Brave New Kitty

In my last post on Conversational Boundaries, I gave some practical tips for dealing with boors who are poor listeners and like to dominate conversations. In many circumstances, practical tips are all we need to figure out the mechanics of doing something. For example, if we know the practical basics of cooking, following a recipe is easy. Or if we know how to read a map, finding a location on any given map is totally doable. You get the idea: for most things, a few simple instructions or tips are all that’s required to get the basics of performing a task.

Not so with setting boundaries, conversational or otherwise. We can read books, seek therapy, memorize techniques, and so forth, and still feel like a deer in headlights when we get in situations that require boundary setting. Everything we’ve taught ourselves just goes out the window and we fall into the old patterns of behavior that feel soooo awful and that we want soooo much to be different.

Why does this happen? Why is boundary setting so hard? Why can’t we just take what we learn and start using it in everyday situations, when we need to? Why does it feel like a foreign language we never learned to speak?

I think it’s because in a very real way, boundary setting is a foreign language many of us never learned to speak. Whether you let people in too easily or have walls a mile high and a mile thick, the source of the problem is usually the same: growing up in a home where you never learned to set healthy boundaries. If your family dynamics had any of the following:

• emotionally distant parents (as in withholding approval to control their children’s behavior),
• emotionally inappropriate parents (as in making their children feel overly responsible for their well being or sharing adult information with their children),
• overt abuse (emotional, phsyical, or sexual),

then it’s likely you have some issues with boundaries. Your issues could be any of the following, or any combination of them:

• having a hard time saying “no” when people ask you to do something
• sharing too much personal information with people you hardly know
• gravitating toward disrespectful people and being uninterested in kind, supportive ones
• being overly dependent on a partner for your sense of self-worth (codependency) 
• allowing people to dominate conversations, or dominating them yourself
• letting people touch or hug you when you don’t want to touch or hug them
• saying what you think people want to hear, especially when you don’t mean it
• sexual promiscuity
• on the other side, keeping up walls and not letting people get close to you even when it is appropriate to do so.

There are more, but you get the idea: bad boundaries are about not knowing how to take good emotional care of yourself. And you usually learn this when you grow up in a family that doesn’t value your emotional well being. Another way of saying this is that having bad boundaries is an emotional lie you were taught so other people could get what they wanted from you. And emotional lies are the very hardest of all to discover, accept, and overcome.

Why are emotional lies so hard to come to terms with? Because they serve such a powerful purpose: they protect us from emotional truths that are painful to accept. Also, these lies often begin at birth and are fully ingrained in us by the time we’re able to talk, so it can be extremely difficult to even know they’re there! Even when all the symptoms are obvious, it can take years of therapy and “reparenting” to understand why, and we usually do so only in retrospect.

What are these emotional truths we want so badly to avoid facing? They vary as widely as the circumstances that foster them, but generally distill down to something along these lines: my parents didn’t value me enough, didn’t nurture me enough, or didn’t love me enough. And that is tough stuff to deal with.

This is why it can be so difficult to change certain habits: doing so brings us too close to confronting things we don’t want to confront, things we’ve been protecting ourselves from since we were too young to know we were protecting ourselves. Having poor boundaries, however it manifests itself, is part of a childhood defense mechanism that reduces our anxiety to acceptable levels. Here’s how it works: by giving our emotionally distant (or overly dependent, or abusive, or whatever other form the emotional invalidation may take) parent what he or she wants, even if it is a violation of our own well being, we gain enough approval to feel safe. But we don’t tell ourselves this is what we’re doing; we tell ourselves our parent gave us approval, so he or she must love us. There aren’t a lot of other choices, because this is what we need to believe when we’re too little to fend for ourselves. But in doing this, we internalize the belief that love means giving too much of ourselves and getting far too little in return.

And that, by and large, is how poor boundaries are born, and why boundary setting can feel so foreign, frightening, or impossible. If you’ve ever read about boundary setting, thought to yourself, “that’s simple enough,” and then been completely unable to follow through with the behavior, it’s likely that you have underlying causes that need attention. If so, practice some self-love (which may also feel foreign and uncomfortable!) and pay attention to them. As painful as it may initially be, the release, freedom and sense of personal power you’ll eventually feel is well worth it.

Yes, it is possible, with tenacity and practice, that you may get better at setting boundaries even if you don’t dig deeper. But why would you want to? That would be like living with a broken leg your whole life when you had every opportunity to get it set. People do it, but it’s a huge and needless emotional handicap, and a fundamentally dishonest approach to life. Nobody should have to (or want to) live like that.

