You ever have a day where all is right in your universe? I am talking you wake up, maybe get a little extra loving in the morning, the kids wake up in a grand mood, in other words none of that pesky whining that can drive a parent mad at 7am. The day is just going marvelous and you end up talking to a friend and they just say the most foul, fucked up thing. All of a sudden the sky just got pitch black in your personal world for a few minutes. You brush it off and go on but all of a sudden, you just aren’t feeling as good as you were before that exchange with your “friend”.
Or you are chatting with an e-friend, perhaps you are tweeting about something going on in your day and the e-friend volleys back with a comment that just makes you feel like the world’s biggest idiot.
Everyone has off days where instead of saying the right thing, we just open our mouths and out comes all kinds of madness. Life is like that. The thing though with certain people we cross paths with, they always seem to have a knack for just saying shit that makes you feel like shit. Then to add insult to injury, they often feel obliged to share how wonderful their life is while being critical of you.
Over the past few years, I have come to realize I have more than a few of these types in my life and I have a word for them. They are happiness snatchers. Why you ask? Because they seem to almost take joy in making people unhappy, but unlike a true asshole, they position themselves to come across as kind, caring souls. But let me tell you after dealing with folks like this, I have decided the problem is they are not happy. Repeat they are not happy. As a result they don’t want anyone else to be happy. However unlike folks who openly wallow in their own unhappiness (had one of those too) happiness snatchers are not mature enough to own their own feelings. Happiness snatchers often position themselves in such a way that it seems they are living the perfect life, but as I recently asked myself if your life is so grand, why do you want to bring others down? Misery loves company, plain and simple.
If you have a happiness snatcher in your life, the sad truth is there is nothing you can do for them. I repeat there is not a damn thing you can do for them. Until a happiness snatcher realizes they want true happiness and seeks to make active change in their own life starting with admitting their own unhappiness, keeping them in your life is a waste of energy. So just like we take the trash out because otherwise it will stink up the house at a certain point, we often have to let the happiness snatcher go lest they create madness in our lives.
I can really related to this! I soon-to-be-husband and I are struggling with all the happiness snatchers in his family. Unfortunately, one of them is his elderly mother who we are helping to care for so she can stay in her own home and not go to a nursing home.
Any suggestions about what to do about happiness snatchers when you can’t avoid contact with them?
I might add that a few relatives fit into this catergory. I never thought I would tell my brother to never call me again, and that I would always love him from a distance. I refused to be called names and disrepected the way he did the last time I spoke to him…now I had had to so the same thing with his daughter, my niece! SMH!
Great name for the sour folks in your life! Until about five years ago I didn’t have the heart to get rid of Happiness Snatcher’s….but that changed the day I forgot to call back a person whom I regarded as a friend after she left divorce court and had lost everything….Now it may sound like I was the bad person, but literally, one of my kids had a game and I had been talking to this person daily about her feelings and problems. When I did realize that I didn’t call her back and did, she told me that I could never be anyone’s friend because I focused too much on my family. For a few weeks I felt like shit….thinking to myself daily how could I have let her down? Then one day I woke up and thought how did I let that heffa talk to me that way! Especially, after I tried so hard to be there for her…even told her not to get into a relationship with someone who had converted from being gay to straight…she didn’t listen, eventually he decided that he was really gay after, to make matters worse for her, he was a prominent attorney in the area…now did she think she was going to win a case against him? I didn’t…and told her that….I also begin to think about that throughout the relationship I was always supportive to her…After some thought I calmed and said fuck it! So even though she dumped me physically, I decided that I would not allow her to emotionally snatch my happiness anymore!