Why do some people get under your skin
This Might be Why That Person Gets Under Your Skin
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We just find certain people more irritating than others, don't we? But what if the people who get under your skin could tell you more about yourself than about them?
- Therapist Ajay Khandelwal invites you to try a thought experiment to discover something more about yourself
Do you want to find out more about yourself? Well, try this experiment. Are you sitting comfortably? Get yourself some paper and a pen.
Think of two or three people who really irritate you. When I say irritate you, I mean people who literally get under your skin. Even if you try and behave in a civilised manner with them, you cannot help but get hot under the collar. You have a genuine, uncontrolled, physical reaction to these individuals. Something in them really disturbs you. If you search your memories, try and find a few people like this.
They could be family members, celebrities, work colleagues, or even fictional characters. Ok, so write down their initials.
Now think about the specific “quality” or “attribute” about them that annoys you. What is it about them that infuriates you? Are they selfish, arrogant, stupid, lazy….? Write down whatever comes into your mind, and just jot it down. Don’t think about it too much at this stage. It might look like this:
J.B: Lazy
R.F: Selfish
Obviously, write down whatever works for you. The litmus test is that it has to get UNDER YOUR SKIN. You may be fairly dispassionate about a murderer, but you may feel agitated about your “selfish” neighbour who is having building works done. This does not have to be a rational process. In fact, the more irrational and uncontrollable the process, the more likely it is to be on the money.
Once you have done that I’d like you to put your pen down. Take a breath, get comfortable. Try and distance yourself from the agitation.
Breathe normally. Now what I am going to say here is a bit controversial, so don’t shoot the messenger. The qualities you have written down are actually qualities in you. “No way” you say; those qualities are the very opposite of me. I could not be more different to J.B. or R.F! You continue, “I’m a million miles away from them in terms of personality”. You plead, “I am NOT lazy. If anything I am noted to be an industrious person. I am not SELFISH, in fact I am known as a self-sacrificing person.”
So, you may have a point. Consciously, you may well be a hardworking and caring person. In fact as you grew up, people complimented you on those very qualities. You even became a social worker who worked hard for other people. You were the very opposite of selfish and lazy. True. But where did those qualities of laziness and selfishness go? We are humans not gods, so they don’t just disappear. They may have gone deep into the unconscious, or shadow. You have no connection with those parts of you.
Therefore you have to find someone outside you to hang those “distasteful” qualities on.
The psyche doesn’t just randomly assign qualities to others. It generally finds good candidates! So J.B. may well be the laziest person around, and R.F. maybe nauseatingly selfish. But they fact that you have a bodily, physical and psychological reaction to them suggests that there is more going on. They are stirring up something that lies dormant in you. There may be selfishness and laziness in you that you are completely unaware of, but is spotted by those around you. In fact they even get in to arguments with you about it when this side of you erupts, or ruins the day. The shadow aspects, which are being projected out onto others, may also provide clues about your unlived life. For instance, the imaginary social worker may need to get a bit more selfish, and leave work on time, and take care of themselves, otherwise they are heading for a heart attack.
I have to say, this is rather distasteful work.
You may feel that you have been tricked. This can’t possibly be true. You are not X and Y (the attributes you find so disturbing), but the other person is definitely X and Y! Of course, you do have a point, but why would you be getting so crazy about it, if it didn’t have something to do with you? There are lots of annoying people out there, but you can rub along with a good number of them without any psychological irritation. Yet some people stick out, and really get to you. That’s the sign that they are telling you as much about your own unconscious material and they are telling you about the world out there.
Still, if you are able to mine this information, it can be very rewarding. Subtle inner shifts, as you being to recognise those previously disowned qualities in yourself, can bring about new possibilities and different relationship dynamics. For instance, you might even begin to see the value in “X” and “Y”; perhaps laziness has its place in the scheme of things; after all doesn’t lazing about allow you to really be with yourself and others in special, unpressured ways? And being selfish, well isn’t that good sometimes? At least all the aggression and desire is upfront; you know where you stand with a selfish person!
Next time you press your car horn and fume about another person’s bad behaviour, take a pause to think about your own.
Yes, they really are a bad driver! But what is being stirred up inside you and what does that mean for you? You may want to get even with them, but maybe a more interesting route is to get curious about yourself.
Ajay Khandelwal is a verified welldoing.org therapist in Central London
Further reading
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The 2 Reasons Why Someone Will Get Under Your Skin | by Miriam Meima
You know that feeling when you’re interacting with someone that just gets to you? For me it’s a combo of an eye bugging out of frustration (which I can usually hide) and a gut tightening mixed with pulling away.
My clients are usually experiencing this with someone at work. The person that is annoying just because he/she is in the room.
