‘Word of the Year’ appears to be overtaking ‘New Year’s Resolution’ as a way to convince ourselves that we are actually doing something—possibly because 80% of NY’s Resolutions fail by the second week in February anyway.

And, since 64% of us make the same resolutions every year, what is the point, really?

Word of the Year Not New

So now we have something new to try. But it’s not really new, as dictionaries have been picking a word for the year for a while now.

This year Merriam Webster picked “Gaslighting,” which tells us a little something about the world we are living in:

A driver of disorientation and mistrust, gaslighting is “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage.” 2022 saw a 1740% increase in lookups for gaslighting, with high interest throughout the year.

As far back as 1938, there was a play and then a movie about a man trying to make his wife insane by telling her, relentlessly, that what she thought was true about the gaslights in their home was not. 

Now the term applies not just person-to-person, but culturally and politically too. So many people are accusing many other people of lying. 

In an earlier post I wrote on “The Truth About Lying,” my research suggested that most folks actually do lie, and that even though it is developmentally normal for kids to lie, it is also something we are supposed to outgrow. Oh well. Maybe someday.

Meanwhile, here’s another 2022 Word of the Year, from Oxford Dictionaries, Goblin Mind:

It defines the term as “a type of behavior which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations.”

There we go again, me, me, me, me, me… Reminds me of the 1979 book, The Culture of Narcissism.

Narcissism here then, here now, and for who knows how long. Which brings me to my own Word of the Year.

My Word of the Year

“Period.” I picked this word because I have been hearing myself use it a lot with my clients who bury themselves in overthinking.

Often, they are thinking about who did what, why they did it, why they did it to them, what it means about them that they did it to them, what they should do back… On and on it goes ‘til they are exhausted, and can’t think straight anyway, so why think at all?

Look, the holidays are here, and there other big things going on too, as you know. So people may be stressed and behaving badly to each other more than many of us would like. But there it is. So why not put a period on it, rather than dragging it out.

Why not put a period on it, then breathe, and use your word, at least until the insanity stops. Go here for a quick and easy breathing tool that I would love everyone to have.

Then, who knows, there may be nothing else to do at all. And if there is, chances are it will be smarter and better executed than it would have been otherwise.

In other words, put a period on it when the mind goes out of control, and that’s my word for 2023: Period. Now for yours.

Your Word of the Year?

If you don’t already have one, and would like one, here is a list of 300 words to give you some ideas for a central organizing word—to help you focus on how you want to live your life.

You can also click here for tons of articles with explicit instructions on how to choose your word if you get stuck.

And if you find yourself overthinking it, you can use my word: Period. Pick a word and be done. Period.

Would love to hear what you came up with, so feel free to pick one and let us know.

Warmly,

Madelaine

Photo by  Unsplash Susan Holt Simpson

No, I do not mean that your potential is your problem. I do mean that a promise you have made to yourself—a promise you may not even be aware that you have made that actually limits your potential—can be exactly your problem.

What Is a Promise?

From Merriam-Webster: A promise is “a declaration that one will do or refrain from doing something specified.”

This definition doesn’t say whether the “something specified” is declared out loud nor whether the one making a promise is even aware that a declaration of intent is being made.

As only one example, I did not realize until long after big damage was done that I had made a promise to myself to maintain emotional composure no matter what.

So, when I was in the ER with not yet diagnosed flesh eating disease and they kept sending me home, I should have thrown a fiery fit and refused to budge, but kept my promise to myself to be composed and cooperative instead.

Had I broken this promise to myself, I would not have a mark on me today, could have avoided the 7 weeks in the hospital, 10 trips to the OR, the $397,000 the healthcare system spent on my care…you get the idea.

Another personal example is that my father had made a promise to himself that he would honor his mother’s deathbed wish that he would take care of his father and the family business. This promise was made before my father had a family of his own.

Since my grandfather’s house was attached to our factory, my father’s way of keeping the promise to himself, to be a good son, was to go to the shop every day at 5am and come home at 10pm, except on Sundays when he came home at noon.

Had he ever consciously reexamined the extent and cost of how he honored this promise to himself, he might have remained alive to continue taking good care of his father, the business, and his own wife and children as well.

I see this in my practice over and over again: The one who made a promise to himself that he will never answer to anyone but himself, and is struggling financially while refusing offers of employment that could help him fund the new business he is trying to build.

