MAYbesitting

At all times children need to be nurtured, cared for and someone must always be responsible for them. These duties all naturally belong to the parent of the child. But sometimes the parents want to take a break from their child or children. They want a break because they want some leisure time, or they have something else that they need to do and can’t concentrate on the youngster at the same time, or because they just want someone else to feel what they go through every day and they can be comforted in knowing that they aren’t alone, someone else knows exactly what they are going through.

Parents hand their children over to babysitter for these reasons. They ask that someone else temporarily nurture, care for and be responsible for their child or children. This is babysitting and while that child is in your care you take on all the roles and duties of the parent, babysitting. Babysitting is a tough job.

In the same token that people like to relieve themselves from their children, so often also is the case that they like to relieve themselves of their own personal problems, dilemmas, stigmas and issues. How do they do that? The same way they hand their children off to close friends and family, they will through projection try to hand off their problems and issues to you. When they are going through something they will plant a seed in your ear that perhaps you are going through, have gone through or you’re about to go through the same thing. They will talk to you and have you thinking that maybe their problem is your problem, maybe what you are doing is not going to work out because it didn’t work out for them, maybe you should model yourself after the imperfect them instead of the perfect you, maybe you aren’t this, maybe you aren’t that, maybe you have been on the right track but on the wrong train, all these different maybes. I call this maybesitting. In the same way people want you to take on their kids so they can be free from them or want someone else to be go through parenting and problems they are going through, they want you to often take on their issues and you must say, “No I am not maybestting your problems today, tonight, tomorrow or any other day.”

We cannot be our most healthy selves if we allow other people to successfully project their unhealthy mental or emotional problems on us. We must refuse to own temporarily or permanently issues of others. They do not belong to us and we need not accept them or nurture them for if we do then they become an unnatural part of us and will begin to grow and fester creating real problems that didn’t already exist.