That said, there are some practical considerations that can help with boundary setting, preferably in conjunction with digging deeper, and not as a substitute for it. This will be the subject of my next post.

Finally, I think it is important to mention that most parents who “teach” their children bad boundaries do not do so intentionally or malevolently. Most parents are simply fallible humans with imperfect child rearing skills. Most people with poor boundaries grew up with them, and if they haven’t worked through them, then they’ll inevitably pass some on to their children. Which, by the way, is another excellent reason to dig into your issues: to stop the family pattern and spare your children some of the struggles you’ve had to deal with.

A recent comment from Cheryl on The Meaning of Good Listening asked for tips on managing one-sided conversations when you’re in the middle of them. I thought it was such a great question that I decided to write a post about it.

As I said in my reply to Cheryl, one-sided conversations can really feel awful. For me, I think that’s because it re-creates my childhood situation of not feeling heard, which really meant that I didn’t feel valued. Sometimes, after such a conversation, I feel rageful, ruminating for hours about what I should have said and how I should have handled it differently–and worst of all, blaming myself because I couldn’t “get through” to the person and “make” him hear me. It doesn’t even have to be anyone I’m close to; in fact, these days, it usually isn’t. Any sense of being a prop for somebody else’s conversational needs can set off this chain of negativity in my head. It doesn’t happen as often as it once did, but it will still happen occasionally; as they say in the 12 Step world, progress not perfection. And I am grateful for the progress I’ve made, and for the things I’ve figured out not only about my reactions, but about why people do this, as well.

The primary thing I’ve figured out is that people are self-centered conversation dominators because of their own neediness and desire to be heard. The reason I know this is that I’ve noticed when I do it, this is how I’m feeling. We all have noise in our heads that makes it hard to hear other people sometimes; for some people, that noise is going on all the time. This noise consists mostly of wanting approval, wanting to be liked, and wanting to be heard. People who talk too much and listen too little are particularly needy. They want to be heard, to be seen as important, to impress you with their wit, their experiences, or their knowledge. Ironically, they dominate conversations in the hope of gaining approval. We should have compassion for the conversation dominators and try to be as kind as possible to them (just as we should for ourselves when we notice our own neediness). This is the kindest attitude, but also the one that has the most potential of giving someone enough confidence to maybe someday stop posturing and actually have a real conversation with you.

Having said all that, it is also important to take care of yourself in the face of this behavior. Just because you understand that someone’s boorish behavior stems from his own neediness is no reason to let him take you conversational hostage. Your time is just as valuable as his, and if you find yourself feeling anxious or resentful, then you need to have a way to excuse yourself from the conversation. Although others equal it, there might be no greater self-care skill than knowing how to set boundaries with finesse. Here are a few tactics I have found to work well:

Interrupt, or wait for a lull, and in a gentle voice say you have something to do (which is always true!). You can simply and politely excuse yourself from a conversation. People may think you rude, but you can’t live your life worrying about what other people think. If it makes you feel better, you can approach the person later or send him an email and apologize for your abruptness. Just don’t let your guilt get the upper hand and stay on after you’ve said you need to leave.

Steer the conversation toward a more relevant topic. Oftentimes, conversation dominators don’t want a dialogue, they just want to talk. You can use this to your advantage. If you are being held hostage by a chronic complainer, offer them helpful information. If someone is talking about her abusive relationship, for example, sympathize profusely, then tell her the name of a good therapist or a good book. If someone is complaining about a job situation, tell her how you handled it and how well it worked. The point is that the more you try to help them solve their problem, the less they will want to talk to you about it. There is also a huge upside to this: if this person ever does actually want help, then they will know where to get some! As always, taking care of ourselves is the best way to take care of other people, too.

Quit trying to engage and let the conversation feel as one-sided to the other person as it does to you. This one I have found to be particularly effective. If you’ve made several attempts to respond and the person ignores them, then just stand or sit quietly after they’ve finished talking. Don’t be rude. Keep smiling and being polite. But when the dead air comes, don’t try to fill it. Not a single “hmmm” or “uh-huh” or “that’s awful.” Just smile into the lull and see what happens. This might feel very awkward at first, but resist talking. This person is counting on your conversational prompts to keep their monologue flowing, and if they cease to come, it will upset the pattern. He may not get it at first, and keep talking to fill the lull himself, but eventually, he will get the message. Furthermore, after doing this a few times, you’ll be flagged in his head as someone he can’t bamboozle into a conversational corner anymore, and next time he needs a prop, he’ll look elsewhere.

