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Episode 8: How to get along without going along
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tonight's topic is how to get along without going along before we go into that I want to talk about something fairly briefly and this was this is a short New York Times article there just written a couple of days ago that one of my friends said me and my friends been listening to this and I've kind of seen this article kind of pop out in different viral feeds and Facebook and social media and it's called teaching men to be emotionally honest it's written by Andrew Reiner and of course right away the title just just doesn't sit right with me it really doesn't seem like like you really can teach somebody to be something that they're not and a couple of shows ago we talked about dr. Lyle and I we talked about the biological differences in different genders and one of the differences dr. Lyle that you mentioned is in how men express emotions so the article starts off describing a YouTube video that went viral a couple you know some time ago video was made by Jamar Collins who took his son to get vaccinated and as the boys trying not to cry his father's telling him be a man don't cry who's the man you're the man so let's listen to this clip for a second and you can hear what's going on big boy big boy be man big boys don't cry you got it don't cry don't find me make it big boy high five high five single man I'm a man say take the hit oh sorry it's okay thanks I'm a man man oh okay very sweet video ah very cute for me to watch this boy bonding and learning from his father but this video went viral and of course when that happens out of the word work came people like the author just yelling and screaming about how this is just representative of men's emotional suppression in fact this author quotes the quote is the home video was right on point illustrating that boys are taught to mutate their emotional suffering into anger more immediately it captured in profound concision the earliest stirrings of a male identity at war with itself now I think this is a total crap I mean I don't see a father teaching his boy to turn his suffering anger it's actually dad's masculine way of helping the boy deal with something he really has no control over which is the pain from from a shot it's actually more empowering rather than crying about it being a victim and he's actually teaching his boy how not to be a victim so what do you think dr. Lao yeah I think the author is obviously an idiot doesn't know anything about developmental psychology it's got to turn out that in a situation like that I mean we could talk at length about that we probably won't that children are and actually all humans but this is particularly true of children are designed by nature to to actually use crying and whining as a manipulative tool to get support from adults and so oftentimes very good move if you're a parent that has a kid that does this a lot what's happening is that you are actually facilitating that by being overly generous with time energy and support and this isn't to say that we're cold to our children but the point is is that we can give them cues oftentimes these are you have to understand that the crying for example and whining are manipulative tactics now the child does not know that these are manipulative tactics these are automated mechanisms built into them so if you're a child in the Stone Age and you're confronted with something that looks like a predator you should cry and that cry is a critical mechanism to alert your parents that you're in serious danger and so there's a reason why little kids cry and they're designed by nature to cry a hell of a lot more than they need to just on the off chance that parental support may be useful and statistically increasing their likelihood of survival so it's going to turn out that most of the crying that takes place in the world today actually in in the sort of well-to-do world has nothing to do with some child being hungry or in any way threatened by anything they're inconvenienced and mildly irritated or in this case a little bit scared and so for a parent to essentially signal to the child that there is no great danger and the parent by being relaxed and confident chuckling a little bit this is actually perfect perfectly fine and in no way doing any damage or shunting or repressing or any other wacky thing that this guy thinks is going on this is great this was a great example of excellent parenting I'm glad to hear you say that because this is something that I think a lot of people hear and I've certainly heard it when I was in college and a lot of college student Cara constantly bombarded with this whole idea that all of our emotions are socialized and that we learn how to do something and that that's just how we are it's because we were taught rather than trained in our DNA yeah that's insane it's completely wrong our emotions are not taught at all our emotions are actually automated mechanisms as a result of deep value judgments that the organism makes in response to its environment and their critical signals to tell the the person what is going on and what the nature of it whether it's good for them or bad for them and to what degree and in what way so these are not it is not possible teach these your feelings are your feelings and they are devices and and they are highly reactive to what's going on in the environment so for example in the case of a kid who is frightened because he's in some pain he essentially starts to signal to the parent that hey I could be in trouble now if the parent signals back no problem you're not in trouble this is actually reduces the kids anxiety and now he's fine okay so this doesn't change the way this child deals with the fear and pain and emotional upset and cause him to not have those feelings that is utterly ludicrous so a person you know who's thinking that just doesn't know anything about how psychology works and the fact that he was - man