Conversely, there is the one who remains employed in a toxic environment because, even though she is in good shape to freelance, she made a promise to never be out there on her own.

Then there is the one who promised herself she would do something extraordinary in life, making it difficult to enjoy and appreciate life’s simple, ordinary, everyday pleasures, although she is working on this and making good strides. It is possible to do both.

There are many other examples and in every one of them I am seeing the Ego involved, so let’s talk about that.

What is The Ego?

Mindvalley’s, Irina Yugay puts is succinctly when she says: “In day-to-day terms, ego is your personality and your identity. It is what you think of yourself.” Yugay discusses the difference between Big Ego (inflated, dysfunctional sense of self) and Ego Strength (realistic, stable, and able sense of self) — and whether we would do well to transcend Ego altogether for a universal consciousness that needs no Ego.

Maybe someday, who knows, but the Ego has been around for a long time, and probably not going away entirely anytime soon.

Would you believe I still have my Psych 101 textbook.  So from Introduction to Psychology (6^th edition, p.375), and in Freudian terms: “The Ego….plans how to achieve satisfaction….is essentially the “executive” of the personality because it decides what actions are appropriate.”

So, if a person is hungry, Ego decides when to eat what, based on real world constraints and opportunities, whether and when the appropriate conditions in the environment are found.

Okay, so there’s the problem right there. I’m just starting to think more about promises made and broken myself. But from what I can see so far, the problem is the single promise we make to let Ego decide.

I’ve heard clients say outright that this part of themselves, in charge of strategy, has gotten them where they are.

That may be true, but their deference to Ego may also be the reason they are having trouble going any further.

How bossy. Ego, running, sometimes ruining, our lives the way that it does. And we let it.

Seems to me, Ego could make suggestions, without being completely in charge.

And, in all fairness to Ego, if it didn’t get the memo that things have changed, that maybe you’ve grown and changed, that maybe your needs and interests are different now, that maybe the old strategy needs some tweaking, how is Ego supposed to know? 

How is Ego supposed to know that you are the grown-up in the room now, and you got this from here?

In other words, how is Ego supposed to know —until we know ourselves—that the promise we made to Ego about who’s in charge of our lives—has to be broken or at least revised.

What is Your Promise to Your Ego?

In an earlier post, I talked about “The 5 Why’s.” Here is an excerpt:

Organizational Politics: Theory and Practice, Practice, Practice… is a training program I first designed and delivered at Harvard Medical School. One of the program’s exercises is the 5 Why’s, credited to Toyota, but dating back to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The idea is that asking “why” after the answer to the first question, and then asking “why” after each subsequent answer, will lead us to a root cause understanding of who we are and why we do what we do – or not. Here below is a case example**

Case Illustration: 5 Why’s and the Sleepy, Grumpy CEO

Q1: Why does it bother me so much that my adversary is not on board?

A1: Because I am wasting so much energy trying to bring him on board.

Q2: Why do I need to stop wasting energy trying to bring him on board?

A2: Because I could use that energy to move the project along. (Now the very grumpy CEO is getting annoyed with what seem like stupid questions but persists.)

Q3: Why do I need to move the project along?

A3: To fulfill the organization’s mission.

Q4: Why do I need to fulfill the organization’s mission?

A4: To make everyone happy, even though I know that’s not possible.

Q5: Why do you need to make everyone happy?

A5: So I can feel like a good person.

Time after time, person after person, regardless of age and gender, no matter how high up the organizational ladder – the answers were the same. Everyone wanted to be, to feel, and to be seen as a good person.

After all, in the environment of evolutionary adaptation when the modern human brain was forming, if we did not have a good reputation, we and our kin would not get fed and would be left to die.

So ‘looking good’ matters. And though we may each define our own goodness differently, and differently over time, I believe that we have each “specified something” with Ego too often in charge.

If you want to know what promise you may need to break or revise, try asking yourself: What do I pride myself on the most?

And, then ask yourself: Who is the boss? Is it you or Ego in charge of implementation in your life?

Practice, practice, practice… See what happens, and let us know.

Warm wishes,

Madelaine

Photo by Pexels Marcus Winkler

Lying About Eating

How funny, I thought. LOL. Everyone lying about eating. And refreshing too, just to keep it light for a change—if you will pardon the pun, because this study is about eating and weight.

