Kate Swoboda's Blog

How do you reset your life after a big transition, while honoring the places you’ve been and paths you’ve walked? As I celebrate the 100th episode of the Your Courageous Life podcast, I’m offering a metaphor for how we can think of this time of pre- and post-pandemic transition, and sharing the three essential pieces that you need when you reset your life to pave the way for a new beginning.

The post Reset your life appeared first on Your Courageous Life.

*First, let’s put on our critical thinking hats: Of course I am not minimizing clinical depression by saying that these are a few tips n’ tricks for someone struggling with a biochemical issue. While it’s always possible that these ideas might help, someone who is experiencing clinical depression or anxiety is encouraged to seek help from a licensed professional.

Recently, I was having a series of bad days. I was waking up kind of meh, and I was easily annoyed, and I was feeling sad-but-not-sad, meaning that I felt kind of sad, yet I didn’t feel like I needed to cry. I also didn’t feel any desire to create—that’s always a big red flag that something’s up for me. That’s a kind of weird in-between space.

So I thought I’d share what I do to turn around a bad day, because there are some specific things that I do with an intention of turning that around.

First: one of my big go-tos to turn around a bad day is exercise. I can already hear the groan from some of you, ugh, exercise, nooooo. And so I wanted to say that when I am trying to turn around a bad day, I actually don’t feel motivated to exercise the way I do on a day that’s running smoothly. I feel resistant, I don’t wannnnna, I don’t feel like it, all of that, just like any other human being. But I make myself do it, because I find that 20 minutes or so of just getting into a workout often creates a “break” of some kind between ruminative thoughts about why life happens to suck at the moment. I’m into CrossFit—I find that intense exercise helps me turn off my brain a bit more because I have no choice but to focus on the workout—but I’ve had success also with going for a long walk or doing some push ups. There are numerous studies that exist showing positive connections between exercise, and alleviation of depression or anxiety and they’re easy to look up if you want to see the research basis for this.

Second: I try to really pay attention to the impulses to do things that I know aren’t going to help. For instance, when I’m sad, yeah, my thoughts turn to having a glass of wine, or sugar. I pay attention to that and in fact what I do is try to get metacognitive about it, sort of observing the observer. I’ll notice myself think, “Ah, glass of rose would be great right now,” and then I’ll think, “How interesting that today has been a sad day and suddenly you’re craving alcohol. Interesting to notice that false desire—alcohol won’t solve this.” I’ll do the same thing with sweets. By no means am I perfect about this, by the way, but it’s been a helpful practice to consciously and intentionally remind myself that giving in to sugar or alcohol—or disappearing into TikTok or numbing out in some other way—won’t actually help.

Third: another big go-to is to try to do something really nice or helpful to make someone else’s day better. Can I take a chore off of my husband’s plate? Can I be extra nice to that person I see when I’m out walking the dog? Can I offer to help someone with something? Because any of those things create a feeling for me of connection, and usefulness. I like feeling connected, I like feeling useful, and when I can create those feelings I generally feel better. Bonus, it helps someone else, which is also great!

Fourth: I’ll process out anger or sadness. Literally, I’ll scream into a pillow, or try to consciously cry, to get to the root of some feelings. Sometimes I think that our feelings don’t always need to be intellectualized. Sometimes I think they just need to be fully, and completely, felt.

Now, I’m not saying that processing out feelings means we all need to stop intellectualizing. I’m actually going to share that I do undergo a process of analysis, of intellectualizing, when I notice I’m having several bad days, or a rough couple of weeks: At that point, I investigate the “why” of having several bad days, and when I investigate the “why” I take an extreme blank slate approach of, “Let me just put ALL the options on the table, even those that I think are unlikely or probably irrelevant.” Usually one bad day I’ll just write off and get a good night’s sleep and start the next day fresh, but if I’m not feeling great several times in a week, or for several weeks, I stop to look at that and get ALL possible options on the table as to why I might be having a bad week.

I thought I’d share what I came to realize as I investigated why I was having bad days. It took me a moment to realize that I had, in essence, fallen into “confirmation bias.” As humans, the way our brain operates is that seeks and sees patterns. This is default, and unintentional, and unless something truly novel jumps out at us, we have to be aware of confirmation bias and override it a bit. If you start thinking that the world is X way, or that you are a certain type of person, your brain will be more likely to notice and focus on the things that confirm that the world is X way, or that you are a certain type of person.

The confirmation bias that I had fallen into was “the world is an angry place and people are mean.” This was not a conscious thought that I was having. I was not literally thinking, “The world is an angry place and people are mean,” so much as little things were adding up.

