Jellyfish and Sociopaths

When I was younger I had a trump card that forced every decision. “Which option will keep other people from being angry or hurt?”

It seems selfless, but it’s not. I wasn’t out to make people happy, though it could appear that way. As a child torn between two families by divorce, I was out to keep my personal pain to a minimum. If I could keep everyone happy, I wouldn’t have to bear their disappointment, hurt, or anger.

It was the extreme side of decision making—always focused on avoiding pain and never toward gaining pleasure. But no matter what I did, I couldn’t please all the people all the time. I felt like a failure for causing other people to be unhappy.

Eventually I realized that it’s not actually my job to make people happy.

And I learned to balance my decision making away from total pain avoidance to include some pleasure seeking. (Neither extreme is healthy. One is a co-dependent jellyfish, the other is a hedonistic sociopath.) Sounds weird, but that’s when I finally started to figure out who I was.