Discomfortable

Clarity   On my recent adventures in dating, I’ve discovered that we are living in an epidemic of Ghosting, ambiguity, and a general lack of clarity. And I am just as guilty as anyone else! As I said in one of my recent Instagram polls, “Ghosted people ghost people.” This culture of ambiguity is self-reinforcing, spreading like a virus, turning innocent victims into cold-hearted Ghosters. In my own case, I use the excuse of “being nice” to avoid rejecting people in clear and honest ways. As if a confusing, gradual fade is more pleasant than a hard stop. But in actuality, I’d much rather someone just tell me the painful truth than leave me wondering, because my negativity bias will just fill in the blanks with something even more hurtful. So over the last few months, inspired by a rash of ambiguous dates, my episode on Honesty, and Brené Brown’s quote, “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind”, I’ve made it my mission to try to be as clear as possible as soon as possible. Taking part in several Pride events in Vancouver last month turned out to be the perfect place to get discomfortable with clarity. From run-ins with old flames to dance floor make-outs to unwanted flirtation, Pride is awash in ambiguity and uncertainty. Everyone is wondering, what does this person want from me — if anything — and what do I want from them? I’m happy to say that in my limited experience with clarity so far, it has proven to not only be effective, but very welcome. People seem grateful to know where you really stand, and it even inspires more clarity from them in return (often with surprising results about the assumptions you made about what they “want” from you). Not only that, but being clear is such a relief! It’s not just kind to the person receiving the clarity, it’s kind to yourself as well. Clarity, when delivered with compassion and humour, actually makes the situation less awkward and less dramatic. What’s more, clarity even has the ability to salvage relationships that would otherwise have ended in resentment. If you have the urge to avoid someone, it is probably because you haven’t been clear with them about something. Clarity says, I respect you enough to be honest with you, and I value this connection even if I don’t want to date you, sleep with you, or be your new bff.

The Shame-Back   This week’s podcast is actually a video! You can still listen to the podcast version if you prefer, or you can watch the video version below (or here) complete with footage ripped from the classic teen comedy, Mean Girls (2004). Watch Part 1 here. Watch Part 2 here. https://youtu.be/07X_cW0S71c Part 3: The Fall of Regina George. In this episode, we see how Cady has not only succeeded in toppling Regina’s reign, but she has actually replaced her. Cady has become the new queen bee of The Plastics, and without even realizing it, she’s completely lost her identity and sold out her integrity in the process. This is a powerful demonstration of how shame, and especially our threat response, completely blind us and take us outside of our values in order to “protect” us from the “threat” of social rejection or disrespect (which isn’t really that big of a threat anymore). We discover that Cady is no better than Regina — when we are in shame, we can easily turn into a “bitch” if we allow ourselves to be controlled by our animal instincts. In order to make things right, Cady has to challenge the hierarchical thinking that culture and shame have coerced her into adopting. She realizes that no amount of putting other people down actually raises her up. She starts to see the value of equality instead. If you presuppose that everyone is of equal value, then gossip, backstabbing, comparison, competition, and shame all lose their power. The film dramatizes this nicely (if a bit cheesily), when Cady wins Spring Fling Queen and decides to share the crown with everyone, literally. If you liked this video series and want to see more like it, let me know! I’d love suggestions on other popular films that would make for interesting depictions of shame and other Discomfortable themes. 