As I reflected, I realized that I’d seen several recent examples on social media of people who were just being mean and unkind. I’m going to spend just a few minutes going into this, because when I’ve talked about this with others, they’ve had some lightbulb moments that this was impacting them, as well—so see if this is you, too. I saw these examples of people being intentionally mean, cutting, taking someone down, screaming, judgments, and these were coming from people whose views I otherwise would generally have agreed with, and they were basically screaming at people they disagreed with, name calling, all the rest, and something in my heart was just…no. No, no, no, this is just so awful to be around, to even bear witness to, even if I’m also upset with that person who said or did that thing—to watch someone be taken down, the viciousness of it, it all felt so antithetical to my own values around integrity or connection or even courage, because when things get vicious, you can absolutely know that fear is in the room, not courage. Sometimes I think we all forget that in the same ways that being around harmful behaviors in the houses we grew up in can affect us even if they weren’t directed at us, so can being around harmful behaviors in the media we consume.

And then I was feeling a sort of despair because I was also seeing people post social media memes like, “You can be a nice, kind person who also tells people to fuck off, sometimes,” and again, my heart—no. No, no, no. It is not kindness to speak to someone that way, this is adding to the problem, it is making things worse, it is not integrity to operate from that place, and it’s tearing us all apart. I truly believe that if we respond to harm with more harmful behaviors, we are colluding with that harm and eventually can move from simply exhibiting harmful behavior, to abuse—and that means we’re capable of becoming abusers, ourselves, when we are not considering how we want to respond and whether that response adds to the harm or creates something better.

To be clear, of course I would never suggest the opposite, that someone being harmed should be told, “Well, it’s okay, let me just be sweet and kind.” Harm does need to be named. But responding to harmful behavior by essentially “hitting back” with our own harmful behavior, does not work. If you were ever a child living in a household where two adults were at war with one another, you know what I’m talking about. You know that when you heard those two adults at war with one another, and your stomach tightened and your heart started to race, that everything in your soul was saying, “This is not love, this is not helping, this is scaring the shit out of me, please, someone make it stop.” If you have ever felt that someone who was in prison did not deserve to be beaten just because they committed a crime, then you understand this fundamental principle that just because someone has done something harmful, does not mean our response should be to create further harm for that person.

By the way, the difference between abuse and harm, in most definitions I’ve seen, has to do with power—abuse happens when someone is in a position of power—and when it’s extreme or repetitive. When someone uses power in some way to either strike one intense blow or to chronically harm another, this adds up into becoming abuse. I think one thing that happens on social media is that many individuals think, “Well, I don’t have power—I’m not exercising power over someone if I give them a piece of my mind, I’m just one person.” The problem with that is that many individuals collectively then form their own power unit, and so yes, trying to take down someone over a social media post is a form of creating harm that can turn into abuse.

I was not just seeing this aggression on social media. Being in Texas for the past year, I’ve seen some pretty awful sides of people come out during the pandemic. I have been at the grocery store, and watched as two people nearly got into fist fights in the grocery line. I’ve been on the road, and been around some really, really aggressive drivers—I gotta tell you, I know that there are people who hate Prius drivers, but a WHOLE lot of people in Texas really hate Prius drivers, and I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been driving over the speed limit in the right hand lane and a big pickup truck gets behind me and starts honking and flashing their lights for me to move out of their way instead of just going around me, and then when they finally do pass me on the left side, they’ll cut in really close, on purpose. There’s this weird aggression I’ve experienced here that I haven’t experienced anywhere else I have ever lived, which has included time in Missouri, in Illinois, and in California. The aggression is coming up around mask wearing, around politics, around all kinds of things and it just really started to add up. This is combined with—and this is something unique to me because I know a lot of people just don’t care—the humidity in the Austin area of Texas in the summer, and then experiencing the wind and allergies in the winter really bugged me. It just wasn’t a fit.

So as I investigated “why,” what kept coming up was realizing that the environments that I was in—in the real world, on social media—were collectively not great environments for me to be in. So, I stopped getting onto Facebook and in fact have hardly been on Facebook for the past month or so. On Instagram even, I stopped surfing as much. There were a few people in my life who were also routinely aggressive or judgmental, and while I’m not someone inclined to make sweeping statements like, “Eff off” when I am not happy with someone’s behavior, I am someone who will communicate when something doesn’t feel good and then mentally hold a boundary where I no longer give anyone behaving that way as much access to my heart, my interior life. And in a larger scope, my husband and I had been thinking we needed to move out of Texas for quite some time, even after having been here less than a year, but in the spring we just decided, yep, time to go.

