Category: Question and redefine everything

“The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.” Socrates

Over 2500 years after Socrates determined the definition of terms to be the beginning of wisdom, we seem to have lost the importance of this critical practice.
Depending on how we define things, different avenues open up in front of us and other options cease to exist.

The way we define the terms of our life shapes our reality!

Join me in questioning and redefining the important elements of life in a way that quiets our inner critic and soothes our neurobiology to replace stress with peace. I welcome you to question my definitions and share your own.

How to effectively respond to a “jerk”!

Once upon a time, I met a very special person. He was so intelligent, loving and kind. He would show up time after time, expressed his fondness and admiration often and much, went out of his way to be supportive in good times and bad, was accountable for his own actions and made promises he would be here for me in this life and the next.

Except, when he experienced negative emotions: The story would suddenly change, as did his behavior!

One of the most destructive relational patterns of behavior involves behaving in an incongruent manner, changing our stance towards another from one moment to the next.

The psychology dictionary, defines incongruence as an inconsistent state of behavior, described as inconsistency between the goals, values, and attitudes projected and the actual behavior observed.

We tend to define someone who behaves in an inconsistent manner as a “jerk”!

Have you considered that anyone who employs unhealthy relational patterns just does not know how to regulate their emotions and simply has been accustomed to blaming (or punishing) others for their very own negative feelings?

A person who contradicts themselves, by their words and actions probably has significant attachment injuries. They most likely have a hard time letting go of the past and do not have experiences that involve the beauty of healthy relational patterns, or know how to soothe themselves in a healthy way when fears show up internally.

If you too have someone in your life that tells you one moment that you are the most important person in their life and then (when they are upset about something) they exclaim that your relationship has no value to them, do not despair!

Although the obvious stance against unhealthy behaviors is to walk away, there are circumstances where you may not have a choice.

Here are the most effective ways I have been able to effectively address another’s inability to relate to me in a healthy way, when they are incongruent with me:

  1. Ask powerful questions

Point out the inconsistency head on. If someone tells you how much they value you and then you find out you were excluded from an important event in their life, simply point out the contradiction and ask them to tell you more about it. Don’t allow your self to get emotionally involved or take the contradiction personally. New insights from neuroscience, reveal that people that were raised by parents that were not attuned to them, (or even worst, were raised by parents with mental illness or substance abuse), have significant issues with nervous system regulation and deficits in parts of their brain that are associated with relational abilities.

Therefore when our fellow human beings bearing attachment injuries feel the sweetness of connection and intimacy, often times without cognitive awareness they will employ “deactivating strategies” to rupture connection.

Asking questions, without being emotionally charged, breaks the spell of a deactivating strategy and may be the only way to awaken someone from a state, that quite frankly although has become automated, causes them a lot of trouble.

  1. Seek first to understand and then to be understood

Power is the ability to do something effectively.

As describe in Stephen Coveys “7 habits of highly effective people”, seeking to understand and be understood is a fail proof strategy, even if you are dealing with someone that has not yet learned how to be effective.

Explaining with love and kindness the tremendous energy drain that any nervous system uses up to reconcile differences in reality, may be a perspective that they have not come across before. Let’s face it, if someone frequently employs contradictory behaviors as a way of relating to others, not many will stay by their side, let alone invest any energy to understand a behavior that hurts. If anything can provide compelling evidence of the power we all have for positive change, this is it!

  1. Role model emotional intelligence.

It’s very easy to simply get mad at someone who makes the most wonderful promises and when we challenge them for not delivering, they say: “I don’t know what you a re talking about”. Speaking emotional language with someone and the impact their actions have on us, can often times trigger feelings of empathy even in people with reported structural deficits in the anterior insula region of their brain. (Brain region involved in healthy development of empathy.)

After all, emotional intelligence is nothing other than making intelligence use of our emotions.

By role modeling emotional intelligence, we have a much better chance of getting through to someone, but even if we don’t succeed, at least we maintain our internal balance and prevent our selves from getting out of our zen!

  1. Set and enforce healthy boundaries.

We can be kind and loving to all life, but first and foremost we have to be kind and loving toward our self!

Brene Brown, Ph.D., best selling author of a number of books on the power of vulnerability, defines betrayal as “choosing not to connect to someone when the opportunity is there”.

We have to face our fears and practice being assertive, speaking clearly of what we are willing to tolerate and what we will not.

