I loved the way Jonny talked about how behaviours can align or not align with our life goals. Once we establish what our life goals are then we can hold our behaviours up alongside those goals to see how our behaviours are faring. Because therapy doesn’t change every bit of us. In therapy we only change what we want to change.

And what I want to pick up on here is the bit that came after that in the A-side. There was a part of the conversation with Jonny where we discussed changing behaviours in order to change how we feel. As in, front loading it. It’s a well-used CBT and DBT technique: if we accept that there is a connection between thoughts, feelings and behaviours, that each one influences the other two, then if we change one then the other two will change too… 

For example, if we feel anxious about flying, then we can either stop flying (that’s the behaviour), or we can use statistics to change the way our thoughts relate to flying, which, in turn could have an impact on how we feel about flying…

I asked Jonny what happens to the emotional fallout from the change of our behaviours if all we do is just behave differently. He had used the example of a jealous lover. If you feel jealous when your partner talks with someone else at a party, then instead of behaving in a jealous way, he said, try to behave in the opposite way, and allow or even encourage your partner to talk with other people at parties! I was intrigued by this because I wondered what happens then to the emotional fallout of doing that. Does the jealousy go away if we behave differently or does the jealousy remain, festering inside us…? Then we might behave correctly but we will be swamped by reactivity coming from that inherent sense of fear. It won’t matter how well we behave, because we still feel terrified we are going to lose them (if that is indeed the fear underneath – it could, of course also be, that I will be humiliated, or any number of other things…), and that terror or humiliation could manifest as something more dangerous, such as anger… 

So, one task we have to undertake is to look at how we feel, and ask it if it aligns with our life’s goals. If one of my life’s goals is: I want to be in a trusting relationship (and I am not excluding polyamory from this conversation, there is of course still trust in poly relationships…), then we need to sit with anything that gets in the way of that goal. What’s in the way of my relationship being a trusting one?

If you can allow it, sit with the cringe, and investigate it, with curiosity rather than judgement. You will be rewarded with much richer conclusions, and insight that will help you make meaningful change. (If you struggle to do this alone, that’s where therapy can help.)

Let me explain in more detail, because what we are looking for here is whether the thing you feel is helpful or unhelpful! So, let me assume I behaved in a way that has led me to feel guilty…

Because, and here’s the thing… sometimes guilt can be helpful. Healthy guilt can help to kickstart changes in our behaviours. (DIFF GULIT AND SHAME) Please know that I do not praise shame as a constant state, I don’t value anyone sitting in a place of self-loathing as a result of something they did, said or thought (more about that later). But if we let feelings of guilt, or any emotion, guide us, then we can be led to behaving more in-line with our life goals. So, anger, if we listen to it, can be a great catalyst for understanding how we have been hurt or neglected. BUT, and this is the key bit, we have to bear in mind that THE PAIN MIGHT BE DISPLACED! Almost all pain we feel in the presence of someone in our lives now is a direct result of ways we have been hurt in the past.

I’m jealous that my partner is talking to someone else at a party, this could mean I am frightened I will lose my partner, which could mean I am frightened I will be abandoned, maybe this means I have been abandoned in my past, and not by this person who I am angry with now. Can I allow the feelings of fear to be within me so I Can find out where they come from, and then deal with the original fear?

If I didn’t get to my fears in time and I behaved badly and I feel bad about it, that guilt can be a great catalyst for apology, for repair, for healing. 

So we feel jealous because our partner talked with someone else at a party, or maybe we feel guilty about the way we treated them as result of that jealousy. A good therapist will get underneath that jealousy and that guilt and help you work out whether it is this ‘healthy’ kind, encouraging us to make amends. It might be uncomfortable, because it is encouraging you to do something about it. 

But not all guilt is healthy. Sometimes we feel guilty for something we needn’t feel guilty for. Not all guilt contradicts our life’s goals. Sometimes we want to do something, behave in a certain way, or we can find ourselves in situations where we are behaving in ways that maybe some people in society don’t like, and that can send us into a spiral of self loathing and unhealthy shame. But it might be because we think OTHER PEOPLE won’t like it. Again, can we sit with it and investigate it? Is this thing, this behaviour conflicting with our goal or what we imagine are society’s goals for us? 