Or is it? On second thought, maybe this study is really about lying. Reminds me of those SAT reading comprehension questions on what the passage was really about.

In this case, however, we do not have to choose only one, so let’s address both: 1) lying about eating, and 2) lying altogether, because lying, in general, is a pretty troubling issue right now.

University of Essex researchers found that all 221 participants, whether thin or obese, lied about how much they ate.

Why this matters, according to the authors of the study, is that Britain’s health guidelines are based on the notion that people are obese because they lie about how much they eat.

Now it seems from this study that everybody is lying, including thin people, so they will have to focus on something else, e.g., risk factors related to high-energy density foods.

The authors add that there are better ways to measure energy intake, using radioactive water and urine testing, than the self-report measures we now know can be full of lies.

Why People Lie

Consider this from Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, National Geographic:

Lying, it turns out, is something that most of us are very adept at. We lie with ease, in ways big and small, to strangers, co-workers, friends, and loved ones….Being deceitful is woven into our very fabric, so much so that it would be truthful to say that to lie is human.

This makes me sad, and here is why from an earlier post I wrote on “The Truth About Lying”:

My daddy always said, “Honesty is the best policy.” I believed him, have lived my life accordingly, and been proud of it. Now we hear that everybody’s doin’ it, even those of us who say we’re not. One study found that 92%  of people who said they didn’t lie admitted they had when asked if they had lied in the past week. 

I’m sorry, to the best of my knowledge, I still don’t think I do. I did swear to god about something important once and later on changed my mind. But I meant what I said when I said it, so I don’t think it counts as a lie.

Open to the idea that I am lying to myself about lying somehow, I took a test to determine what kind of liar I am, only in none of the sample situations would I have ever resorted to lying in the first place, not at all necessary, other skills to use, if we can even consider lying a skill.

Researchers actually do. They consider it part of emotional and intellectual development when a child learns how to lie:

From about age 4 on, children lie for many of the same reasons adults do: to avoid punishment, to gain an advantage, to protect against an unwanted consequence, and even to boost self-esteem….to demonstrate power, to maintain privacy, or to protect a friend…. recent research has shown that lying plays a positive role in normal development. Essential human skills— independence, perspective taking, and emotional control—are the same skills that enable children to lie. 

Most kids eventually learn that others may stop giving them what they want, or want to be with them at all, if they tell so many lies that lying goes from something they do to something they are.

So, they develop other kinds of skills, conflict resolution and negotiation skills.

And then there are those who just get better and better at lying.

Unfortunately, the more we lie, the easier it gets for the brain (amygdala), then the more we lie and there goes any trust that might have been possible had we found another way. 

Ways to Deal With Lying

If you find yourself in frequent contact with someone whose primary life strategy is lying, rather than lose your sanity, you can run for the hills. (Or turn off the TV.) 

Lying is a form of gaslighting and can be very bad for your health.

But it is not always possible to run for the hills, and not always necessary either.

Just the other day, someone lied in contradicting emails to put herself in a better light at my expense, I thought.

As I have posted before, a favorite question I like to ask myself when things get sticky is this: “Is there something to be done here?”  

In this case, I decided there was not, not with her anyway, because that would bring me closer to energy better to avoid. 

Create the world you want to live in, the other thing I always love to say. For me, that world has more truth than its opposite in it, to whatever extent I can help it.

And, if and when we may feel tempted to ever lie ourselves, we can take a deep breath and ask if, in that circumstance and with that person, lying really is our best and only shot. 

Practice, Practice, Practice…truth mixed with kindness, and see what happens. True, kind, necessary, beneficial as the Buddhists would say.

Warm wishes,

Madelaine

Photo by pexels-tioroshi-lazaro

What is Impostor Syndrome?

Impostor Syndrome is the idea that you got where you are by luck and it is only a matter of time before everyone finds out that you’re a fraud. Oversimplified for sure, but I do notice something like this a lot in my work.

Even though these men and women may have proven their ability many times over, still they are filled with doubt about whether they can pull it off and measure up. From an earlier post I wrote on Impostorism:

I think it happened to me without my even knowing it. Twice. Can you even believe that I turned down an actual acceptance to Harvard for a PhD, telling myself that it would be too hard on my family. Well then, why did I even apply in the first place? And, surely there are lots of women who would have gone and made it work, including the woman I am today. And then, when it was time for business school, an esteemed Harvard Business School professor told my equally esteemed father-in-law, “Tell her to apply, we are looking for people like her.” I might have been shoo-in and did not even apply.