Slut-Shaming   This week’s podcast is actually a video! You can still listen to the podcast version if you prefer, or you can watch the video version below (or here) complete with footage ripped from the classic teen comedy, Mean Girls (2004). Watch Part 1 here. In Part 2, Cady develops a hopeless crush on Aaron Samuels, the ex-boyfriend of her frenemy Regina George. Regina uses this secret to her advantage by rekindling things with Aaron in a cruel display of social dominance. With the help and encouragement of Cady’s new friend (and Regina’s ex-bff) Janice, Cady wages an all-out shame battle to take Regina down, while still pretending to be her friend. So basically it’s just high school as usual. Watch Part 2 here: https://youtu.be/AlX8cfYQwCo This episode looks at the use of slut-shaming as a weapon both amongst the girls themselves and the culture at large. As Halloween rolls around, the rules of what is and is not “slutty” seem to change, revealing how arbitrary and mercurial shame really is. On a regular day Cady would be shamed for dressing “slutty”, but on Halloween Cady feels shame for not dressing “slutty”. Meanwhile, Cady calls Regina a slut for getting back with her ex (the guy Cady has a crush on) and we see Cady tumble down a shame spiral in real-time. The film does a great job of dramatizing how shame triggers our threat response, sending Cady into fight, flight, and denial. Instead of literally attacking Regina for stealing Aaron, as Cady is tempted to do in ruminative fantasies, she satisfies her fight reflex in another classic way by concocting a shame-back scheme. A shame-back takes the shame and pain we perceive someone as having “caused” in us and throws it right back at them. It feels like justice but really it’s vengeance. The shame-back just perpetuates the endless pinball game of shame and reactivity spreading like a virus through the school and our culture at large. Part 3 drops next week!

Shame &Belonging   This week’s podcast is actually a video! You can still listen to the podcast version if you prefer, or you can watch the video version below (or here) complete with footage ripped from the classic teen comedy, Mean Girls (2004). I’m not entirely sure this video is legal (fair use?), but it’s for a good cause: Shame Ed. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was actually my 13-year old niece who suggested I do a video on Mean Girls and I’m glad she did because it turned out to be a cornucopia of shame! So much so that it quickly evolved into a trilogy of episodes. Here’s the first: https://youtu.be/2q3PBAnq2Ks I’ve been a fan of Mean Girls since way back in the day when I rented the DVD from Black Dog, the edgy video store in my old neighbourhood, only to be mocked about it by the staff in front of the whole store (talk about shame). But it was worth it. The more I watch Mean Girls, the more I appreciate how well-observed Tina Fey’s script is (its genre conventions notwithstanding) and how terrific both Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams are in their respective roles (again, relative to the genre). That said, you don’t really need to have seen the film to appreciate this series of episodes, but of course, SPOILER ALERT (though it’s not really the kind of film you can spoil). Here’s the setup, as paraphrased from Wikipedia: Sixteen-year-old homeschooled Cady Heron and her zoologist parents return to the United States after a twelve-year research trip in Africa. Her first time attending a public school, Cady routinely embarrasses herself in attempts to fit in and make new friends. The film is all about belonging and authenticity (or lack thereof), as well as the inevitable(?) hierarchy and shame of high school. As Cady is thrust into a dizzying new world of social norms, rules, and cliques, she struggles to juggle her new friendships, frenemies, boys, and of course schoolwork. Cady gets caught between the artsy kids and the irresistible gravity of the infamous “Plastics”, the most popular girls in the school who basically just want Cady for her good looks. When Cady develops a crush on the ex-boyfriend of Regina George, the Queen of The Plastics, a shame battle ensues for social dominance and the coveted title of Spring Fling Queen. The film is also a fascinating demonstration of how shame (often in the form of embarrassment) is at the root of most comedy. Watch Part 2 here.