and that's how not to cry about it on camera yeah this is just a way that males bond yeah actually the truth is that it is true that it is advantageous for males to not be actually crying out to the village in helplessness looking for looking for assistance because it would reduce their status and it's going to reduce their their mating potential and so men by nature are made of a little bit of tougher stuff here then then females are and this is natural so the fact that your dad may in this case the dad is made of tougher stuff than mom and so the dad is not as upset by his kids upsetedness than mom might be in general I didn't see this clip but that that would typically be the case and because they're because of the gender difference between the data the mom and as a result the dads going to be a little less facilitating of this kind of this emotional display of kids and this is fine this is a no problem with this whatsoever and this is just part of human nature that this plays out this way great okay so now let's move on to this actual topic I just wanted to talk to artists because I've heard from you know we live in we're in California experienced and say the guys living in you know the you confidential or something like there's there's a lot of differences in opinion and was that I tear up this this little nature versus in aperture but let's move on here so last week we we had a great show talking about personally character personality characteristics and happen using the big five the five factor model we can really start to understand personality more clearly if you mention what is that along with each of these personality traits comes a set of tool 'nor abilities where people can may be exploited or and also a set of strengths for instance someone who's incredibly conscientious or on the higher conscientiousness strive to get things done right and the potential for this is to be over committed and overwhelmed and what any more often if they are also highly agreeable of course right if they're highly disagreeable they'll be able to say no often but they might burn some bridges in the process as well right so with all that said we have you we're here to talk about so that we can get along with our peers and get along with our friends and stant workers anybody else that's present in our life about necessarily going along with everything that everybody wants to do that's exactly right and last week what we talked about was what I would call sucker triad and that is that if you are if you're intelligent and you're conscientious and you're agreeable you've got sucker written on your forehead because you are you are one of the most valuable people that people are going to run into your intelligence is going to make you confident to deal with a lot of problems your conscientiousness will make it so that if it gets assigned to you you will absolutely do a good job on it and your agreeableness will make it so that other people will approach you and try to push you a little bit to get you to agree to it because you are easier to get to agree than someone else and so those three things are what I call the sucker triad and that's it that's a big handicap for people but the way we get out of or the way we manage the problem of having a agreeable personality riah bullying conscientious personality you don't necessarily have to be that that's smart to be really valuable and this way if you are if you are merely agreeable in conscientious you are already in trouble in terms of social pressure going to burden your life with everybody else's needs so what we need to do is we need to actually learn why it is that we are susceptible and what this is about is it's going to be all about other people's anger so if we ever say no to them then they're going to be upset and it is the agreeable person's inability to deal with other people's angle anger effectively that is the root of being a sucker now this this was recognized in the 1970s and gave rise to a genre of self-help called assertiveness training and sort of this training has you know it wouldn't be fair to characterize the whole thing a classic book was written by birdie and Emmons it's called you're perfect right and you know sold millions of copies and there's been there's other best-selling books when I say no I feel guilty I'm okay you're okay there's been various and sundry works that have been written along the lines of how to be more assertive in to stand up for yourself this is it's not easy to do for agreeable people but we can talk about tonight actually specifically what people need to do in order to develop some skill in this area we step back a little bit I'm most curious at the very beginning at least why do we want to get along with each other so much well it's going to turn out that human human action coordinated action is highly profitable so they're simply running cost-benefit analysis on affiliating with each other and so it's going to turn out that throughout the animal kingdom you're going to see different kinds of creatures have different degrees of social affiliation with each other and humans are going to be a very very highly social creature and the reason why creatures are social is because having other creatures around at the same species brings more benefit than it cost genetically and so it's going to turn out that people actually do some things more socially than other creatures and one of the things that they do is they trade all kinds of favors so I'm sure that we could get a primatologist that would tell us that you know other primates will do this they will groom each other and pick the ticks out of each other's fur and so on and so forth but they do not do the kind of things that human beings do so human beings will go help help a friend on a project for you know two hours and then there will not be any direct expectation that there's going to be an immediate reciprocal process that you know the two hours are owed it's sort of a floating credit account that that goes between the