So it came down to—what are the environments that don’t feel good? Environments can consist of online environments, the people in your environment, or the literal environment itself like the physical space or the weather or the local culture and what is considered normative behavior within that culture.

I think that when we are seeking to change something that’s a bit of a downer, it’s not just, “That thing that’s a downer has to change.” I also need to look at myself in relationship to that thing. This is where putting ALL possibilities on the table is helpful. For instance, on social media, it’s not that I sit back and feel bad until social media changes. Social media might not ever change. But I can look at myself, limit my contact with it, avoid bad algorithms by not clicking on the bad news stories, and in some cases I unfollow accounts where I disagree with how someone is behaving, though I also try to look at my own judgment of their behavior and ask myself to what degree I can just sit with them being different than I want to be. It’s a push-pull in that way, with no clear cut answer.

With other people who are judgmental, it’s not that I sit back and get angry until they change—it’s that I look at where I could extend that person more grace or understanding for why their behavior is the way it is, or I could see if there’s anything positive around which we CAN connect, and I even look at myself and how I judge others, and how someone else’s judgments can be a mirror for me to look at, too. And with my physical environment, I try to notice anything that does work, that does feel good, that is within my control, and I try to put as much appreciation on that as possible. I’ve experienced that Texas generally has more people willing to get aggressive than I’ve experienced in other places where I’ve lived, but I’m also trying to acknowledge that that could be a confirmation bias. So, I try to look at the kind, helpful things I’ve experienced here, too, because for sure I’ve met some great people, or I’ve seen some moments where people were trying to help one another.

In essence, I try to look at all sides of the equation, not just the sides that “feel” like they must be true in any one given moment. That helps pull me out of rumination. And I also look at the things that I might need to put a boundary around, and the things that are my responsibility to change, because while I can’t always control what I feel, but I can control how I respond to what I feel.

The post How to turn around a bad day appeared first on Your Courageous Life.

“On some level it all comes down to Feeling Better versus Getting Better. Repressing information about ourselves or our friends, creating scapegoats as a way to avoid our problems, using shunning to unite a clique and create group identity—all of these make people feel better because it makes them feel superior. But the only way to truly get better is to face and deal with each other, sit down and communicate.” — Sarah Schulman

Think of a few times where you’ve been talking with someone, and you felt an uncomfortable feeling in your body. Something felt off. Maybe you felt like they were arrogant because they kept interrupting you. Maybe you felt like they were talking about what was going on in their life so much that you couldn’t get a word in edgewise to share your own life updates. Or perhaps you felt that they were negative, complaining, a total downer, and it was bringing you down to hang out with them. Or perhaps they’re someone who feels passionately about an issue or a topic, and when they really get to soapboxing they take on this intense argumentative tone—and if you ask them a question, they treat it like a debate.

You know what that experience is like, right? You’ve probably had it any number of times. If I was in a room with a crowd of people and asked the room, “How many people have had this experience?” most people would raise their hands. And if I followed it up by saying, “Those people are annoying, aren’t they? They’re so difficult!” I would imagine that most people would nod their heads. That’s right, yes, those people, so annoying, so difficult.

And if I asked the same group of people, “Who here is interested in learning how to create better relationships?” a significant portion of the audience would say, “Yeah, absolutely.” They’d raise their hands.

Yet if I asked the same group of people, “Great—raise your hand if in those situations with those annoying, difficult people, you decided to ask for what you need from that person,” the room would have very few hands raised. Maybe a few of them would go up, but if I clarified what I mean further some hands would go down.

If I asked the audience, “When you felt as if someone was interrupting you, did you say to them, ‘Oh, wait—I want to finish what I’m saying here,’”? hands would go down.

If I asked the audience, “When someone was talking so much about their own life updates, did you say to them, ‘We’ve both been busy! I’m excited to catch you up on some things that have happened with me,’”? hands would go down.

If I asked the audience, “When the person was so negative and complaining, did you either ask them how you might support them since clearly they are struggling if they’re complaining so much, or, did you ask for a topic change?” hands would go down.

If I asked the audience, “When that person was getting really passionate and debating for their position, did you say something like, ‘I want to keep talking about this, but this is feeling really intense, for me,’”? hands would go down.

So in essence, people are all about saying, “I want to create better relationships,” until it means doing something difficult: speaking into and negotiating what you need, in your relationships.

Let’s flip it around. No one likes to imagine this of themselves, but what if you were the one who was interrupting a lot? Perhaps you didn’t even notice it. But a friend privately decides that she’s had enough, and she’s over it with you interrupting. She stops taking your phone calls or making plans with you. You have no idea that this is why she isn’t making plans, and are left wondering. How does that feel?

