Essentials for Accepting Your Enemies

When reading the article's title, you might ask yourself, “Why should I accept my enemies? They're the last people I'd want to accept, as they're just trying to cause me harm.” I completely understand those feelings. I've felt the same way for many years. It's clear that thinking about accepting the people who are causing us grief is nerve-wracking, and can be very hard to do.

Note: This article is based on blogger Daniel Miller, offering us 5 basics for accepting our enemies.

However, I now realize that I've suffered because I refused to accept people I have unnecessarily hated or despised, in terms of personal suffering and unproductive responses to their nasty actions.

Advantages of accepting adversaries and enemies:

Adversaries and enemies come in many forms, including unscrupulous business competitors, bossy seniors, unfriendly coworkers , court opponents, athletic competitors, bullies and control freaks.

But over time, I understood the benefits of accepting these people for who they are, and along the way, I learned some important tools and strategies to accept them, which I'm going to share with you now.

One of the advantages is that accepting your enemies helps you avoid or at least reduce the harmful and sometimes costly confrontations and payback and the stress and aggravation that accompany them. However, the most important advantage - or gift, as I like to call it - to accept your enemies as they are is that you will make the decisions that are right for you.

Allow me to illustrate this with a true story of my life. Several years ago, I had a tenant whose business grew quickly and expanded from the warehouse space at one of my properties. This caused serious problems because his delivery trucks were continuously emptying a huge stock in the parking areas of the property, and this hindered the access of neighboring tenants to their warehouses and parking lots.

These works were in clear violation of the tenant's lease terms; therefore, the tenant in the adjacent unit complained that he was suffering because of it and showed photographs documenting the obstructions.

We talked to the tenant who caused the problem and showed him the pictures. He denied that the unloading of the stock had hindered his neighbor. He committed for a few days, but then he returned to the unloading where he wasn't supposed to.

The tenant next door moved out of his apartment a month later, at which point I felt I had two options, either to sue for financial damages for breach of the lease agreement and loss of the other tenant, as well as to request an injunction against other lease violations, or to pay huge amounts to the parking monitors in order to help reduce the violations.

Because of my anger at the tenant's violations, my first reaction was to file a lawsuit, and when I took the weekend to reflect on the situation, I started thinking of another option, and I realized that the key facts were:

1. The tenant did this because he had no choice given his rapid business growth , not because he was intentionally trying to hurt me. I accepted that, and it reduced my anger.
2. It may take money, time, and a lot of complications to pursue legal proceedings, and while we are likely to win the case, we may not be able to recover the damages.

So, I concluded that I needed to accept the tenant, and accept the situation as it was. The tenant was acting to preserve the business, and I had little chance to stop it.

Therefore, I chose a third option, which is to do nothing and see how things would go. I was also informed that the tenant's rent would increase significantly if he stayed after the end of his lease. Then two months later, that tenant moved. The silver lining of the story was that I rented the same property to a new tenant at a rate 20% higher, which increased our operating profits and property value.

5 Essentials for Accepting Your Enemies:

Accepting our enemies and adversaries as they are is not easy. It begins with understanding what acceptance doesn't mean:

1. Understanding Acceptance:

Accepting doesn't mean justifying or condoning what someone has done or is doing, nor means denying our values and principles or being unable to take care of ourselves. It means accepting the basic truth of the situation or the person without judgment or negative feelings, such as fear, anger, and resentment.

By accepting our enemies in a balanced way, we'll be able to identify the options and opportunities that work best for us. Our focus moves from others to what we can do to best serve our needs.

2. Don't act or react impulsively:

Slow down and take the time to assess the risks in your complaint against someone and their importance. When doing so, consider whether you can change the person or change what they do. Remember that even if you feel that you can have some influence on your enemy, consider whether success is worth the cost, energy, and suffering.

You can ask yourself a few questions, like “Is it better if I leave this be for now?” or “Am I exaggerating?”

3. Address your concerns:

Our fears of what our enemy can or will do to hurt us cause us to show reactions rather than to address and discover what we can do to protect or care for ourselves. When fear dominates our thoughts and actions, there's little hope to accept our enemy in a way that allows us to make the choices that best benefit us, whether it's at work, social affairs, or anywhere else. Most of our fears are illusory and fade away as soon as they are examined closely.

4. Handle your anger:

Anger and resentment when someone hurts us is normal, but the important thing is to address these feelings in a timely manner and not let them linger. Continuing to feel anger and resentment hurts us.

As the late American actress Carrie Fisher said, “Resentment is like drinking poison, then waiting for the other person to die.”

Anger hides things that are actually threatened and what we can do to fix it, regardless of what happened to us or what someone else did to us. We still have a choice in this, either we can stay involved in our anger and resentment or try to find ways to suppress it before it affects us too much.

It doesn't have to be seen as right or wrong. Even if we're right, there's no point if we keep drowning in these negative feelings. Revenge is also an option, but at best, it makes us feel better only for a while (if it does), and it probably increases our torment.

5. Think about your role:

You should always think of whether you have a role in the annoying behavior of others. For example, were you arrogant or rude or ignored them? Did you misunderstand what they said or did? It takes courage and self-honesty to admit that you may be partially wrong.

You should always check if you're responsible in some way. Sometimes, we can't see our role in what happened because the enemy's "sting" makes it difficult, and with a few exceptions, I've learned that no matter how innocent I am or whether I'm right about something that bothered me, I've been responsible in some way for it.

Highlights:

When dealing with an enemy or annoying person, I'll ask that you try to accept them as they are, don't overreact or retaliate, slow down to address your anger and fear, avoid taking the situation personally, and do not assume that there's an intention to harm you, but consider whether you have any role in what happened.

In doing these things, note that you feel calmer, more realistic, less upset, more focused on your needs, and more able to make better decisions.