It can be difficult to imagine that someone wouldn’t root for you and your success....READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE ▶▶
Keeping a grudge is one thing, but actively rooting against someone to make their dreams come true is something else.
And yet there are some people out there who gain the most satisfaction from seeing other people fail, schadenfreude being their main source of joy.
Unfortunately, it’s not always immediately obvious who is a true friend and who is secretly rooting against you and even plotting against your plans.
How can you tell when someone is being genuine, and when they’re just trying to stop you from achieving your goals?
Here are 8 signs that someone secretly doesn’t want you to succeed:
1) They’re Obviously Jealous
Jealousy is quite a different emotion, isn’t it?
Because even when someone does their best to hide the fact that they’re jealous of you, you can almost always sense it on them.
It might be the gaze that lingers a little too long or the slight tone in their voice; whatever it is, you just know when someone’s jealous of you.
But as a good person, you never want to assume it, of course. You might tell yourself that they’re jealous of you for other reasons.
Regardless, when a person is jealous of you, they not only covet what you have, but they also don’t want you to have it in the first place.
They have the mindset of, “Why does he deserve it if I don’t?” which then turns into, “If I can’t have it, no one can.”
This fuels their root issue with you: they don’t want you to succeed, because they haven’t, and their intense jealousy can’t take it.
2) They Undermine Your Accomplishments
When you accomplish something praiseworthy, one of the first things you want to do is share it with the people you love most.
Your friends, your family, the people who’ve been with you on your journey.
But when you share your progress, your achievements, the things you’re proud of to the people you love, there’s one person who butts in before you can finish just to undermine or diminish whatever you’re sharing.
Why do they do it?
Because they can’t stand that you even have anything praiseworthy to talk about in the first place.
They hate that you’re getting somewhere in life and making something of yourself, and they feel that they should be the center of attention.
The last thing they want to see is even more success in your life, so they make your current successes sound minimal and exaggerated every chance they get.
3) They Offer False Promises
People who want the best for you will always do whatever they can to help you out.
When someone wants you to succeed, they know that their help may not be exactly what you need, but they try to give it anyway, because they know it’s also a form of moral support.
It’s not just about the help itself; it’s about the fact that they were there for you when you needed them, and that’s what they want to show you.
But when someone doesn’t want to succeed, they’ll do something a lot worse than refusing to help you.
Instead of directly refusing, they’ll pretend that they’ll try to help you, only to end up disappointing you at the end of the day.
If you ask them if they can help you meet someone important, they might promise to reach out to their network and arrange a meeting, and they’ll continue to promise that every time you ask.
Because it’s not just about withholding their help from you; they also want to waste your time and push you down, making you feel like your attempts to move forward in life are hopeless.
4) They Talk Behind Your Back
Is there anything worse than finding out that someone talks behind your back?
It’s a terrible feeling; knowing that someone dislikes you so much that they gossip negatively about you to your mutual friends.
Not only do you end up feeling insecure around them, you also end up feeling insecure around everyone you both know, because now you don’t know what anyone feels about you.
Talking behind a person’s back is one of the easiest ways to discourage an individual from doing whatever it is they’re doing.
It makes us feel judged as if we’re doing something so bad that no one around us accepts, and it makes us feel alone and isolated from the people we thought were our friends
5) They Kick You When You’re Down
When the person who ends up not wanting you to succeed is the person closest to you who constantly tells you that they “want what’s best for you”, it can be difficult to see whether they’re actually giving genuine help and advice, or just trying to make you feel as bad as possible.
So when you find yourself struggling with your goals, this person will pop up to make sure you really feel that struggle.
They’ll try to come off as playful, telling you how you should just quit before you waste more time struggling, failing to achieve anything.
Instead of trying to lift you back up, they’ll ask you if you’re embarrassed and if you’re ready to throw in the towel.
They put the thoughts in your mind because they know that even if they don’t drill those thoughts in, you’ll inevitably end up doing it yourself.
6) They Emphasize Your Weaknesses (enable your doubts medium)
You might not always understand why a person doesn’t want you to succeed.
If you’re generally a good person, you won’t be able to relate to the mindset of hating someone’s potential success so much that you’ll do whatever it takes to stop someone from getting it.
But one way to easily tell if someone doesn’t want you to succeed?
They enable your doubts every chance you get, reminding you of everything you might be insecure about.
For example, let’s say you spend all your time working on your own business.
Your partner may say that they support you, but in the back of their mind, they just wish that you would get a regular job so you could have regular work hours.
So whenever you start to have doubts about whether this business will ever work, they say whatever they can to enable and worsen your doubts.
They may remind you that you never spend any time with the kids, or that you’re losing your hair and gaining weight from all the stress, or that they need a partner who is home more often.
Instead of supporting you and telling you to keep pushing, they emphasize all the downsides of your dedication, making sure you know that all those issues are in the spotlight.
7) They Make Your Goals Seem Impossible
No matter what your goal may be, you will struggle along the way.
And when you’re at your lowest moments, this person may start being incredibly apparent in your life.
They suddenly can’t stop messaging you, trying to talk to you, trying to give you advice.
They’ll talk about how maybe your dreams were too big to begin with, or maybe that you’re wasting the prime years of your life on something that might not happen.
Every time you talk with them, you can’t help but shake off the feeling that your goals seem farther than ever before, more difficult to achieve than ever before.
You really start to doubt whether you have it in you to do any of this at all, or if you should just cut your losses now and start working towards a more “normal” life before it’s too late.
8) They Explode On You (Rarely)
It’s not the most common sign, because most people can keep explosions of anger locked up inside themselves for as long as possible.
But if you’re suspecting that a person doesn’t actually want what’s best for you, the best way to see it is by asking yourself: have they ever exploded on you?
When a person doesn’t want you to succeed, they have an intense, insane level of frustration built up towards you, but they know it’s a frustration they can never act out on without risking revealing their true feelings.
And yet every now and then, you’ve experienced angry explosions from this person: out of nowhere, they couldn’t control their annoyance towards you anymore and they lashed out at you in ways you never knew they could.
Of course, they apologized shortly after, but the personality change was so sudden and immediate that it always left a strange taste in your mouth, as if you saw a side of them you didn’t know existed.
The hard truth is this is the side of them they’ve always had when it comes to you; it’s just that they’ve never let you see it, except in some flashes and glimpses of passive-aggressive acts here and there.