two individuals and and you you're not going to see that kind of friendship with that magnitude of trading of energy in different places in the animal kingdom so human beings are extraordinarily bonded as friends whereas mostly you will see more significant trading of energy and risks in in other animals only when they are kin is winds up being very much a kinship shaman on but that is not true people people can develop really warm loving close friendships with non related individuals and it's because partly because we are so capable of helping each other in ways that other animals are not so for example if if you're a Thomson's gazelle and you've got a buddy that you run along the side with on the savanna and you get your foot steak stuck in a snake hole and break it there's nothing that your friend can do to help you but it's a human they can and so as a result of this the the utility of the help that people can bring bring to each other makes it enormous ly profitable to be helpful so that's because if you are if I'm helpful for you to you today I might save you enormous time and energy today and then a month from now we you may reciprocate on this very issue and save me enormous time in so the reciprocity that's involved if we thought about you and I living out in the woods and each of us breaking our legs every other year we would see that that six weeks of hustle that I would do to help you get you back up and running and surviving that process would be enormous ly beneficial to me because it would be a credit account that I could tap into a year later when I break my leg you can only develop this sort of reciprocity friendship floating process if you you know if you develop if you have along with it your you're coding for feelings including for cost benefit analysis and you and it turns out that it's very very much in the black to be this way so Wolverines don't act this way camels don't act this way but humans do and so this is humans are a hyper social species for the simple reason that they can do a lot in will do a lot to help each other and it's enormous ly profitable to be social it reminds me of a video I watched with Milton Friedman who's long time ago as an economist and he's holding up a pencil and he said this is this is the only species in the world that can come together and ma I in the mind the is collect all the resources there and create pencil for for as much as a quarter goodbye my pencils pork and you got all these people working together to do this and that's what the heart of human so in human nature is first it it is becoming almost ridiculously successful now with a free-market economy as Friedman would have pointed out but the the roots of this were back in the Stone Age with very very simple treads and a very simple trust actually and the trust is that if I help you today you are likely to help me tomorrow if I call call you on that for that assistance and and we both recognize that there's many things in this world that we're going to call four handed jobs where if you've ever been a carpenter or you've ever tried to hang a pane your living room or something you ever tried to do anything that is essentially impossible to do it with two hands but with four hands it's very simple okay might be moving a picnic table from one nd or your yard to the other that you may not be able to do it by yourself but with a second pair of hands it becomes a trivial project and so as a result human beings have many many four-handed jobs that confronted them in evolution and as a result they developed an affinity for essentially if I have a four-handed job that it might take me 10 hours to do but with your help I can do it in five minutes then if I accept your help I now owe you that five minutes and you will carry that around in your head and you will collect that five minutes at a time when it might save you two hours or four hours or might save you 10 hours and as a result of being having an oscillating situation where we are helping each other on this reciprocal basis both of us are massively better off and that is a huge root of human social behavior in normal human relationships in human nature there would be a fairly decent accounting system where people would sort of be keeping track of these oscillating processes and there would obviously be some people that would be trying to take advantage of other people more often than the other way around and so and this is going to be the agreeable versus disagreeable dimension and so you can see how you could be an agreeable person and it would still be worth being in a relationship with a disagreeable person because for example on a desert island there's still four handed jobs so let's suppose that the you and I live on a desert island and you've got four handed jobs for your problems and I've got 400 jobs for my problems and you wind up exploiting me to this point that for every hour of help that I give you you only give me ten minutes for help but it turns out that it's still overwhelmingly worth it to me to do that because you're the only person that I've got and and if I can get your forehand your extra hands to help me that thing that takes ten minutes will would have taken me ten hours now the cost of it is to give to help you for two hours or an hour in order to get that ten minutes so your disagreeableness how to go she eighths me but it is still in my best interest to trade nonetheless and so this is this is why it is that you have a range of personalities on this dimension where most people are somewhere pretty close in the middle what we call sort of fifty-fifty traders real fair and then there's going to be real sweet people that can be taken advantage of those are very agreeable people and then there's going to be varied you know disagreeable people who are much more exploitative and they exploit the people less agreeable to them by use of the threat the threatening of anger it's there it's the displays of anger that are there the ultimate threats that are being utilized there