Why Does it Exist?

Again from the earlier piece on Impostorism, and pulling from Clancy Martin’s Imposter Syndrome: Do you sometimes feel like a fraud? in The Atlantic—here are some reasons why so many people have it:

Martin writes that early family dynamics and sex role stereotypes have resulted in many high achieving women feeling like impostors. He says this applies to ethnic minorities as well. And, for men and women, there is something about surpassing one’s parents—or I would add not surpassing one’s parents—that can make one feel like a fraud. He talks about how hard it is to reality test performance in the intangible service professions of today, and how comparisons with inflated Facebook posts are not helping either.

One Simple Fix That Could Work?

People can outgrow Impostor Syndrome. I don’t have it anymore. How do I know that? Probably because years of good training, good work, and good results have nourished my confidence out of any doubts like that? Oh, and because I took a test—which you can too. The Clance IP Scale is on the internet. You can find it here. And if you do score in the Impostor Syndrome zone, doesn’t have to stay that way at all.

The opposite of Impostor Syndrome would be to live and work in realistic appraisal and application of one’s talents and skills. People in this zone don’t ever have to know or be able to do everything. They can always ask for help or learn something new anytime they want or need to.

What I’m finding, though, is that a lot of people plagued by self-doubt think the opposite of Impostor Syndrome is self-interest—and they don’t want to be like that. As in, they don’t want to be like the son of the gods, Narcissus, who held his own reflection in a pool of water in such high regard that some versions of the myth say he fell into the pool and drowned.

They also don’t want to be like Icarus, whose hubris had him flying so close to the sun that his fake wings melted and he drowned in the ocean. Pride (or hubris) is, after all, at the top of the Seven Deadly Sins. So, in all fairness to the 70% who experience(d) Impostor Syndrome, it is easy to see why it might be hard for many to be all that they can be without being scared.

Check out The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level by Gay Hendricks for a whole book on upper limit fear of success.

For right here right now, though, you can try swapping out one single word. That is, instead of thinking the opposite of Impostor Syndrome is Self-Interest—think Self Respect instead. this came up just the other day with a client who had a really good response. She seemed relieved and said, “I like that.”

We will see over time if it actually makes a difference for her. You can try it too and, if you care to, let us know what you find.

Warm wishes for your success in all things that matter to you,

Madelaine

Photo by John Noonan Unsplash

Anybody remember bumper cars? They remind me of us, a bunch of egos colliding all over the place, sometimes just for the fun of it, sometimes not. What is that? From Nobel Prize winner, Daniel Kahneman:

“We all care intensely for the narrative of our own life and very much want it to be a good story, with a decent hero.”

Bumper Cars

That’s all it is really, everyone trying to be the hero of their own story. Each of us, just a tiny speck in the universe, trying to deal with our massive vulnerability, trying to matter more than we do — by producing and directing the story of our own lives, in which we are the star.

Trouble is…without realizing it, other people have a part for you in their movie, and you have a part for them in yours. But people don’t necessarily want the parts assigned to them in other people’s stories because they are busy starring in their own.

So, whether at work or home or wherever we may roam, we are like bumper cars, everyone bumping into the wishes, needs, and aspirations of everyone else. And although collaboration is our birthright too, it often gets crushed under the weight of the crashing bumper cars.

3 Steps to Interpersonal Sanity

So here are 3 simple but powerful tips to ease the tension and foster the collaboration we need now more than ever in these challenging times.

1. Pause your movie and greet each person as if you are meeting them for the very first time. Every day is a new day. Set yourself and your baggage aside long enough to let the other person in as they conceive of themselves separate from who or how you think they should be.

2. Focus your speaking and your listening on the subject at hand. Each time the mind wanders to what you think about the other person, or what the other person thinks of you, bring the mind back to the topic on the table. 

3. Express your “what I find” to the others once, maybe twice, just to be sure you have been heard. No response? Not the desired response? Move on, enjoy your day, and remember that we are all just peas in a pod trying to get through the day—and our lives—in the best way we know how.

Stay tuned for Getting to G.R.E.A.T: 5-Step Strategy for Work and Life…Based on Science and True Stories, coming soon with relevant chapters on “Other People” and “Mastering Your Mouth.”

