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Episode 202: Leaving an unhappy marriage, Flirting, Toxic parents, Needy friends
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I've been married to a 90% disagreeable man for 42 years many times I've packed my bags but I've never followed through I dream of being on my own doing the little things in life without constantly being questioned if it wasn't his idea isn't a good idea as he's gotten older his drinking has become a problem I'm sure he's an alcoholic his rule is the first beer isn't cracked until 4:30 it used to be five and then game on by the time supper comes about he's 100% disagreeable and every year finds me getting more and more depressed the question is how to know when to go hmm well it sounds like you you know that it's time to go you just are not willing to pay the price of going so this is this is getting to the heart of all human activity which is that everything is a cost-benefit analysis so you you've been running for 42 years a cost-benefit analysis I'm remaining in this relationship so there there is a trade that is maintaining this equilibrium or the equilibrium would not be this stable so this is where it can get really interesting and I would need to know a lot more about your particular situation to figure out what exactly is contributing to that sense of some some kind of sense of fair trade or this would not be stable so usually in a lot of cases that is a straight financial situation so what particularly women who find themselves in a long-term unhappy marriage they're staying in that long-term unhappy marriage because they're they're so financially enmeshed with their partner often to the point of financial dependence so they they don't have an independent income that they can fall back on they don't have any sort of you know career path that they could easily move into and particularly if you've been married for 42 years that puts you somewhere likely in your 60s or even 70s and so you know you're likely looking at some some difficult to market prospects as far as managing your own financial affairs so that very often is something that contributes to women putting up with this kind of situation not that men can't as well men can also be financially dependent and people can be mutually dependent for lots of other reasons they own property together that's really complicated to disaggregate there are children involved there are all kinds of different things religious expectations so you you kind of have to look at very in a very clear-eyed courageous sort of way what the factors are that have essentially been tilting the balance towards stay all this time because the it doesn't sound like your your happiness is in question it sounds like you're very clearly not happy he's very clearly showing signs of progressive alcoholism which is a progressive process it's never going to get better he's you know if he's moving up his time of when he's cracking his first beer that's just gonna get earlier and earlier and unless he completely interrupts that process by abstaining altogether it's it's just gonna continually get worse and 90% disagreeable is pretty disagreeable so you're you're staying there for some number of reasons you can also be staying there out of sheer personality distortion and this is one of the reasons that we talk so much about personality on every show and I particularly am obsessed with it because when we are really distorted on certain personality dimensions we wind up putting up with things outside of what we should be on average we're the species putting up with so if he's 90% disagreeable it's likely that you're pretty agreeable someone who's extremely disagreeable if they're in a long-term relationship is almost always married to a saint so you know we're gonna put you at at least at least well above-average agreeableness for a female and that's contributing to some major distortion about how you were running the CD I'm getting out of this thing because agreeable people stay they stay way too long they don't want to rock the boat they don't want to upset anybody they underestimate their needs and their requirements and they devalue their own happiness they're basically going through life saying well you or everybody else's well-being is more important than mine everybody else gets a bigger share of the pie I'll take what's left over that that is what agreeableness is and so if you're if you're running a fairly high degree of agreeableness and if you're pretty conscientious and so you're you're taking care of the messes that are created by him and you're you know you don't you don't want to subject everything to a bunch of chaos and you're emotionally stable like all of these things can make an otherwise very marketable person stay in a bad relationship for a long time so the if the question is how to know when to go it's it's really that's not quite the question you should be asking the question is are you are you willing to pay the price of leaving and so far you haven't been because you haven't and so just looking at what that price would be and if you're willing to change change your willingness to pay that's really the only thing that can move the needle here and with this kind of situation both dr. Lisle and I are always reminding people that you don't have to do anything drastic to see a really big change in your life so you don't have to make any big declarations you don't have to file any major paperwork you don't have to you don't even have to announce anything you just you just tell this guy hey you know I'm gonna go stay with my sister for a while or I you know I just really need some time on my own I'm gonna