A dead-on video from The School of Life.
The video is based on this article from The Book Of Life. This passage is my favorite:
We apply the wrong medicine:
This section hits home to me, especially as I watch more and more relationships come to pieces around me, including, of course, my own relationship with my ex-wife. It's always a battle to refrain from senseless blame when we feel hurt; careful introspection can help us realize that the hurt we wield against those around us usually stems from problems deep within ourselves.
I appreciate how the School Of Life and Book Of Life folks seem well aware that our minds are far from tame, that we are by no means "rational animals." The baggage we carry with us can affect every part of our lives, no matter how much we fight against it. We mis-aim our solutions and choose misguided shortcuts that inevitably make life more difficult in the long run. We compromise where we shouldn't, and stay steadfast when we should compromise. So with every marriage that crumbles, with every friendship that goes silent, I can't help but wonder at the hidden, mis-addressed thorns in each person's side, at the ways we've lashed out at those we love the most. It's terrifying when so many of my friends, so many of the people I love and respect the most, seem to be hurting so much. At least we'll be keeping therapists in business. I'm exhausted. I don't think I'm going to get to have any sort of routine until January. But lord I can't wait for that routine. I can't wait to get up in the morning and calmly prepare for my day, and to finish my schoolday with most of my daily tasks completed, to go home and do things for myself a little. I know that people say that you should be able to take care of yourself at any time, but right now there are a few too many commitments to use my time wisely. I'm having trouble keeping weight off, keeping up at work, keeping my few extra-curricular activities maintained, and keeping positive with my daughters. But a time will come when I'll finally be able to perform the introspection necessary to accurately identify and address the hidden thorns in my own self, and I look forward to it.
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Self-help, leadership, and motivational literature is all about getting out of ruts and expressing yourself authentically. Much like religious devotional literature, they all riff off of the same sorts of human truths. Also like devotional literature, what you connect with is often more a matter of tone than content. I like these pithy outlines that I found on Pinterest today. They appear to be outlines from a "Crucial Conversations" workshop that Jami Breese put together in a creative and accessible manner. These notes have piqued my interest in Crucial Conversations, so I'll be keeping an eye out for potential future workshops. I'm going to go through a couple of the ideas that I like here. Since it seems like the outlines are each in a specific order, I'll follow that order myself. Sketch 1: #crucialconversations steps 1 & 2This sketch makes me think of the following:
Sketch 2: #crucialconverations steps 3 & 4
Sketch 3: #crucialconversations steps 5 & 6
Sketch 4: #crucialconversations steps 7, 8, & 9
I've printed off a few copies of these for my classroom so I can keep them on hand. Perhaps I'll post them to my filing cabinet with all my other resources. And then, once I get this apartment fully set-up, once the girls are settled in their new place, I'll be able to pick up the book and possibly try to adopt some of this. Maybe just one of them. Maybe just one.
Because I'm a dork and I have two whiteboards to put up in my home so I can lay out these ideas and try to get my life back on track. Because, as much as I'd like to deny it, I'm likely a teacher through and through.
For years, I've tried to see opinions from the opinionator's perspective. When I was religious, for example, I felt it important to understand how non-religious people saw the world and deliberately sought to understand my faith from "their" perspective; now, as a secularist/humanist/whatever, I think it's important to understand and remember how religious thinking frames one's overall mindset and do my best not to dismiss religious ideas. I think I'm fairly good at maintaining two separate truths in situations like this; empathy is something I'm generally at peace with, and it tends to work for me.
However, the social media echo chamber is a legitimate concern. On Twitter, etc., it takes effort and dedication to "follow" people who piss you off. I recently came face to face with this when I unfollowed a Twitter user whose raison d'etre had morphed into an anti-feminist MRA mouthpiece. I followed them for a long time despite my differing perspectives on things, but I could no longer handle (what I saw as) their closed-minded vitriol. It's perfectly OK to close out toxic people and perspectives; it's my right to do that. Right?