It is entirely possible to do both: set boundaries, and be kind. And while being able to take care of yourself in the midst of other people’s inconsiderateness is important, even more important is gaining deeper awareness of the underlying issues, which I’m going to address in my next post.

If you love something, set it free…

Contrary to popular belief, hate is not the opposite of love. Control is the opposite of love.

In many ways, control is a good thing. People should strive for control in many areas of their lives: they should have control over their finances, over their careers, over their schedules, over their driving, over their eating and exercise habits, and for the most part, over their children. They should be in control of their emotions, of their actions, and of their reactions. People should always exercise self-control to the best of their abilities, and also be ever mindful about improving those abilities in areas where they fall short.

But we should not try to control other people. This applies to all people, but in particular to those we profess to love. In fact, I think it is correct to say that the amount of control we try to wield over another person is inversely proportional to the amount of love we truly have for them.

If we define love as “deep care and affection for another person, romantic or otherwise,” and control as “to exercise restraint or direction over,” (both definitions from dictionary.com) then we begin to see how love and control are opposites: if you have deep care and affection for another person, then how can you also want to control him? The whole idea of control implies a lack of concern for the other person’s desires and a clear interest in fulfilling your own (although such tactics show a poor understanding of how to do so). This is why “restraint and direction,” when used on someone other than yourself, have nothing to do with love.

Control occurs in situations of uneven power: boss/employee, soldier/officer, teacher/student, policeman/suspect, etc. These are impersonal hierarchies, and part of how a society functions normally. This is not to say that all social controls are good, or that we shouldn’t constantly be questioning their legitimacy, because they aren’t, and we should. But the need for hierarchies and social controls to exist is not really a questionable concept. If there weren’t the means to control people’s behavior in a society, then might would always make right, and it would be extremely difficult to accomplish anything of value.

In the personal realm, however, people try to control others for reasons having nothing to do with protection of rights or maintaining a free exchange of ideas, goods, and services. People try to control those close to them when they feel threatened or insecure. They have an attachment that they do not want to end, and they use whatever means of control possible to hang onto it. Or, they want something but don’t want to ask directly for it, so they try to get it by using manipulation and dishonesty.

We are all guilty of control at times. We all form attachments, and we all occasionally act out of fear or insecurity in the interest of hanging onto those attachments. Nobody gets through life without doing some of this. But if we want to have good relationships with the people we care about, we need to be aware of our controlling tendencies and work to overcome them. Because personal relationships that aren’t based on mutual care, respect, and equality are dismal, and utterly unable to bring any real satisfaction to either person. This applies not only to romantic partners, but relatives, friends, and children, as well.

Controlling behavior in personal relationships takes many forms. There is the woman who controls her partner with sex; the man who controls his partner with physical force; the mother who controls her children with guilt; the child who controls his parents with intimidation. Also, there are more subtle forms, like the delicate flower who is too “sensitive” to be told anything negative, or the master manipulator who controls through cold silences and facial expressions of shame, disappointment, and derision. There are so many ways for people to have dishonest, manipulative relationships with each other, it would be impossible to list them all. The main thing to remember is that if communication isn’t direct, honest, and respectful, then there is some form of manipulation, thus some attempt at control, going on.

Communicating openly and honestly all the time is scary. It means exposing ourselves to ridicule, rejection, and loss; it means people might go away; and it means confronting the truth about our own attachments and desires. It’s no wonder we are weak and cowardly, when there is so much at stake! But the alternative–using ploys to control other people so as to minimize our own risk and anxiety–is much, much worse, offering no hope for satisfying relationships or any sense of self-respect. Attempting to get what you want from personal relationships with control and manipulation is a primary form of unenlightened selfishness. It makes no one happy, brings no contentment, and actually results in the opposite of what the controller intends by making a relationship less intimate and caring rather than more so.

Hate is not the opposite of love. Hate is just another strong emotion, no more opposite of love than fear or joy. Control is the opposite of love because it is the antithesis of a loving attitude, which consists of honesty, respect, and encouraging the people you care about to do what makes them happy, whether you are part of it or not.

Introspection, as I talked about in my last post, is the process of looking within and determining who you are and where your values lie. To continue with this topic, I think it is important to view introspection as an entirely selfish process, and to understand what that means and why it is a good thing–why selfishness is, in truth, the only path that can lead to personal development.

I attended a women’s therapy group for about 4 years. In it, I learned this general rule of therapy–not always, but often, true–that women need to focus on autonomy, while men need to focus on communion. This is because women will generally err on the side of building too many bridges and not enough walls, while men will err on the side of building too many walls and not enough bridges.