Worse is when this person opens his/her mouth in a meeting or sends an email. In this moment, reading this post, it may seem ridiculous. I promise most of us have had this experience at some point.
Often a friend or client is bringing up this dynamic either with a hint of embarrassment and just asking “what can I do???” Sometimes it comes up with a desire to vent — the frustration has built so much it needs to be let out.
My response is usually: “You have a learning buddy!” Having been in this dynamic myself I know it’s not always fun to hear this response from a friend/coach/advisor, although it has always been true. By “learning buddy” I am referring to someone who is uniquely set-up to teach something. The good news is there isn’t anything that needs to be “processed” directly with a learning buddy in order to learn, all of the necessary self-development can happen on your end. Often simply seeing the person through a different lens shifts the dynamic, lessening the intense reactions that used to happen.
When it comes down to it, here are the two reasons that someone can get under our skin:
(1) This person reminds us of some part of ourselves we are ignoring or rejecting.
When I was 16 I worked at a data research facility (yes, I have always loved data). My parents were divorced and I rotated between their houses one week at a time. I remember one weekend that I was staying with my Dad I got a message from my mom (on the answering machine). After months of hard winter in Michigan she was hopping in the car and driving south. She wasn’t sure when she would be back because she wasn’t sure how far she would need to go to get warm. The strongest thought in my head was “why do I have to be the responsible one?!?!”. This is hilarious because she was paying the mortgage and keeping the fridge stocked and taking care of countless other responsibilities. I didn’t see that though. All I saw and felt was how wrong she was and how hard I was working (school, work, life…it all felt overwhelming).
I know now that what I wanted was to say was “me too! I’m coming with you!” It would take me another decade to learn that deep-down I was fun-loving and adventurous and spontaneous. I was working so hard at being responsible that I kept all of that buried deep inside.
(2) This person is exhibiting behavior we don’t allow ourselves to even consider.
Years ago I was a classic co-dependent, pitting the needs of almost everyone else above my own. This meant that when I was around self-assured people, I would feel frustrated, walked on and they would get under my skin. Eventually, rather than being mad at them or judging them for being the way they were, I realized that I needed to learn from them. These people I spent so much time and energy trying to avoid actually were the most helpful teachers, they modeled for me how to put myself first. I took it slow and gradual and my version of self-assured looked VERY different than theirs but I don’t know how I could have stretched into that new skill without having points of reference on the opposite end of the spectrum.
Ultimately, being with people that contradict our chosen modus operandi is threatening to our (sometimes tightly held) beliefs about ourselves and the world. In the face of this contradiction we can choose to buckle down on our way of being or we can open to seeing a reflection of how else it could be.
Do you have any learning buddies in your life right now?
Teenager got parasites under his skin after being buried on the beach
Parasitic worms settled under the skin of an American teenager who burrowed into the sand on the beach. Doctors warn that sand can contain eggs of dangerous parasites, so even walking on it without shoes is unsafe.
Seventeen-year-old American Michael Mulhollen Dumas was vacationing on a Florida beach. When he returned, there were several small red blisters on his feet, which his mother, Kelly, mistook for mosquito or tick bites. A few days later, however, blisters appeared on the back of the legs, and then on the buttocks.
The itchy rash forced the family to see a doctor.
It turned out that parasites had settled under the teenager's skin.
The doctor found that Michael had symptoms of a roundworm infection called hookworm. It belongs to the diseases characteristic of the poor strata of backward countries. The teen's story was featured in The Washington Post .
Ankylostomiasis is caused by parasitic roundworms of the genus Ancylostoma. A person is infected by larvae that enter the body through the skin from the environment or along with contaminated food or water. Adult hookworms settle mainly in the duodenum, stick to the mucous membrane, damage it and feed on blood. Among the symptoms: weakness, fatigue, anemia, impaired bowel function.
Worm larvae are found in the faeces of infected people and animals. You can get infected with them simply by walking on the ground or sand on which they fell.
Michael didn't just walk along the beach. He dug himself into the sand, up to his neck.
The doctor prescribed antibiotics and deworming drugs for the teenager. Days passed, but there was no noticeable improvement. Then the family turned to a dermatologist, who suggested cryotherapy - the treatment of affected skin with liquid nitrogen.
But during the treatment of the legs, Michael asked the doctor to stop. “I can feel them running away from liquid nitrogen,” he said.
There are two types of hookworms, animal and human. In fact, both of them can infect a person, but only the second one settles in the intestines. The first one is unable to adapt to the human body and its representatives usually stay where they are. They try to travel under the skin, resulting in an itchy rash. Unable to mate or even reach maturity, they die.