and are they actually angry or I mean is is feeling unfair I guess anger comes from that unfair and hinging this concept of unfair right so just agree life will be much more angry more often than agreeable people absolutely so in contrary a contradiction to the idiot that was thinking that we learn our emotions that we were talking about earlier today the truth of the matter is is that that angers excuse me emotions are highly specific to the circumstances in which elicit them so for example if we were to take a take a I don't know some some ice cream and and stick it into your knee you wouldn't have any taste sensation yeah it would have a very specific feeling and that's what it would be in the same way that if you tried to tell me you know what what does what does the color red sound like you know it does make any sense makes absolutely no sense you have to take a lot of mushrooms and LSD to understand that well okay so the so in here eight the it's going to turn out that anger doesn't just arise spontaneously out of the human nervous system or any animal without reason the reasons are highly specific anger is a mechanism of signaling another organism that you have been treated unfairly by your perception and so human beings only feel angry when they feel like something is unfair so they may they might be feeling that it's unfair to some third party about as possible but almost all human anger is directed at whoever it is that whoever or whatever in other words what a group of people is is essentially treating me unfairly and so you can now imagine the following if you think of the characteristics of people's agreeableness is following in a bell curve which it does so you have people that are we're going to put normal fairness right down the middle of this bell curve right in the big fat part of the bell curve and then as you go to the right side of it as the bell curve tails off we're going to call those very nice people so let's say people in the 80th percentile or or greater in other words say in the 20% of the tail of the bell curve to the right those people are very nice people the people in the twentieth percent 20 percentile to the left those people are very disagreeable people and so this disagreeable people literally have a different perception about what is fair than agreeable people or super nice people you know the normal people are nice people so they are they are going to be angry much more often they're going to be irritated which is just another word for anger except the word we use at a lower level and no aid might be another word these are all just human beings you using different slightly different words to characterize degrees on a dimension furious and arranged are the same idea except they're just further I can't believe that psychologists like to parse these things out is if they're different phenomena they are not okay ray will debate mom talking to be a man and not you would be a man maybe it's Plan C we left up you know too long right yeah they gave me time crackers as opposed to Oreos so I learned all yeah in emotions that's how you learn these things that's right so what we're gonna find is that that how how angry people are is going to depend upon what this seemed to be and how and how unfairly they believe they've been treated so you could see this for example in a sports fan who believes that his team has just been robbed at the Super Bowl Super Bowl victory by a referee and as he watches the play even on replay he's infuriated because it appears the ref got it wrong however then he sees a second angle that he had not seen before and he sees that the referee got the call rate that he sees his guys got his hand on the other guy's face mask and it's very clear there's been a foul okay the anger will go away immediately it will go away 90 plus percent maybe a hundred percent in a matter of seconds so this tells us that the anger is a highly specified emotion that is designed by nature to be activated when you feel like you or yours have been treated unfairly and so therefore people that are that are more disagreeable are simply having that emotion much much more often because the anger has great utility the anger is a threat to the people who are have some control over that resource in this case the referee the anger is a threat to the referee that I feel like I've been treated unfairly and I'm going to impose costs on you if you continue to do this and so when you say kill the referee what you are saying is you're saying the cost that that that is deserved there is death and and effectively screaming fans are threatening the referee with their life now what's very interesting in a very careful analysis of sports and refereeing and the home team advantage this was very interesting it was in done in baseball football and basketball all major sports in the United States and this was a very very detailed statistical analysis of fairness the and it was everybody tried to figure out why it is that home teams would have have about a sixty to a percent or so chance of winning on average the obviously a very poor team and a league does not have a 62% chance of winning a home game but on average the the average of for example in the National Basketball Association the the average home team should be in principle 50 B but it is not it is about 62 percent or so so the question is why and so they analyzed everything that they could figure out but to analyze for example there's many theories that the team shoots better at home turns out to not be true they don't shoot any better at home than they shoot away there's also the idea that the but the backup players don't play as well on the road they but they shoot better at home that turns out to be utterly false the backup players don't shoot any better at home than they shoot when they're playing in other arenas etc etc etc other words one one grand theory after the next crashed on them on the rocks of the data analysis and it turned out that what turned out to be the case was it was the