go on a trip or whatever it is that you can manage within your financial parameters and your openness and everything else that just gets you a little space out of this thing where you can get in better touch with what your emotions about the relationship really are and and start to start to get a sense of how you feel when you're apart from him because that is going to contribute to running a more accurate cost-benefit analysis on ending the whole thing altogether so don't make a big decision when a small decision would do in the first small decision is just to take some time take some time away from it absolutely fascinating I'm you're reminding me when I was a kid when we used to drive to school my mom would put on a radio show it called dr. Laura the dr. Laura show and there was this family therapist and she would she had this she was actually nationally syndicated so she had quite an audience people would call him and ask her about these questions and and this was actually a fairly common question maybe not the alcoholic and abuse maybe not the alcoholic and and the disagreeable but but it was a very common question and I just remember getting frustrated every time I would listen even though I was a teenager and the way she would put it out is of you know you've got to find out what happened in your life that's traumatic that's causing you to want this god sake see this is what it is this is psychodynamic BS and that's that is absolutely the the learning theory world that most psychologists are immersed in and most people culturally just assumed to be true and certainly if someone's gonna get a nationally syndicated syndicated show that's um they are gonna be preaching that kind of gospel that's that's the dr. Phil gospel too it's oh you know you have intimacy issues because of all of this damage that you accumulated in your childhood and you just need to learn to communicate better in your relationship because of those deep-seated emotional intimacy issues and you need to unwind the damage of the past oh my god it's so misguided and frustrating and detrimental to people's well-being and happiness over time it makes me very it turns me into psychology Hulk now one thing one thing in your in your explanation I mean this is brilliant and one thing I wanted to ask is let's suppose the the lady I mean it doesn't sound like he's that she's in fear and and that's why not she's leading but of course you know I'm gonna I'm I don't know her situation but but if there was somebody who's in a similar situation and the reason that their cost/benefit is skewed towards not leaving is that they fear cigarette or some violence what what advice would you have then yeah well that's gonna be very situational a dependent and that very often is part of the deal because yeah she may be running with some accumulated evidence that he responds in a very unstable way when she if she's packed her bags and threatened to leave before and he's gotten real shitty about it then of course that's going to that those are pieces of information that go into cost-benefit about whether whether it makes sense to leave or not so if I don't I don't get that vibe from this particular question but I've certainly talked to clients in that situation before and it's not entirely uncommon and if he is an alcoholic and he's you know becoming more unstable as a as a feature of that progressed alcoholism which is likely then that's you know worth considering so depending on her financial situation the answer to that's going to be different you know depending on her essentially what kind of position of power she's in but this is when we lean on friends we we lean on family if she has it I you know you find somebody who can help you stage an exit and show up and support you and provide safe haven for you while you you get away from him and depending on how nasty it is and how dangerous he is you might have to you know really orchestrate this in fine detail before you make your move so you're waiting for him to pass out and then you're leaving and you're leaving no sign of where you've gone like it really depends how extreme it is in this case because it doesn't sound like he's he's that dangerous or he's that unhinged I think it's probably good enough to just have a pack of friends show up and help you when you're you're moving out or or to just kind of bluff him with this very like I'm suggesting just an early experiment to take some time away if she is still feeling some dissonance about it if there are good good things about the relationship that she's hanging on to which there may be and she still has some dissonance about it that's why it's important to take the time to sew so you just put him to sleep by saying hey I'm just gonna go stay with my my good friend and in you know Florida for a while I just need some Sun I got to get out of town yeah I'll be back in a month and you know he might grumble or whatever but you're that's giving you the opportunity to really recalibrate and and to make a plan and to call upon your social resources to the extent that you have them but everybody's in a different situation with us and lots of people I mean I've I've this is I mean it's an incredibly common question and incredibly common situation dr. Laura had a lot of calls about it I talked to a lot of people who were in some kind of situation and it's you know the financial dependence is the most common explanation but also especially when you're dealing with agreeable people particularly agreeable women they're hanging on to these little these little crumbs of goodness about the person and you know they've gone through some tough times together 42 years obviously there's there's