We can work with our internal resources to maintain our inner balance in the face of someone who does not have the ability to relate to us in a healthy way. We can even have empathy for their condition and understand that their behavior reveals that they have established intimacy and vulnerability as a threatening situation and that it’s nothing personal.

But at the end of the day, if we employ all the skillful and effective techniques and we are still not able to see accountability from the person that confuses us with contradictions, we may not have many options left.

The healthiest and most effective approach may be to love them and leave them.

What is abuse?

At one time I used to think abuse was a foreign concept that only existed in the lives of my fellow human beings who had limited education and a compromised standard of living. I thought they experienced abuse because they did not know any better.

Little did I know!

Abuse does not discriminate by socio-economic status and appears to be widespread and present not only in the lives of many individuals and families, including the affluent, but even in the business practices of many reputable, organizations.

Abuse includes any type of behavior that targets another human being, with the goal of making them doubt their perceptions and abilities in order to gain power and control over them.

Here are some effective ways within our control to build resilience against abuse:

  1. Learn to recognize abuse when we see it.

One of the biggest problems with abusive behavior is the myriad of ways it camouflages itself, which makes it difficult to recognize.

Beyond overt name-calling, anytime any of us has not cultivated our own personal power and choses to define another in a negative way, we are crossing the line from an effective to a dysfunctional pattern of behavior and communication. Some examples include:

  • When we give someone the “silent treatment” because we are upset with them, thereby defining them as nonexistent.
  • When we withhold fondness and admiration from someone we care about, because we experience discomfort with an aspect of our relationship with them.
  • When we use mishaps of others from the past to coerce them to act a certain way in the present,
  • When we minimize the perspective of another human being or counter their expressed feelings or needs,
  • When we dismiss agreements we made and act as if we do not remember them,
  • When we deny reality in response someone’s efforts to re-connect with us and we deny being aware of any disconnection in the first place: “I don’t know what you are talking about”,
  • When we make a joke about someone that highlights a part of them that is not one of their strengths.

These are all examples of maladaptive behaviors that “abusers” use to gain power over others.

  1. Understand the core issues that lead one to behave abusively.

Although when we are being abused we tend to take it personally, being subjected to abuse is not at all our responsibility. Someone who uses any of the above ways of interacting with another,  has an injured sense of self worth, hence, attempts to make you feel less than who you really are, as a way to feel good about themselves!  We need to understand that as scary as the behavior of an abuser may be and as misunderstood and unimportant as we may feel (as well as afraid of what may happen if we press the issue), an abuser’s behavior comes from a sense of powerlessness. As crazy as it may seem when someone is putting you down If we can cultivate empathy for the obvious ineffectiveness of the abuser to express their feelings and needs in healthy ways, we can actually begin to make a difference in eliminating this destructive pattern of behavior. By not taking it personally and understanding how challenged “the abuser” is psychologically, allows us to stay empowered to use assertive, effective communication, strict boundaries for accountability, and zero tolerance for abusive transactions. Trust me, the “abuser” deep down is miserable for how ineffective their dysfunctional patterns are in their life’s outcomes, they don’t really want this kind of trouble just don’t know how to change it!

  1. Take an active stance against abuse by refusing to respond to it.

We often think that by getting upset and responding with anger toward someone who puts us down, we set them straight. Actually, playing “tit for tat” games with an abuser feeds their injured sense of self.

If and when we do something that offends another and our behavior requires adjustment, we deserve as much good will and respect as we do when we are acting beautifully. When our responses comes from a deep sense of self worth, we do not tolerate unhealthy treatments because we made a mistake. Equally, when we feel worthy and deserving of love and belonging, we don’t engage in somersaults to make someone treat us with respect. We treat ourselves with respect by not getting upset and by setting clear boundaries.

So, the next time anybody “stone-walls” you, you can clearly express that you acknowledge their challenges in expressing their feelings and needs at this time. You can inform them that when they are ready to tell you what they need, you will be happy to hear their perspective. Then simply go about your day and remove yourself from being treated as invisible.

After all, everything is simply a temporary perspective, and your perception of self is the only valid reality.

  1. Reinforce and role-model healthy communication.

We are all beautifully human, and we don’t have the power to read somebody else’s mind, nor can we feel, sense, and experience life’s events through someone else’s lens. We will ruffle another’s feathers at times and they will ruffle ours.

After all, the dictionary definition of relate is to make a connection between differences. The only way we can make a connection between our differences with another human being in a healthy way is by choosing to express our feelings and needs in a loving way—void of criticism, hidden agendas, and contempt.