Lets say you are someone dealing with a loved one who has an addiction. I wonder if you fear everyone else has an idea about how you should be managing the situation. Or of course, simply being a parent means you are wide open to other peoples comments about what you should be doing. So much so that it is incredibly difficult for people in these situations to not just disappear into their own heads, caught in a cycle of shame.

Could this judgement have been ingested from society, or our family of origin as how we SHOULD be – . And of course socieity’s standards rarely take into account the complexities of being human. If you don’t believe me, ask any one of the 1 in 5 people who’ve had affairs. They’re not all doing it because it’s fun. Some of those people are desperate in one way or another. Some are pulled in all sorts of different directions for all sorts of painful reasons, and not all of them are visible to people on the outside. 

Your task, or your task in therapy, is to establish which it is. Is it a contravention of my own values, or of my perception of society’s values?

Here’s one thing that complicates things for us.

Shame comes from a belief that I am bad. From a failure to trust our inherent goodness. And if we can’t trust our inherent goodness then when we make a mistake we get psychologically fired off into a dark place where this thing we did just becomes proof that we are indeed bad. And when we believe we are bad, we are actually not especially able to change. We either become utterly self-destructive where our only perception of self is one of worthlessness, or we become defensive and fragile. And we are not able to change who we are from THIS place. 

So the person who thinks they are bad, might well express jealous behaviour because, for example, they can’t believe that anyone would really be with them. So, if they believe deep deep down that they are bad, then they may either believe that everyone else could discover that badness if they let their guard down for a second, or they might just not trust the person who is with them, trying to love them… How could you possibly love me?

And like I explored in the conceal don’t feel b side, the narratives we hold about ourselves are the lens through which we view the world. If we think we are bad then we look for ways to prove it, because the brain works on prediction. So this shame means that we use the decisions and narratives we hold about ourselves as a template for how we interpret the world.

We also hold onto how we are good too. Which can also have a negative impact because, well, what if someone doesn’t see how we are good? I have an example for you. If think I am a good person, but maybe a situation arose when it was hard to settle my behaviours into neat binary categories. Maybe I get involved with someone who demands a lot from us. Maybe I care about them, and I want to show them how much I care, so I show up when I would rather not, when I would rather be spending time with partners or friends.  Maybe one of those partners or friends starts to get upset that I am not around as much as I should be, and I then find myself trapped. Whichever way I turn I am letting someone down. It’s easy to see how this situation could develop into something quite complex if we don’t know how to deal with it. We end up with conflicting priorities: we care about this new person, but we also care about our old friends, and they don’t demand as much of me as this new person. But perhaps there’s something else in the mix with this new complication, what if this new person sees and values a part of me that nobody else has ever seen before? So while I can see how my new relationship with this person is draining the life out of my pre-existing relationships, I am just don’t know how to help myself, especially if this new person conveys a kind of helplessness without me. How is any of this me not being ‘a good person’? I’m trying to take care of everyone. Lives are so complex. Untangling this situation would take several months in therapy, to look at all the ways I feel about all these people, and all they ways I feel about myself, and why this new person has such a hold over me…

Being a good person is an unhelpful bar to judge ourselves alongside. Does this align with my own goals is much more helpful, thanks Jonny! 

And of course, along the way, anyone involved could accuse you of being a bad person, of being thoughtless. 

And here’s another aside, just because someone thinks you are a bad person, doesn’t mean you are one. Maybe they are just making you the person they need you to be to fit their narrative. This doesn’t mean we should feel able to go around hurting people and not apologising, what I mean is, know what it is you are responsible for, examine it, and then face the world, and all the accusations levelled at you from that place. So the key is to try to be open to the messages we receive from other people but to not trust them blindly.

When you are accused of something or labelled as something, by yourself or by others. Ask yourself is this fair? Think about something someone has asked of you or accused you of being.

Pause

Is it fair that they ask that of you? Maybe you think their accusations are fair but it’s just really hard to hear? That’s ok. We don’t have to find this stuff easy. As long as we are open to hearing where we have injured people, and we know the limits of our guilt and shame, then we are connecting with the world from a place of truth.