Safeguard Your Circle: How Negative Influences Shape Our Destiny

Stay away from infectious characters or suffer the consequences. In biology, an infection is defined as the invasion of an organism’s body tissues by disease-causing agents. Similarly, some human beings function like an infection, invading your life like a disease-causing agent, and before you know it, you’re on the path to self-destruction.

Have you ever met people with good intentions who wanted to help transform others with negative attitudes, only to end up adopting those same negative attitudes they set out to change? You can suffer and die from someone else’s misery. Emotional states are as infectious as diseases. You may feel like you’re helping a drowning person, but you’re only precipitating your own disaster.

The law of impartation by association states that;

we tend to become like the people we associate with.

There are those who have been brought down by circumstances beyond their control and deserve our help and sympathy. However, others draw misfortune upon themselves through their destructive activities and unsettling effect on others. If you try to help them, they’ll drag you into the mud too.

It would be great if we could raise them up and change their patterns, but more often than not, their patterns end up changing us. Humans are extremely susceptible to the mood, emotions, and ways of thinking of those they spend time with. That’s why scriptural texts like 1 Corinthians 15:33 and Proverbs 22:24-25 admonish us to beware of our associations.

Studies have shown that we unconsciously mimic almost all aspects of other people’s behavior, especially when we spend a lot of time around them. The unstable have a particularly strong infecting power because their characters and emotions are so intense. They often present themselves as victims, making it difficult to see their miseries as self-inflicted, and before you realize the real nature of their problems, you’ve been infected too.

My point is this: in life, the people you associate with are critical to your progress. The risk of associating with infectious individuals is that you’ll waste valuable time, energy, and daylight trying to help them. Never underestimate the dangers of infection. Don’t take pity and entangle yourself trying to help. The infector will remain unchanged, but you will be changed. Never associate with those who share your defects; they’ll reinforce everything that holds you back. Make this a rule of life, and you’ll benefit more than all the therapy in the world.

Watch the company you keep, because you become the company you keep.