Or, let’s say that you’re really excited about some big life changes, and you’re yammering on about them. You mean no harm, but yammer away you go. Your friend decides that this means you’re really full of yourself, and one day she angrily tells you so. You had no idea that she was upset, and for you, her anger has come out of nowhere. How does that feel?

Or perhaps you’re struggling, and it’s really difficult to see the positive in life right now. Someone at a party talks with you for a few minutes, decides you’re too negative, and excuses themselves to go get a drink. Standing with a few other women nearby, the person says to the group, “Don’t talk to that person over there—my god, she’s so negative.” How would that feel?

Or perhaps you feel passionately about an issue. Underneath your passion is actually fear—you’re afraid that the issue won’t change. When someone asks questions, without intending this, you feel the push back that those who are opposed to your issue often give you, and your voice takes on force as you try to advocate for why you’ve really thought through the changes that are needed. The intensity in your voice had nothing to do with your friend or the questions asked—it was all you, getting worked up over something you care about. Later, you think to yourself, “Oy, maybe I was a bit overboard,” and you say as much to your friend, who laughs it off, no big deal, all of that. But she calls less and makes plans less until it’s clear that she isn’t interested in maintaining the relationship, because she’s decided that you’re too annoying when you soapbox. You have no idea that that’s why she’s suddenly unavailable, though. How do you feel?

My guess is that you’d feel pretty awful. My guess is that you’d feel embarrassed. My guess is you’d say things to yourself like, “What did I do wrong?” My guess is that you’d rack your brain trying to figure out what in the world happened.

Let me throw out one more hypothetical—let’s say that your child was interrupting, talking too much, etc., and so their friend group at school, without every talking to them about what was bothering them, threw them out of the group. Shunned them. Talked about them to other people. Stopped inviting them to things. Would you be okay with that? Would that feel good?

I’d like to point out a few things that are obvious to everyone, but that not everyone actually puts into practice when they want to create better relationships. As you’re listening to these, I’d like you to imagine the person you have the most conflict with, someone you wish you could have a better relationship with or at least have less conflict with. Perhaps it’s a coworker, a family member, a friend you haven’t been vibing with for awhile. If you would raise your hand and say yes, I want to create better relationships in my life, I want to experience less conflict, then I’m hoping you’ll be willing to examine each of these areas:

First: It’s human to make mistakes, to be imperfect—to not have all the perfect skills of communication and interaction and relationships nailed down. Someone might say, “Well, if someone doesn’t want to annoy other people, they need to make sure they don’t interrupt, yammer on about themselves, complain or talk about negative stuff, or get political. I don’t do those things!” Well, to that person, I’d say, congratulations on being perfect and so much better than all the rest of us. But for the rest of us humans, sometimes we interrupt, get caught in cycles of negativity, talk too much about ourselves or soapbox about something we’re passionate about. I’ve done all of those things, as have most of the rest of the people I know.

It is part of being a human being to mess these things up. And when I reflect on the times when I’ve been the worst offender in any of these areas, I can always trace it back to a mistake on my part of thinking that I was connecting, without realizing that I was alienating. So maybe I interrupted thinking that the conversation was just flowing along or I was excited about what the person was saying, and had no idea that I was being an annoying interruptor. Consider, too, that our society has different views on interrupting—some people say that they know they are close to another person because they can “finish each other’s sentences.”

Can we give one another some grace? Can you give the annoying, difficult person in your life some grace, and see if that creates a better relationship?

Second: You don’t have to be friends with everyone, and not everyone is for us, true—but if you are writing people off, and you never communicate your needs to the person, how can you even really say you know who they are? Isn’t part of who we are embedded in how we respond to the requests of others? What if you communicated what you needed, and they realized something about themselves and decided to do it differently? Now, this is not to say that because you make a request in a relationship, someone else has to honor it and that’s what constitutes a good friend. But it is to say that if you write someone off without having a conversation about what you need or finding out what their motivations are for the behaviors that annoy you, then you have no real idea who the person is or what they, or your relationship, is really capable of becoming. And I hate to say this, but…with that behavior, you are simply judging people. That’s it. And constant judging of other people means…you’re being a judgmental person. That doesn’t create better relationships. And if someone else wrote you off and never gave you an opportunity to talk about what you need or to negotiate aspects of the relationship, then they’re judging you. This is profoundly anti-relational.

Are you committed to being relational, with others? Are you committed to being compassionate and non-judgmental? There’s a big difference between deciding that a relationship is not a match because it just doesn’t gel for you, and quietly judging someone until you reach a breaking point and then cut off without ever having a conversation. These conversations require courage.

