Teaching Pigs to Sing

There is an old Southern saying: Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and it annoys the pig.

This is a saying I have used many times when talking with my clients who are dealing with toxic, controlling, difficult people, especially when they are in there trying, for the seventy-leventh time, to get the person to wake up and change. (I’ve also heard the corollary: Don’t get down in the mud and wrestle with a pig. You’ll get dirty and the pig enjoys it.)

Here are just a few of my own failed attempts to teach one particular pig to sing:

~ Sitting down with the narcissist (one more time) to explain calmly and carefully how I felt when he was rude to me during an evening out with friends. Asking with sincerity what it was really about and requesting he behave differently in the future. The result? Anger and defensiveness.

~ Asking the narcissist for crumbs of attention. For example, requesting (again, calmly and carefully–I knew he was quick to explode) that we spend even a couple evenings a week doing something together after dinner. The result? Either empty promises or excuses as to why he was “too tired.”

~ Sharing that “words of affirmation” are my “love language” and letting him know this was important to me in relationships (and that I would of course, pay attention to his love language as well). The result? Crickets, for the most part.

~ Letting him know how I felt about his excessive spending when he owed me money. The result? I was told I was overreacting and controlling.

And yet, I kept trying. Kept explaining. Kept finding the remnants of my patience to have a careful, respectful, calm conversation at an “appropriate” time. In the process, I learned not to bring things up in the moment because he felt “ambushed.” I learned to spend 90% of the time listening to how he felt before bringing up anything I was unhappy about. And (eventually) I learned that even when we seemingly got somewhere and it felt like he understood, it never lasted.

An when I finally realized that I was trying to teach a pig to sing, I left.

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This post was previously published on But Now I Know Your Name and is republished on Medium.

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