Attention-Seeking Behavior

Attention-Seeking Behavior

To those of you who like to label some others as “Attention-Seeking” or “Self-absorbed” for talking about their problems a lot, I understand where you are coming from. It is inconvenient for a person to listen to the issues of another person, of course it is. We all have our own lives to live and it would be much easier to just label and stigmatize a person who is so desperately trying to get your attention. However, no one should use terms like “Attention-Seeking” or “Self-Absorbed” as ways to antagonize another person, because we shouldn’t attack people with attention seeking behaviors at all.

We often have busy lives and we rarely stop to truly understand what is going on inside another person’s head. A lot of the time some of us make assumptions about what another person’s motives are, and then we take that assumption about another person and judge it very harshly- as if it were a confirmed truth. For example, a girl speaks about her struggles with anxiety and depression to her friends, and another girl sees this and assumes that the first girl is trying to get pity and extra care from her friends. In reality, the first girl is lost about what to do in response to such struggles, and is really just trying to find support from her friends, and does so because she feels that it is necessary to maintain motivation in seeking professional help.

Of course there are people in this world who are going to want to be the center of attention and will actively try to accomplish that. But, looking at this scenario, and knowing the reality of it from the first girl’s perspective, we should know that ,in this situation, she is having a hard time in life and is merely fumbling for a way out of it, and we should at least understand this this instead of labeling her as a way of harsh criticism.

We should also keep in mind that it’s already hard enough for this girl, and she can do much more to improve herself without being branded as an attention-seeker. I can say this from experience. To my knowledge I’ve been tagged as an attention seeker by at least three people in the past one year of my life and it has done severe damage to my self esteem, and any ability to help myself. Speaking out about a three year struggle with mental illness and a toxic relationship has led some to feel like it’s okay to say that I am constantly seeking attention. Truth is, I was never looking for sympathy, I was looking for hope. When I would tell someone about my issues, I was really just trying to find someone who believed in me in overcoming them, and I did that because I couldn’t believe in myself. I know it’s no one’s responsibility to give me encouragement or support, but my attention seeking behavior should not warrant the kind of labels used to attack people like me. People who exhibit attention seeking behaviors, in cases like mine, are crying for help and not validation like many people want to assume. When I hear that a person calls me an “attention-seeking wh*re” I begin to feel more sad than I already had before. I feel as if I have  no ability to improve myself, and I feel like a horrible person who should not desire the care and support of my friends and family. It’s very discouraging to hear such a demonizing label being spewn at what little self esteem I have left, and ironically, it makes it even harder for me to not want to compulsively ask my close friends if I really am self-absorbed and attention seeking- So it’s sometimes ultimately more harmful to call someone “attention-seeking” than it is helpful.

With that being said, we all know it’s not okay to have attention-seeking behavior, because it is unhealthy for anyone involved, but we shouldn’t criticise attention-seekers as if they’re lower-quality people. Instead we should have a much more gentle approach when it comes to confronting attention-seekers, because if we label them in a way that is meant to put them down and shame them, we might possibly be hurting a person who is already in so much pain, and we might be doing so to the point where their behavior worsens. So next time you want to use name-calling to attack an attention-seeker, please remember that they, just like everyone else from time to time, might just need someone’s help - And that’s not a crime at all.