On the problematic aspects of enthusiastic consent

On the problematic aspects of enthusiastic consent. Photo by Brady, with nephew's parental consent. 2021.
On the problematic aspects of enthusiastic consent. Photo by Brady, with nephew’s parental consent. 2021.

“If I don’t get a ‘hell yeah’ then it’s gonna be an automatic ‘hell no’ from me. I’ve no time anymore for fake love, and those are just my boundaries. I’ll only accept enthusiastic consent from now on.”

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The preface that I like to give when I talk about, explore, and examine enthusiastic consent, is that within the scope of my practice, and many years working with abusers and abused, often one and the same, I’m familiar with many, “tools,” that people use for seemingly good reasons, that consciously or unconsciously, are used as weapons. I know enthusiastic consent far more as that: an effective weapon more than as a helpful tool. I also know many people who refuse to give up their weapons and the power they carry, especially the tested and highly effective ones.

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To begin, I professionally and personally know of far too many people overcoming long histories of being forced to show happiness, delight, enthusiasm, joy, as the only way to access parental, familial, or social resources. I know of far too many cases where that same display, that performance of enthusiasm, was used against a person later as a defense against any criticism, or perhaps linguistically, “How can you say it was bad, because you were soo happy?” It is a tangled knot to unwind, how a performance meant to guarantee consent can also be used coercively against the performer later if the performance ever falters, and yet I know many who have lived with that corrosive pressure of performing enthusiasm.

Additionally, with so much societal and social media talk of trauma and abuse coming from emotional manipulation, it seems odd to me that there isn’t more pushback against enthusiastic consent as a standard. That it isn’t broadly seen as triggering for those that were held to performative, rigid, and overdone expressions… does make a little sense though. Most folks don’t realize that they may be continuing patterns of manipulation or harm because they believe their good intentions couldn’t possibly cause harm, and yet, that is exactly how problematic aspects operate: not believing something to be harmful allows for harm to go unseen.

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I also know many people who would refuse to give up their weapons, especially the tested and highly effective ones.
Regarding vulnerability, generally the one initiating or the one asking for something is in the more vulnerable position, because within that initiation or request, there is now an opening for rejection. But to only allow for enthusiastic consent is to, in its own artful way, be in the classically vulnerable position of asking but not being vulnerable. Perhaps worse than not being vulnerable, it is defensively anticipating the taking away of the request, waiting to withhold, or prepared to reject, if the performance isn’t good enough.

Within that anticipation, there’s a ground of hostility, unconscious perhaps, in waiting to reject someone for not being enthusiastic enough. Perhaps there is some unacknowledged anger in even asking for consent, but asking and waiting to reject for a lack of enthusiasm isn’t allowing for another to accept as they would want, but only as they are allowed to accept. This is where power dynamics tangle up, because freely consenting on one’s own terms is disallowed, but additionally, another may not be able to freely consent too; children, employees, those intoxicated, and various other conditions may be present that do not allow for the capacity to consent, and to ask for enthusiasm when one cannot consent is an altogether different kind of cruel.

The acceptance of a freely given yes as a yes, or a no as a no from those that can freely consent is then subverted with enthusiastic consent, as if to say: it needs to be performed correctly and to standard. Therefore the one asking for consent is also the judge of when a yes is a yes, or when a no is a no. It is the very same controlling dynamic that is present in, “I’ll decided if your no is a no,” that is present in, “I’ll decide if your yes is a yes.” And enthusiastic consent operates on the same problematic grounds of judging performances.

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Perhaps there is some unacknowledged anger in even asking for consent, but asking and waiting to reject for a lack of enthusiasm isn’t allowing for another to accept as they would want, but only as they are allowed to accept…

The danger in the manipulative element, and in the performative element, are there, but there’s also a danger in the corrosive element of enthusiasm as the standard. The desire for enthusiasm makes a certain kind of sense from the classic domestic violence model. Enthusiasm, overjoyed happiness, adoration, love-bombing, can feel like the only valid expression of love that can be trusted as firmly certain. Any other expression of feeling is felt as restrained anger waiting to explode, as experience and history would indicate. To be even more overly reductionistic within that classic model: there is ‘feeling good,’ ‘soon to be bad,’ and ‘bad.’ As the ‘bad’ becomes more volatile, more destructive, what is felt as ‘soon to be bad’ takes over more nuanced expressions, and good expressions become narrowed into even stricter expressions. Enthusiasm somehow remains, and that seemingly good display of enthusiasm and love, is an only ever shrinking resting place of calm in that volatile cycle, but it also dangerously keeps that very same cycle going. 

When only the biggest of displays, the biggest of feelings, are the acceptable minimum, other feelings become less valid along that spectrum as well. Softer feelings, gentler expressions, lighter displays aren’t as valid, and in time, simply direct feelings, clear expressions, and honest displays aren’t seen as valid enough rather than the bigger, more enthusiastic ones. With that highest of emotional standards, anything else can only be less; anything nuanced is likely lost.

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There is an earnestness in the tool of enthusiastic consent: giving permission to say no if one is not excited. The simple earnestness of that tool, even for its intended aim, can be wielded destructively. One can, in this exact way, consent without enthusiasm and want it to be received as unconsenting, manipulative, as it were, to say no without saying no. The unintended harm in this, then, is furthering indirect if deceptive communication as valid as direct communication.

Perhaps the shadow of the tool itself, and a tool that is meant to encourage listening and mutual understanding, discourages listening in favor of indirect control.

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With enthusiastic consent, to give an uncertain yet trusting yes, isn’t good enough; to give a gentle yet hopeful yes, isn’t good enough; to give a small but curious yes, isn’t good enough; to give an honorable yes because the question was even asked, isn’t good enough. There is a right response and only one right response allowed when it comes to enthusiastic consent… 

My hope would be that when softer expressions of consent are heard, they are heard and accepted as they are, and that the response in kind, were equally kind; a gentle touch of yes received with an equally gentle and accepting touch of that yes.

About the Author

Brady

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I'm a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in private practice down in the greater Long Beach, CA, area. I've been in the mental health field, formally, since 2005, and I consider it a deep and rewarding honor to see other people grow and live the lives that they want. If I'm not sitting on a couch with a cup of tea in hand, I'm probably on my bicycle, or lost in my own thoughts on the beach; meditating, tweeting, blogging, and talking into a video camera are also known to happen.

On the idea of a safe space

On the idea of a safe space. Photo by Brady 2021.

On the idea of a safe space. Photo by Brady 2021.

“I’m really looking for therapy to be a safe space for me; just a good non-judgmental place to explore myself. But also, I didn’t really connect well with my last therapist because I didn’t feel that they were very open. You know?”

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As far as first impressions go, whenever I hear this sentiment from a new person coming into my practice, my first thought is: “oh, do I know… and you’ve shared more about your defensiveness than you probably intended.” And it is almost as if an imperceptible boxing bell dings somewhere between us, and another fated first round begins a minute past the hour. 

I know what is implied, though not directly stated, and that is that defensive if hostile lines have already been drawn by the person wanting a safe space. On my end, I know by conventional definitions that a safe space is a place where a person isn’t under attack, isn’t in harms way, and won’t suffer discrimination. In truth; I don’t technically disagree. However, a person can feel discriminated and disbelieved in the most banal of standard assessment questions, can feel under attack when challenged to try something a different way, or they can feel harmed when destructive and abusive behavior are not co-signed. It is a tricky initial moment, because even exploring what a person means or truly wants when they’re making that statement may be felt as an attack or critical of that desire. 

It is a request, yes, but also a statement that what they would want, they also might not be able to accept, and are likely to sabotage.

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When a person says they don’t want judgment, I also hear an anticipatory resistance, in that they may have a difficult time accepting all kinds of judgment, including the judgment of respect.
Loosely speaking, having someone else explore your world and your thoughts and your feelings, can feel implicitly unsafe. Sharing one’s innermost thoughts and feelings to another person has an intrinsic vulnerability, so it makes sense that there would be some degree of fear and uncertainty about being safe in that moment. Maybe more unconscious fear is felt that cannot be articulated, because, “you know.” In truth, I don’t quite know what it means for another. I do know that safety is consciously felt, but unconsciously confirmed, when a person is guarded and defensive.

