Last day I was looking for the meaning of a word and stumbled upon this - the ricochet effect. What is it? If you are a person who happens to have a caring nature and believe in being nice to others, you surely have experienced this. Ricochet effect is defined as the willingness to show up and help others but ending up in negative circumstances ourselves. Sounds cool right? But this experience is a nightmare for those who experience it. Never knew this is what it is called.
At least once in your lifetime, you will experience the ricochet effect if you believe in doing good and making things better for people. The experience is pretty much the same, yet the intensity changes; you end up getting hurt and realize people don't deserve you. The loss of belief in oneself coupled with constant guilt trips, and self-blaming takes you over. You may wonder what on earth have you done to suffer all this? You might even curse yourself for being good to people and decide that you are never going to be nice to anyone. Sometimes it takes months or years for your mind to get healed from the bruises and injuries. And ultimately what is left of you are terrible trust issues and the constant fear of being backstabbed.
Why does this happen? One of the obvious reasons is, most of the people you care about don't really care about the way you do and they just take advantage of your goodness. The truth may hurt a bit, but what to do? Has it not ever happened to you that people you trusted above everything, denounced you, betrayed you, and you felt like your whole world falling apart? All of a sudden everything you did for them, without expecting anything in return, doesn't count at all! Trust me, it is one of the worst feelings one can experience while alive.
Sometimes some people come into our life unexpectedly. Maybe they enter our life at a point when they are longing to be taken care of or when they are broken. And naturally, the goodness in you makes you reach out to them, love them, and they gradually heal. But then they disappear or ditch you to move towards what's more comforting. The first time this happens, it literally hurts like hell. Because all you ever did was to try and help them, you didn't even want it to be reciprocated, and that's when it hurts the most. You feel betrayed and it will leave you with a pretty big scar, which when similar incidents happen acts as a benchmark; whether the last time you screwed up was similar to this or did it aggravate? Any way you end up as a mess.
But the question is how do we not let this happen and spare ourselves from this pain? I know this is going to be too long for a single blog post. So I'm saving the rest of my reflections as the next post. See you soon.