referees and so it turns out that the referees are completely fair except in the very final crucial moments of a game where there is a the game is on the line and there's an ambiguous call and then in that case the home team will get that get the an ambiguous call about 62% of the time this is extraordinary this is also true in football and it's also true in baseball and so it's because of the threat of violence against the referees so the referees are are absolutely know that under an ambiguous situation if the call goes against the home team there they feel the outrage of 15,000 screaming maniacs in the stands and their stone-age brain does something to cover their their life expectancy and so what they do is they more often than not they lean into the what's in the best interest of the screaming masses and that is the cause of the home team advantage in in professional sports so what you're saying is we can not control this as much as we want and that you know people are going to bend to the will of a extremely disagreeable force if yes fit is sufficient and in this case get cost-benefit is I either die or I give them no a game so which one's right which one's worth it right exactly so nothing nothing nothing is more unpleasant to a referee that a game that's going to come down to the last second the that is in fact we just saw the national championship game between North Carolina and Villanova and the referee more or less decided the game and the Villanova kid got stuck in a key and he was actually in in trouble he was very well defended and he didn't know what he was going to do so he turned and was going to put up a shot cuz he didn't have any choice and there was a slight bit of contact the North Carolina kid had defended him beautifully called a foul okay and so this is uh this is nobody wanted to see this game a major turned out there's more plays in the game and there's some great plays but that was actually a critical moment there was a deciding moment in that game and it was made by the referee now in this case the referee you know was not under the intimidate of any sort of home crowd he was just trying to he was facilitated and made the call you know that he you just felt momentarily compelled to make but this is sort of pressure is is very much ways on referees and it's interesting that it doesn't matter how far away those fans are whether it's a football field and there are a long ways away or a basketball Stadium and the right up close to you you feel the pressure of all that human noise and human emotion and you save your hide it's exactly what people do and this is exactly what nice people do when angry irritable selfish people put pressure on them and so this is this is exactly the same process where what the purpose of anger is to win concessions from people on the other side of transactions so in your practice though what are the what are some of the most common defenses of pushy behavior from from others um I see I mean it's going to be there's going to be a variety of situations there's going to be there may be spouses where one spouse is most definitely the pushy one out of a pair um there could be situations where someone is dealing with a work situation work or hierarchy or a boss who is definitely being aggressive about you know taking a person's time in their life away for them the it could be a situation between parents and children parents for example are being very pushy about their children's performance in various sundry ways and putting a lot of pressure on them so there's different different ways that that this can can come about and so I'm always looking for whether or not what I have is a pushy person exploiting a nice person and if I do then what I'm going to try to do is try to figure out how to even the score what are those tips and tricks that make him either even yeah get along with people yes not necessarily go along with them what we have to do is we begin with understanding that that our problem is the anger of the irritable person so that that person that that anger is actually very threatening people are designed by nature to be intimidated by anger and anger what what fits under anger is actually what anger is is a threat and the most blatant threat of anger is actually the threat of violence so when you have screaming fans that is a that is not a threat of wow we're gonna complain to the league office about you and we think you should you know you should lose your job no that is not what the guy is thinking or feeling when he's on the other end of an enraged stadium he's thinking that he's his life is being threatened so when when a big strong or loud voice very angry person raises their voice towards their wife or their child or their husband or you know their employee this when this is happening make no mistake that what is happening is at the very stone age level this is a subliminal violence threat is what it is the it's useful to know that because if you're on the other end of it it's useful to be able to reconstruct that in bass the vast majority of cases there is no real violence threat it just feels like there might be and you can sometimes get yourself a little distance in the situation and essentially re-establish a sense of your own options because you are not actually being threatened with violence you are just you are feeling the threat of violence in someone else's anger now the the second thing to understand is that anger is is the is the flip coin is the if great romantic loves feelings the other side of it is enormous just pointman and shock and loneliness in other words those those two things are being devastated if those two things are sort of flipped sides of each other in the same way angers flipside is guilt so going to turn out that the purpose of anger is actually to activate guilt circuits in the other person so let's suppose we have an angry person and they're saying there's snarling and what they're doing is they're threatening now they may not even be threatening violence they