It is a curious thing then, a classic psychoanalytic encounter getting deeper into conscious and unconscious material, wherein a person wants to be understood, but guardedly and defensively doesn’t want there to be a process to understand or for there to be a process to relate. This shows up when a person wants to be heard, and yet, when evidence of listening is presented, often in the form of identifying incongruent thinking, hearing opposing motivations, or noticing incompatible goals… rather than exploring that, a person can become defensive at the slightest hint of being seen. It is an offense-as-defense tactic that would argue that I, the shrink in the room demonstrating my desire to understand them, also is proving that I do not understand them. When, in truth, my own attempt to explore how those incongruent thoughts might make sense for them, how those motivations might have a unifying core in their personality, or to try to more clearly see them in their goals, is an act of connecting; connecting therefore breaks the illusion that connection magically happens.

The work of connecting to a person might also feel like disconnection. Further along, other than desiring connection, there is also a fairly common assumption of what constitutes judgment in that opening stance. That is, the only judgments that would count as judgment for them are probably disrespect, worthlessness, wrongfulness, or simply hate. There is a double-bind in that narrow definition; since those are the judgments that counts as judgment, someone worried about being judged will look for those judgments and also be more inclined to interpret interactions through that narrow definition. More loosely, this typically looks like a person quick to deem others as, “always having to be right,” but somehow seem to erase moments when another person genuinely agrees with them, as if those moments don’t count as judgment, and the judgment of respect. This is all a long and roundabout way for me to say that when a person says they don’t want judgment, I also hear an anticipatory resistance, in that they may have a difficult time accepting all kinds of judgment, including the judgment of respect, esteem, validity, worthiness, and also, at its core, the deepest judgment of yes: love. 

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A person that wants a safe space, almost without exception, thinks of it in terms of how others would act, but not in terms of how they alone would act in that space.
A safe space isn’t an unspoken agreement to always agree with another person, and create a frictionless echo chamber; though many people would believe it were only that. The belief that there is also safety, not in guardedness, but in that fantasy of conflict-free if seamless agreement, well, that’s another defense guarding a deeper fantasy of how relationships operate. More casually, a person who believes that way has probably never felt respected by someone who also disagreed with them, so a disagreement must be disrespect, so it all would feel judgmental and unsafe. To be in disagreement with one’s therapist, for some, can feel like a deeper betrayal of trust because the stakes are even higher and the expectations even greater; the fantasy of a mythic safe space must be persevered at all costs, and the fantasy can’t be wrong, so it must be another that is wrong. In this problematic if formulaic instance, it is the therapist alone that cannot make the person feel safe, so the therapist must not be open, must not be connecting, must not be providing the safe space. That a therapist, alone, is responsible for a person to feel safe, is a lovely fantasy, and I wish that were the case and it were that easy. Truly.

Unfortunately, I find it very telling that a person that wants a safe space, almost without exception, frames it in terms of how others would act, but not in terms of how they themselves would act in that space. To think of a safe space as an opportunity to speak knowing you’ll be heard, in a way means not needing to yell or scream out in pain to be heard. To think of a safe space as a place where someone wants to believe you, means not justifying your feelings for them to be valid, but directly expressing them without justification. To think of a safe space as a place where someone wants to understand more of you, means believing another’s questions are asked from a genuine place of curiosity and desire to know you more, and not that they are gathering data to formulate an argument against you. To think of a safe space as a place where you can directly ask what you want, means not needing to manipulate a person to get what you want, and not feeling like the only option when feeling unsatisfied is to preserve safety and leave without a word of why. 

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In a different world, if a person came to see me and said, right out the gate, without any defensive posturing, that they simply struggle with trusting and are scared of getting close to anyone, I wouldn’t hear a harsh boxing bell go off in my mind. I’d hear them, listening to the sound of their uncertain exhale and that start of a careful new breath, and feel an instantaneous respect and immediate compassion for them, as if a softer bell was humming somewhere close. I’d also try my best to not let them be alone in that moment. 

About the Author

Brady

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I'm a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in private practice down in the greater Long Beach, CA, area. I've been in the mental health field, formally, since 2005, and I consider it a deep and rewarding honor to see other people grow and live the lives that they want. If I'm not sitting on a couch with a cup of tea in hand, I'm probably on my bicycle, or lost in my own thoughts on the beach; meditating, tweeting, blogging, and talking into a video camera are also known to happen.

On diet and exercise advice

On diet and exercise advice. Photo by Brady. 2019.

“All my doctor did was tell me to diet and exercise for my depression. She doesn’t need to know why I’m depressed, that’s none of her business, but… I hate that she only see me as fat. Doctors are just garbage. No offense, Brady.”

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These conversations are unconscious minefields. For some, any conversation about diet and exercise, even with regard to mental health, is thought of as judgmental, as toxic, or as fat-shaming. In this way, for far too many people, having any kind of conversation about diet and exercise, including neutral and objective ones, even with people whose business it is to know, can feel degrading, hostile, or even shaming. As someone that has spent many years and countless conversations attempting to de-trigger those moments, and to prevent the projection of shaming onto the conversation, it remains a deeply personal and deeply perilous conversation for most everyone, including the professionals in the room. 

As a quick aside before I get into this any further: most conversations that include general advice target those that over-eat and under-exercise or seem overweight, and don’t quite address the concerns of those that under-eat and over-exercise, even though there is some overlap. The conversations with those that over-eat and over-exercise is also much different than ones with those that under-eat and under-exercise, but in many ways the overarching conversation for each of those subtypes about how-much-food to how-much-exercise is, for all of us, ideally a dynamically evolving conversation. The personal solution to that equation, again, needs to be different over the years, because our bodies and our lifestyles grow and change, and diet and exercise ideally grows and changes as well. But for many it doesn’t. 

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Advice that only seeks to see effort along a certain criteria, will not register any other expression of effort as valid, and that’s where advice that seeks to help but effectively undermines the solution, occurs.
Conversations about diet and exercise advice tend to break down over the terms of the discussion, especially when discussing diet and exercise advice for those targeted as overweight. With this in mind, this is where I’ll focus the main points of this article. Some people, often the supposed recipients of advice, can only have a conversation, or accept advice, that centers being overweight as a symptom, and not a cause, of greater personal health problems. They’d argue that shaming is the real problem; the societal judgment is the real problem. Some other people, oftentimes the advice givers, can only have that conversation when it centers being overweight as the cause of many problems, and not the symptom of other personal health problems. It may sound far too simple, but both conversations are valid, and both are important in the overall conversation of diet and exercise advice. And yet, for many conscious and unconscious reasons, it can be difficult to have both conversations. It’s near impossible to have both conversations simultaneously, and ensuing hurt comes when either side only wants to have their own conversation.

What makes matters all the worse is how effort is often used to undermine those conversations. For example, someone might want to see another person eating only vegan and kickboxing 5 times a week and getting at least 9 hours of sleep a night as “effort,” not acknowledging how much invisible resources, finances, and support structures are needed to pull that off. With this, they are likely to lack compassion, and to see anything other than seamless diet and exercise perfection as, “lacking effort.” Advice that only seeks to see effort along a certain criteria, will not register any other expression of effort as valid, and that’s where advice that seeks to help but effectively undermines the solution, occurs. In this way, diet and exercise advice that only allows a narrow definition of success, sabotages a lot of effort to change, and to keep on living. 

I see the conversation of diet and exercise advice that centers effort along certain criteria as sidestepping the more difficult conversations about dynamically growing, and continued living. Anyone’s diet and exercise can become stagnant, ceasing to grow, and that will become manifest on a physical, but more so emotional, level. Permit me to ramble some more.