Embodied Beliefs   It all started when I made an offhand joke to my young nephew that monsters lived in the basement of his cabin. Apparently, he believed me and refused to go into the basement after that. My brother texted me, not impressed, but I didn’t even remember having said it (though it certainly sounded like something I probably would say). So the next time I saw my nephew, I explained that there weren’t actually monsters in the basement, that I was just “joking”. And he replied, “That’s okay A.J., that was before I knew about lying.” This idea that he didn’t know about lying kind of blew my mind. It reminded me of the saying, you don’t know what you don’t know. Not only did my nephew not realize I was lying, he didn’t realize that I even could be lying. He didn’t realize that lying existed, or even understand lying as a mere concept. It makes sense, of course, how else do we know about lying unless someone else teaches us about it first? But it reveals the frailty and fallibility of our whole belief system. Our core beliefs and identity are created and crystalized in our childhood, but that is also the time in which we are the most naive, ignorant, and susceptible to misinformation.  I think this is a perfect example of the way shame and cultural conditioning insidiously control our lives. Though I’d like to think I was a savvy and intelligent kid, on a very deep level, I never fully realized that my core beliefs about the “rules” of the world were just that, beliefs. I took many of them to be facts about reality, based on how ubiquitous they were in my cultural experience and how shame and conditioning had done such a powerful job turning them into embodied beliefs. Messages like, “Being gay is bad” felt deeply real and objective to me. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, which was that they were just the arbitrary opinions inherited from my personal experiences during a temporarily homophobic period of history. The worst part was, my brain actually chose to believe them, unconsciously at least, mostly because it didn’t realize or believe it had any other option. This is why I think Shame Ed is so important. It takes education to empower people to think outside of their shame bubble. That’s the only way you can know what you don’t know! Once my nephew learned about lying, he realized that he actually had a choice in what he believed. He no longer had to accept everything his weird uncle told him about the world as real. The same is true for shame and our cultural conditioning about what is “right” and “wrong”. It feels powerful and true — because shame is designed to keep us in conformity with our social in-group — but it’s actually not. We have a choice, a responsibility in fact, to decide for ourselves what we believe, value, and want out of life. We choose our own purpose and meaning, either consciously or not.

Shaming   This episode compares and contrasts two different experiences I had with shame recently, each affecting me, my body, and my reactions in distinct ways. It helped me understand the difference between the natural feeling of personal shame and the feeling of being shamed by another person. Shame and shaming are two very different things, and the degree of guilt involved, as in the degree of personal responsibility we take for the shame, makes a big impact on how that shame affects us and how we react.  In my experience, personal shame manifests as an unpleasant feeling in my gut, like a black hole sucking me inward. It makes me feel like I want to disappear into myself in order to avoid the pain of others seeing my mistakes. Shaming, on the other hand, seems to activate my threat response before I’m even conscious of being in shame at all. This adds another layer of complexity on top of the pure pain of shame, as our threat response shuts off our prefrontal cortex, the logic center of the brain, leaving us to the whims of our archaic limbic system. Our threat response pressures us to enact one of several inauthentic survival strategies that are inevitably outside our values and tend to make matters even worse, including fight, flight, freeze, please, and denial.  I found that the gut pain of pure personal shame was perhaps more unpleasant physically than my threat response, but actually easier to manage strategically. Though I had an almost comical urge to look down and avoid eye contact, it felt like I had greater access to my prefrontal cortex and was able to make more rational decisions about how I wanted to react to the situation with integrity. In this particular case, I decided to apologize to the people involved and be vulnerably honest about why I thought I had made the mistake in the first place. This strategy worked out well. In the shaming situation, however, when I was caught in my threat response, I noticed that my negativity bias was going crazy filling in all the blanks of the story that weren’t yet clear to me. All I could imagine was all the ways that I may have screwed up, and all the ways that everyone might be judging me, rejecting me, or laughing at me. Fortunately, I was able to lean into my flight reflex in order to buy some time and space. Instead of just ruminating, as is often the case when in flight mode, I managed to wait until my threat response died down and then made the rational decision to ask for clarity from the people involved in order to counteract my negativity bias, or what Brené Brown would call my “shitty first draft”. Ultimately, as I had logically suspected all along (though my threat response willfully ignored it), the whole shaming situation turned out to be a big misunderstanding. The upside is that it made for a great learning experience!  