but the threat that comes out of their mouths is essentially the threat of some other some other thing that values that the person values so for example you know you are if you're late one more time I'm going to fire you okay so there you're not threatening violence there you're threatening their job or if I see you look at another woman like that I'm leaving you okay so that's the threat of the termination of a relationship or if you don't get that homework done you're grounded for the weekend so this is uh the the anger is is signaling that the person means business and that they feel very much like they have been like they have been treated unfairly by the other party so a parent that is yelling at the kid together their homework done really feels like the kid is being unfair to the parent the parent after all you know has has great plans and goals for the child the parent wants the child to to accomplish big things and the parent feels like they work really hard for them etc or the parent is a egomaniac that is determined that their kid be some superstar and they they're pushing the kid along like a poor little puppet and the parent feels very bent out of shape that the kid doesn't achieve you know more spectacular things than the kid feels like achieving or quit achieve so in any way you look at it what you have is anger on the one side and the purpose of the anger is to win concessions from the other side and the first the way those concessions get one is that the person on the other side feels guilty so guilt is an emotion again that is not taught and not learned for God's sakes so our friend in New York that wrote that article is an idiot once again the very times the starter is three times the charm yeah in case anybody wants to check the logic if emotions were learned it would not be possible but everybody on earth including when we paddle up the Amazon basin and meet a tribe that had never seen the outside world it turns out that they have exactly the same characteristic emotions as everybody that's living in Chicago and it turns out that they have the same emotions with the same facial expressions with exactly the same muscles that are firing in their face and around their eyes and around their jawbone they have exactly the same paralinguistic cues with respect to what their voice sounds like under different emotions they have a thing called laughter they don't they're not when they are not angry when they laugh for God's sakes in other words and the very same social situation is to give rise those specific emotions are exactly the same social relational situations that take place in Chicago or Tokyo or Bangladesh so the point is is this is not possible that this learn these are universal features of human psychology and so emotions are our human universals now the guilt is therefore not learn about it is simply a device that tells you that somebody's anger at you and you had better make a concession or they may impose a cost okay I have a question yeah what's the difference between guilt and then like Jewish guilt because there's a big difference that I feel when my mom gives me the universe guilt yeah it's actually it's actually not your yes you're feeling the sort of pushiness as your mom might signal to you if we talk about parental guilt at this way the parents can signal to the child that the child is not doing what the parent would have expected and that the parent also feels like they have earned and is due them from the child and so they are absolutely signaling that in order to gain concessions from the child and you need to be married and I need to have grandchildren okay whatever so the see the parent goes like this lightly so well yeah exactly so this is this is uh this is just the the nature of a in this case a pushy individual that is trying to activate guilt circuits and the other person on the other side in order to gain concessions because they want what they want so normal brains for parents to go through right a normal process the more disagreeable to parents the more acrimonious the situation is going to be within a household so the I've seen households where the genetics of all everybody in the household were disagreeable and everybody's fighting all the time and almost nobody ever feels guilty because everybody feels like they're being treated unfairly so that's that's a spectacular comedy act that you will if you're a therapist you'll eventually see in your lifetime most of the time you don't most of the time you see that one individual has sort of gained the upper hand on the moral high ground and has is signaling very often that they feel like the person on the other side is is not treating them fairly the person on the other side will very often experience guilt and that they will be giving confessions but the truth of the matter is what's suppose we have a suppose we have a 70/30 traitor a very aggressive pushy individual and they are family with what's supposed to sky marries a wife and the wife is a real sweetheart so she's a 30/70 trader and so the two of them are in fairly good equilibrium because the pushy guy takes advantage of the nice lady you know routinely and she doesn't even feel that bad about it because she's a 30/70 trader however she has a son who's got a little bit of dad in him but mostly mom and so that the kid is a 4060 trader so he's a very nice kid he's willing to give up 60 to get 40 and most transactions in other words he's more than fair he's treated as more than fair by friends and and other students in his school and teachers so he's very obvious to be seen that this is a very nice kid however his dad is irritated dad's irritated it wasn't me the dad wants him to do things that the kid doesn't want to do and so the dad is pushing with his aggression and the kid feels guilty but the kid feels guilty and makes concessions but he they don't stick because the dad wants 70/30 and the kid only wants to give up 40 he doesn't want to give up 70 excuse me the kid only wants to give up 60 and as