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At the most neutral, if objective, level: the more a person doesn’t exercise, the more inefficient their body becomes, and the weaker their muscles, and their mind and mental capacities, follow. When a person spends more time thinking about reasons why they don’t exercise, why they are weak, why they are fat, why they shouldn’t even bother exercising, then all of these reasons to not exercise become compounded. This makes it altogether harder to change.

There’s some commingling variables here, that I think of as a compounded and cascading effect. If you are nervous about people’s thoughts on your diet, then you are more likely to not eat around others, which compounds isolation, self-defeat, and depression. If you are nervous about exercising, then you are also more likely to not exercise around others, not go to a gym or go outside for a run, again, which compounds isolation, lack of opportunities to exercise, and limits ideas of what kind of exercises to do in general. In even vaguer terms: not doing a thing, whatever it is, makes it more likely to not do that thing in the future, and on a circular level more reasons to not do that thing are created, leading to less of the thing, and even more of the problem. 

There is a stagnant quality in choosing nothing new, for sure, and an even riskier gamble: that those familiar habits can be maintained indefinitely.
As my go-to exercise examples go, it’s hard to chase around toddlers in ill-defined games of tag, or when they simply make a run for it as flight-risk toddlers often do, when you don’t regularly run. It’s hard to roll around the floor with a puppy, or play fetch with a persistent puppy, or lift a puppy to cuddle, or chase a puppy in a park, or explore a whole neighborhood through the nose of a puppy, if you don’t regularly cross train. It’s hard to dance for an hour or two with friends, or stand upright in a lounge for a few hours, without core strength and some ankle mobility. Frankly, it’s also hard to have the swinging-from-the-chandelier kind of sex a person might cinematically hope for, if there isn’t cardiovascular and endurance training to support it. There’s a lot of implicit buy-in to exercising, and yet, many times I hear conversations about exercise as exercising to exercise more, and not exercise for the purpose of living more fully. It is the exercise-to-live-more-fully part, while we can, that sadly get’s unspoken in well-intentioned diet and exercise advice. 

I see deteriorating mental health, a cascade of problems, when a person doesn’t exercise, loses strength, loses a desire to move around, gradually becoming a shut in, only working, getting the same drive-thru food, and going home, until there is a tipping point and then they can’t ever leave the house. From another angle, this is similarly a problem when a person eats the same limited foods, the same alleged “comfort” foods likely from childhood, and they stop growing and discovering new foods and cuisines to grow into. There is a stagnant quality in choosing nothing new, for sure, and an even riskier gamble: that those familiar habits can be maintained indefinitely.  

In these cases, where new habits aren’t formed, I don’t see a lack of effort. No. In fact, I see far too much effort to hold onto a way of being that was outgrown years ago. The effort to hold onto the past, to hold onto an idea of how things were, of what comfort tasted like, of where your happy place was, of who you were, and so much that a person doesn’t want to, or can’t yet, grieve, is undeniably there. 

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I see conversations about exercise and mental health breaking down at this vulnerable level as well. One person is likely having a conversation to encourage exercise and thinking forward into a still attainable future to enjoy; the other person is often having a conversation about their inability to even imagine a future. It really is hard to imagine a future, of more hilarious dancing, of more toddler wrangling, of more puppy hijinks, of gossipy conversations over a cup of coffee and a chocolate, of more cinematic sex, of more long walks at sunset, if you’re not even doing it now, and many times both parties in the conversation struggle to see that.  With this, giving or receiving advice on what to do to have the strength and fuel to live a full and adventurous life, can’t exactly land.

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I don’t see a lack of effort. No. In fact, I see far too much effort to hold onto a way of being that was outgrown years ago.
I realize that a large part of this post may seem to be written for an able-bodied audience trying to give advice to those targeted as overweight. And in many ways it is. What I’ve alluded to, but may need to make explicit, is that when I write about diet and exercise even for those seemingly able-bodied persons, it is also with the caveat that those who are able-bodied, are in truth temporarily able-bodied, because injury, age, and illness come to us all. For those that routinely exercise and physically move about more freely in the world, it can be a serious challenge to their mental health to lose that ability to exercise, to run, to lift heavy things, to walk, to eat certain foods, or simply to hold… anything. 

As a small example I’ve encountered more than a few times: a person may have had surgery or an illness and can no longer sleep comfortably on one side of their body, and no longer able to do what they have done for several decades; fall asleep holding their loved one. Their inability to sleep comfortably on that familiar side most always leads to feeling defeated, unable to love, worthless, and immobilized with depression. They may never consider switching sides of the bed, and sleeping on the other side, embracing their new limitations, adapting, but still finding a way to do something close to what they want. 

This, more than anything else, is what is important to me in regards to exercise as it relates to mental health: a knowing in your body and bones how to move, and with that comes a tested ability to adapt to one’s changing landscape, and to keep moving forward. Otherwise, a person consciously or unconsciously decides to stagnate, no longer exercise, no longer move forward, and simply wait to die. Because I have this conversation quite often and steer the conversation to this level, I therefore give a lot of diet and exercise advice looking at this long game, and acknowledge how we can all, incrementally, live smaller and smaller lives until we die. I also don’t believe I’m the only one attempting to have this conversation on these terms either, because I hear a ton of advice trying to prevent this self-defeated long game. I can hear the love in a lot of diet and exercise advice… and many people are too hurt, too defeated, to hear anything but inevitable defeat.

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Unsolicited advice time? If a friend encourages you to go for a walk, or do yoga, accept it, or counter-offer with a more preferable physical activity. Then, at another time, return the effort, and ask them to go for another walk, or another round of kickboxing, or exploring a neighborhood with them and their puppy, if that’s more your style. That’s living, and furthering a relationship, and a life. If a friend offers to go out to eat with you at a new restaurant, accept it, or counter-offer with a more preferable place to eat; somewhere new too. Then double-up and try something new to eat, maybe that you’ve never eaten. Then, at another time, return the effort, and ask them to go eat at a different place. That’s living, and furthering a relationship, and your life. 

Choose a different chocolate treat, make it your new favorite, and make it even more special by choosing to eat it only with one special person. In this, create a new tradition and make it matter to you, and to more than you. Consider it one exercise, and one part of your diet, that can have a deeper reward than only ever eating the same standard box of chocolates, similarly alone, in another forgettable moment.

Going back to the premise of this article and giving advice; if advice is to land, then it needs to center living and moving forward with life, with others. Otherwise, it comes across as hollow if circular: diet and exercise simply are needed because diet and exercise is good. Therefore, not following the advice is seemingly bad. The same narrow perspective holds on the other side as well: refusing to be controlled by advice for the sake of refusing is good, and following advice is bad. However, hearing all of the advice, even from doctors, on diet and exercise as empty, as shaming, as simply controlling, and not hearing in the advice how others may want you to have a more full and enjoyable life and future, well, is more on how you hear the advice, than on what advice is being offered. 

About the Author

Brady

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I'm a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in private practice down in the greater Long Beach, CA, area. I've been in the mental health field, formally, since 2005, and I consider it a deep and rewarding honor to see other people grow and live the lives that they want. If I'm not sitting on a couch with a cup of tea in hand, I'm probably on my bicycle, or lost in my own thoughts on the beach; meditating, tweeting, blogging, and talking into a video camera are also known to happen.

On the death of an abusive parent

Photo by Brady, from a sidewalk in Long Beach. 2017.

“I don’t really know what I feel. What should I feel? I don’t think I’m sad, but maybe I am.”

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The death of a parent is, at the most neutral developmental perspective, significant, for it simultaneously makes one more of a child and more of an adult. In less neutral terms, with that particular death comes the acute awareness that, though still a child in some regards, there is no longer a parent to turn to for comfort or guidance, as a child naturally does. However, when a parent is abusive or harmful, and that child never exactly felt safe going to their parent for comfort or guidance, a different kind of grieving is felt when that parent dies.

For context, I’ve sat with many people over the years as they have struggled to grasp hold of their words and feelings around the death of a parent, or parents, that abused, mistreated, abandoned, neglected, demeaned, belittled, and in many other countless ways didn’t love or didn’t attempt to love their children. With that, I don’t know of a single time I haven’t cried tears that weren’t fully my own. It is a deeply painful, but also deeply healing experience to grieve an abusive parent, and it is also healing to acknowledge that there wasn’t love where there should have been love.

