What's usually your first reaction?

It would depend on the person talking about me. If it was a close family member or friend, I would confront them about it and ask them what’s going on. I wouldn’t do it out of anger, more so out of hurt. If it was just about anyone else, I’d ignore it.

Like @Seaofclouds it would depend on who it was. I used to be convinced I deserved it, finally I grew up enough to understand that comments say more about the commenter rather than the commentee. Still not good at confronting, though. I’m such a worm… ;-)

Forgive? Who cares its just an easy way to get drama out of your life. Buying into their BS is a control mechanism and you become the little toy that you wind up and watch go. By not participating in the game you actually don’t suffer from other peoples shortcomings.

Show them that their words have no effect if you want to control your life.

if I found out someone was talking about me it would probably be from a third party, and so i would not want to tell the person that I heard they were talking about me, because I wouldn’t want to cause animosity between the person that told me and the person that was talking about me (plus i would eliminate the person that told me ever telling me anything again). so I would be mad but not confront the person.

You’re a bad person.

But I would never say that behind your back.

LOL

I will forget as bullshit is hardly worth the effort of getting upset over. Forgiving is for someone who mistakenly grabbed the wrong beer and offered to buy you a new one.

I really don’t give a shit about what anyone says about me behind my back. I mean, really! Life’s too short for that crap. Similarly, I will discuss someone when they aren’t present, but I try not to say anything that I wouldn’t tell them to their faces.

As far as I can tell, people who actually care about these things don’t have anything better to do. Then again, they say women are much more concerned with building social relationships, so these kinds of things may be of more interest to them, in general (but not for all women). Men tend not to understand these things (not being as good as women at building relationships), so perhaps that’s why we tend not to notice when these things happen, nor pay attention to it if we do notice.

First reaction? Utter apathy. It’s of no consequence to me, if that’s what floats their boat then fine go right ahead. Me, i’ve far better things to occupy my mind than that irrelevant nonsense.

I agree that it depends on who it was..

But honestly, more often than not, when I hear about someone saying something bad behind my back I just get anxious/depressed. Anger should be my first reaction, sure, but I’ve never been great with anger.. so I fall bad on just feeling sort of crappy.

I would be hurt that someone is talking about me, maybe they are jealous, who knows?

Ahhhh Drama

It depends on who was doing the talking and what were they saying. I have reason to believe that there are certain people that do talk about me behind my back but as I don’t care what they think it really doesn’t bother me. However, if it was someone that I cared about I would probably be very hurt. Like @JilltheTooth, I’m not good at confrontation though.

Like you said, everyone talks about other people. My motto is, I don’t care what you say about me as long as I don’t find the bad stuff!