No more monkeys!

Someone once gave me the most amazing advice about dealing with people who always come to you with their problems.

‘Everybody who comes to you with a problem – think of that problem as a monkey. Talk to the person about their problems and help them to find solutions to it. Make sure that when they leave, they take that monkey with them. Because if you don’t you will soon end up with a home or office so full of monkeys you can’t move. Those other people, however, will be blissfully monkey-free’

Prior to that I had always taken problems from the people who brought them to me. Those people left me feeling unburdened, and I felt stressed and frustrated.

This is very similar to ‘not my circus, not my monkeys*,’ which sometimes pops into my mind when people try to involve me in drama.

I am a good listener, so people often come to me to vent, in confidence. I wonder what they think I do with all their venting? Honestly, I can take it once or twice but sometimes people vent about the same thing over and over again. And then I get stressed, frustrated, irritable, and annoyed. It feels like they keep hitting themselves in the head with a hammer and then constantly complaining to me that they have a headache. How many times can you tell someone to put the hammer down?

As an aside, why are there so many monkeys in idioms? Or maybe this has largely fallen out of use due to potential racist connotations. I heard it a lot because we had loads of monkeys in the trees in our neighbourhood and they really got up to mischief. As cute as they were, sometimes they would break into your kitchen and throw food all over the place.

• monkey on your back
• monkey business
• monkey’s uncle
• brass monkey
• as fun as a barrel of monkeys
• monkey see monkey do.