The Wellness Edition No. 36 // Dealing With Dominant Personalities

There are character traits we get along with well and umm others we can't really handle that well. Lately I had this conversation with my best friend whenever we talked about dominant personalities. I realised that I often tend to be surrounded by dominant characters even though I feel quite unwell around them. In friendships it is still easier to distance yourself from dominant people once you feel overwhelmed but when it comes to working with them it gets a lot harder and there comes the point where I start to feel really miserable. My best friend and I had this conversation a few weeks ago and I just remembered this conversation lately whenever I was forced to work with very dominant people in a group which was a real nightmare for me as you can probably imagine. 

In pretty much every job I ever worked in, there was always at least one super dominant person with a behaviour I could barely tolerate. In fact, all that happens is that being surrounded by those kind of people makes me feel utterly miserable. This is something I really have to work on since I noticed that the situation just gets constantly repeated over and over again - I was just recently forced to work with someone extremely dominant and in the end I usually just keep my mouth shut, even though I am completely unsatisfied with the situation but I always feel that it is not worth losing energy over discussions that don't lead anywhere anyways because ultra dominant characters usually don't reflect their own behaviour, instead they just put the blame on others.

I still have not figured out any good way to deal with people like that. Basically what made me write this post was the realisation how conflicted I feel whenever I have to deal with a dominant person. Truth is there are so many dominant souls out there, there is no escaping them it seems. So, instead I have to figure out how to behave in order not to feel miserable whenever I am surrounded by them. 

I feel pretty powerless when I have to deal with dominant folks and that is something I have to work on. You are only powerless if you let it happen that somebody else takes your power away from you and that is where the problems begin. People treat you the way you let them treat you and if you give your power away they will take it and treat you however they want. Maybe realising this helps me in the future to set better boundaries and to get offensive so they cannot put me into a defensive position.

By any chance, I am not an offensive person at all but I guess people with very dominant character traits don't leave you any other choice. You either get proactive and sort of offensive or they run straight over you because they clearly don't care about your feelings anyways. But you have to protect yourself, that is for sure, because otherwise they take your power and energy away and you are the one suffering in the end. 

It must be a lesson that I experience again and agin until I finally developed a strategy to cope with it. Unfortunately that's how it goes. We meet similar people, get in similar situations until we finally grow them out and they can't hurt us anymore or make us feel bad about ourselves. And the one with the dominant characters apparently still is one of my lessons to learn because I will always have to deal with people like that again - as much as I don't want to. I truly believe that this only stops once we learned our lesson. Some lessons you learn faster, others take longer. 

graphic design and illustrations done by me, leave photography by jared fowler, door photo via unsplash, earring photograph via pinterest