Since it’s Thanksgiving, I feel compelled to count my blessings and all of you who support my writing adventure. Life Intelligence exists because you want to read it and I want to write it for you. It excites me to know and interact with people who love this human experience and want to “live more, love more, do more, and matter.” I am sorry it’s not all free content anymore, but have you checked grocery prices lately? I can’t write without eating. If I figure out how to live without eating, I’ll be more famous and successful than Ozempic.
But this post is free – the second one this month, because I feel Spirit overtake me… Amen! Nah, I just appreciate you guys. No spirits necessary 😉
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Onward….
Holidays happen every year! Yet, despite the annual practice, most people experience mixed emotions about them. Family dynamics seem predictable and inevitable to most. It’s like every turkey comes with sides of crazy, nagging, passive-aggressive, grumpy, and “I told you so.” I’ve got a recipe for a better time this time. You’re welcome.
A study found that people who believed to be inferior perceived interactions with others validating that inferiority. It was done in a “job interview” setting, where the participants received a fake scar on their faces and were told to monitor how the interviewer treated them. Everyone reported negative interactions because of the scar. What they did not know was that, just before they went in for the interview, the makeup artist, under the pretext of fixing the makeup, had actually removed the scar. The interviewers did not know the purpose of the study. They were told to simply evaluate the candidate on specific job qualifications.
And there you have it. Whatever problems, shortcomings, and issues you think you have, you also think everyone else judges you for them. They may not even be aware of what you think about yourself, or may not care. But you will treat them as if they do know and interpret negativity where there might just be ignorance, stupidity, or something completely unrelated and possibly not even negative. This is similar to what psychologists call “projection,” where we literally project onto others something originating within ourselves. We interpret other people’s behavior from our knowledge base, personal experiences, conflicts, beliefs, and self-criticism. Kind of like holding a mirror to someone’s face but the mirror faces us instead of them. So, we only see ourselves in the mirror.
Convoluted? Yep. Try convincing someone that’s what they are doing! Hahaha. You get a lot of push-back, anger, and rationalizations. Very few people go, “Hey, wait! You’re telling me that Grandpa’s grumpy comments shouldn’t ruin my time because they have nothing to do with me?” Yep, that’s what I am telling you. Your grandpa is grumpy because he’s old, gets tired easily, doesn’t understand this new world and the choices people make in it, and misses all his grandkids. He’s possibly lonely and feels left out. You may get triggered by his grumpiness, interpreting it as criticism and judgment, because you criticize and judge yourself for putting Grandpa on the back burner, never visiting, or making questionable choices.
Now that we got this out of the way, remember to ask yourself “How do I feel about myself?” before you storm out of the dining room before dessert is served.
Also, remember that this works in both directions. The person talking to you sees in you what they don’t like in themselves, or whatever your presence invokes in them that makes them uncomfortable. They, too, perceive in you their projections. Have some compassion for the nagger, the passive-aggressive, and the downright critical around the holiday table. No need to take anything personally.
And, for a jolly good time, call on these additional tricks below:
1) Give people your undivided attention. Look at them, hug them, sit with them. No, not 100% of the time. That would be creepy. Just when they talk to you, tell you stories, ask you questions. Connect! People love to be seen, heard, and sat with! They may or may not care about your opinions, but they do love being with. So, do it. Yeah, no phone! Turn it off, unless you’re on call at the emergency room or are a first responder, you should leave that thing in your pocket on silent.
2) Be an animated listener. I love this about myself. I didn’t realize I did it until someone pointed it out to me. I nod my head and make faces a lot. My whole body participates in people’s stories. I’m like, “Oh, yea! Really? Whaaat? No way! OMG! WTF?” etc… If you are talking to me and all you get is “Uh-hu, yah, sure,” I am not paying attention. Because if I was, you’d get me, myself, and I reflecting your story back at you. You probably have friends like this and you love talking to them. Everyone else is just boring. 😊
3) Ask questions. It beats making assumptions. Listen for things you never knew before. Sometimes, you have to tease them out of people. It shouldn’t be too hard. People like talking about themselves. Just don’t ask them “What do you do for a living?” Try, “What do you love about what you do?” Instead of the judgmental, “When are you finally going to…. ?” ask “What’s something that interests/excites you lately?” Grumpy grandpa will be less grumpy if you ask him what he remembers about being your age. Watch the floodgates open!
I have a notebook full of questions I want to ask people in random situations. I am always looking for questions no matter what I am doing. I source them from reading, watching movies, while walking my dog, and eavesdropping on people’s conversations. (I didn’t just admit that, did I?) I write them down and hope I’ll think of them at the right time.
Once, I was invited as a +1 to someone’s birthday party. I only knew the person who invited me. Raise your hand if you’d feel as awkward as I did! What would you do in this situation? I’m an introvert, so I had to call my extroverted adaptive style to the rescue. I grabbed a glass and rang on it until everyone quieted down. Some 20 or so people had spontaneously organized in small clumps having competingly loud conversations while the birthday lady fussed around the table settings.
“Hi all,” I said, “It seems that I am the only person who doesn’t know the birthday girl and I am not sure who knows who in this fine company of cheerful humans. Y’all want to help me out by introducing yourselves and saying how you met her, and one story you’ll never forget about her.”
