no common ground
I haven’t been taking my own advice . When dealing with situations that feel harmful, I always say, rather than trying to change the other or others involved, get out of the way yourself. This is the quickest way to put an end to a bad situation, since the other guy may not see it as you do, or he might ignore your entreaties to stop doing whatever it is you don’t like. (He has the right to.) Since the only person you can change is yourself, I always say: Leave. I still think this is good advice. But I haven’t been applying it. That’s because I’ve failed to consider that we sometimes cannot see when a situation is harmful. Even if we’ve been unhappy, or complaining, trying to resolve conflict or trying to get others to resolve it, we may have never really seen the situation as harmful. There are times when we perceive a situation as intrinsically inescapable. This could be a result of learned helplessness , codependency, enmeshment, ...