Warm wishes for the holiday,

Madelaine

People are getting on each other’s nerves. Not everyone of course. But this pandemic has put a lot of people too close together and a lot of other people too far apart. And it’s making a lot people on either end…well, cranky. The crankiness can really get in the way of caring about others, which then only makes things worse. So how can people take care of themselves without being selfish?

This question reminds me of my trek along The Camino de Santiago in Northern Spain, when my companion on the pilgrimage said one of the nicest things I’ve ever heard, which was, “I like how you take care of yourself and the other person too.”

I thanked him and told him what I had learned about narcissism from the masters on this subject. That is, we are all on a continuum. At one extreme would be exclusive tending to the needs and interests of others. At the other extreme, would be exclusive tending only to the needs and interests of oneself. 

Randy, in Scott Turow’s book and movie Presumed Innocent, comes to mind as an example of someone consumed with himself. If I remember correctly, there was a line in the book that went something like: It took everything in him to get through the day just being Randy. So not a whole lot left over for thinking about anyone else.

Most of us are further along than Randy, somewhere in between the two extremes. And depending upon what’s going on internally and externally for us, we can slide back and forth. 

We probably slide around within a range, just as a lot people do with their weight, a few pounds this way and that from one day to the next.

The truth is that there were times on our Camino trek when each of us was entirely self-absorbed with our blisters, our fatigue, thirst, hunger, or whatever it was.

So how did we take care of ourselves without being selfish? 

The short answer is: By staying alert and aware enough to make sure that we had our hands on the dials. That way we could calibrate and recalibrate what and how we were doing—so we never got stuck at either end. I liked how he took care of himself and the other person too.

Warm wishes,

Madelaine

The researchers found that brain activity associated with happiness, along with self-reported happiness, increased simply after making a commitment to be generous to others. Happiness and happiness-related brain activity also went up when actually giving, the research team found, and left givers in a happier overall state than those who acted selfishly. Interestingly, relatively small acts of giving gave rise to just as big a happiness bump as bigger acts, the investigators said.*

Have you ever noticed how incredible it can feel to give? I have…years ago when I was drilling nails to build a child’s bedroom with Habitat for Humanity, a bedroom that kid might not have otherwise had. Not sure whether these Swiss researchers looked into how long the happiness bump lasts, but I can tell you mine has been around for decades. Every time I think of it I get that rush.

So they are right about just the thought of it. It will be a few weeks before my hospice volunteer work actually begins and, here again, just the thought of giving to another that way makes me feel good all over.

The ‘feel good all over’ that goes off in the brain when we give encourages us to do more of it, just like eating and, well you know, feel good to encourage us to do more of that too. Back in the day reputation mattered. Still does. It is speculated that givers appeared more trustworthy than takers, resulting in greater control over resources (or at least access to food and safety) with which to survive and to thrive. Doing well by doing good is what we would call it today.

We all want to be seen as good, and we feel happy when we are. In my Organizational Politics workshop, virtually every participant peeled down on our 5 Why’s exercise to being fundamentally driven by a deep desire to be seen as a good person. Makes us feel good.

Yeh but…what if the giving is obviously to get. What if, let’s say, a husband is stingy with his wife where no one can see, but an uber generous big tipper, big donator out in the world where everyone can. Or what if a woman sits on a variety of non profit boards, but is rarely home for her children, and rude to her employees. More about ‘looking good’ than being and doing good we might say.

Maybe you know people like this. And maybe you don’t like them, so not sure about the happiness bump for them. In fact, one such person** told me that, despite his most generous public persona, deep down he felt like a “wretched soul.” So the self cannot be fooled for long. Even if everyone else can, no real happiness for him.

Another woman I know** said she believes people only feel like giving when they are already happy, as in cup runneth over, so why not. To this I added my own yeh but…telling her what she said makes sense too but, if the research is right on what’s so great about giving, isn’t when we are feeling down a really great time to give. Look at all the happiness we can kick into motion for ourselves and others to help make the world we live in a better place.

She thanked me for this, which brings us to gratitude. There is plenty of research linking gratitude and happiness. And what is gratitude, after all, if not a form of giving itself. Giving thanks, that is. But don’t take their word for it, nor mine. Test it out yourself and let me know what you find.

So, for example, instead of spending on yourself, spend on someone else instead to see how that feels. Just a test. And remember, it doesn’t even have to be big. Something as small as offering a smile, or holding a door…could tell you all you need to know. Or something else you might like to try. Practice, Practice, Practice…and See What Happens.