So in my therapy group, we did a lot of work on developing a stronger sense of self: on not defining ourselves by our relationships, on setting boundaries, on examining the roots of our neediness and finding more autonomous ways to deal with them (“reparenting” ourselves, for example, rather than looking to another person to fill our emotional neediness). As an example of why it is so important to develop autonomy, I heard the story about the oxygen mask hundreds of times: When there is an emergency situation on an airplane, oxygen masks pop out of the cabin ceiling so people can get oxygen if needed. If a woman is on the plane with her infant child, her natural instinct is to give the child oxygen first, then give it to herself. But for the child’s own good, as the stewardesses will explain, she must do the opposite: she must give herself the oxygen first, then administer it to the child. The child will not survive without her, so she must attend to her own well being first for the sake of the child.

The point, of course, is that we must take care of ourselves before we can take care of anybody else; we must attend to our own needs before we can truly attend to the needs of others. This is what I call enlightened selfishness, and I think it goes far beyond boundary-setting and dealing with codependency. I think it is the core of personal growth itself.

The oxygen mask story is, I think, a decent metaphor showing how “selflessness” is not a practical worldview. In fact, there is really no such thing as selflessness. There are only more and more sophisticated stages of selfishness.

Being selfish is not bad or wrong, it is simply the state of being alive. As long as we inhabit a physical body–in other words, always–we are driven by “selfish” biological needs: water, food, air, sleep. Survival itself is a “selfish” desire, as it is the wish that your “self” will continue existing. And why do we want our “self” to continue existing? Because, even in the midst of angst, pain, and suffering, we basically enjoy being conscious, and all the things that go along with it: emotions, thoughts, desires–ideally, more and better stages of each as we grow and change. Even the desire for enlightenment is a selfish one, even if that desire is rooted in a desire to be of service to others. It is still a desire, and therefore, selfish.

Selflessness, then, is the opposite of fulfilling the self’s needs. It is sacrificing your “self,” but not for something greater; this would feel good, and thus, it would be selfish. Selflessness would be desiring to serve others and not doing so. Selflessness is about self-denial, not about being of service. Putting others people’s needs ahead of your can be noble, but it is not selfless–unless you hated being of service to others and did so anyway.

I’m not sure how these ideas got so confused, how selfishness became equated with vice and selflessness with virtue. Perhaps because of the “self-sacrifice” of Jesus on the cross, or the “selfless” heroism of people who risk their lives to save others (such as firemen and policeman). But if we look closer at these examples, the selfless motives begin to unravel. Jesus did not voluntarily seek crucifixion. He was sentenced to it, along with countless other enemies of the Roman state in that time. It was his followers, in the wake of his passing, who turned it into a sacrificial myth of epic proportions, of giving his life so that all of mankind could be saved. Jesus’ message of brotherly love and understanding was one of enlightened selfishness, not selflessness. He understood the spiritual truth that we are all connected, all one entity, that to harm another person is to harm yourself, and that to love other people is to love yourself. How did Jesus reach this point? Through the selfish processes of introspection and meditation, borne of the selfish desire to understand his true nature and that of the world. If we were all so selfish, the world would be a much nicer place.

And heroism, while greatly romanticized, rarely arises out of a pure desire to help others. It usually has a more complex mix of motives. Sometimes, heroism is an impulse that overtakes people almost beyond their will, as in jumping into a river to save a drowning stranger. This impulse is something we are all capable of, rooted in that same fundamental truth that Jesus discovered, which is that we are all indelibly connected, although a person who just saved a stranger probably couldn’t put that into words. As for people who make a living being heroes, such as fireman and policeman, they always have some selfish reason for what they do. It may be a desire for admiration, a way to gain respect, a way to feel powerful, or a way to feel useful to the community. Even if the desire is purely that of wanting to help people, it is still selfish, simply because this desire is a component of the person’s self. Again, selflessness would be having that desire, and doing something that didn’t fulfill it.

You may call this an issue of semantics, saying that whether you call it selflessness or enlightened selfishness, it amounts to the same thing. But selflessness is a state of self-denial, and its glorification creates confusion and guilt about the most basic human impulse to fulfill our desires and pursue what makes us happy. If you’ve ever felt guilty for doing what you want, then you know what I’m talking about. Rather than a noble virtue, selflessness is more a term of manipulation used by people (parents, church, public education, etc.) to make you do what they want. Understanding this and being able to refute it on rational grounds is a powerful self-actualization tool. (Self-actualization: yet another form of selfishness we all strive for, whether consciously aware of it or not.)