To be bold, yes, I do draw that line in the sand: abusive parents didn’t love or attempt to love their child. Some may disagree, for instance if one child in that household felt loved, when another didn’t. However, even in the case of a parent having multiple children; one child being loved and cared for doesn’t take away from another child being abused or unloved. Regardless of how a particular sibling’s parental relationship operated, there are many ways that a child’s experience of their parental relationship may be discredited. All too often the expression, “they did the best they could,” is used to excuse, to minimize, and to enable that lack of parental love; the disharmony of that platitude is painfully sharp, and I can’t hear it otherwise. As an aside, the desire for others to offer that platitude, I have found, comes from the comforter’s own sense of denial, and their own desire to not see abusive parenting when it occurs. Too often, that denial presents as a hollow protectiveness of idealized parenting, because a “real parent” wouldn’t do that, and yet, a real parent did. In this way, many people don’t want to admit abuse, or to question if a parent is unloving, because doing so might mean re-evaluating their own perspective and feelings about their parents.

Sometimes all we can do in searching for words for our feelings, is to look for the fragments of those discarded feelings that are left behind.
Acknowledging abusive parents and unloving parents is challenging. Being surrounded by a culture and society that venerates parents, never questions a parent’s sense of “love” for their child, gives multiple holidays to parents, and shames any disrespectful or ungrateful child for questioning or for not unconditionally loving their parent, makes it all the harder to feel the ache of being parented by an abusive and unloving parent. In many ways, therapy is even mocked for calling out abusive parenting, because, “it’s all about blaming the parents,” which silences any discussion about the pain and traumas that parents can uniquely inflict upon their children. And yet, not calling out how parents can cause irreparable harm to their children is to be complicit in that harm.

So what is a child to do? Placate those around them with a fanciful narrative that their parent must have had redeeming qualities? No. If a parent wanted to be respected by their child in their legacy, they needed to respect their child over the course of their child’s entire life. Sure, a parent can be competent in child-rearing up until the child’s third birthday, thereby granting their child some emotional and psychoanalytic resources for the child’s coming adulthood, but that parent could also cause undue harm from when the child is three years old to forty-three years old, infecting and eroding what fealty they, the parent, may feel entitled to. It isn’t the job of the child to make the parent feel better about their choices, and yet, many children take on that role.

This, sadly, is the twist that those grieving abusive and unloving parents feel; though the parent may have abandoned the relationship long ago, the child may still want the parent to change, wanting that love, even if it hasn’t ever been felt, somehow proving it is there after all. Which is a certain protectiveness that children, even of abusive parents, painfully demonstrate. And yet, with the death of that parent, when they are ready, they can learn to not be as protective of a person that wasn’t as protective of them.

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In some ways, healing can tangibly begin when abusive parents are dead. They can no longer hurt their children. The feelings of grief then, is that in death, that parent can no longer change and learn to do right by their children; a possible loving parental relationship is forever ended; a loving childhood has never, and will never, come to be. This definitive moment of clarity, that one’s parent is no longer alive and the experience of parental love, though long wanted and never felt, can’t come to pass, is to be mourned. Mourned, not for the parent, but for the lost childhood. And those childish tears, if they come at all, are right to be shed.

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Sometimes all we can do in searching for words for our feelings, is to look for the fragments of those discarded feelings that are left behind.

And for those who have recently or long lost an abusive parent: I am so sorry. You deserved so much better.

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About the Author

Brady

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I'm a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in private practice down in the greater Long Beach, CA, area. I've been in the mental health field, formally, since 2005, and I consider it a deep and rewarding honor to see other people grow and live the lives that they want. If I'm not sitting on a couch with a cup of tea in hand, I'm probably on my bicycle, or lost in my own thoughts on the beach; meditating, tweeting, blogging, and talking into a video camera are also known to happen.

On loving someone with depression

All generalities are false“I don’t know how to talk to her. She’s so depressed, angry, and shutoff, and everything I say she takes the wrong way. I’m just worried I’m going to say the wrong thing and she’s going to…”

…

Whenever I hear someone say these words to me, I hear a heart break. Mine does too. I also hear the implicit broken idea, painful as it is to admit, that simply loving someone should be enough to help them. What goes implied, but acutely felt, is how humbling if humiliating it can be to come to the realization that love isn’t enough. I wish love was all we needed, but it takes much more, specifically, more relational skills that many aren’t innately equipped with, or properly trained in using, to love someone struggling through depression.

There is a tremendous amount of hurt, guilt, pain, and conflicted feelings that comes with loving someone who struggles with depression, and in large ways those feelings can make matters worse if they are unaddressed or unresolved. There are conflicted feelings, especially because the person you love, because of depression, is hurting themselves; simultaneously, your loved one is both the person being hurt, and the person hurting someone you love. The nuances and difficulties in loving someone who has depression are immense, and the feelings therein are as difficult and nuanced.

Perhaps worse of all, if those feelings are worked through or processed with someone who is depressed, it may only serve to make them feel more guilty, more depressed, more defeated at what they may feel is irreparable harm to you, to their relationship with you, and to themselves. Which is to say, it’s best for those feelings to be processed, and those relational skills to be built, with your own therapist, support structures, and friends that have been through similar relationship dynamics. Looking to the person that is depressed to help you help them, well, puts an extra level of expectation and responsibility on them that they may not have the capacity to give, and they can use that as additional reason to be depressed.

This may all read as completely overwhelming to you, and a whole other mindset to helping someone with depression, that it is a lot of homework on your end, and emotional labor, and it may very well be; generic advice doesn’t help, but an altogether different approach to relating can help. With this in mind… here are some skills and thoughts to keep in mind when loving someone with depression, knowing that loving someone is about hand-tailoring a style of interacting, and not relying on generic, if expected, interactions that might work in most relationships.

…

A big skill in loving someone with depression is recognizing that many expressions of love and kindness are going to be felt with innumerable unspoken caveats. Examples:

“It was so good seeing you today (but it wasn’t fun being with you last week).”

“I’m glad to see you are going to the gym and taking care of yourself (because actually seeing symptoms of your depression bother me more).”

“It’s great that you are talking to your therapist (and not to me, because I don’t want to hear it).”

There are conflicted feelings, especially because the person you love, because of depression, is hurting themselves; simultaneously, your loved one is both the person being hurt, and the person hurting someone you love.
Knowing and recognizing that most anything that you say will likely be heard with unspoken accusations, whether those accusations are true or not, is the skill. Anxiously trying to prevent those unspoken additions from being projected onto what you say, unfortunately, is not the skill and will only dilute the message. Which is to say, there isn’t exactly a better way to say: “it was good to see you today,” but there are plenty of worse ways to say it.

As a textbook anxious example, saying, “it was good to see you today, and also yesterday too when we hung out, but that doesn’t mean that yesterday was better than today, so don’t take it that way, I’m not simply saying that to sound nice, but I do like what we did today and I had fun, and I’m sorry I’m saying this the wrong way, so I’ll shut up right now,” is making it worse. This causes more injury in being said. If anything more is to be said, it needs to center what occurred (i.e. what coffee/carb was had over conversation, what changes/new exercises were in the workout, what insights or growth happened in therapy, etc.), rather than the depression (i.e. their mood being better, their not isolating, practicing self-care, etc) that would simply come across as forced positive reinforcement. Talking about what occurred, rather than why what occurred was good for their mental health, is a far more neutral edit, and relationally smoother.

…

Believing that one isn’t worthy of a person that has those developed relational skills is another way to beat oneself up, so is feeling awful that someone developed skills to better relate. If someone you love struggles with depression, they can, because depression is insidious in this regard, use the thought of someone learning how to better relate as ammunition against themselves.