probably some adult kids involved you have a history together and the guy's not a hundred percent a shithead you know there's some redeeming qualities and maybe you have some shared rituals and routines that really give you a lot of joy and so women will hang on to these things and say oh but I really like watching TV with him at night or he's really funny or he's really supportive of my my quilting or whatever it is and so a lot of what I'm doing when this comes up clinically is is you know urging people to look at this situation not to not get too attached to those little crumbs but to take it as a whole you have to take this person as a whole you have to look at the relationship from a more holistic perspective and run that cost-benefit analysis a little more coldly on the on the whole picture not on the promise that you might have a good day one more good day in you know two weeks and then a not another one for another six weeks like you can't you can't link your happiness and your well-being to the promise of some crumbs like that you you really have to be more clear-eyed about it so that's a trap that people will very often get into as well but certainly yeah if it's if it's nasty and directly abusive especially physically abusive then we call in some support from other humans absolutely fascinating now you mentioned traps and so just right right right away I'm thinking if someone's if this lady happens to be agreeable like it sounds like in what you said she is but also conscientious where she's overestimating the worst case scenario with a disagreeable person like this partner here provides some some level of comfort to the stone-age brain essentially saying hey if there's ever then attack you know this guy's going to look out for me whereas for two years I've built that protection essentially whereas if I start over yeah you know I may not get any protection at all for the rest of my life yeah oh there's all kinds of stuff going on I mean if she's in her 60s and she's and she's been with the same guy for 42 years I mean there's there's distortion on top of distortion on top of distortion and there's there's some accuracy to some of that CB as well so yes if she's been free riding on a disagreeable partner for 42 years and I have been in that position myself is a very agreeable person it's it's there is there's great benefit in connecting yourself to someone more disagreeable because they can provide that protection and they can they can be the tough guy and basically improve your situation in life better than you could for yourself so there's of course there's a there's a trade there and at some point it sounds like that became just the trade was no longer beneficial for her in yeah right yeah but if she's in her 60s and she's taking a hard look at her potential mate value and she she's running an analysis about how likely she is to find another mate who could you know especially if she is financially dependent people that this is why people don't leave because they look at the situation and they say oh well god I don't I don't think I could get a job that could keep me at the in the circumstances that I'm accustomed to and I don't think that I could likely find another partner who would be able to you know at least at an unconscious level provide this kind of disagreeable protection racket that you're talking about and everything else that comes along with this the security and the comfort of a long-term relationship so you know the the fact that she's still there and that she's been there for this long is not an accident she her brain has been very accurately running these odds and running these expectations for four decades and she's consistently come down to the the computer has spit out the decision we stay we stay we stay and she's got dissonance and she's unhappy and it's not an easy not an easy process to extract yourself from that and it's really she's you're weighing those trades that you're making really that are just a representative of some degree perhaps a very severe degree of inconvenience that's really what a lot of psychological problems come down to is that you're not willing to pay the price of extreme inconvenience that that making a different decision would entail so in this case that inconvenience could mean you have to live in a homeless shelter you know because you can't you don't have anywhere to live he gets the house he can't afford a job you can't there's nothing else that you can do so that's obviously that's a very high price but it is the price like everything has a price and so part of her process is like really looking at that extreme scenario and asking herself if she would if it's bad enough is she willing to pay that extremely inconvenient price to you know make make a play for her actual moods of happiness and in the remaining thousand you know ten ten thousand days or whatever it is of her life for her hundred thousand hours as we're often referring to because that's all that's all you get I don't know exactly how old she is but just to remind people this is the specter of a hundred thousand hours is the idea that if you're 60-ish or so but that's about what you're looking at if you expect to live an average average lifespan and that's it and you know one of those is getting taken away every hour and you can't get it back you can't earn more so she has to really look at her time and her energy and how she's spending it and who she's spending it with and if that's if that's not willing if that is not worth the trade of pretty significant inconvenience then it's not but you know maybe it is so that only she can come to that decision that's great I mean we touched on this a little bit