure to say it. Tell a pretty woman how beautiful she is. Tell war veterans how grateful you are that they fought for your freedom. Thank a firefighter for protecting your community. Get in the habit of being nice.
Each day, make sure to do something nice for someone. Help a person pick up something that has fallen. Hold the door for a delivery driver. Allow someone to merge in front of you on the road. Get in the habit of being nice. Being nice is not a weakness, it is a strength, both of character and will. You will find that giving a little to the world each day will enhance, not deplete your resources.
Finally, take time to smell the flowers. As mentioned above, a big start is treating yourself right. If you don’t love yourself, no one else is going to. You have demonstrated the presence of mind to address the issue here at the boards. It means that you hold yourself to be worth something. Never forget that. Each day, do something nice for yourself. Listen to a favorite song, start planning a trip to somewhere you enjoy, anything. Most of all, smile! You’ll look better to other people and they will smile back. You’d be surprised how just this one thing can result in big changes.
Go for the gusto! You’ll love the results. Feel free to update us in this thread with how things change for you. Maybe, even keep a journal for yourself. Here’s hoping you are successful in your quest.
Jesus, you made me read THIS?
What an asshole.
In all seriousness, best of luck. I’d suggest saying as little as possible, that should have a positive effect. People like listeners better than talkers.