Michael was infected with animal hookworms. Itching and pain were caused by their migration under the skin.
Antiparasitic drugs are usually used in such cases. But even without them, the larvae usually die within a few weeks.
Michael also had to treat a staphylococcal infection brought in when he got infected. Left untreated, staph can lead to life-threatening conditions.
His mother posted on Facebook photos of the teenager's legs affected by worms and reported the cost of treatment - it cost almost $ 1,500.
“Never dig in the sand and don't let your kids do it! she wrote. “I'm just showing some pictures because it's very disturbing. Please, please pray for his healing. And you are free to share this post and warn other people. The Pompano Beach Department of Health told us, "Everyone knows you have to wear shoes on the beach to keep out parasites." I assured them that not all!”.
Michael is now getting the drugs he needs and is waiting for all the larvae to die. “I wouldn’t wish on anyone what my son went through,” Kelly says. “And I will never go to the beach without shoes.”
Not only worms can live under the skin, but also snails . It happened to an 11-year-old boy from Los Angeles.
The family went to the hospital with symptoms of an abscess on the boy's elbow - swelling and redness of the skin. However, the child did not complain of pain and itching.
After examination, the doctors decided to drain the abscess to get rid of the pus. But there was very little pus in it - the main space was occupied by what the doctors described as "a small, dark-colored foreign body."
The "foreign body" upon closer inspection turned out to be a 4 mm diameter cochlea.
It was probably Littorina, a gastropod that grows up to 25 mm in diameter.
The boy said that he slipped on rocks in one of the tidal pools on the ocean coast, about 11 km from the city of Long Beach, near the port of San Pedro. As he fell, he hit his elbow and tore off his skin. The parents treated the abrasion, but after some time the skin in this area turned red and swollen. Apparently, a clam egg got into the abrasion on the elbow. It successfully developed and a small mollusk hatched from it.
This whole process contributed to the appearance of an abscess.
The doctors allowed the boy, who was visibly agitated by such an incident, to keep the mollusk to show off to his friends. But he, unfortunately, died a day later.
Is it true that the bugs from the Mummy movie crawl under
Dimon
Author:
Dimon
June 27, 2020 21:35
Tags: interesting insects facts
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Our today's hero is familiar to many from the movie "The Mummy". This beetle was remembered by the audience for its terrible ability to get under the skin and devour a person from the inside. Previously, this bee was equated with a deity, but even now people tremble with horror at the sight of this creature.
Is this black lord of the sands so terrible? Let's figure it out! Refrain from eating, dear friends, because today our story will be about the great and terrible sacred scarabs.
From birth, the bukakha is dressed in armor from a matte black exoskeleton. But, despite the status of a god and external pathos, this creature can only do two things: dig and roll . The limbs of the insect are ideally designed for the above functions. Even the head of the beetle is spade-shaped with notches, so that you can go headlong into your favorite work - delve into poop and eat them.
Scarab wings are not needed for flight. With them, he extracts moisture from the fog. The beetle stands against the wind and spreads its wings, collecting particles of water with them.
The scarab lives throughout the Mediterranean, including the country of sands and pyramids. At a time when this land was called Great Egypt , people greatly appreciated our hero.
And they seemed to appreciate the substances very much. For to consider that, in addition to dung , a gothic kalovoz also brings happiness , one can only get stoned hard. Modern Egyptians do not appreciate the beetle at all. But scientists continue to call the scarab sacred.
Six-legged coprophiles hanging out on the placers of cattle manure. Due to the fact that the beetles constantly dig into someone else's feces, their exoskeleton is rubbed to a shine. Insects need kakahi for two things: to devour , and to rivet kids. Therefore, often for ready-made round beetles they arrange real battles.
Here you are laughing, and then there is drama at the level of Spielberg
So that rivals do not covet the fruit of other people's efforts, scarabs roll the coveted ball to hell and dig in with it.
Beetles leave their homes only when there is absolutely nothing to eat. Well, or when the so-called basic instinct kicks in.
Reproduction in beeches is difficult. First, male rolls balls to the female he likes, and in the most direct sense. If the tackle is successful, then the next stage of the relationship becomes search for elite varieties of manure (all the best for children).
The pinnacle of bug romance comes when lovers jointly rivet a ball of manure for future kids. I can imagine what Love is gum inscriptions would look like if scarabs had them.
Only after caring parents have provided the children with living space, the couple starts the long-awaited intercourse. After coition, the male dumps immediately. Mommy follows him, but only after she has chopped eggs into that same dung ball.
So, where is the info about that terrible horror that everyone saw in the movie "The Mummy"? Well, we hasten to assure you that the episode with scarabs has nothing to do with reality.