a couple of podcast episodes ago where I mean you just said that the cost-benefit analysis is working accurately which you know it sounds like it is and yet she's feeling more depressed every year and so it seems to me like yeah there's that on one hand the the the calculators working properly but on the other hand the future the future sensor is saying you know this isn't this isn't great yeah well there's internal conflicts of interests and among her different value propositions and and the the calculator works correctly for the individual but the individual might be systematically skewed on a personality dimension like agreeableness or conscientiousness so if you're a super hyper agreeable person the CB runs correctly the little calculator does its little process and it's it's assigning high value to those things that are highly valued by agreeableness because that's what it's programmed to do so it produces a quote unquote correct result but that result is can of course it can be at odds with your happiness so it's it's it's producing the right result for genetic success but success and Happiness are not the same thing like they're very often not the same thing so just because you're this is what beating your genes is about so just because you're your genetic script is telling you that something is correct it is correct to eat the pizza and the Twinkies instead of the the vegetable soup in the kale salad that is the correct choice to make for your survival and reproduction because it's maximizing your your time and your energy and it's maximizing the motivational triad but it's not the right recipe for success or for happiness excuse me so so success and Happiness are diametrically opposed to each other in in that example and many many many others that we find ourselves in so if she's projecting out the kind of life that those that those outcomes are going to secure for her and she's feeling some depressed feelings about it then that is that's a cue from the system that something is awry but her her genes or perhaps her genes perhaps her situation her financial situation or whatever or an abusive situation or whatever it is are leading her back into maintaining that equilibrium against the Mandate of happiness all this talk of soup and salad and Twinkies you're making me hungry but I'm not going to tell you what I'm I don't know about a Twinkie salad that's pretty that's pretty extreme it's on the menu the holiday menu at the fast escape well so many the as far as genetics goes would different genetics feel more depressed more quickly and so so we essentially state more stable lady here yeah she could go on for forty two years whereas someone who's not that stable she might not last for a year in this type of work sure yeah I mean the fact that she stuck around for 42 years in a sub optimal situation tells us that she probably is fairly stable but you know she's packed her bags and she's thought about it but she hasn't done it so there's that's that's not telling us that there's a huge amount of impulsive nough sin this person so she just from this question knowing nothing about her not not meeting her and not knowing her full situation I I can read you know hi agreeable hi stable hi conscientiousness that's that that is the kind of person that's going to stay in a crappy relationship for four decades so and that's those are that's a tough combo like I I have that combo as well and I've stayed in shitty relationships way longer than I should have for very similar reasons and you know some of its personality distortion some of its economic distortion and situational you know conflict of the sort that I'm talking about with financial dependence but whatever it is whatever she's dealing with there is there is a path to get out but it might entail some short-term or even long-term significant inconvenience and a lot of risk you don't know that it's gonna be better there's no guarantee that you leave this relationship and it's hearts and flowers and cupcakes and rainbows all the way like it may not be it might be really crappy like you might be living in a homeless shelter you might be living with your sister for the rest of your life you know things you you might be really lonely and and never find another relationship and and that would be the expectation actually that would be the norm for the species and so again it's no accident that she come down to stain in a suboptimal situation because there's you you run those odds and there are no guarantees and you know it could be a worse situation on the other side of it there's no promise of that but what we do know is that this is this is pretty bad Wow yeah really cheerful stuffer yeah all right our next question why is it that men flirt I'm falling for a guy who is a huge flirt I see him flirting with me and with other women and he has a long-distance long-term girlfriend who he is faithful to why does he flirt so much why am i falling for him even though I know he doesn't mean anything serious by flirting besides his flirting he's actually a good person good character respectful kind intelligent and diligent and well-liked um well he's so-so yeah sure men flirt women flirt - lots of people flirt flirting is on a continuum like everything else and it's it's like everything else in general it's a mix of the genetic predisposition to flirt ie or what kind of personality you have and a given context and environment and the cost-benefit analysis that's associated with that context and environment so this guy is he's a big flirt partly because he's a born flirt so there's there's some degree of flirtatiousness inherent to his personality which is really just probably that he's extroverted