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Stop Tolerating Intolerable Behavior

By Jodi Cohen

People will treat you the way you allow yourself to be treated.

This lesson—and the fact that I have complete agency to determine how I allow myself to be treated—is sadly new to me and long overdue.

If you—like me—were raised in an environment where you do not believe that you matter or that your needs matter, it can be even more challenging to articulate them.

I was reflecting on how this played out in my life and recalled that after college, I moved to Washington, D.C., to work for Senator Ted Kennedy in the Senate Health & Human Resources (HHS) Committee. My roommate’s job was starting a week after mine, so a cousin on my mom’s side of the family offered to let me crash on his couch.

When I arrived, he insisted that I sleep in his bed while he took the couch, which seemed chivalrous until I woke up in the middle of the night to find him fondling me while I slept. I didn’t know what to do, so I locked myself in the bathroom and attempted to sleep in the bathtub. These were the days before cell phones, so I waited until morning, grabbed my suitcase to dress in the bathroom, and then snuck out of the apartment as quietly as I could manage.

I had just started my new job and didn’t know anyone in town, so I called my mom (from a pay phone with my AT&T calling card) and asked for help.

She told me to “make nice” and not to say anything.

I was so traumatized (and frankly terrified) that I ignored her advice and spent my lunch hour calling everyone I knew within a 3-hour radius of D.C. Thankfully, a friend from my semester abroad who lived in Richmond, VA offered to drive to town that evening and introduce me to a few of her friends who allowed me to crash on their couch instead and escape my cousin/sexual predator.

I share this story because it is a clear example of how I was groomed to tolerate (and even enable) intolerable behavior. Behavior that I continued to tolerate through most of my adult life.

I was so trained to find ways to tolerate intolerable behavior that I even wrote a blog about dealing with difficult people with the assumption being that my needs didn’t matter and the best I could do was find a way to regulate my response to difficult people—not respect myself and communicate my own needs. I’m embarrassed to admit that it never occurred to me that I didn’t need to tolerate intolerable behavior—until today.

My brother-in-law likes to say that “no good deed goes unpunished.” I also seemed to accept this motto without question.

That all changed today when a friend who asked me to promote her product to my community failed to get me marketing materials in time. As I was investing way too much time emailing, texting, following up, and inconveniencing my team to try to secure assets so I could do her a favor, it occurred to me that I should not put up with this kind of unprofessional behavior. I could create and communicate clear expectations to partners about deadlines instead of bumping deadlines to accommodate late deliverables and unprofessional conduct.

It then occurred to me that I could create a list of basic expectations for all the relationships in my life—a clear rubric of what I will and will not tolerate.

I think I am old enough not to need to “make nice” and enable bad behavior. I also realize that my pattern of tolerating bad behavior and then blowing up when too many lines have been crossed is not necessarily a character flaw on my part but rather a failure to recognize that this anger was there to fuel my transformation.

READ THIS NEXT: Fueling Transformation Through Anger

“How you allow yourself to be treated” refers to the level of respect, consideration, and kindness you expect and accept from others. You are essentially setting boundaries and deciding what behaviors you will tolerate in your interactions with others.

While you cannot control how others behave, you can control whether you tolerate their unhealthy behaviors. This means you need to first clearly define what you consider to be acceptable and unacceptable behavior—a lens through which you will run all future interactions.

I did something similar before I met my fiancé, clearly defining four lists: must-haves, deal–breakers, what I would like but can live without, and what I would prefer not to have but can live with. This list gave me a clear rubric as I started dating to help me focus on the relationships that would best align with what I was looking for.

I decided to narrow my friend and colleague qualifications down to two lists: acceptable behavior and unacceptable behavior.

Acceptable Behavior:

  • Kindness, Compassion, Empathy and Respect
  • Reliable, Responsible, Dependable, Accountable and Honor Commitments
  • Good communicators who are capable of listening respectfully, ensuring mutual understanding (so you feel heard, valued, and respected), and offering honest and constructive feedback (including things that may be true but hard to hear)
  • Trustworthy and Loyal
  • Good sense of Humor
  • Helpful, Supportive, and want the best for me (Cheerleader)
  • Nurturing and generous
  • Honest and having integrity
  • Non-judgmental
  • Collaborative
  • Intelligent, Curious, and Open minded (adaptable)
  • Positive, Fun, and Creative
  • Passionate and Motivated
  • Brave, Courageous, willing to grow and do hard things (grit and perseverance)
  • Healthy and choose to invest in their health
  • Emotional Flexibility (capable of being adaptable or accommodating)
  • Organized and Disciplined
  • Thoughtful and Respectful

Unacceptable Behavior:

  • Unkind, Disrespectful, or Rude
  • Violent, Aggressive, Hostile, Argumentative, or Attacking (including verbal or written violence or threats)
  • Bullying, Diminishing, Belittling, or Insulting
  • Manipulative or Self Serving (at your expense)
  • Dishonest
  • Irresponsible
  • Inflexible, Needing to be right, or Insisting on having things their way
  • Jealous, Resentful, or Undermining
  • Judgmental, Critical, Mean, or Engaging in Gossip
  • Overtly hostile, intense, inconsiderate, or outspoken (so you can’t get a word in and don’t feel heard)
  • Makes you or others feel uncomfortable 
  • Difficulty regulating emotions
  • Exhibiting toxic traits, like gossiping, catastrophizing, excluding, or triangulating
  • Second-guessing or challenging everything you or others say or do
  • Lacking concern or empathy for others 
  • Lack of Accountability
  • Negative Attitude or Constantly Complaining
  • Interrupting, monopolizing conversation, or not listening
  • Ignores your opinion, Berates you (name-calling and insults), or treats you like you are incompetent and unintelligent
  • Defensive or combative when held accountable for inappropriate behavior
  • Ignoring your needs or concerns, expecting you to drop or change plans and accommodate them

I encourage you to make your own list of behaviors that you seek out and those that you no longer tolerate so that you can both recognize the behavior patterns and choose to change them—either maintaining the relationship but demanding different treatment or choosing to prune it.

To change patterns, including patterns of how you perceive behavior and what you choose to tolerate, you need to shift entrenched maladaptive patterns in the limbic system of your brain, which, in essence, resets your limbic thermostat.

Research on the “Central role of the brain in stress and adaptation” highlights how your “limbic brain plays an integrated role in cognitive, emotional, and visceral control processes” that are important for how you respond to stress (including strategies for responding to the stressful behavior of other people).

Your limbic brain supports social and emotional information processing and triggers cognitive and emotional responses often based on past behavioral patterns—even if they are maladaptive patterns you continue to default to.

To change this default, you need to reset your limbic thermostat, and the easiest and most effective way to do this is to inhale essential oils.

Your sense of smell links directly to the emotional control center of your brain, the amygdala, where emotional memories are entrenched, and maladaptive response patterns are stored. Unlike your other four senses—sight, touch, taste, and hearing—the smell is the only one that is directly linked to this unconscious area of your brain, known as your limbic lobe.

Your sense of smell and the tool of essential oils are the most direct paths to resetting your limbic thermostat and upgrading entrenched maladaptive patterns.

Essential oils inhaled through the nasal passageways enable immediate access to the regions of the brain that house entrenched maladaptive patterns. This allows us to change patterns and update our limbic thermostat to help create a container for healthy relationships and supportive behavior.

This allows you to rewire these adapted responses, actively prioritize your well-being, and not repeat old, entrenched patterns of allowing for actions or attitudes of others that feel disrespectful or unsupportive.


Limbic Reset™

Your limbic system is your “threat-detection & response” mechanism wired to respond to sensory information— especially the sense of smell—to help keep you safe.

As your sense of smell is critical to your sense of safety and your olfactory bulb is physically located near your limbic system, essential oils can be a powerful tool to help restore the proper function of your limbic system.

Your sense of smell has direct anatomical and functional access to the amygdala in the brain’s limbic lobe, which is physically located near the olfactory bulb.

In particular, the chemical constituent Sesquiterpenes—found in high levels in essential oils such as Frankincense and Sandalwood—are thought to help increase the oxygen in the limbic system.

Limbic Reset™ blend contains a proprietary formulation of essential oils designed to calm threat arousal and send safety queues to help reset your limbic system and support healthy emotional regulation. Limbic Reset™ was formulated explicitly with Helichrysum sandalwood and Melissa oils, which are touted for brain function and are known to cross the blood-brain barrier to carry oxygen to the limbic system and reset your limbic thermostat.

As you inhale or topically apply on the temples, consider the following strategy to help you stop tolerating intolerable behavior:

  • Clearly Define Expectations: Define what behaviors you will and will not tolerate in your interactions with others. You can use my list as a starting point or share what else you might add.
  • Communicate your needs: Clearly express your expectations and how you want to be treated. 
  • Identify Red Flags and Walking Away from Toxic Situations: If someone displays disrespectful behavior, calmly and directly address the issue or remove yourself from any environment where you are not treated with respect.
  • Self-nurture: Treating yourself with kindness and valuing your own needs, which in turn influences how you allow others to treat you. 

READ THIS NEXT: Reset Your Limbic System

Jodi Cohen

Jodi Sternoff Cohen is the founder of Vibrant Blue Oils. An author, speaker, nutritional therapist, and a leading international authority on essential oils, Jodi has helped over 50,000 individuals support their health with essential oils.