Joe90 wrote:
Isn't that how most people communicate their feelings? Telling others how they feel? What you're doing sounds normal to me. It always makes others feel better when they talk about their feelings to me or others, and the same goes for me. I'm surprised nobody else has mentioned that in this thread, unless someone has. I haven't read all the replies.
Seems reasonable to me.
Yet I have read/heard many reports from people that find offense in this sort of thing, and go on to label such people as depressive, negative, toxic, and emotional vampires, - presumably because the downloads aren't always of cheerful nature, or perhaps are rarely of a cheerful nature. They seem to have a point, but I suspect that the reality of the situation is that they were ok with it up until some point where they then felt some need to use this against the other person.
I think it has something to do with emotional reciprocity, and some expectation of the other person to have much responsibility for your own emotional state. One of the people involved doesn't feel like they are getting what they want and then takes some action to affect more control over the situation.
Honestly to me, that sounds more like manipulation than compassion.
I think there should be more compassion, and realization that people feel much more of a need to talk about things that bother them than they have to talk about things that are going well.