and open that's that's what a flirtatious personality would be maybe agreeable although I've known some pretty disagreeable flirts in my day and so he's partly just congenitally a flirt and and then you know he's got he's got enough opportunity to flirt in ways that make him make him feel good about his mate value without entailing much risk so it sounds like you know a lot of people will use flirting as a form of market testing so people do this all the time so if he's faithful to his long-term girlfriend but he's going out there and he's flirting like crazy with this questioner and with everybody else he's just really above all gathering market feedback to calibrate his mate value he's he's putting his his sexual display out there and he's seen what kind of feedback that he's gonna get so that might mean that he's pondering defection on his relationship but it might not it might just mean that he is more interested in calibrating that than other people are so different different people will have all kinds of differences about how likely they are to do that people have this idea that but no matter how strong and stable and beautiful and mystical and idealize their para band is that people aren't going to be sort of keeping one eye toward market testing of course they are their market testing all the time and it's just a little more obvious in some cases like this guy he's he's gathering more data on an ongoing basis about whether there's a better opportunity for him out there and that's there's nothing there's nothing pathological about that that is what we're wired to do this is this is a an endless competitive slog in the romantic arena and in the friendship arena and in the and in the work arena qualification for a romantic relationship is a is a daily battle you know it's not it's not one and done you don't just qualify for a relationship and that's it you're your qualifying every day for that relationship and you're subject to market comparisons every day so you'll see this advice in women's magazines I've seen this for years that you know oh the relationship is really in trouble when people stop courting each other which is this big cliche but it's actually very true so that that really is the process of attempting to continually qualify for your mate that is what courtship is and so this guy we don't know his we don't know his particular motivations and his particular feelings about his long-term para bond and how seriously he's considering defection but he is just on the continuum of significant market testing and he's a little more of a social butterfly and a little bigger flirt and so you're just gonna see a lot of that behavior from him yeah so it's and it's understandable that she would be falling for him that yeah this magazine you just brought up the those was at the Cosmo magazines where they say courtship starts or what if courtship stops and then the relationship ends so yeah that's it's fascinating because I've learned from from you and dr. Lisle that that when courtship stops it's not that you have to start it up again it's that the reason why it stopped is because you were less motivated to try to qualify for that person anymore is that exactly right right yeah but that a lot of that comes from this notion that that it's you know qualification is is not an ongoing process or that you don't in principle have rivals or you know you have a false sense of security so the only way that you could have a true sense of security is if you've settled so far down the scale that you have somebody that you're partnered with somebody who is so over rewarded that you know it's it's not going to be an issue no matter how little effort you put into the thing but that's very unlikely or if you sign a contract that that makes it very difficult to get out of the relationship right we're not we're not gonna you know sling mud at marriage on this podcast we're about barriers that's what I know very very fair point but yeah I mean this there's always whether it's a romantic relationship or a friendship or a work relationship there's always somebody younger and better-looking and more talented and willing to do more work for less money coming up on your heels you know like this is that the competition does not stop in any of these arenas ever so you can feel temporarily very secure and you can feel like you found your soul mate and all of that but the the fact is that there's there's continual market testing happening constantly in all of those competitive domains and it's just that some people are a little more aggressive about making that obvious ie through something like a flirtation flirtatious process so other people are much more subtle about it there people are less sensitized to it and are you know especially if they're more more agreeable and more stable like our previous questioner they're they're more content in a relationship for a longer period of time they're less likely to be seeking any kind of recalibration so there's all kinds of variation all over the place but everybody's on the continuum somewhere as far as market and to people who say gosh dr. hawk this sounds depressing and you know so cynical why what's the point if someone's always going to be looking through one eye about somebody better like what what would you say to that yeah well there's a lot of questions in evolutionary psychology that come down to that kind of idea and it's like well would you would you rather be we should rather stick your head in the sand about these dynamics and pretend that they don't exist or would you rather be informed and and be able to build your life and make choices according to to these tenets of human dynamics and