What goes implied, but acutely felt, is how humbling and humiliating it can be to come to the realization that love isn’t enough.
In other words, it hurts to not be able to comfort someone you love; though it hurts too to be inconsolable, to be the seemingly awful person that is the one rejecting what solace is being offered. In many ways those with depression are hurting, but in many more ways they perseverate on how much they are supposedly hurting others, are a burden, are terrible for others, and a net negative in every equation. That’s not something that a person can easily solve with the, “right words,” to get someone out of their depression. Allowing someone to feel their own way, while remaining clear on your end that you feel differently, while not minimizing their feelings, is the only way through that relational conflict. Otherwise it can become an argument of who is the best judge of who harmed the relationship, and who is more right. It needn’t be. Allowing someone to have their thoughts and feelings, without trying to convince them otherwise, or to make your feelings more valid, more right, or more accurate, serves to bring someone closer; not doing so, and making your feelings matter more, only serves to further divide relationships.

As a more psychologically resonant word, I also call this ability: spaciousness. To me, spaciousness is the emotionally expansive landscape, where emotions may exist without narrow confines. Or in less psychobabble language: someone else’s emotions are allowed to simply be, to simply exist, and aren’t twisted into anything that they aren’t. So, depression is allowed to be, allowed to breathe and to heal, and it isn’t used as a sign of mental weakness, a symptom of personal wrongdoing, a moral failing, and not used to make one a bad friend, a cold lover, a failed parent, or any other seemingly unhealthy thing. Many people, though thinking they are trying to break through to a person with depression, go to these places of painting themselves as wrong, or the person with depression as wrong, which makes the depression deeper and harder to get out of.

Generic advice doesn’t help, but an altogether different approach to relating can help.
There are many ways to center your own pain in their depression. Making yourself responsible for their depression (i.e. I’m such an awful partner, that’s why they are depressed), responsible for not making it better (i.e. A parent should be able to make it right and help them), responsible for it worsening (i.e. If you only took my advice and got medication and listened to me it would get better, but I guess you don’t want to get better), and your pain (i.e. Seeing you so depressed scares me), shift the focus of who is hurting in regards to depression. Conversations about this, or even allude to this, with someone that is depressed compound the depression.

In truth, the pain of going through depression is different than the pain of someone you love going through depression. In relationships though, many arguments, spoken and unspoken alike, can arise with those that are depressed fighting about who is in the most pain. Being better able at recognizing when you, yourself, are feeling the desire to have your pain and frustration validated, and recognizing when you are about to take it out on those you love, is key. Ideally, that growing self awareness of how much you are struggling to love them becomes a reminder to seek out your own care, and seek out validation of your feelings elsewhere, and not devolve into conflicts where your frustration, your difficulty in getting through, your doing all you can and not seeing change, are argued.

Being able to give a person space, without abandoning or distancing, is perhaps the most essential tool in loving someone with depression. Otherwise, you are forcing them to get better, forcing them to get medication or into therapeutic treatment against their wishes, or at worse, forcing them to simply look better for your sake, and not their own.

…

Two books I highly recommend to people that have loved one’s with depression is I don’t want to talk about it by Terrence Real, and How to be an adult in relationships by David Richo. Real does an amazing job of describing the way depression is the compounded process of shutting down, and shutting others out. He works with men, and mostly writes for men and those struggling in their relationships with depressed men, but there is a lot of insight about depression and its nuanced presentation if you’re able to read between the lines. The other book, by Richo, is written primarily for romantic partnerships, but is broadly applicable to any relationship between adults. The foundational skills in that book are incredibly and broadly applicable to loving someone with depression, and as homework it is one of the first foundational books I recommend.

…

Yes. Offering support by way of therapy, medication, or residential treatment are all ways of helping. Those gestures, even if sincere, can also be felt by the person that is depressed as your own way of distancing yourself from their depression, or potentially used against them as proof of their personal failing. That interpretation might be hard to understand, but I’ve heard it discussed countless times as a therapist working with those that are depressed. In working with those that love someone that is depressed, what solace I can provide to you is that there truly aren’t right words, and I wish there were.

If you think that loving someone with depression is about saying the right thing, that is putting a lot of extra responsibility and worry and guilt on your part for fixing their depression. Although we might like to think that our love is enough to save someone, to help them cope, to help them enjoy their life, to keep them living, it’s difficult, and painfully humbling, to admit that it isn’t enough. While love alone isn’t enough to help them fully recover, you can not abandon them, use their depression to think less of them, or give up simply because it is hard for you. You can keep wanting and offering to talk to them, and also be okay with them not accepting your offer. It is hard for them too, and not giving up on them, and still reaching out without expectation of how you will be received, goes a long way in loving them.

About the Author

Brady

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I'm a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in private practice down in the greater Long Beach, CA, area. I've been in the mental health field, formally, since 2005, and I consider it a deep and rewarding honor to see other people grow and live the lives that they want. If I'm not sitting on a couch with a cup of tea in hand, I'm probably on my bicycle, or lost in my own thoughts on the beach; meditating, tweeting, blogging, and talking into a video camera are also known to happen.

On stopping the nagging

On stopping the nagging. Photo by Brady. 2017

” She just won’t stop nagging. She gets so angry… the rage… it triggers me. I have so many flashbacks of all her anger, all her rage, and all her nagging. It needs to stop.”

…

Here we go.

I work with many people in relationships. I wish I saw most of them, either individually or collectively, years, if not decades, prior, so I could help them navigate conflicts, and become more accustomed to open conflict as necessary for a working relationship. Openly bringing up grievances, openly bringing up disagreements, and openly bringing up different approaches to the same problem; to me, all of these fall into the general category of open conflict.

In general, a lot of couples don’t have the clarity to recognize when both parties are right in their respective arguments, or the clarity to discern when several arguments are haphazardly, and hastily if desperately, had at the same time. So, to scorecard a typical argument I’ve refereed more times than I can count: one party bring up the problem of needing to use coasters, for instance, and another party counter arguing that cups with hot liquid don’t need coasters, and then the original party counters that counter with the problem of how disrespectful a partner is being, and then is met with a counter on the second counter with another problem of how the nagging is the real problem… all the while the coasters go unused and the coffee table gets a little more damaged, intentionally, each day. In this, the problem of not using coasters still goes unseen when all the other conversations are used to kitchen sink someone.

The problem is generally the problem; talking about a problem, isn’t.
However, problems are rarely addressed as problems, and relationships unconsciously devolve into these contracted positions where seemingly one person has a problem that another person doesn’t see/acknowledge/respect as a problem. Thus: nagging ensues.

I could stop right there, and simply point to the difference in one person being aware of a problem (i.e. using coasters) and another person refusing to be aware of the problem, and that any person refusing to see a problem only wants a problem to continue. They may get something out of the problem existing, either objective (i.e. a cleaning staff to pick up after their own disregard) or subjective (i.e. a feeling of control in their environment by taking up all the space and leaving none for others) or both, but they have an interest in maintaining the problem. With this, any acknowledgment of the problem, any attempt to discuss it, must be attacked, must be challenged, must be heard as nagging, to maintain the problem and win the argument. Unfortunately, whichever party is arguing for the problem to remain and the nagging to stop, in truth, is fighting a losing battle.

…

The problem is generally the problem; talking about a problem, isn’t. If it is, well, then that is a red flag that one party in a relationship doesn’t care about, value, or even respect, the other party.

There’s really no other way to say it.

If taking about a problem is a problem, then that says something foundational about a relationship, and it is an altogether different conversation to be had at another time. And if I can give arbitrary advice, the second level conversation about talking about the problem needs to happen after the first one: the initial problem.

…

Whichever party is arguing for the problem to remain and the nagging to stop, in truth, is fighting a losing battle.
There’s also a different kind of nagging style, perhaps one that you might not consider nagging at all: silent nagging. I call silent nagging those internal if incessant screams about a problem, that are never made externally. A problem, an irk, a peeve, or whatever minimizing language is used for your own strategic advantage, is kept hidden and solved in silence and in the shadows. The silent nagging does function to solve a problem, sure, but not calling it out or acknowledging it to the other person, so that you maintain the higher ground of solving a problem and keeping someone else from knowing there is a problem, has an insidious cost: uneven and unseen distance in a relationship.