Last: We create better relationships through the ability to rumble with and navigate diversity, not homogeneity, and often—this is the bitter pill to swallow—the things that annoy us in others are things that need examination in some way in our own lives. So for instance, sometimes, the person who interrupts is annoying you because you don’t feel permission to take up space with your opinions in conversations. Sometimes, the person talking about their life is annoying you because you don’t have a lot going on in your own life. Sometimes, the person who is negative and complaining bothers you on some level, you know that they are suffering and because you are afraid to look at the places in your own life where you suffer, and you’d definitely be too embarrassed to talk about those issues with other people. And sometimes, the person who is so passionate about an issue triggers you because you feel latent guilt that you aren’t doing anything about that issue, and you feel out of integrity with yourself.

Diverse viewpoints and ways of being create more opportunities for critical thinking, understanding others’ motivations, and humanizing other people. It is a sign of maturity if you can handle someone else’s way of being, being different than your own. It’s a sign of immaturity when you can’t tolerate someone being different than the way you expect or want them to be.

Spoiler alert: most of us struggle with this. I struggle with this. Of course it would be easier to live in a world where everyone conformed to my expectations—but that’s not the world we live in, so I, we, have to learn how to either deal with that or watch our social worlds collapse inward and become smaller and smaller until they only include those few people who are willing to strain to pretend they can always meet our needs. Because that’s all someone’s going to do if they sense that that’s what you expect—pretend and strain—because no one can ever always meet our needs or always show up the way that we want them to show up. And then eventually, we lose.

So if we want to create better relationships, we need to acknowledge that we are not perfect, and neither is anyone else. We need to remember that no one is a mind reader, which means that we have to communicate our needs and be willing to hear the needs of others. We need to consider that diverse viewpoints and ways of being often lead to our own growth, even if we initially reject the discomfort and messiness of being with someone else’s views that are antithetical to our own. This is the price of admission that we pay, to be received by that same person when our views, our way of being, is different than theirs. This is what it means to really hear one another.

Most relationships are destroyed not because one person is bad and needs to be excised from your life, but because two parties are not willing to really sit down and hear one another.

If we want to create better relationships, we have to start with examining whether our own behavior is relational. It takes courage to be relational. It’s not smooth. It often doesn’t look cool. But I truly believe that when we write someone else off because they don’t behave according to our liking, there’s a part of us that writes ourselves off, too, because we’ve just cut ourselves off from a potential opportunity to learn from the world or from others. We’ve lost an opportunity to build our own character by going through the process of facing our own discomfort with another human being. If you write someone off without communicating, you’re making assumptions, which means we aren’t growing; we’re just relying on our past beliefs about the world in order to function in the present or we’re projecting into the future as if we can predict that.

I want something better for our world. I want us to practice these skills so that we can teach our children these skills so that our children don’t experience the pain of being excluded without explanation. I want something better for the online discussions that so easily tip into full-blown warfare. I want something better for families torn apart by silence.

And, I hope you do, too, and hope you’ll have the courage to join me in reflecting on how we can create better relationships.

The post Create better relationships appeared first on Your Courageous Life.

Let’s talk about narcissism and gaslighting. If you’ve been on the internet at all since the Trump Administration, you know that there is regular and ongoing discussion of narcissism and gaslighting, because there’s been ongoing speculation that Trump is a clinical narcissist and would routinely gaslight people. So let’s talk about what those terms actually mean, and particularly, I’m going to talk about when use of these terms can be an overstatement of harm that ends up escalating conflict in your relationships, rather than what I presume we all want—to deescalate conflict.

Clinical narcissism is a personality disorder involving self-aggrandizement, a need to always be the best, associate with the best people, to be special. There will be no admission of fault. There is no recognition of the needs of others. A full description is available here, from the Mayo Clinic.

“Gaslighting,” according to Google, is “to manipulate someone by psychological means into questioning their own sanity.” There was a movie in the 40s called “Gaslight” in which a husband intentionally tried to drive his wife crazy by lowering the lights in the room—which were controlled at the time by gas—and when she talked about how dim they were, he’d say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He did this on purpose, to psychologically manipulate his wife into questioning reality.

The reason it entered the cultural conversation that Trump could be a clinical narcissist is in the constant talking about how he is the best, the smartest, and an inability to admit to any fault whatsoever or take any responsibility for his behaviors. He’s also been called a gaslighter. There are videos where he says X and later denies he ever said X; that’s gaslighting. There are videos where he talks about himself as the best and refuses to admit responsibility for things he did, and that’s a classic portrait of a narcissist. We don’t need to resuscitate every example; there are many and they are easy to find if you wish to find them. We can’t diagnose someone with clinical narcissism just from observing these behaviors. We can speculate, but that’s about it.