However, when I unfollowed them I simultaneously closed one more door to an alternate opinion and way-of-seeing-the-world, and I'm not fully at peace with that. I hate vitriol, but I want to understand the different ways our society disenfranchises different people. As much as I tend to see Men's Rights Activists as inconceivable, misguided, entitled whiners, I still want to keep myself open to perceived injustices. That's part of their angle on the world and the more clarity I have about their perspective, the more I'd hope that I won't fall into similar entitlement traps. I think of this a bit when I see those articles about "Who are these Trump supporters," where writers try to make sense of Donald Trump's popularity in a population of people with whom they themselves likely have very little crossover. On reflection, I realized that I do not "follow" any Trump supporters that I know of in any of my social media feeds. I have "othered" that portion of the population and chosen to view them through my chosen people. In the case of Trump, just like with MRAs, I've justified closing my feed to their perspectives because I perceive them as misguided and intellectually and empathetically shortsighted. But I don't know if that's really the right thing to do. As somebody who values empathy, I'm also aware of its weaknesses. Empathy doesn't help in every situation, and sometimes we can mis-aim it in careless directions, or people might aim it at us when we don't need or deserve it. Empathy is important in all relationships, but it's a skill we need to hone and practice every single day. The following quotation, embedded below, describes a situation when empathy might be a little misplaced, since people might use your empathy as a tool for injustice.
In this case, it's important to remember that even if we can see something from somebody else's perspective, it doesn't mean they can see it from your perspective. The ability to empathize could be a rather narcissistic, assumptive skill; we assume we can do it and that our perception is accurate, and this very much might not be the case. Just because we feel that we're empathizing doesn't mean we are. Empathy is a sort of essential relational delusion that brings us together under seemingly common feelings and perceptions. We need it, but it's not necessarily accurate.
I guess what I'm struggling with right now is the fact that I feel as if I empathize with numerous different people and peoples, but I could very well just be narcissistically assuming something completely off-base. I may empathize, but there's no way to prove that I can do it. That means I have to trust myself. If I feel like I'm working hard at it, and if I'm trying to learn and practice empathy more, I also need to develop the self-confidence to trust my perception. And trusting myself has always been a very hard thing for me. My empathy depends on my own self-trust. That's crazy.
I haven't been able to afford to continue therapy with my psychologist for the last couple months, but the therapy was effective overall. There, I was able to talk through childhood to the present and identify a few common patterns and issues that have culminated to my current mindset. I am fully aware that the psychologist was just working with what I presented him during the sessions, and that I likely gave him a skewed vision of myself and others, but it was something nonetheless and gave me some data to work from.
When he first suggested that I may be "codependent," I immediately got defensive and said "no," but I've learned to pay attention to my defensiveness and decided to look into it further. When I did, I was crestfallen by the familiarity of what I read, particularly when I realized that codependent characteristics were often considered virtuous in my upbringing. He made it very clear that I have codependent characteristics and tendencies. Based on what he heard from me, he identified my sense of responsibility for others' feelings, my willingness to sacrifice and martyr my own needs for the sake of the perceived needs of others, my habit of acquiescing to pressure in order to maintain harmony, and a few other classic codependent traits. I fit the bill. Most importantly, we talked about personal boundaries, a topic that made me cringe. I'd associated personal boundaries with selfishness until I read about them in Nonviolent Communication, and I couldn't even make sense of them for a while in the therapy room. And I've been working through this, concussing myself through my childhood indoctrination, and it's tough. I don't mean to be cyber-redundant. I've tried to write about them here, and I tried to talk about them here, but I don't think I've got a full grasp on them yet, But I think I've figured out two very important personal boundaries for me:
I'm working on it. It's hard. But I'm getting there.
I've been working through The Disease to Please: Curing the People-Pleasing Syndrome over the last couple days. It's had quite a few passages that have really stood out to me, but this one really takes the cake:
This passage stands out to me because I've heard some of these accusations before — "passive-aggressive," "manipulative," "coercive," "controlling" — and I've always felt that those labels have been obscenely out of place. I felt entirely misunderstood, that the labels were unfair and misguided.
But this. To be honest, I knew this stuff was happening, but I couldn't put words to it and I didn't want to admit it. But to see it laid out so clearly on the page is rather humbling. Part of this whole process is about learning how to take responsibility for my own behaviour, my own convictions, for the times when I've ignored my own boundaries and needs, when I've said "yes" in order to placate a situation where I most certainly should have said "no." The other part of this is learning to not take responsibility for other people's emotions, for other people's feelings. I can affect other people's feelings, but they need to take responsibility for themselves as well. I don't know how to do that yet. But that's coming up in the next few chapters, and here. |
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April 2024
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