It is far more helpful, and rational, to understand what most people call selflessness to be enlightened selfishness. We all start out completely narcissistic, literally incapable of seeing beyond our own needs. The more we develop, the less narcissistic we become. But becoming less narcissistic does not mean becoming less self-ish; it means gaining perspective on what the “self” really is. Thus, an adult primarily concerned with material possessions and unconcerned with the needs of other people is still highly narcissistic and has not achieved a very sophisticated level of understanding about his “self.” A person concerned with the well being of people close to him is less narcissistic, and has thus reached a higher level of understanding about self. And a person who is concerned with the well being of everyone on the planet has reached an even higher stage, truly understanding that loving himself is identical to loving other people, and vice versa.

This process of outgrowing our narcissism and reaching higher levels of understanding about what the self is cannot be undertaken on a selfless basis. Personal growth is a selfish process, one we do out of our own desire to become more whole and more complete. It is a pure and good desire, and there is no reason to feel guilty about or ashamed of it. Without “selfish” desire, there is no passion, no enthusiasm, no joy: no self. Life is an empty shell.

Not only must we attend to our own needs, we must do so consciously and deliberately, without guilt and with the understanding that our “self” is all we really have–but that we can expand its scope almost infinitely. The only questions that matter, then, are “What are my true heart’s desires?” and “How do I go about achieving them?”

Selfish? Gloriously so.

Isn’t it a relief to admit it?

In “Yes, It Really Was That Bad,” I talked about how accepting the truth of childhood invalidation is key to dealing with emotional problems in the present and in this sense, is a pivotal factor of personal growth. While I do believe this to be the case, and encourage anyone struggling with emotional pain to do this work, my beliefs have evolved over the years, and I’ve been having trouble articulating what this means. I’ve been trying to get at it with articles like It’s Not About the Blame and First, Look Within. And while these ideas are true, and important, I think I’ve finally figured out what I’ve been trying to say in addition to this.

My thoughts on personal growth boil down to two basic aspects (or at least, today they do):

1. All people suffer, not just those of us who seek help to deal with it.
2. All personal development requires understanding of yourself.

The Common Condition of Suffering
There is a popular perception that people who seek out therapy or self-help groups to heal from emotional pain are narcissistic, vacuous, and flaky, and that therapy only causes people to focus on the wrong things–a past they cannot change, for example. As a graduate of self-help groups and therapy alike (and several different types of each!), I can say from experience that this perception is somewhat accurate. I know many people who get stuck in the victim mentality of the early stages of healing, that place where we begin to realize that yes, it really was that bad and that hey, I deserved better. It’s an easy place to get stuck for many reasons. One is that nursing our wounds feels good; righteous anger feels good, especially when it’s been buried inside for so long. Another is that a victim mentality provides an instant lowest common denominator, a sense of belonging, with other people in the same situation; some of the most powerful bonds are those formed with people we meet in the early stages of recovery, when emotions run hot and the sense of self-discovery is new and exhilarating. Understandably, many people hesitate to leave that behind. Yet another reason is that therapists often encourage people to stay in this spot, as ruminating on our past is what pays their bills (I know this sounds cynical, but it happens). And finally, it’s just easier–less emotionally demanding–to stay stuck at the wound-nursing phase than to move past it.

But maybe the biggest reason that therapy/self-help seekers are seen as narcissistic is that frequently, we act as though we have a corner on human suffering; yes, it really was that bad translates into I had it way worse than most people on the planet. Which of course is not true, but because we’re focused on our pain in a way that people not in therapy can’t relate to, it can seem that way, to both us and them, particularly for those in the early stages of healing (or those stuck in the early stages).

This, I finally figured out, is what I’ve been trying to articulate: Those of us struggling to overcome adverse childhoods aren’t alone in our emotional pain, but sometimes, perhaps because due to the self-involved nature of trying to put back together the disowned pieces of ourselves, we act as though we are.

Everybody suffers; this is the First Noble Truth of Buddhism. We are all afraid and insecure, isolated and anxious; we all have self-doubts and self-criticisms; we’ve all been mistreated, and we all carry a burden of emotional pain. This is the unavoidable human condition. People in therapy may talk more openly about their pain, but they by no means have an exclusive market on it. Suffering is a boat shared by all humanity.

Thus, while much of what I write is about those early stages of healing, of the rather self-absorbed process of coming to terms with inner demons, the process applies to everybody, because everybody has emotional pain. Because abuse and addiction (for example) are part of my history, they’re what I write about. But you don’t have to have had these same experiences to relate to the process. Everyone can benefit from looking within and discovering who they are on a deeper level, even if their goals have little to do with figuring any of this out, which brings me to my next point, and which I’ll talk about in my next post.