a result the the kid then gets passive-aggressive and he actually doesn't come through with what the dad wants he feels resentful and then the dad you know recycles is aggression again and this you wind up with a constant recycling anger guilt anger guilt and and that also sort of periodic rebellion now what we're gonna do is I'm going to cut to Lourdes that people can do in order to help their weaknesses with respect to pushing back against pushy disagreeable people pushy disagreeable people ie people what's Calma in the upper third assertiveness with respect to you know essentially anger people that are that are more angry than the average bear more of the times these people are going to have a strong tendency to be exploitative with respect to the other two-thirds of the distribution so what do we need to do when they push us to just to do things or they want things their way particular coming after your time which is a very big thing that people try to take from you what you tell them is you wish you could but you can't so that needs to be the first the first words out of your mouth so okay could you come and help me with this I wish I could but I can't it's to be a reflex that's just what you say now what's gonna happen is the disagreeable person is going to cross-examine you about why it is that you can't help them because they feel completely justified that that they need to take this two hours of your time or whatever it is or two years I've had incredible situations where where a disagreeable person was in a relationship a romantic relationship with a with a very agreeable person and the variable person was extremely unhappy and wanted to leave the relationship and the disagreeable person is basically like now like absolutely not no nobody's leaving anything where we are we're gonna we're in this forever and apparently oblivious to the notion that a an agreeable person could be pounded upon and guilted into staying in a relationship that they have no interest in being us this sounds fantastical perhaps some people listening but the truth of the matter is these are real live situations that happen with real live people and sometimes essentially cost people their entire lives in terms of their happiness so this is no small thing but the basic template is as follows I wish I could but I can't at which point the disagreeable person says why not and the answer is there's something I have to do and then they say well what is it that you have to do and you say because there's just something that I have to take care of you say well what is it that you have to take care of you say there's just something I have to deal with okay well what is it that you have to deal with say well I promised somebody something and I just have to take care of it okay you'll work it out now the sequence looks like this the disagreeable person wants you the person to tell them why it is that you can't do this what other important value is essentially eclipsing their needs if you tell them hey I've got to take my mother to the airport then their their answer is going to be well just cut hire a cab and have a hi a cab take her to the airport because I need your help okay that's what they're going to do so this is why we do not give disagreeable people the reasons why we're doing things because no reason is often sufficient now obviously if your mother just broke her leg and you're on your way at an ambulance with her then you could say gee I wish I could but I can't why cuz I'm in the ambulance with my mother okay so but most of the time we don't have that kind of ammunition and so as a result when you just want to go home and relax and turn on the game and you say no I can't help you wish I could but I can't why because I just really feel like going home and relaxing and turning on the game you are going to get their anger and that anger is going to be very intimidating so this is actually why very agreeable people turn out to do a lot of lying and so you know they're under if their conscientious it's a problem because this gives them a lot of dissonance because they're supposed to not lie and they're supposed to always do the right thing but the problem is is that their life is being taken away from them by pushy people and so this is why we I have this constructed in this way I wish I could but I can't why not because there's something I got to do what is it that you have to do something I have to take care of what do you have to take care of there's just something I got to deal with okay so we say the same thing three different ways right through this thing we spin it just slightly now only a real pushy pan and AK will continue to push like well what do you really have to do then you say I just promised somebody something I got to take care of it now the reason we put the promise in there is because promise is a very important feature of human village life that if you promise somebody something it means there's a lot on the line for that other person on the other side of this transaction and that they tell you is the person who made the promise you have to come through and so as a result of this this gives you the moral high ground against any interloper of a pushy person who is going to insist on coming through here and breaking apart this deal and so that's why we say that I promise somebody something now the first thing you promised was yourself promise yourself that you wouldn't let some pushy person run over the top of your life okay so that's the promise you can make and you could always make that promise but you don't tell them that's who you promise if they say well who'd you promise you said look there's just something I got to take care of you'll work it out okay the the phrase you'll work it out is essentially signaling to them that it's giving them esteem by saying look you can handle this you don't need my help okay and it's it's a way to essentially shut them down and close off the discussion do not try to solve the problem for them do not say well what is it