Stopping this kind of nagging means not keeping a problem unseen or unacknowledged.

…

The only way to stop someone from nagging is to not hear discussions of problems as nagging at all, then, actually look at the problem and look at your relationship to that problem in particular. I’m always in favor of having those second level discussions of: how come you don’t see this as a problem? And really get into it. From a respect standpoint, from an efficiency standpoint, from a safety standpoint; all the angles you can see. Full-tilt explore how they see no problem with themselves or their behavior whatsoever.

True, there are many different ways to do right by someone, and there are many seen and unseen ways that we can do wrong by another person. It is challenging to see how we have wronged those we love, how we have created problems and burdens and wounds simply from not knowing. It is necessary to take on this challenge, so that a relationship can be nurtured and grow. Otherwise, they’ll only nag, you’ll only get angrier, all because you need to win.

To me, this feels more like losing the opportunity to have a working relationship.

 

About the Author

Brady

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I'm a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in private practice down in the greater Long Beach, CA, area. I've been in the mental health field, formally, since 2005, and I consider it a deep and rewarding honor to see other people grow and live the lives that they want. If I'm not sitting on a couch with a cup of tea in hand, I'm probably on my bicycle, or lost in my own thoughts on the beach; meditating, tweeting, blogging, and talking into a video camera are also known to happen.

On abusive and nonabusive relationships

On abusive and nonabusive relationships. Photo by Brady. Taken at Burning Man 2016

On abusive and nonabusive relationships. Photo by Brady. Taken at Burning Man 2016

“Brady, I just don’t know. Am I in an abusive relationship?”

…

Truthfully, this conversation comes up so often, and I love what happens when it does. There’s so much education and personal growth opportunities in these conversations, as frustrating and scary as they may be to have, that in many ways these conversations become important and necessary.

To start, it can be difficult to honestly ask yourself if a relationship you are in is abusive or not. It’s challenging even approaching that conversation because it means admitting that things probably aren’t exactly as you’d like them to be. Importantly, there is a huge distinction between being in a relationship that is great, that isn’t exactly as you’d like, or nonabusive, and being in one that is abusive.

What is nonabusive, you may ask? Well, figuring it out means discerning the vast spectrum of neutral relational behavior that isn’t exactly abusive, hostile, or trauma inducing. Neutral, like, offering a friend hot chamomile tea when they aren’t having caffeine, asking a friend to go for an afternoon run, allowing another person to initiate a conversation, unsolicited advice, and the like. Is any of that implicitly abusive? I’d offer: not really. Now, some of those may be things someone would absolutely love, and they would probably call them healthy or loving, and for some, they would call it unwanted or abusive. However, from my vantage point, many relational actions are neutral, but are interpreted as healthy or abusive, not necessarily because they are implicitly one way or the other.

To this end, deciphering if another person’s actions in a relationship are abusive or not is more than simply figuring out what is healthy and what is abusive, but more closely determining what is done, first, and how it is felt, second. It is a two-fold process, with lots of extra subprocesses throughout, which, in many ways, people quickly want to be a singular and simple process. This is where I find a lot of people reaching for convenient answers of whether or not a relationship is abusive, convincing themselves to stay in or leave a relationship based on what they want it to be more than what is actually happening.

Many relational actions are neutral, but are interpreted as healthy or abusive, not necessarily because they are implicitly one way or the other.
Categorically, I see it as people making a quick decision to end, or stay in, a relationship without going further to figure out what is happening without what they want it to be, which would look like seeing behavior as: healthy that is felt as abusive, neutral that is felt as abusive, abusive that is felt as abusive, healthy that is felt as healthy, neutral that is felt as healthy, abusive that is felt as healthy, healthy that is felt as neutral, neutral that is felt as neutral, and even abusive that is felt as neutral. Thats a lot of angles that a relationship can be seen from, and very rarely do persons consider relational actions from all of those perspectives, which can be intimidating. With all of that, the most common thing I see is one person conveniently deciding what another person’s actions are rather than spending some time examining what is occurring and allowing the room for multiple possibilities beyond a basic dichotomy.

…

My caveat here cannot be made enough: those with a personal history of being in traumatic and abusive relationships have an even harder time distinguishing between nonabusive and abusive relationships. Some of this, well, a large part of this, is because of the nature of abuse and trauma. To vastly oversimplify, being in a relationship with a person that is abusive, whether physically, sexually, emotionally, socially, or financially, also is to be in a tenuous state of interpreting behavior. Anything other than overtly warm and loving actions are often felt as soon-to-be hostile or hostile; there is no grey. And there really isn’t warmth, either, only a tacit knowing that it can get much worse.

Something not bad, isn’t automatically good; nor is something actually bad because it wasn’t felt as absolutely good.
So for those that have had a history of trauma with intimate partners, it can feel like the difference between abusive and soon-to-be abusive, which is hard to unlearn, especially when nonabusive and healthy relationships are such foreign experiences. It is hard to learn what a healthy relationship can look like, and what nonabusive behavior looks like, and how to see it for what it is, when you’ve a compromised initial idea as a foundational premise.

Or as I like to think of it, it is hard to distinguish gentle touch or firm touch over deep emotional scar tissue, when you only seem to feel rough touch.

…

The huge challenge with all of this, then, is being able to see abuse when it is there, rather than simply convincing yourself that it must be there.
Admittedly, it is challenging to figure a lot of this out, especially without a professional to help decipher what is going on. I’m not admitting this as a professional in private practice looking for more business, but as a person that has seen many relationships implode because one party convinced themselves what was happening was abusive, or wasn’t, and couldn’t see other perspectives. The huge challenge with all of this, then, is being able to see abuse when it is there, rather than simply convincing yourself that it must be there.

But, if I’m to give generic, decontextualized if impersonal advice, it would be this: in many ways, all relationships will have boundary violations, and those need to happen, and those violations aren’t implicitly abusive. Boundary violations will exist simply because other people aren’t us, so there will be a learning curve for better understanding how to do right by others. Implicit to a learning curve is being aware that a person is trying to do right by you, and that can be difficult to see when you’ve been wronged. Ideally, in all relationships it can be seen and felt when boundary violations occur, are addressed, and greater awareness of how to do right by both parties is openly discussed. It can also be seen when those pieces aren’t there. Things only become abusive when another person consistently doesn’t care or disregards another person’s pain, avoids or denies the idea that they might be wrong, and has little concept of the consequences of their actions. That can be very hard to see, both when you are being abused, and when you are abusing.

…

In many ways, it’s difficult to change your response to, to change how you feel, another’s actions. Something not bad, isn’t automatically good; nor is something actually bad because it wasn’t felt as absolutely good. Which is to say: ideally, we grow to feel things as they are, and experience others as they are, and less how we want them to be.

About the Author

Brady

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I'm a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in private practice down in the greater Long Beach, CA, area. I've been in the mental health field, formally, since 2005, and I consider it a deep and rewarding honor to see other people grow and live the lives that they want. If I'm not sitting on a couch with a cup of tea in hand, I'm probably on my bicycle, or lost in my own thoughts on the beach; meditating, tweeting, blogging, and talking into a video camera are also known to happen.

On ghosting

On ghosting. Photo by Brady. 2016.

On ghosting. Photo by Brady. 2016

“I don’t know what it is that I am doing wrong, doc. And it must be me, right? Guys don’t just disappear on you like that. They can’t all be like that. Can they? I mean, I am the common denominator. This sucks. I’m done.”

…

The paraphrased sentiment above, though I hear it coming from different people, pertaining to different forms and stages of relationships, nevertheless points to an altogether too familiar problem that too many people face. Being in a relationship, or even starting a relationship, and it abruptly ending, not with a conscious decision to end it from the agreement of all parties, but from one person unilaterally ending it and not telling the other person that it was ended, is the operation of being ghosted.