Honesty   I teased this subject several episodes ago, but I’m finally ready to release my treatise on honesty. Unlike most religions, I don’t see any moral imperative for being honest. In my mind, honesty is beneficial for purely selfish reasons. As social animals, we are designed to connect with other humans. In fact, many scientists think belonging is the most powerful and important human need. Because humans survive better in groups, we have evolved all of these emotional reinforcements towards belonging. This means our ancestors who enjoyed being social survived and our more solitary, individualistic ancestors perished. As such, we inherited pleasant emotions like love and joy as positive reinforcements towards connection, and unpleasant feelings like shame and loneliness as negative reinforcements to encourage us to avoid isolation and disconnection, which were an inevitable path to death.  However, we now live in an ultra-modern and safe society in which death is no longer a day-to-day threat. This means the message of shame, to fit in at all costs in order to survive, is no longer relevant. We now have the opportunity to focus on pleasant emotions and wellbeing instead of constantly worrying about avoiding death. And the best way to experience pleasant emotions and wellbeing is through the positive reinforcements surrounding sociality, connection, and belonging with other humans. But in order to experience true connection and belonging, we need to be honest! Deep down, our subconscious brain knows when we are being dishonest, or inauthentic, or putting on a mask, and therefore it knows that we can’t be truly connected or loved for who we really are because we are hiding something. As such, not being fully open, transparent, and honest robs us of the opportunity to experience true belonging, arguably the greatest feeling we humans have. Honesty then becomes a conscious strategy we can enact in order to feel the best feelings a social animal can feel.

World Domination Summit   World Domination Summit (or WDS) is an inspiring conference that brings together 1000 open-minded misfits from around the world under the slogan, “Living an unconventional life in a conventional world”. I first heard of WDS because my boo Brené Brown (who I’ve never actually met) spoke there in 2012 and I’ve had my eye on the conference ever since. Last year, I finally had the chance to attend for the first time. I have to admit, while I felt immediately connected to all the interesting characters I met at WDS, I was pretty skeptical at first about the conference itself. I didn’t really get what WDS was even about and its excentric creator and host, Chris Guillebeau, came across a bit like a cult leader. The “core principles” of WDS are “community, adventure, and service”, all of which I value, but I wasn’t sure what that had to do with dominating the world? Over the course of the weekend, however, all of the quirks and curiosities of WDS started to grow on me. This year, when I returned for my second WDS, everything that I was skeptical of the first time felt charming and familiar the second time around. If WDS is a cult, I was certainly drinking the Kool-Aid. But more important than the actual conference itself (or perhaps as a testament to it), it was the fascinating misfits and weirdos I met that really made the experience memorable and worthwhile.  Ever since I wrote that sitcom during Remote Year, “Excess Baggage“, I’ve been looking at my life in a slightly new way. I’ve realized that the characters who make a sitcom or film interesting and hilarious are the ones who actually drive the story forward. They create the humour, the conflict, and the drama. But in “real life”, those are the people I usually find annoying, or weird, or “extra”. It wasn’t until I started writing a sitcom based on real people, however, that I started to appreciate how little story there would be if everyone just got along and acted exactly like me. Life would be boring. So I started to really appreciate that the people who I used to think were annoying misfits, or trouble makers, or provocateurs, were actually the ones making my life interesting all along! And WDS is full of those kinds of misfits and weirdos. It’s basically a conference dedicated entirely to the best characters from the sitcom of life. The people who don’t quite fit in, or don’t want to fit in. The people who step outside of the cultural norms that shame enforces and instead pave their own more honest, more authentic, more unconventional path. The people who bring the interesting. In fact, I’m just now realizing as I write this that the slogan of WDS, “Living an unconventional life in a conventional world”, is a perfect encapsulation of overcoming shame!