For help with this or something else, or to let me know what you think, Contact Me at:

Email:  Madelaine Weiss

Phone:   202-617-0821

* Givers Really Are Happier Than Takers. MedLIne. Tuesday, August 15, 2017. https://medlineplus.gov/news/fullstory_167833.html

** Examples and illustrations are fictional composites inspired by but not depicting nor referring to any actual specific person in my practice or life experience.

Copyright © 2017. Madelaine Claire Weiss. All rights reserved.

“Narcissistic Personality Disorder…An enduring pattern of grandiose beliefs and arrogant behavior together with an overwhelming need for admiration and a lack of empathy for (and even exploitation of) others.”*

Every day people thank me for my posts on Narcissism. When I mentioned this to someone I know** she replied that, not counting the current intensified interest in the topic politically, she believed that most people either know a Narcissist or are afraid they are one. And pity the ones who try to love one. Holy Hannah. It hurts. It matters. And people are trying to figure it out.

Some experts are saying that Narcissism is rampant these days; selfies, facebook, and the like. Others are saying that true pathological narcissism is in fact quite rare, that Narcissism is an overused term we lay on people who get on our nerves: in-laws, exes, ‘difficult’ people of different stripes.

So what is it and why is it? Here’s my take. At the risk of sounding grandiose and arrogant myself, I do want you to know that I am not just pulling what I am about to say out of my personal experience, although there is that. Having studied the topic with the masters, I have come to think of the ordinary old Narcissist, the kind a lot of us know and worry we may be, in a way I believe to be both useful and humane. See what you think.

What we commonly refer to as Narcissism is a continuum on which we all live that has something to do with how much energy it takes to steady our sense of self, everyday. What it takes for each of us to feel okay enough about who and what we are to do well in love and work (that’s Freud, love and work, all there is) varies. Easier for some than for others. Some pretty much wake up feeling okay enough, maybe not perfect, but who is, and who needs to be. We’re all just peas in a pod trying to get through the day in the best way we know how. Others might be plagued by more crippling angst about themselves and their place in the world. These are the people who spend so much energy on ‘looking good’ to themselves and others that there is little if any energy left in genuine caring for anyone or anything else. These are the ones we may see as grandiose and arrogant who, underneath their glossy exteriors, may be all the more likely to be deeply demoralized and depressed.

Maybe their parents were stingy about loving them just for being, and/or stingy with praise for specific behaviors when it was deserved. Maybe that’s how the parents were raised and the only way they knew how. Or maybe the parents loved them in a enmeshed, hovering kind of way, or praised them too much, hooked to nothing particularly deserving of it. Sometimes it’s inconsistent; sometimes too much, sometimes too little. Either way, the child grows up wondering what if any of it had anything to do with him/her at all. Either way, there is little sense of stable self to wake up with everyday. And that’s where an unfortunate amount of time and energy goes – toward the stabilization of the self. The leftovers, what little there are if any, might go to caring about other people in love and work. But not necessarily even then, if it has become one’s habitual way of being in the world to almost entirely, if not entirely, care pretty much about oneself. Nature/nurture it seems because some experts are saying that Narcissism, as a character disorder or personality style, can have a genetic component too. And, culture, let’s say social media comparisons, not helping either, as you know.

So if we know one, love one, are one, too far along on the continuum of energy expenditure…what can we do? We can stop it. Yes, that’s right. Chronic stress shortens the telomeres on the end of our chromosomes, and shortened telomeres shorten our lives. When we find that we are being damaged chronically by another person’s utter disregard for us, we can and should run for the hills. Leave the relationship. Find a new job. What if you can’t? What if you love the guy/gal? What if you’ve done your due diligence and found that this is the best job, or only job, for you? Then please, please make it a priority to take very good care of you. Food, fun, sleep, exercise, interests, social supports; call on everything you’ve got to take care of you. Wait you say, won’t that make you one of them? With all this focus on yourself. Not necessarily. You should be taking care of yourself anyway, and they always say to put the oxygen on your own face before you try to help anyone else when the plane is in trouble. Take a good whiff and get on with your day.