But let’s also talk about how narcissism and gaslighting have entered the everyday pop culture lexicon and now, there is a bias to start seeing those traits in everyday, human conflict, and how the application of terms like these inaccurately, can really escalate human conflict. In other words, sometimes I’m seeing people call things narcissism and gaslighting purely because they are offended, not necessarily because they are accurate terms to apply to the situation.

Let’s say that oops, you step on someone’s foot. It hurts, so they are angry. In conversations where someone misunderstands what narcissism and gaslighting actually are and deploys those terms carelessly, use of these terms escalate conflict rather than work towards a solution:

Person: You stomped on my foot! That was mean and unkind and I’m standing up for myself and I’m not taking your shit, anymore.

You: [Feeling defensive because you’ve been accused of something, and because you’re feeling defensive, you’re also more focused in that moment on defending yourself than on apologizing]. Whoa, wait—I didn’t stomp on your foot. I stepped on your foot, by accident—I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry about that.

Person: No, you stomped on my foot. How can you deny that? I was right there, and I saw it. You stomped on my foot.

You: I stepped on it, by accident—I didn’t stomp on it, on purpose. How can you think that I would do that, on purpose?

Person: It’s always about you, you, you. What about me, and the fact that you stomped on my foot? How can you take the focus off the fact that my foot is hurting?

You: I’m not trying to take the focus off of your foot hurting; I’m trying to talk about the fact that I didn’t intentionally step on your foot, which is what you’re accusing me of when you say “stomp.”

Person: You’re gaslighting my experience—I was here, I saw what you did, it was definitely a “stomp,” and now you’re trying to convince me that it never happened.

You: I’m not trying to convince you that it never happened. I’m trying to convince you that it wasn’t intentional!

Person: Impact is more important than intention. I’m saying the impact you had on me was that I felt like my foot was stomped on.

You: But…so…I’m supposed to say that I did stomp on your foot, so that you feel I’m validating your experience?

Person: See, I knew it. You can never take responsibility for your actions…

Now, let’s break this down for a moment. Most humans, when they are in conflict with someone, feel defensive. When they feel defensive, most of their focus goes to…defending.

If someone is defensive and does not want to take responsibility for their behavior, this does not automatically mean that the person is a narcissist. It means they are defensive. In the example I just gave, the defensive party isn’t saying, “I never even went near your foot.” They’re arguing with the interpretation of what happened, not saying that it never happened that way. In conflicts, it is very common for two different people to experience things very differently—thus prompting two different realities.

We need to keep in mind that just as someone else’s interpretation of what happened or what the behaviors were can differ, their interpretations of us can also be very different.

As a society, we need to get clearer about what clinical diagnoses actually entail. Now, I am not qualified to diagnose anyone with anything, but I took graduate level coursework in diagnostics as part of a marriage and family therapy program tied to a masters in counseling degree, and the professor for that class emphasized that if you look too much at the DSM or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, you’ll see yourself in everything. The question is often tied to severity and prevalence.

Again, let me say—the diagnosis is often tied to severity and prevalence. So, how intense are the symptoms, and how often are they happening?

So yes, from a diagnostic perspective, clinical narcissists overly focus on outward appearances, but we have to take into consideration the entire picture. Let’s say there’s someone who wears a lot of makeup and maybe they’re even judgmental of people who are who don’t put a lot of time into their appearance or who don’t wear makeup. Now, if you said to me, “That sounds like a very unattractive quality in a person, very superficial to be so focused on outward appearances,” I’d be inclined to agree with you. But if this same person also made a point of always taking care of her grandmother, and cleaned up the house for their family members, and was apologetic when they made mistakes, guess what? They aren’t a narcissist, just because they have a focus on outward appearances, or just because they judge others who don’t put as much time into appearances.

Or, to bring in another example—let’s say there’s a marriage that’s been marked by arguments and conflict for several years. One partner feels life should be less about the hustle, and wants to slow down and have less going on in the household. The other partner is a workaholic high achiever who gets a lot out validation out of working, and that person also has trouble apologizing when they are very clearly wrong—they say and do things that are snippy and irritable, and they never want to admit it. In fact, when it is pointed out, they tend to deny (“I wasn’t irritable”) or redirect (“Well, what about how irritable you sound, right now?”).

If you just cherry-pick the examples of their workaholic behaviors and difficulty with apologies and tendencies to deflect, it would be easy to paint a picture of this person as a clinical narcissist who is gaslighting their partner in the marriage.