It is deeply unsettling and uncomfortable for so many reasons. Notably, the person left behind is alone in figuring out what went wrong, what didn’t work, what they did do or didn’t do that caused distance, and they can never fully come to understand what happened because that other person isn’t there to answer the questions. Any empty, if conciliatory, answers one gives oneself, even if kind or compassionate, aren’t the needed answers from the other person, which makes ghosting all that harder to endure. There is no ability to answer the, “why,” of their absence. Therein lies much of confusion and bewilderment that happens in the wake of being ghosted.

“And it must be me, right?”

Ideally, when persons decides to end a relationship together, in surveying the damage done, both parties can theoretically walk away with more discernible challenges and areas of growth, so that they can be better for their next relationship or for their own personal growth. Without knowing what one did do, or what one didn’t do, substantive growth is unreachable. And this goes for all parties involved.

The above blanket statement aside, walking away from a relationship without deciding together to end it isn’t ghosting in an abusive relationship. I can’t stress this caveat enough: for all parties in those abusive dynamics know what happened, even if it is hard to acknowledge.

…

Figuring out if someone ghosted you or didn’t ghost you does take some careful, and perhaps clinical, consideration. Being ghosted hinges, largely, on you being present in a relationship while they are absent. It isn’t something as simple as them not texting back. For example, it is them not texting back in the middle of planning communications, after you asked them what they are doing tomorrow night for dinner. There is a distinct difference there. Some people conflate the two kinds of non-responsiveness, which is to say: you might both be ghosts.

Before we even get into what to do about others being a ghost, or a potential ghost, a big part of the problem is developing an awareness of one’s self and our own capacity to ghost.

Any empty, if conciliatory, answers one gives oneself, even if kind or compassionate, aren’t the needed answers from the other person, which makes ghosting all that harder to endure.

To do this, to not become someone else’s ghost, means clearly, and unambiguously, ending relationships with others, preferably with concrete reasons. If you think this is mean, so be it. Nevertheless, please do so. And give no hints. No, “I’m just in a weird place in my life.” No, “I don’t know if I can handle a relationship right now.” No, “I’m too busy this week.” No hints. Because, if you are irked in any way that they aren’t getting the hint that you aren’t interested, then you are oblivious to the fact that you are actively ghosting.

Searching your own heart to better understand why you do not want to pursue a relationship with someone, is a big challenge. A vague answer of, “I’m just not feeling it,” isn’t enough. It is a non-answer, and for their sake, and your sake, a concrete answer, of what exactly you, “aren’t feeling,” provides a place from which to grow. They may grow in changing themselves, or may not, but that is for their growth. You may grow, too, in holding a boundary, or eventually outgrow a boundary, but not with them, and that is okay too. But all parties involved have reasons to work with, on their own.

…

There isn’t nothing you can do about others being ghosts. You can do some self care strategies to prevent over-injury from being ghosted. I like to think of it as preventative care, or wound care, so the injury doesn’t get infected.

One big strategy for self care is to not over extend the relational effort. Relational effort is the felt sense of a relationship moving forward, and more mechanically, it looks like introducing yourself, planning a date, counter-offering if you can’t give your partner exactly what they want, following up on a conversation, etc.. Lacking relational effort would be the negative, or the absence, of effort: wanting someone to introduce themselves, having someone else plan the date, simply rejecting without counter-offering, not following up on a conversation. So not over extending the relational effort means being aware of how much you are putting in and how much, or how little, they are putting in, when it comes to the effort of relating.

Now this is where it gets tricky: being at peace with the amount of effort you put in, knowing you could do more, call more, ask them out one more time, send another text, and yet, knowing you can’t do their effort for them. It is tricky because there is the inherent possibility that they might not put any effort in and it ending, as much as the possibility that they might put in effort and grow the relationship. You are allowing it to grow, or fail, equally.

If you are irked in any way that they aren’t getting the hint that you aren’t interested, then you are oblivious to the fact that you are actively ghosting.

It takes a lot of self reflection, and a lot of practice, to fine tune that sense of effort and operate from a place that feels right for you and does right by others. Because, if you are doing all the effort, even with earnestness, sincerity, or love, you also aren’t allowing that other person to do their part. You might be efforting the whole relationship, doubling-down on effort, and subsequently liking them more because you are putting effort in. Meanwhile, you could be efforting a relationship that the other person doesn’t like or want to be in. Therein lies more insecurity, and vulnerability, in putting effort into a relationship.

They may not return the effort. And it can be incredibly hard to allow another person to fail in this way. However, being more aware and in tune with your relational effort and limits, means you are less likely to grow more attached to those more likely to ghost.

…

Even if you do everything “right,” there is still another person involved that can’t be controlled. They can’t be, and that’s actually a beautiful thing if you look closely enough at it. If you could control, exactly, when other people come and go in your life, always on your terms, and your terms alone, then you are sabotaging dynamic growth from occurring in your own life. You would only ever believe that you should always be in control of all of your relationships. Which leads to becoming more afraid, more defensive, and more tense in relationships, unable to allow them to grow. And yet, so much beauty and growth comes from actively doing your part, and only your part, of a relationship.

But yes. It hurts. To open up to a person, to want them in your life, to invest in cultivating a connection, and to be coldly left, is to be left without an ending to tangibly feel. They have become a ghost to a relationship you can’t exactly grieve. They hunger for something they lack the ability to taste; those hungry ghosts can’t be fed. Not by you. There is the hope that one day those ghosts may be able to feed themselves, to put effort into being with others, to be seen. And other than allowing them to be ghosts, you can also allow yourself to be at peace with knowing you did your part, and you could only do your part.

…

About the Author

Brady

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I'm a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in private practice down in the greater Long Beach, CA, area. I've been in the mental health field, formally, since 2005, and I consider it a deep and rewarding honor to see other people grow and live the lives that they want. If I'm not sitting on a couch with a cup of tea in hand, I'm probably on my bicycle, or lost in my own thoughts on the beach; meditating, tweeting, blogging, and talking into a video camera are also known to happen.

On bloated resilience

Photo by Brady. 2016.

“Why can’t I just get better, Brady? It’s crazy! And no one knows. No one really knows how depressed I am. I’m such a fraud. I just can’t seem to get over it like I should! I’m crazy!”

…

Admittedly, when I conduct therapy, I deal with a lot of resiliency narratives that are slippery, insidiously undermining, and hard to dismantle. People can come into therapy wanting to conquer depression, cure anxiety, rid themselves of insecurities, overcome every obstacle, and succeed at life in the most positive way possible. To this point, one of the first agenda items I write in my notes is: lance this bloated idea of resilience.

Because it naïvely does more harm than good.

Because it, in itself, is a problem.

Resilience is that plucky idea that you can, and should, be able to bounce back from any difficulty. Moving to succeed, after failing, thus demonstrating resilience and fortitude, erases the emotional and psychological necessity of the full experience of failure. Not the experience of failure for the purpose of eventually growing to succeed. Not failure for the purpose of future humility, to redefine the failure as an actual success. Not failure for the purpose of redirection to focus on other avenues of success. Fully experiencing failure means embracing failure as is, of being defeated, of losing.

It is important to experience our failures as failures, and not anything else.

To this point, one of the first agenda items I write in my notes is: lance this bloated idea of resilience.
Before I write further, yes, there is the natural caveat that there are many things in life which are neither successes nor failures. As such, there is an implicit possibility to view one’s actions or one’s life as a success or failure, when there isn’t necessarily that necessity. When it is though, when something is done that is felt as a failure, then it is. It is a failure. As a shrink, I don’t challenge it, and in my work with others, I try to not challenge another’s experience as much as possible. With others, I don’t deny the feeling of failure, the feeling of can’t, or of won’t. If it feels like defeat, then it is. If it feels too heavy, too hard, or too much for someone, then it is not my place to deny that experience.

Dismantling resilience, in part, means accepting failure as it is, and not denying its presence, which is what so many good intentioned resilience narratives do.

….

There is a line in Tera Naomi’s song, Job well done that states it clearly and completely: “maybe someday you’ll realize your mistakes and maybe make yourself accountable for one; and they say success has many parents, but failure is an orphan.”