Now, what if it’s you? What if you’re the one who spends too much of yourself trying to feel good about you. What can you do to ease the pain for you and everyone around you? Well, you can stop making your self-esteem your full time job. Check out Ron Siegel, PhD who talks about self-esteem collapse. For Siegel, self esteem (as in, our estimation of ourselves) is something that has a way of rising and falling when this or that happens for all of us whether we like it or not. And when this or that doesn’t happen too. So like when you didn’t get the memo, or the reply to your email, or the invitation to the party you didn’t even want to go to. You felt bad, real bad, even if you didn’t want to go! For Siegel, the what we can do is to begin to notice – to begin to notice the tyranny of self esteem, to notice what slaves we are to trying to make ourselves feel good not bad in the face of provocations, big and small, all day long. But we can get a grip on that. What if, instead of trying to win the all consuming self esteem game, we stopped playing it as much as we do. We are who we are. Unlikely we can stop altogether. Unlikely we should. But just think how much energy we could free up, for the good of ourselves and each other everywhere in our lives, if we started paying enough attention to discipline our minds in playing the game – a little bit, somewhat, or a whole lot – less. Practice, practice, practice…and see what happens.

For help with this or something else, Contact Me…

Email:  Madelaine Weiss

*“Narcissistic Personality Disorder” PubMed Health https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMHT0024871/

**Examples and illustrations are fictional composites inspired by but not depicting nor referring to any actual specific person in my practice or life experience.

Copyright © 2017. Madelaine Claire Weiss. All rights reserved.

“A first-of-its-kind study that ranks nations by empathy puts the United States at No. 7, behind countries ranging from Peru to Korea to Saudi Arabia. While a top 10 finish isn’t bad, Michigan State University’s William Chopik, lead author of the study, notes that the psychological states of Americans have been changing in recent decades – leading to a larger focus on the individual and less on others.” *

‘Individualism overriding empathy’ is one way to view what America’s election was all about. What about me? What about me? A cry heard from every corner. There are many ways and many levels upon which to view our election and its aftermath. Here I would like to address the electoral outcome as a pathological reaction to dramatic change and to propose a treatment for it. On so many fronts, the pace and depth of change has been exponentially breathtaking. Boundaries are shifting all over the place like mercury. Who are we? Who are they? And where is this all going? What does it even mean to be a human being for crying out loud, given how many of us are becoming as much medicine and machine inside our bodies as anything else. Our very identities feel threatened in ways that we hardly understand, but that nonetheless shake us to our core. In response, to use the vernacular, whether we know it or not…We are freakin’ out.

Who even knows what it means to be a family anymore, a gender, a nation? What does it mean to be a Republican now? Depends on which one we ask. Doubt they know themselves. What does it mean to be a Dem? The party of tolerance? Not so much, when we hear good people among my own dear friends and family saying things like “only half the country cares about others.” And they think it is the proverbial Us. We’re good; they’re bad. Us versus Them. Surely they know this is not true, or surely they should. Take a look at this passage from J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, his memoir about America’s white working class.

“Jacksonians say hello to everyone, willingly skip their favorite pastimes to dig a stranger’s car out of the snow, and—without exception—stop their cars, get out, and stand at attention every time a funeral motorcade drives past. It was that latter practice that made me aware of something special about Jackson and its people…”

So careful please whom we cast as people who don’t care. And while we might even consider the smashing to smithereens of both parties as a kind of long overdue creative destruction; still, any among us, of any party or not, who want the privilege of seeing ourselves as openhearted champions of democracy and diversity really need to walk this talk in tolerance of all. Not just the people like us, but the other ones too, the ones whose needs and perspectives may be different from our own. Casting the other as wrong, stupid, or bad is a solution that perpetuates the very pathology of ‘individualism overriding empathy’ that we must heal. The Cambridge dictionary defines an informal usage of pathological as “(of a person) unable to control part of their behavior; unreasonable.” What was pathological, what was out of control and unreasonable – and the losing party and pundits have already told us this themselves – is how many Americans were unable to listen to voices other than their own, how little empathy for the other was in the mix. This pathological ‘individualism overriding empathy’ went both ways and still does.

Doesn’t have to be this way. We have choices. We can go with the solution that is creating the problem of frightening discord and unbearable uncertainty, trying desperately to secure ourselves in our divisive We’re good; they’re bad. Or, no matter which side we are on, we can put ourselves in the shoes of the other, trying hard to see and respond to the cry for help outside of ourselves, in ways that make us feel bigger and better without feeling that we are losing ourselves. We can choose empathy over individualism to heal our nation and ourselves. We can take control – of our minds and behavior. We can call forth the better angels of our nature, as Lincoln would say. And, because we can, we must. Or at least that’s how it seems to me.

