One day, whether you are 14, 28, or 65, you will stumble upon someone who will start a fire in you that cannot die. However, the saddest, most awful truth you will ever come to find – is they are not always with whom we spend our lives.
-Hunting Season by Beau Taplin
How should we spend our lives? And if not with those who set us ablaze with wonder, then with whom? Put a different way, is life too short to spend it with bullshit people and their bullshit antics, or does the magic reside in being able to swim in another’s depths?
Balancing our individual needs with/against the needs of those around us has been a theme running through much of what I’ve read and listened to this past week. An article about therapy-speak and selfishness made the rounds on Twitter which sent me to a different article about cutting toxic people out of our lives. The podcasts I listened to covered neediness, silencing the inner critic, and playing the role of the virtuous victim. All of these things seem to center on how to be true to ourselves and compassionate with others given the feverish pace and overwhelming amount of noise that exists in modern society.
Twitter lives and dies by the tempest in teapot moments. There’s always some new tweet that everyone is talking about, debating, or simply mocking. And outside of major national or international trends, going viral can be deceivingly local depending on how one’s feed is curated. There are topics I’ll see, and it’ll feel like everyone is commenting on that topic when really it’s just some guy Stu and the eleven people I follow who are also associated with Stu.
Last week, “Stu” and his eleven followers were all talking about the article “Is Therapy-Speak Making Us Selfish?” The primary concern of the article seems to be that people, especially younger people (almost everyone interviewed is under the age of 35), are ending friendships with all the warmth and understanding of an HR severance letter. Without the benefit of a corrective action plan, they’re using therapy-speak as their reason to terminate and deny unemployment. Pack your things, security will escort you out, you’re banned from the premises. This is an at-will friendship and I can terminate at any point without cause. An example of the type of therapy-speak people are using reads:
“I’m in a place where I’m trying to honor my needs and act in alignment with what feels right within the scope of my life, and I’m afraid our friendship doesn’t seem to fit in that framework,” the friend wrote. “I can no longer hold the emotional space you’ve wanted me to, and think the support you need is beyond the scope of what I can offer.”
To me, that sounds awful. The debate, of course, is whether we’re becoming too focused on the “scope of our lives” and “framework of our needs and boundaries” to “hold space” for others. Is this no-nonsense approach to self-prioritization at the expense of learning how to negotiate our needs with the needs of others? It’s as if we’re forgetting that there are other people on the other end of these conversations. I tend to believe that breaking up with friends should be a little harder than turning down a business client. As the author states, “And when you’re on the other side of someone’s perhaps overzealous self-care, the experience can range from annoying, to frustrating, to downright hurtful.”
Back in August, The Atlantic ran an article “That’s It, You’re Dead to Me.” It too, looks at the seemingly growing trend (especially among young people) of deeming anyone who causes emotional distress as toxic – the cure for which seems to be an abrupt cutting off. Both articles cite the small cottage industry of tik-tok videos on how to cut toxic people out of one’s life as examples of this perceived change in attitudes towards friendships and the self and how we honor our true selves.
If you’re on social media at all, you’ve seen the memes. I have a few Facebook friends who frequently share self-assured “nuggets of wisdom” – all of which hinge on the certitude of dualistic thinking. “People inspire you or drain you. Choose wisely.” No doubt, that for anyone suffering through relationship or friendship drama, that can feel empowering. But if we’re being honest, it’s a bullshit statement with bullshit advice. A more honest and helpful approach would be to say, “people inspire you AND drain you. Learn to accept the one and mitigate or cope with the other.” I’m all for surrounding oneself with things and people who bring joy, but eliminating the things that drain us would leave most of us unemployed, friendless, possibly homeless, and without family.
From an evolutionary perspective, I understand the need to identify threats, label them, and avoid them. What these articles are describing feels like something different. This feels as though our pursuit of self-care may be making us shallowly selfish, or less tolerant, or less patient (perhaps all three). In focusing on self-care (which is important), it’s becoming easier to assume the role of the virtuous victim. The convenience of this approach is that it allows us to project a sense of heroism in our own story. It allows us to make the narrative be about the strength and fortitude required to walk away from bad situations (“toxic” people). What seems to get left out of these narratives is the alternative to walking away, the alternative to writing someone off as toxic. I’d argue the more difficult work, the work that requires real strength is to see beyond “toxic,” and sit in discomfort or work through difficult (not necessarily bad) situations. The difficult work is to set boundaries, adhere to them, and work within them. That usually means being present (within one’s limits) as opposed to walking away.