Well, that took like a lot of time. People sat down at the table and went around as asked, telling stories. Occasionally the stories bumped into each other and meandered around the table. The birthday lady kept blushing, laughing, saying, “NO, DON’T tell that one…” A few tears and hugs later, the food was gone, and so was the cake, but the smiles remained on people’s faces.
By the way, this is a good strategy to keep people off politics, too.
4) Check your expectations. Do you expect that some people will be obnoxious, cranky, demanding, entitled, moralizing, criticizing, etc? You often get what you expect from people’s behavior. It’s called the Pygmalion Effect or the observer-expectancy effect. It happens because unconsciously we modify our behavior to match our expectations altering reality and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. So, don’t blame them for behaving according to your expectations! I get it. Once you “know” that someone is stupid, they can only do stupid things, right? Exactly.
5) Carry earplugs. If everything else fails, you can always shut your ears. Not kidding. You’re not the Magical Family Lovefest Fairy. You’re just you and responsible for your actions and reactions. If the noise gets to be too much, you may consider taking a walk, a loooong bathroom break, or sitting in the corner and observing everyone with a big smile on your face like you love everything about your nutty family (with earplugs in your years). I call it TTT time - “The Ten-min Timeout!” Make sure no one notices! If they do, you’ve got a lot more coming than you’d like to deal with.
Happy Thanksgiving to you all. Save this post and read it again before Christmas. The same rules apply.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for being/becoming a subscriber and supporting your Life Intelligence.
🙏🤝💗
If you need help figuring out your situation, relationships, priorities, plans, and purpose, contact me. I can help!
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Yours truly,
V
The interview experiment (with the scar that isn't there) is a great example of how contextual every situation really is. We view the world through a kaleidoscope of past experience, both recent and archaic. It's really quite humbling if taken seriously, which often happens once a person decides to seek out professional help with whatever persistent problems keep coming their way. This recognition that maybe the patterns mean something, rather than always assuming the world is out to get you, is a huge step!
Projection is the perfect segway topic to the idea that all situations are at a minimum viewed through a kaleidoscope made out of past events and experiences. Projection, and/or an "activated complex", is a sneaky way for repressed or simply forgotten (ignored, denied, etc) unconscious elements within us to get our attention in the outside world. I like the analogy of a projection being like a coat, and to hang up a coat one needs a coat hook. So we walk around in the world with an inner closet full of coats (projections ready to fly out into the world) just looking for coat hooks. When we find one it is almost always because there's a familiar element to that situation, thing, or person which acts as the hook. What this means practically speaking is that when we project ... say a shadow element, so and so is such a smarty pants ... that is probably true to some extent of this person (this is the hook), but it's also probably true of whatever is projecting from within us. Important here is that we aren't "wrong" per se about this person, they probably are an annoying smarty pants. If it's a projection there's probably a lot more energy present than would be if that's ALL that was going on though, each person has to figure that out for themselves. If it's a projections (aka they're so annoying you are fantasizing about strangling them and loosing your cool) it's probably a clue that we may also act at times like a smarty pants know it all, OR maybe we have a previous experience where supposed or actual intelligence was used to put us down or make us feel small, OR we might fear the idea of thinking of ourselves as intelligent because we've convinced ourselves our entire life that we're dumblings. so we see oppression and mansplaining everywhere we go. The idea here is that what we see in the other person is to some extent real, the mirror of projection isn't entirely just giving us our own reflection. Secondly, what we see in that projection could be any number of inner issues that need to be worked on. Only an individual can unravel the inner message wanting to be interpreted and acted on, and there's almost always more than one option, at a minimum are we attracted to or repulsed by something because it's a lot like us and we secretly don't like that about ourselves or it's nothing like us but we wish we secretly wish we had more of it, add to this a thousand variations and the personal work to be done becomes very tricky indeed. The only way toward the finish line is through the dark woods though, so get going :)
On the topic of telling other people "Hey you're projecting right now!", particularly if it is accompanied by some uninvited psychoanalytic monograph on what they should actually be doing, thinking, saying ... well I don't think anyone should be surprised that this type of comment isn't going to be well received. Psychodynamic and depth psychologists understand that "leading" a client in this way almost never works. It's like giving the punchline to a joke before setting the stage, but basically the opposite. You're trying to tell the person that they're the asshole in the situation, and that's a tough pill to swallow for pretty much anyone but the thickest skinned individuals, so maybe 5% of the population can handle this, those with Big 5 neuroticism in the near-zero range. Everybody else requires a careful engagement (or just plain avoidance, choose your battles wisely). If a person doesn't find their own way to greater awareness (aka growth, consciousness, evolution) then there's almost no way to force this upon them by giving them a 30-second psychoanalysis. Another key point here is that you actually NEVER know if you're possibly the asshole, targeting another person as projecting and causing problems for themselves and/or others. You can't know this with certainty because you cannot ever know that you aren't also projecting in some way in that situation. So for a person to distrust being handed an on-the-fly armchair therapeutic insight is actually quite reasonable in many ways. If they are open enough to listen and consider what you've said at a later date and in more depth, then good for them, but don't get too righteous if they decide what you've said is more about you than it is about them, they could be completely right! Walking around feeling like we have our life and the world figured out, so much so that we are handing out life advice to other people without some serious internal work of our own, and some serious safety checks and balances in place, well that's just another version of having a lot of work yet to do (instead of deflated, depressed, stuck, we are over-inflated, lack humility, and assume that what we can't see or detect in ourselves must not exist, we already handled all that and our journey is done ... yeah right!).