human relationships like I would rather be informed even if it's depressing and cynical and and like yeah well it's kind of like yeah this is not great news like it you do have to qualify everyday even if you've found your soulmate so it's it's just the way that it is and I am a truth-seeking kind of person who wants to be informed rather than then you know just pretend it's not a process so but that's up to everybody to decide for themselves and there's there's no end of findings throughout behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology that are equally sort of anxiety inducing especially for women especially for women over a certain age so it's a there's a reason you don't see a lot of women in this field yeah that's a whole another Pandora's box I guess it is yeah it is yes well yeah well yeah keeping it cheerful here right on time for the new year I mean just nothing better that's right yeah Happy New Year everybody good luck in that endless competition we call lazily but actually you know what is the line what's the line yeah ever in your favor is that what it is yes oh yeah that's that's good the vibe here but but I guess to spin this around in a more positive light more more optimistic light is is that once we know that there is a competition and what the what the rules are essentially or what the competition entails and what what's what's allowed in this competition really really the next step is to just get to work roll up the short sleeves and get to work on the fundamentals and and even if we don't achieve everything that we wanted even if we don't get the results that we wanted the process getting lost in that process and feeling good that that's gonna make us feel good about ourselves yes that is that is the secret to happiness right there the way that you've described it but of course that is you know that scenario is competing with all of the different little traps that we've talked about on many different episodes and all of these inclinations that people have for very good reason to avoid and dodge and Bluff competitions so there there is no shortage of ways in the modern environment in particular that we can avoid these competitive processes or pretend to avoid them or pretend that we don't even want to compete the Enlightenment trap the various all the different phases of the ego trap all kinds of victimhood narratives all all sorts of ways that we can try to remove ourselves from this endless swirling storm of insecurity and competition and rightfully so because it's like who wants to it takes a very particular sort of nervous system to dive into that wholeheartedly and say well yep I'm just gonna I'm gonna do my best and I'm gonna play honestly and fairly and let the chips fall where they may like that that is what we need to do to optimize our life experience but that is not the average inclination of the species as a whole to take to that naturally that's we are much more naturally inclined to survive try to make life a little bit easier and softer and gentler for ourselves and antics but a lot of yeah yeah a lot of the traps though like a lot of the faces of the ego trap part of how they're operating is that they appear to be more energy conserving than they really are so you think you're getting away with something it through avoiding competition or bluffing that you want nothing to do with competition and it mimics conservation I think it's not that much until years later yeah very very similar very similar sort of problem yeah yeah it's like oh this isn't real money at all but yeah you're you're really undermining your happiness in the process and you wake up one day and you realize that you've missed out on your life because you've just been spending all of your time trying to avoid competition so that's not ideally what we want to do but we're really fighting the genes at every level to make the right eye like this we brought it back around to more positive life for the start of the new year so this yeah that's right this is a little bit of a pep talk go out there and do your best kids all right next question how is it that you deal with toxic and controlling parents who like to believe that they are doing right by continuing to control your life well into your adulthood is it normal to feel that you have a hate relationship with your mother because of lack of support and love to you as a daughter it feels awful to feel it this way but I can't get over the fact that having a distant and uncaring mother has driven me into agreeing to marry a person who's totally different to me in personality even to this date my mother still emotionally blackmails me to not get a divorce by using her health as a reason you can divorce your spouse but how can you even divorce your mother and get over it without feeling the guilt a few times I tried to talk this with my friends but it's only alienated me yeah well this is very this is very similar to our first question I mean you can divorce your parents you just don't want to they're theirs they're just like with our our lady who is with the lousy husband they're there are very stable cost-benefit equilibria that are operating here so you're maintaining this less than ideal relationship with this emotionally blackmailing person out of some kind of perceived necessity your self-interest or personality distortion or whatever has been plugged into that CD for in your particular case so the the late great Harry Brown has a wonderful line here that I always love which is that they can't stop you which is to say nobody can stop you nobody can really stop you from doing anything it just comes back to this point that I was making earlier about you know whether