High maintenance people require constant attention and approval. They crave to be the center of almost every conversation and will often become symptomatic (moody, resentful, loud, threatening) when not. They review every move, thought, words and actions of others. They tend to read unintended meaning into statements, looks, sighs, and attitudes of others. They are easily hurt, quickly offended, quick to rebuke when lacking the attention they think they deserve. Threats of withdrawal or desertion become a way of life.

High maintenance people are difficult, sometimes impossible, even in relaxed circumstances. They pick fights, find fault, and personalize almost everything. They argue with others, especially with intimates, for no apparent reason. They pick fights with strangers like waiters. They often live in a world of cut-off relationships where most others are idiots.

What can you do if you are in a relationship with a high maintenance person? You can do very little that will not hurt, offend, or get a reaction, but you must make a stand. High maintenance people seldom benefit from pity, patience, or empathy. 

They will only benefit from being constantly challenged to grow up.

• You trip over each other no matter what size your living space. It seems urgently necessary to make a schedule for who can be in the kitchen (bathroom, laundry) at what times and for how long. When it’s vacant and you go in, suddenly everyone wants the space at the same time, dog included.

• Under lockdown your eyes become magnifying glasses, enlarging everything. The way he chews his food; the ways she sips her coffee; the way the children leave things open; how she chews ice; how he breathes when asleep; how the children leave stuff everywhere – everything gets magnified and amplified. You get sizzle eyes.

• Things get very personal. You become experts in hearing something behind everything that is said and not said. Whispers can sound like screams especially if the content can be perceived as criticism.

• The slippery slide – of making everything into a catastrophe – becomes really steep and it’s easy to think the sky really is falling.

Rejoice if any of this is even momentarily true for you and your family. You are on a wonderful journey to loving each other in ways you never heretofore imagined.

A 16 minute chat with my son.

The Mercury / Thursday

Daily parenting challenge which I hope you will adopt…

• Be today the adult you’d want your child to become.

• Negotiate deals, resolve conflicts, compromise, in exactly the manner you hope your child does when he/she is an adult. Powerful learning happens by experience and observing, but it’s more than that. Your personal transformations will shape and “lift” your family beyond the power of role-modeling. How you are sets the path for how your children will (likely) be.

• Use money, save money, leverage resources in the manner you hope your child will one day utilize resources. Attitudes, actions are yeast-like. Your behaviors shape and become the norm.

• Treat your parents in the manner you hope your adult children will treat you in your advancing years and then expect nothing more or less.

• Love, serve your siblings and their families so your children in order to remove ambiguity about how love behaves in an immediate and extended family.

• Be an avid reader if you want your child to be an avid reader. It might not immediately “take” but chances are it will in the future. Valuable habits take time, not nagging.

• If you want your child to be well-mannered, courageous and kind, be that way with lover, friend, foe. There is no other way to teach these values.