So here’s a little help. The goal is not so much to change our minds as it is to calm the lower brain enough to put the higher brain in control of how we respond to the very real and raw feelings of anxiety, depression, even rage, that so many Americans are feeling. The goal is not to take our feelings away but to calm the nerves so that we can think clearly about how we want to behave. Sure, some may say this is their grief process, that the only way out is through, that they are entitled to vent. True enough. And, through this, some will begin to notice the shortcomings of unbridled venting, if prolonged, for themselves and everyone else. Then they can begin to breathe. The day after the election the New York Times provided us with a simple guide to controlled breathing. In through the nose, out through the nose. Belly out on the in-breath. Belly in on the out-breath. Calming the body and the mind, to find and release the better angels of our nature, residing in us all. Practice, practice, practice…and see what happens.

To work on this or something else, would love to hear from you:

Email:  Madelaine Weiss

* Is America still an ‘empathic and generous giant’? http://phys.org/news/2016-10-america-empathetic-giant.html

**Examples and illustrations are fictional composites inspired by but not depicting nor referring to any actual specific person in my practice or life experience

Copyright © 2017. Madelaine Claire Weiss. All rights reserved.

A lot of people seemed to appreciate the March 28 post on Narcissism. Of course they did – it’s epidemic – so they say, so just about everybody knows at least one and, if you do, you are trying to figure out what to do about it, because it can really hurt. Sure, you may love yours very much. S/he can be as charming as anyone you’ve ever known, outright dazzling you may say, but a lot of what goes on can really get to you, especially what is now being called narcissistic perfectionism.

Not to be confused with neurotic perfectionism, which is pretty much turned in on the self; self doubting, self critical… You know this type too. Sad to see, wearing in its own way, but not necessarily as toxic to you. The narcissistic perfectionist projects outward. For this person, you are an extension and reflection, and reflect well you must, or be met with disgust and disdain for your failure to make him/her look and feel good. But you can’t…not for long, because the problem lies within and within problems cannot be solved from the outside. So it’s a bottomless pit and, just as the narcissist feels deep down ‘no matter how good, not good enough’, so too will you if you mindlessly go along.

The narcissistic perfectionist wipes out your own good sense that ‘perfection is the enemy of good’, that always striving for this unattainable state of perfection can drain the very enjoyment out of life and living. It can also prevent ever completing anything, sometimes from even starting anything. If one believes whatever it is will not be good enough, then why bother.

Look, this whole thing is a continuum from healthy to toxic narcissism and, if you think there is some of this overly critical, entitled, demanding, expectation of perfection toward others in you, it’s okay, it can be tempered. It is said that narcissists don’t change absent a major life catastrophe not of their own choosing, let’s say a job loss or divorce. But I have seen many people who did it for love, either a love that dropped into their laps and this time felt precious enough to preserve and protect, a yearning for a love never had, or because they had made it, already had it all, except love, and wanted to see what they could do to get ready, willing, and able to love**.

In all fairness, somewhere in the narcissist’s life there was likely someone somehow letting him/her know that ‘no matter how good, not good enough’, just as the narcissist may be doing to you, and probably why. And, whether at work or at home, if you are laying your perfectionism on another, or someone is laying theirs on you, the prescription is the same. First we breathe, belly out on the in breath, belly in on the out breath, to put the higher brain in charge…of reminding us that Perfection is Not Possible. Spending one’s life trying to attain an unattainable state of perfection is the enemy of good. And we all want to feel good. So when perfection attacks, either from within or without, you may try this, if you care to, only if you care to: 3 luxurious breaths, then “There Goes Perfection,” letting it come and go like a cloud in the sky, each time bringing your attention back to “Good is Good Enough.” Practice, practice, practice…and see what happens.

To work on this or something else, would love to hear from you. Write or call:

Email:  Madelaine Weiss

Phone:  202.617.0821

*”How narcissistic perfectionists hurt those around them ” April 12, 2016 http://bit.ly/1rcpgp5

**Examples and illustrations are fictional composites inspired by but not depicting nor referring to any actual specific person in my practice or life experience.

Copyright © 2017. Madelaine Claire Weiss. All rights reserved.