I wish our failures weren’t orphaned, or disowned, or cosmetically changed into successes, but allowed to be as they are: owned failures. Wherein owning and feeling a failure isn’t beating yourself up for failing. Owning a failure isn’t shamefully or continuously torturing yourself for having failed and being defeated. Many people think that attacking themselves for failing is owning their failure, and in many ways it isn’t; because it de-centers the failure towards a feeling of being weak, awful, pitiful, stupid for having failed at all.

And this doesn’t help.

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When we overvalue resilience, we do so at a tremendous cost.

Many people think that attacking themselves for failing is owning their failure, and in many ways it isn’t.
If a failure is met with a reactionary desire to succeed with more vigor, then the failure isn’t allowed to be felt. It isn’t allowed to be. You aren’t allowed to be. In many ways, we can double down in this regards: failing at allowing yourself to fail.

If the only narrative you, or others, or society, promotes is one of positivity, overcoming struggles, and never quitting and never failing, then all else is devalued, is dismissed, is deigned unimportant; but sometimes we do fail. We can hurt so much that we cannot imagine feeling better. Then in those times, empty platitudes of grit and resilience further inculcate worthlessness, because one didn’t succeed. Those supposedly encouraging words have in them an emotional shift of moving towards success that denies the very real experience of failure. You can hurl jargon and call it self-sabotage, narcissistically rooted denial, or even a subtle self-micro-aggression, but it’s all the same effect. Anything other than allowing a failure to be a failure disallows and denies a person from having their own experience. That hard if painful experience of failure.

For it is important to fail and to lose. Not so that you can win with more effort later, or to savor your success; that puts success at the center of failure, which isn’t the point. Failure is important because we have our limitations. And it is okay to fail. To cry. To not be strong. To be defeated. To feel our limits and our inability to push past them.

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There is a necessity in failure. Not to jump to the next step for success, but to stay in the place of failure. Of maybe having hurt oneself. Of maybe having hurt others. But of owning your actions. Of feeling the impact that your actions, and yours alone, have had, and not using them to shame yourself and beat yourself up. This is the other slippery part. Shaming failure is as harmful as praising resilience; both are problems.

It’s okay to feel defeated. Because you are. And you aren’t crazy for being defeated.

 

About the Author

Brady

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I'm a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in private practice down in the greater Long Beach, CA, area. I've been in the mental health field, formally, since 2005, and I consider it a deep and rewarding honor to see other people grow and live the lives that they want. If I'm not sitting on a couch with a cup of tea in hand, I'm probably on my bicycle, or lost in my own thoughts on the beach; meditating, tweeting, blogging, and talking into a video camera are also known to happen.

On false positive thinking

Photo by Brady. 2015.

“I know happiness doesn’t come from a relationship or a career, Brady… I try to be a good person, you know? I do my best and I just… am I depressed?” 

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Oh positivity. That pesky and plucky idea. Supposedly, with the right positive, upbeat, encouraging message, yourself and others will be happy. If you aren’t happy, then it’s easily fixable, think the right thought and you can simply be happy and be the best you can be; for, it is the best. Happiness, in this plucky idea, is the ideal, unquestioned, positive state.

Insidiously though, positivity works. For some people, simply thinking happy thoughts, or reminding themselves of their blessings, helps evoke a sense of happiness and contentment. There are many people for whom a gentle reminder to think positive is all it takes to feel better. It is a vaguely nebulous feeling, this better, because it isn’t a graspable feeling itself, but a felt sense of movement away from one thing and onto another thing.

Being positive moves something away, shifts the focus, distracts.

Which isn’t to say that a distraction at all is awful. I don’t deny that positivity can be a beneficial distraction; it is also a beautifully devised saboteur.

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A major pitfall to the power of positive thinking isn’t in the theory itself, which I’ll get into the theory’s blind-spots shortly, but in how it is wielded without skill or artful understanding by well-meaning friends, inspirational Instagrammers, #positivity retweeters, and a whole host of well-intentioned coaches, teachers, and advisors.

This is where positivity can blur objectivity: thinking positively and how you want to feel is as much a problem as thinking negatively and how you don’t want to feel.
In the hands of a more trained psychologist, positive psychology can be a particularly useful tool for particular problems. As any behaviorist will note, what is positive is what is added to a particular situation or interaction, and what is negative is what is removed from the same situation. The second mechanical component is that what is added can be either wanted (positive reinforcement) or unwanted (positive punishment), as well as what is removed can be wanted (negative punishment) or unwanted (negative reinforcement). This second component is where a lot of positivity, and the power of positive thinking, gets its pluck; it does something, it adds, it feels somehow more tangible. More doable. More concrete.

However, to a trained behaviorist and psychologist, all negative and positive tools can be used equally, with more or less precise aim and efficiency. Mostly though, positive psychology, and those neighboring ideas of setting a positive intention, focusing on gratitude, counting blessings, taking a strength inventory, and others, all have a narrow range of efficacy, because, as I mentioned above, it’s only a quarter of the possible behavioral interventions. Narrower still because of confirmation bias, and not seeing how positivity itself can be a problem.

Being positive moves something away, shifts the focus, distracts.
Confirmation bias, to take a slight tangent, is that other pesky idea that, to be succinct, is searching for a particular answer and discrediting all information that doesn’t support that particular answer. In terms of positive thinking, confirmation bias is thinking that positivity is the right way to think, so negativity is to be dismissed and discredited.

This is a bold statement, and I don’t write it purely theoretically, but from my own experience of doubling-down on positivity. Over the span of my career, I have come to realize in doing therapy with a firm desire to help others become better, with thinking more positively, that positivity itself got in the way of my helping. I didn’t consider that positive over-thinking could at all be problematic until, well, I started seeing the favored imbalance of thought as one that would leave many people struggling with their feelings that were anything other than positive.

This is where positivity can blur objectivity: thinking positively and how you want to feel is as much a problem as thinking negatively and how you don’t want to feel.

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I was very fortunate in my clinical training to have amazingly sharp and deft supervisors. Perhaps sensing my own inclination to favor positive thinking, and an unshakeable idea that I, as a therapist, can know what’s best for others to think, my first supervisor told me, with unparalleled clarity, “anyone can give hope, but giving hope isn’t the answer to every problem.”

Narrower still because of confirmation bias, and not seeing how positivity itself can be a problem.
I didn’t initially get the meaning of my supervisor’s statement. Admittedly, I began my clinical career guilty of rushing to positive thinking too soon. I had many moments as a clinician when I rushed to give positive thinking, to giving the pep talk, because I nervously didn’t want to get into and examine someone else’s pain, their inner torment, powerlessness, despair, rage, fury, or grief. I would earnestly give positive affirmations, simply thinking it was what was best. Assuming, that is, feeling better is what is best, not dwelling on what was bad. If I could get someone to think differently, to feel differently, and by differently I meant better in my own definition, then I had done my job. However, I didn’t do my job when I was simply being positive.

It is very easy to sabotage another person’s growth, with your own hubris, from believing you know what is best for another person. It took me a long time to see my own positivity, my confirmation biases, my hubris, to make peace with them, and to be more cautious and precise in my usage of positive thinking, and to be aware of the root of my own desire to favor positive thinking which can setup further problems down the road.

Thinking positively, and encouraging others to think positively, is earnest in its aim to help, yet false, because positivity is no truer than negativity. However, the desire to think positively, for oneself to be more positive, or for another to be more positive, is a setup for difficulty when those positive affirmations don’t exactly materialize and happiness isn’t readily attained. A setup that someone who thinks positively might not see or even consider.

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If I were to encourage your thinking in any way, it would be to see that those setting themselves or others up to think more positively may only have that tool for now, may only need that tool for themselves, and may not have the answer to every problem, and that may be okay for them. Thinking positively does a lot, but it doesn’t do everything. Being able to see what is lacking, what limits are there, what isn’t addressed, is to go beyond positivity; thinking beyond positivity isn’t better, it is simply beyond it, and there is a lot of valuable thought beyond thinking positively.