you're willing to pay that price of inconvenience or not so you're you're staying in a in a bad relationship with a parent really no there's no different there's there's no real principal difference here than stayin in a bad relationship with a spouse so there is a little bit of genetic affiliation you you do have your sharing genes with them obviously which makes it more makes it a stronger connection but there's no there's no magical quality of a parental relationship that makes it any you're not obligated by the some sort of divine mandate to preserve a relationship with a bad parent you just don't want to use you have not wanted to until now and so you you maintain this relationship in your pain a very high cost not just with a bad relationship with with your mom but by also being in an unhappy marriage because you don't want to be subject to your mom's manipulation about that so this is a this is a multi-dimensional bad scenario and I guess my advice would be I mean she's asking how you can how you can divorce your mother and get over it without feeling the guilt that's unlikely you probably will feel some guilt depending on what kind of personality you're working with and how conscientious you are and you know you're going to continue to have some sort of some sort of feelings about it that might be a little uncomfortable and so in this case that's the price the price is living with those uncomfortable feelings that the trade is getting your life back and and experiencing relationships that you actually deserve and that bring you happiness so until now you have not been willing to feel those feelings of guilt well okay that's it that's fine that's a fine equilibria to come to but it that that is where it is because of that willingness to pay with those feelings so you're in a position where you either accept that that's the case or you you accept the that you're going to pay that price or you just accept that you're going to live with these bad relationships like I realized that that feels like there's no good choice there but we can't really change reality around it to fit our desires in that way so and yeah my advice would be the same with us as it was with the spouse which is you don't again you just you don't have to make a big decision when a smaller decision would do so with a disagreeable parent just like a disagreeable spouse or a disagreeable friend it rarely is the right strategy to make a big deal out of this and to make a big declaration and to have a big fight it's usually a much better strategy to just fade to black on these people and to to pursue what dr. Lyle and I call the disagreeable distance and so you're just you're just withholding you're just reclaiming your time and energy from from this person whether it's a parent or anybody else so that you can you can start actually putting that time and energy into your own life instead of this relationship and then you just fade and you fade and you fade and they may they may squawk and and you know try to engage you in conflict over it and you just kind of shine them on a little bit and continue to fade and eventually they run the Seabee and it's they don't have as much interest in as in trying to in mesh you in that as they initially do so that would be the first strategy to pursue and if that doesn't work we can look at other things but that's where I would start specially because you know dr. Lyles approach your approach is you explain that there's a competition and there's a cost benefit and then you just go through little details of how to get this thing how to how to essentially get this thing played out depending on what what the person needs so different than than some psychologists that I've heard about through different patients and friends and family and all that mm-hmm oh yeah I would love to nothing more than to just sit here and talk smack about psychodynamic therapy for you know another hour it's just it's such a waste of time it's and it's it's not just a waste of time but it's it's actively sabotaging people's life experiences because it's holding them captive in this relationship with an exploitative therapist who is just trying to get them to come back next week and to cash their next check because oh if we didn't we didn't get to the heart of all of the childhood issues that have directed your life into the situation today then by golly next week we'll dig a little deeper and we'll peel that onion back a little further and we just better talk about this more and more and more and spend a lot more of your money in the process so it's a very it's like a parasitical relationship that is that is actively contributing to the distortion that people have that is preventing them from making the kinds of decisions that we are talking about in terms of like actually looking very coldly at your situation and and weighing thatcb in a more accurate way rather than one that is completely encumbered by all of the psychodynamic BS that is untrue and irrelevant but but is being confirmed to you is very relevant by a charlatan therapist so look at the whole came out angry well I guess what I was trying to try to say is that that if people have questions they can call they can schedule phone consults with you you can break this thing down got them out step by step and and get the problem solved rather than just talking about the problem and never being able to figure out what the problem actually is yes yes we we really think of ourselves more as Moore's mechanics in that way like there's there's almost always not to say that there aren't there aren't some very serious intractable problems dr. Lisle breaks the world into real problems and and BS problems