For example, “When you are late to our meetings without giving me a heads up, I feel frustrated and angry. I need you to please give me a heads up as soon as you know that you will be late so that I may adjust my schedule.”

This is the only way one may consider making adjustments to accommodate our request and trust me, none of us will in response to abuse!

  1. The most important action we can take against abuse is to strengthen our own sense of power.

When we process our own wounds and past hurts, we are not afraid to assertively express our feelings and needs. We can move past anyone who comes across our path who refuses to acknowledge our point of view or to be accountable for their actions.

It is important to focus on feelings of empathy and compassion for someone who is in much pain and using maladaptive behaviors to feel better about themselves. Yet we have to be brutally honest with ourselves, as well, when we allow our pain to get the best of us and we find ourselves guilt-tripping another for our negative emotions.

Healthy development and emotional intelligence allow us to accept and respect others points of view, show goodwill, and be accountable when we occasionally slip. We may at times need to express negative emotions like anger or frustration with another, but we can do so constructively, without defining another in a negative way.

The insidious nature of abuse can seriously interfere with one’s emotional and physical health and corrode the essence of the human soul of an individual, a community, and the world we live in.

The time is now to reverse the trajectory of our physical, emotional, and social health—one breath and one relationship at a time.

And it all starts with you!

Strive for balance and not perfection

We all want to live our best life, with our BMI below 25, our blood pressure below 120, and a good night’s sleep averaging eight or more hours per day. We all strive toward these great outcomes, but our current, national health statistics reflect that we still need quite a bit of work to get there. The World Health Organization defines health as the complete physical, mental and social wellbeing. I don’t know about you, but I believe that one of the major risk factors to my optimal health is my own intolerance of my imperfections: I seem to have the tendency of giving up on any health improvement initiative the moment I take a wrong turn and make a mistake! Have you ever been on a diet? What happens when your desire for that slice of pizza wins over your willpower and you give in and eat the pizza?

Do you just shrug it off and move on back to your perfect balance between fruit and veggies, protein and carbs, saying, “hmmm…that was good, now I will get back on track,” or do you give up on the diet all together and eat the whole pizza? Hopefully most of us fall somewhere in-between, but I have an idea: Since none of us are perfect, what if we strive for balance instead of perfection? What if our health goal is to end up with a “five-to-one” positive to negative ratio in our choices that pertain to our health? In other words, what if we ensure that we make five positive choices for every mishap or negative choice we make? If I have that pizza for lunch because I was at that work function and “that is all that was available,” then I will add an extra positive act toward health, like adding an extra fifteen minutes to my walk.

I first became aware of the “five-to-one ratio” concept when I attended the Gottman Institute’s “Art and Science of Love” workshop a couple of years ago. Apparently, since we cannot avoid making mistakes in our primary relationships, making a conscious effort to replenish our emotional relationship bank with five positive acts of kindness for every time we mess up, has been found to do wonders for neutralizing the impact of impasses in relationships. The Gottman Institute, founded by John Gottman, Ph.D., has gathered data for several decades that link behaviors with relational success—predicting divorce with 94% accuracy. However, over this last decade, scientists have explored the application of this ratio in many different life situations, even in the workplace. And guess what? The higher the positive to negative ratio is at work is directly linked to a steady, measurable increase in performance.

Personally, I have found this ratio to be true in every relationship that is important in my life, not just with my precious daughter or a significant other, but also in my relationship with food, my relationship with exercise, my relationship with nature, and most of all, the relationship I have with myself! Striving for perfection and punishing ourselves for giving in to a piece of bacon, or a slice of pizza, is making significant withdrawals from the bank of positive emotions we have for and with ourselves. In order to accomplish optimal health, we have to look with eyes wide open at every component of our lives that is interfering with our ability to maintain a positive balance. Optimal wellness is a significant commitment that we choose to make. But as with every other commitment in life, the commitment to our health requires a deep and unconditional love for ourselves—one that forgives a limitation, or a moment of weakness, and recognizes our beauty in our best and our worst.

So, if you are one of us, struggling to lose weight, give up a bad habit, or stick to a routine of regular exercise, my most heartfelt and effective tip is: Love yourself a little more and increase your self-compassion for your mistakes.

And who knows, maybe striving for a healthier balance in the way we embrace all of who we are, with all of our good and not so good actions and choices, may well be just the perfect prescription to reverse our current health trajectory!