Privilege   I took a rare break from podcasting last week to attend my second World Domination Summit in Portland, OR. I’ll do an episode all about that experience in the coming weeks (here it is), but beforehand I finally decided to address a highly uncomfortable subject I’ve been putting off confronting for quite some time: privilege.  I think that privilege is real and that being aware of one’s privilege is useful, but that it’s also an unproductive source of shame and especially shaming. In fact, I think the utility of privilege as a concept is greatly outweighed by its current cultural weaponization. I believe that demystifying shame is essential before one can grapple productively with their privilege.  In my experience, despite having about as much privilege as any openly gay man could hope for, it didn’t actually make me happy until I understood my shame. And this highlights the problem with obsessing over privilege, in my opinion. Because when I look around the world today, I see millions of people with incredible privilege, most of whom appear to be unable to appreciate or enjoy their privileged position. Though privilege is statically tied to material success and even mortality, it in no way equals wellbeing. To understand this disconnect between privilege and wellbeing, we need to understand shame. Shame is an instinctual reaction that subconsciously equates social rejection with death. As such, shame triggers our threat response, our ancient fight, flight, freeze, or please reactions, even in relation to minor instances of perceived disconnection, scorn, judgement, or disrespect (none of which is actually likely to kill us). And given that these negative social experiences are increasingly common in the internet age of cultural collision and comparison, it is not surprising that most people are chronically unhappy, insecure, and anxious. Most of us are living in our threat response most of the time.  This means we feel we have to dedicate all of our energy and resources to defending and elevating our personal status, because our very worth as human beings seems to be constantly under siege. Subconsciously, we think that if we aren’t constantly working to be seen as valuable, special, or successful, or at very least seen at all, we will not only die, but die rejected, forgotten, unloved, and alone. It’s no wonder that we live in a society where everyone seems to be just looking out for themselves, despite appearing to have all the privilege in the world. When I started to understand how shame works, I saw that its message of ambition and personal superiority at all costs was misguided and not actually leading to true connection and wellbeing. This allowed me over the last few years to finally learn how to relax and enjoy and appreciate my life. This is when my privilege actually started to feel like privilege! My shame breakthrough created new space and energy for me to start to wonder and worry about other people for a change. Now that I was finally starting to genuinely enjoy my life, I couldn’t help but wonder, how is everyone else doing?  This is why I think shame education is the first piece of the wellbeing puzzle. Only once we work through the dogma of superiority and hierarchy that shame creates can we actually get our shit figured out. And then and only then, once we have our shit figured out, are we in a position to truly care about and help others. In fact, if you skip over the essential shame awareness piece and just start trying to “care” for others, I think there’s a very good chance you will actually just end up engaging in superficial virtue signalling in order to combat shame by being seen as a “good” person. Here’s the actual quote I botched in the podcast by Marshall Rosenberg: “If I use Nonviolent Communication to liberate people to be less depressed, to get along better with their family, but do not teach them, at the same time, to use their energy to rapidly transform systems in the world, then I am part of the problem. I am essentially calming people down, making them happier to live in the systems as they are, so I am using NVC as a narcotic.”

Annoying People   One of the biggest misconceptions in our culture is the belief that other people cause our emotions. The truth is, given the same stimulus, everyone reacts differently. What produces anger in one person, produces laughter in another. So it isn’t accurate to say that a given situation, person, or behaviour “makes” us angry, our anger is created entirely in our own heads. We choose our own emotions, though not consciously. Our interpretations, views, values, and norms cause us to react in certain ways based on what our uniquely conditioned brains think will help us thrive and survive. Owning the responsibility for our own emotions has many powerful benefits, combatting anti-social behaviours like blaming others for our problems while also creating more space for empathy and connection. One of the unexpected ways that this reframing has impacted my life is that I now realize my habit of finding other humans “annoying” is misguided. Other people aren’t annoying, I create annoyance as a strategy to avoid people who trigger shame, fear, and insecurity in me. I’ve since discovered that if I look beyond the label “annoying” there’s always a real person underneath with all the same complexity, humanity, and lovability as anyone else. Annoying isn’t a good enough reason to discount someone, judge them, or avoid them. As is often the case, I see dealing with people I consider “annoying” a matter of getting comfortable with discomfort. I try to figure out what it is about them that is so triggering, as it inevitably has everything to do with me and little to do with them. By reframing discomfort as a good thing — something that makes me learn, grow, and become stronger — I’m actually able to enjoy being annoyed and uncomfortable! Now I seek out “annoying” people and when someone bothers me, I know that means I have to spend more time with them, not less. It means I have to try to connect with them, not run away. Annoying isn’t a good enough reason not to be friends with someone!