and there are not that many real problems but there are some you know terminal disease and you know a couple of other things but most problems of the sort that people are writing in about in these relationship issues and parental and spouse problems all this kind of thing these these are problems of being willing to pay the price to change that dynamic and you are in a very stable situation because you have not been willing to pay the price and there's a good reason for that almost certainly but if there's some kind of distortion in that mix then it's our job to help you understand what that is and to get clear about what you're really looking at and what the situation really is and if there is a better choice to make than how we would go about making it so in cases like that there is always a way out it's always a way out we can always find the path out of the forest but it might be great Carol a few thorns a few rodents of unusual size it's the fire slot all right we know how that will go for you a friend of mine is having some troubles getting in touch with his friends regularly he always thinks that if I or anyone else doesn't contact him first that I don't like him anymore it seems to me like he's suffering from some kind of inferiority complex in that sense how do you explain such a behavior in an evolutionary sense or to broaden my question why do people suffer from inferiority complexes and how can they and how can they try to overcome such feelings huh-uh not quite sure I understand the dynamics of the question so he he thinks he's having he doesn't initiate contact with his friends because he's thinking if he has to do that friends of his is Cara Yeah right right right right ates you're asking for a friend yeah I I would chalk that up just to again two personality I mean there there are it's on the continuum that people are especially on this continuum of emotional stability that some people just require more reassurance than others and I I've certainly had friends all over the continuum here who are who kind of subjects subject you to these little tests in this way so they're they're kind of testing to see oh are you gonna reach out to me and if I if I don't if I don't reach out to you for a week will you even notice or will you know will that make a difference and will you reach out to like all this kind of stuff goes on and it's it's really it's people again market testing their place in the coalition and the friendship coalition they're they're looking for evidence that they are valued and that they belong and some people are more coalition deficient in that way than others and some people are gonna be especially less stable people who are feeling a little more emotionally volatile in this dimension are are going to engage in this kind of practice more often so I I would expect that that's probably what's going on here it's also energy conservation where he's you know why reach out to friends and if they're gonna reach out to me first and like I'll just sit back and wait for the invitations to roll in so I don't know that if there's an inferiority complex necessarily I think there's just a little bit of status deficiency and a very high need for reassurance in that particular animal yeah yeah one of my dogs is like that yeah can you talk a little more about I mean what inferiority complex seems like one of those pop psychology phrases yeah well I think we we talked a little bit about when we talked about the imposter complex a couple of couple of weeks ago or a month or two ago we sort of got we we danced around some of those same ideas so yeah this is a pop psychology term for the interaction of certain personalities in certain environmental context so this is my just like broken record here but this is what it is so so everybody is on it everybody is on here is on a continuum with with their personality characteristics that are going to make them more or less likely to exhibit these sorts of traits that we would label an inferiority complex so somebody who's more agreeable somebody who's less emotionally stable those are those are people who are you know more perhaps more conscientious this kind of kind of depends on what we're actually we'd want to be more precise about what we're labeling as an inferiority complex but just like just like the imposter complex was imposter complex is more likely to show up in people who are more agreeable and more conscientious you don't see anybody suffering from an so-called impostor complex who is very low conscientious and very disagreeable they just they don't they don't really have that capacity that existing in their nervous system to be expressed but if you do have a capacity to be expressed whether it's her imposter syndrome or inferiority complex or anything else and you put that personality in just the right conditions to express itself then you could very likely see some sort of manifestation of these traits that we could give a name like an inferiority complex so if he is in relationships if this guy who has the inferiority complex has those personality traits to begin with and finds himself in relationships where he's a little bit over rewarded and he he feels like he's not worthy of the relationships that he's in whether they're romantic or friendship or anything else then he's more likely to manifest those those traits and we're more likely to look at that person and say oh they've got an inferiority complex when really they're just kind of in a position of weakness in their life and they're a little bit inclined to be a little meek and a little retreating and a little uncertain of themselves just by their nature
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