I listen to a few of self-help-ish podcasts. I listen to interviews with psychologists and poets and researchers. I do the medium-hard work of trying to understand the human condition (the hard work would be to read books on these things). As such, the cookie-cutter wisdom of Facebook and Twitter memes, gets under my skin a bit. I’ve spent the last few years trying to understand the nuances in humans and human relationships. I’ve done a fairly deep dive into self-reflection hoping that by recognizing my own contradictions, I might learn to be more compassionate towards others. Based on these articles, that may not be the direction our society is choosing… Though here is where it’s important to remind ourselves that the younger generation is far more accepting of cultural, racial, and gender differences than previous generations.
And maybe that acceptance of differences is contributing to the problem (if there is indeed a problem). Maybe, being accepting of more things provides greater choices in life which has the effect of decreasing our willingness to stick things out. If you don’t like the situation, change it and/or move on.
Among the podcasts I listened to recently, Hidden Brain did an episode on the topic of virtuous victims – more specifically those who cry wolf or simply lie so they might be seen as victims or as having suffered hardships. As an example, it shared a study that showed more than a third of white students lied about their race on college applications. While not mentioned in the podcast, we recently had a president who incessantly claimed to be the victim of the worst personal attacks in all of history. Why would this work? The ah-ha moment in the podcast was the speculation that as we become more tolerant and accepting, we will also see more people willing to exploit that tolerance and acceptance – a supply and demand model of emotional capital. Add to this the pressures of time (technology and social media seem to have sped up the pace of life), then it’s no wonder that we are taking the quickest routes to gaining attention and sympathy and self-worth. We can become the hero of our story if we can quickly identify (and banish) the villain.
And so it seems we find ourselves in this predicament of being more accepting and also less accepting. It’s as if all of our therapy-speak, whether it be about compassion for others or self-care, has been boiled down to the language of bumper stickers. Watching the debate play out on Twitter, I began to wonder if this is really about self-care, boundaries and therapy-speak, or more about the commodification of that language and the all-too-human tendency to look for shortcuts. It’s as if we’ve provided useful tools, but inadequate time and training on how to use them. Sure, the bath water may be dirty, and the baby is crying, but have we paused long enough (before throwing both out) to ask ourselves why these things bother us so?
Unfortunately, much of the platitude-driven advice found on social media is tailored for what social media is so good at doing for us: giving us this little dopamine hits of self-satisfaction and righteousness. I’d argue, that most of us need to go deeper than the meme. If we find ourselves in a truly toxic relationship (and they do exist), we should get out of it, but then ask ourselves (in a gentle way) how did I get there in the first place? Is this a pattern with me? One of the things I liked about the book Be The Person You Want to Find is that it acknowledges we are all selfish and needy and demanding and controlling – depending on who is doing the judging. It challenges us to bring the beauty we see in others into ourselves and also to recognize the the things we dislike about others as parts of our self,
The biggest issue I have with all of this is how reductive the conversation is. I’ve met quite a few people who have talked about past relationships in terms of toxicity and narcissism, and I’m always left wondering how much of it is true. This, in turn, makes me very uncomfortable. I believe that we should believe victims and their claims of mistreatment and abuse – but that might be getting harder to suss out. An important question seems to be how do we, as a society, encourage healthy conflict when we’re being trained to label every type of conflict as abuse?
Navigating these waters is front of mind for me as I think about what I might want in a partner and in a community. For the longest time, I had a statement on my dating profile that said I can hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time. I think that’s important. I think it’s important to work with others as we work on ourselves. One of the accounts I follow on Twitter (one of Stu’s 11 friends who weighed in on the therapy-speak conversation) recently shared:
For a long time, I saw myself as a perpetual victim in relationships. I wanted everyone I was with to change so I could feel better and that their emotional unavailability or ‘issues’ were their problem. Until I saw relationships as my mirror.
I think an important part of self-care is having relationships that can serve as mirrors… the breaking down of self-delusion… the gentle nudges through discomfort towards more honest versions of our self. That feels like the fire within that doesn’t die – the boldness to practice mutual healing, effective dependency, and the celebration of having our orbits knocked and wobbled.