But you’d have to look at the entire picture of this person, if you want to accurately assess for narcissism or gaslighting—is this person a cardiologist who is dealing with secondary vicarious trauma due to the pressure of their job, and while they are distant and conflict ridden in their marriage, their patients would describe them as kind and supportive? Is this person a high achiever who always sends heartfelt cards to friends on birthdays, who has—at another time in the marriage when it was less conflict ridden—held their partner while their partner cried and offered empathy and tenderness?

Again, I’m not qualified to diagnose and I’m not trying to give you diagnostic tips, here. I’m sharing what I learned as a result of my education when I was in an MFT program and when I completed my Masters in Psychology, which is that when someone is diagnosed with a mental health issue, the entire person and the broader context of their life is looked at. Not just their worst character flaw, like being superficially focused on outward appearances with makeup. Not just who they are in one relationship, a marriage, whereas in other relationships or in other parts of their lives, they have capacity for empathy and warmth.

So here’s why I’m talking about this: I see relationships being essentially destroyed because people start throwing out these terms, which escalates conflict. When we start throwing out accusations of narcissism not because the totality of their life adds up to that but rather, because we feel someone is being selfish, that person is less likely to work things out with you. If we accuse anyone who doesn’t agree with our assessment of the situation as gaslighting, then conflict is escalated.

The point is that when conflict is unnecessarily escalated, no one gets what they want. The person throwing out the accusation doesn’t get what they want—in fact, the behavior of the person they’re accusing of narcissism or gaslighting is even less likely to change, which unfortunately will only appear as more evidence that the person must be a clinical narcissist who gaslights. And the person receiving the accusation is probably feeling defensive, hurt, embarrassed, and what’s more, they’re also not fully trusting the feedback they’ve been given because on some level they know that it’s crazy to throw out these terms just because there’s conflict. I mean, to go back to this stomped versus stepped on the foot example—if you know that it truly was an accident that you stepped on someone’s foot, and they are committed to believing that you intentionally stomped on their foot, aren’t you a bit mistrustful of their ability to accurately perceive the world?

Just so that I’m clear—so no one thinks I’m trying to gaslight around the existence of narcissism—I do think that clinical narcissists and gaslighters really do exist. If you are dealing with someone who really fits into those categories, that’s very real, and it’s wrong for them to mistreat you. In no way do I blame the victim of someone’s narcissism. I just think these labels are being applied very liberally, and narcissists are in fact more rare than people might realize based on how often discussion of narcissist and gaslighting traits appear on social media. And, I think that while it may temporarily feel powerful to have a label to put on something, especially when you’ve feel that someone has hurt you, it doesn’t actually solve the problem.

And, of course, I think that someone can wholeheartedly disagree with what I’m sharing here and that’s okay, too.

In my mind, the problem is the conflict that doesn’t get resolved by deployment of inaccurate terms, and two people’s different views of what happened without being willing to ask one another why they feel the way they feel—and truly listen to the answers from others when they are given.

A better approach when you’re angry and convinced that someone did something on purpose?

Tell them how you feel: “I feel as if you might have stomped on my foot on purpose. I feel that way because I saw you lift up your foot and bring it down, really hard.”

Ask questions: “Did you stomp on my foot?”

Diffuse conflict by speaking to your experience, and understand that it’s human to feel defensive, and most people lack skills to navigate conflict, so they may be unaware that they are being defensive in response to you. So, when they are defensive: “I’m not trying to accuse you of anything—it was my perception that you stomped on my foot because I saw you lift up your foot and bring it down, really hard. I could be wrong.”

Give it time: Have you ever finished a conversation where you were defensive and angry and unwilling to admit any responsibility, and then after you calmed down, you realized…okay, maybe that person did have a valid point? Great. Then you know that time can be something of a curative for conflict. Give the person time to digest what you’ve brought to them. See if they come back later and are willing to say, “You know, I truly didn’t intend to stomp on your foot, but if I think about how fast I was running around in the back yard, I can see how it appeared that way. I’m sorry for stepping on your foot.”

Get better at your own apologies. The best way to see the vulnerability and self-reflection and awareness that is involved in making an apology is to start making more of them, yourself. You’ll recognize all the places where you get defensive and don’t want to apologize, and it humanizes the fact that other people might do the same thing when egos get in the way.

Last thing—I’m never saying that abusive behavior should just be excused. We need to confront it and speak truth to it—critical thinking time. Of course I’m not saying that when people are abusive, or when someone is an actual narcissist, that we should just throw glitter in the air and look for ways to rationalize their behavior. No.

I’m only saying that sometimes we create more drama, conflict, discord, sadness, anger in our lives when we are inaccurate about how we apply labels like narcissism or gaslighting. A licensed psychologist would take in a multitude of factors when making a diagnosis, so let’s not get so into the pop culture references or armchair psychology that we think we are qualified or equipped to diagnose our partners or family members.

