So You Were Duped? Me Too. Part 2
You don’t have to stay duped, you know. So…you made some wrong choices. You didn’t have all the facts…or perhaps you chose to ignore the facts because you wanted to justify your choice.
Maybe they were just informed choices.
Maybe they were choices that reflected your mindset at the time.
Or maybe they were impetuous, impulsive choices. (In my experience, those are the most dangerous ones. i.e. my second marriage)
Maybe you were just having a bad day.
In any of those cases, it is easy to be duped into making life-altering decisions. But not all decisions and not all situations of being duped are unalterable.
Could I have stayed duped regarding the crappy, totally useless car I arranged to buy from the tote-the-note, dishonest car place? Yes. I could have negotiated more with the lying manager about how to make my purchase right. I don’t think it would have made any difference…in hindsight all I see is time and more money wasted. But I cut my losses and moved on to something else.
Could I have stayed at the job where office supplies were sometimes lobbed toward my head? Yes. Well, maybe. Probably until the workforce (who was like one big family) decided to “disown” me. I needed the extra money from that job, but I decided my own mental health was more important. I left and I didn’t let the door hit me on the way out.
Could I have been listed in the following year’s Who’s Who list from Cambridge? Yes. If I had come up with another $400. And if I could have convinced myself that the company really did want to tell people how stinking wonderful I am. If I hadn’t figured out that it was a con game. I could have continued fooling myself. But I couldn’t assuage my shame at being so insecure that I had to buy someone’s praise. I didn’t buy into it again. I learned to value myself without other people’s acknowledgment.
Although I am more questioning and careful now, I am still vulnerable to con games and lies. So are you. We will possibly both be duped again sometime. In fact, that’s more probable than merely possible.
It’s not ALL our fault. We expect people to be honest. We don’t expect people to spend all their time, energy, and potential to work only for self-gain and to use everything they can to reap their prosperity by duping us. We want to believe the best about what we choose to ally ourselves with.
But…as we now know from experience, there are people, corporations, and other entities out there that survive by taking from unsuspecting people like you and me. They laugh all the way to the bank and they never give us or what we lost a second thought.
They lie for a living, for greed, for the satisfaction of beating the system, for the false gratification of power, and simply because they can. But they need us, you and me, to continue to do it.
So…how do we keep ourselves safer from being duped? By knowing ourselves better. By being honest with ourselves. By acknowledging that, yes, we did mess up and by changing what we need to change in ourselves to keep from doing it again.
Before we can recover, we have to recognize that not only were we duped, we have our own faults and tender places that make us more easily deceived. And many times, we are deceived because we like to believe ourselves to always be right.
And there’s more to this story…Part 3 is coming soon. Look for it. But in the meantime, you can read Part 1 here.