that you have to do well maybe you could get Susie so-and-so to do it as soon as you open up that conversation you have taken responsibility for the problem okay do not do this do not take any responsibility for their problem but they say well how am I going to do it you say well you'll you'll work it out okay this is how it is this is how we deal with this problem go ahead mate hmm well I was just thinking that each one of these questions seems to weed out more and more tickle people that selects the mouse so the as yeah maybe a 60-40 would be would ask you a pushy question once but then they wouldn't ask you the second time where's a 70/30 would ask you the second time an 80/20 would every question and then only the 90 tends and you know those really rare people would would push even further that is ingenious I never thought of that that that's a perfect way to put it but the first question that you don't want is to 6040 you feed that one back if they come back the second time you know you're dealing with at least a 70/30 you push back they come back to you a third time you know it's 8020 the use you tell of thinking of it this way is that it should get your dander up that they are increasingly out of line okay and that they are the the this is this is signaling to you just how totally unreasonable they are now I have seen everything under the Sun in 35 years of clinical practice I've seen women in their 60s who couldn't go visit their sister because they're pushy husband you know didn't want them to go and and and I had to you know range and think through how is that the social transactions would actually take place what words would you say and how is it that you would do it and I remember one woman said well he wouldn't let me go and I said well let me me get this straight tell me specifically how he would stop you okay would he stop you physically well I don't think so he says well in that case then there's no way so let's suppose you walked out into the street after you called a cab and you're there at the cabin and she said oh he you know I couldn't go he'd stop me well how would that happen well he would you know he might grab my suitcase okay said so he grabs your suitcase now what you reroute in the middle of the street grabs your suitcase you can go that's your suitcase and by everything else that you need so you don't wrestle with the guy for the suitcase if he takes it he takes it okay hop into the cab well the in that case he's gonna have to be yelling and screaming and he might actually grab you now if he does it would be very interesting to see if that happens if he grabs you don't pull away just stare at his arm as he puts his arm on you just stare at it just look at it okay look at that arm for about ten seconds and then look at them do not struggle and this again what we're doing is we're going to embarrass him right so this is uh this is how it is that we sometimes have to think through these transactions with very disagreeable people very often the very agreeable person is extremely intimidated by the anger displays that have worked over and OH again for a disagreeable person in their life and they are they have not fought through how it is that they would actually put themselves in a position of power to defy them and so this is you know this is a critical thing that we need to do to beat our genes because the genes are absolutely going to fire and say oh they're angry we feel guilty we need to concede and agreeable people will very often sweep the hours and days and years of their lives right in a gutter if they do not figure out how to how to manage these problems this is for somebody that is maybe not as close of a friend as well or maybe it is because it seems to me that if someone has a very reasonable request like hey you know is it just you know my mom dying and I need to help you know move in something is we do strategy no matter what what the requests in other words know the truth of the matter is is that the we have to it isn't that we're going to refuse everybody everything thing is is that there are individuals that in our lives that very often if you're a fear a nice person if you're in the middle of the bell curve or to the right there are pushy people probably in your life and those pushy people whoever it is that they are they are using their anger to often manipulate you into giving up your time and energy to their desires rather than your run and sometimes those things are a little bit out of whack and sometimes there are a whole lot out of whack we we live in a in a swirling cauldron of credits and debits when it comes to time and energy between individuals and people that are closed this is all about when we know intuitively that these that the balance sheet is not really right that that there that there's a person who is characteristically irritable that we are they are often causing us to feel guilty with that anger and when I say they are causing it and people say oh no you you're the only one that could cause it this is not true the other person makes noises and facial expressions and use words that activate spontaneously and without any volition of your own guilt chips inside your head that's what they do if it's almost like a trigger trigger to a mousetrap hmm absolutely it's a trigger to a mousetrap and so all what we need to do is if you are a nice person who is more than fair but you are spending your life often feeling guilty and manipulated by someone then this is exactly the kind of techniques that you need to learn to take your life back excellent and you have more of these techniques and on your website esteem dynamics org where he's come video audio clips and some general information you can go on the website esteem dynamics or you can get some consultations dr. Lisle as well with this regard so this is very topic I think a lot of people benefit from this very good good stuff good questions and a very important area for human life satisfaction
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