We don’t get what we want, and no one is really winning in these situations. I want us to diffuse conflict, not amplify it.

Let’s have the courage to call things what they are, and to apply integrity in being accurate and responsible when we call things as they are.

The post Narcissism and gaslighting appeared first on Your Courageous Life.

Committed to being offended? What’s that? It’s what’s going on in those relationships where no matter what you do, no matter how much you stretch or bend or try to make things work, the person interprets everything you’re doing through the lens of thinking you’re rude…and getting offended. Today’s podcast episode breaks down the signs that this is happening–and how to respond from a place of courage.

The post Committed to being offended appeared first on Your Courageous Life.

It’s painful, but true–sometimes, you get happier, but people resent your happiness. When people resent your happiness, you may be struggling with knowing what to do. How do you maintain what you’ve worked for and created, without losing the connection with that person? Today’s podcast looks at how to navigate the tricky terrain of handling people who resent your happiness.

The post When people resent your happiness appeared first on Your Courageous Life.

The last episode in the series, Andy starts with asking Kate about accountability groups (aka Masterminds) and how to go about using these groups to support your courageous habits. Kate gives advice on how to ensure these groups continue to work well for all participants, and some tips when the group may not work well. Kate also talks about the messy middle and key strategies of the Courage Habit to help people manage their resources when facing challenges.

Key Topics (timestamp):
Accountability Groups (1:00)
Not Just for Entrepreneurs Anymore! (17:15)
The Messy Middle (20:00)
Ego Struggle (29:45)
If the Love Has to Be Tough; It Ain’t Really Love (33:45)
The External Feedback Doesn’t Matter as Much as Your Internal Engagement (39:15)
Stepping Forward with Reckless Abandon (42:15)

The Courage Habit podcast was co-hosted with Andy Sewell of Audio Ephemera (https://www.audioephemera.com), who’s also the rockstar behind post-production of each episode.

The post Courage Habit : Creating accountability appeared first on Your Courageous Life.

Kate explains how separating Productivity from Creativity can help quell the Inner Critic. Using unstructured time to exercise Courage Habits is a key component to success. They also talk about knowing what works for you, and adapting when some tactics just don’t work for you. Kate stresses the value in honoring both Creativity and Productivity.

Key Topics (timestamp):
Sharing a Win Against the Saboteur (1:00)
The Separation of Productivity and Creativity (6:15)
Knowing What Works for You (14:30)
Setting a Time to Create (18:45)
Adopting Ideas vs. Appropriation (27:00)
Breaking the Rules (38:00)
Letting the Horse Come to You (45:00)

The Courage Habit podcast was co-hosted with Andy Sewell of Audio Ephemera (https://www.audioephemera.com), who’s also the rockstar behind post-production of each episode.

The post Courage Habit : Productivity and creativity appeared first on Your Courageous Life.

Andy asks about the difference between the Internal Critic and criticism from the outside. Kate explains that how you respond to any criticism is how you assert your power. Living your courageous life means being confident and true to yourself and your actions. Interactions with any criticism (internal or otherwise) define your character.

Key Topics (timestamp):
Giving Power to Criticism (1:00)
Power is How You Respond (5:00)
It’s All Just Feedback (11:00)
Conscientious Attention on Our Choices (20:00)
Act From a Way of Being (25:00)
Building Community of Joy (40:00)
Listening (41:15)
You Never Know Who You Are Influencing and How (48:45)
Attachment to Outcome (52:00)
You Cannot Control the Past (55:45)

The Courage Habit podcast was co-hosted with Andy Sewell of Audio Ephemera (https://www.audioephemera.com), who’s also the rockstar behind post-production of each episode.

The post Courage Habit : Responding to criticism appeared first on Your Courageous Life.

We express ourselves through telling stories. As our lives evolve, those stories evolve. We will all have many starts and stops through our personal and professional lives, and those transitions are chances to reframe those stories. Kate challenges Andy on how he initially sees his transition from a corporate career to a career as a freelance creative.

Key Topics (timestamp):
Reframing the Story (1:00)
Being Adaptive (12:00)
Sticking With What You Start (15:45)
You are Allowed to Leave the Things Not Meant for You (20:30)
You are Writing the Story to Come (26:45)
The Core of Who You are is Always There (28:00)

The Courage Habit podcast was co-hosted with Andy Sewell of Audio Ephemera (https://www.audioephemera.com), who’s also the rockstar behind post-production of each episode.

The post Courage Habit : Reframing our stories appeared first on Your Courageous Life.