SYTB 18: Role Reversals
Ending qualified immunity.
My husband reminded me that you can’t say the right thing too many times or too many ways. I am going to get more specific today on how to evaluate your relationships, how to ask for what you want, how to determine if the fault in the relationship or the weak link is yours and how to be accountable to one another in specific ways to improve your relationships overall.
The most puzzling aspect for people who have relationship struggles is how they allowed the people in their relationships to have a sort of qualified immunity. Qualified immunity seems to be given freely to anyone who does the honor of liking you or having you around. Not you? Just me? Relate? “Wow, you like me, so I will never ask you for anything, much less hold you to the lowest standards of basic, common courtesy.”
I’ll ask you again, “Is this what you really want inside of your boundaries, what you want to protect or defend?” The thing is, whether you know it or not, by keeping that person inside your picture, you are defending your boundaries. You are defending that person staying inside the picture over and above defending yourself from being treated like crap. Your “boundary problem” is rarely about defending what is inside your boundaries. It’s more of a priority issue of what you already chose to put inside your boundaries. It’s a matter of prioritizing who or what has the most value in your life in a way that works best for you. People often unconsciously put someone else in their own starring role in their personal picture and give this other person top billing in their own picture even over themselves. Every time you let someone treat you poorly, every time you feel hurt and do nothing, you are defending their superiority in your leading position over your own. You are defending them with your silence.
Someone asked me today, “how do I deal with this poorly behaved person?”
You know how. You do. You treat them the way you treat anyone who is acting badly. You treat them the way you’d tell someone else to treat them if this was their story and you were giving the advice. This is what I mean by qualified immunity. We give some people privileges they do not deserve based on their proximity to our life. What’s worse, it’s often those closest to us whom we allow to be the most abusive toward us without saying anything at all.
Not a lot of people separate themselves far enough from the conflict to see things rightly. First, you give top billing to other people starring in your picture. Next, you defend it with your silence as they steal your show. Finally, you’re afraid if you say anything, your cast will walk out on you, and you’re not sure if you can pull off a one man show. Again, it’s your starring role in your picture. It’s your life. If you don’t put yourself in the center of it, it won’t be a picture worth watching anyway. It won’t. You’ve lost the plot. Better to be a one man show than something that makes no sense, trying to let other people live your life for you while running it into the ground.
Stop right now and for 3 seconds, hold your hand so closely to your eyes that no light can get through. Hold it so close that you can barely open up your eyes before removing your hand. 3 seconds and… Go!
Now, tell me: when your hand was that close could you tell me what your hand looked like? Could you see what was going on around you? Could you compare your hand to another and get perspective?
No. Sometimes when something is too close, it can be blinding. I’m not suggesting that you can’t get too close to people, but if they are so close you have lost your senses, it might be more like smothering than love. Something to consider.
I always recommend a relationship wherein you can take a healthy step back to gain perspective. Change roles. See what you would do in their shoes and them in yours. The thing is, we often go out of our way to make sure people stay in our picture because we know or are afraid, deep down, that if we complained about their poor behavior, they would eliminate us from their picture. What I am saying is we are valuing people who do not place the same value on us. If that weren’t the issue, there wouldn’t likely be a problem. If they valued us or if they knew better, they’d be acting better. In many cases, if the people we value, valued us as much, they’d be on their best behavior.
Family is tough, though. Some people in our lives have behaved the same way toward us since forever. I mean, as bad as they behave now, they have possibly only improved in their behavior toward us since we were born. I understand the desire to applaud or not discourage whatever progress has come. If we have always been treated poorly and are used to being treated poorly, when they started behaving nicer, we might have even felt (not knowing any different) that we didn’t deserve it. Some people in our lives may have been so conditioned, so used to receiving this kind of diplomatic or qualified immunity in their relationship from us that they didn’t even know when they were overstepping the boundaries. To tell the truth, since boundaries are personal only you can say what you want or expect inside your picture. You’re the director. If you’ve been letting this drama play this way since forever, how will they know that their behavior was undesired? How can they know if or when you decide to shoot something new or better if you don’t ask them for what you want in the new picture?
If you have been following this course, you have hopefully taken some notes on what kind of life you truly desire, what you envision inside your dream picture. Today, I want you to look at your closest relationships and make a sort of analysis of them. I want you to take out your journal and name the 5 people you are closest with. These are the people you spend the most time thinking about or with whom you spend most of your elective time. As you write down their names, imagine you could hold the person back a bit from your face so you can really see them for who they are. Now, imagine trading places with them and you acting toward them the way they act toward you. How does that feel? Write that scenario down.
Now, imagine how you would respond if you heard yourself asking to be treated differently or more respectfully by you. Do you think these people would be as kind or sympathetic to your plea as you would be to your own? Write down how you want that conversation to play out when you ask for the relationship you desire.
Now, there’s a possibility you are the one that needs to do the self-work and to make the improvements in behavior to improve your relationships. Frankly, we can all make improvements. What if our relationships are crap because we aren’t putting in enough? So, for the last part of this exercise and for the sake of improving our relationships, let’s imagine other people were treating us the way we treat them. This might be the hardest part or the easiest. If you want to have fantastic relationships, it’s important to do the work, and this is the work. It’s important to be able to see ourselves rightly if we want to improve ourselves and our relationships. Write down what you think you can do to improve these relationships.
Alright, so now that you have a good, solid account of your top 5 relationships, you can start to flesh out what action steps you can take today to improve each. Write down your action steps for each of your top 5 relationships to make them better. If you need to talk to someone on your list to ask if they could treat you differently or if there are ways in which you can improve in your behavior, write them down.
Think of concrete, measurable ways either of you could improve in your treatment toward one another. Make sure that you can clearly notice or track the improvement over time. “Respect me” or “be more considerate” are not concrete, measurable asks. They are, however, a good start. What are some ways in which a person can demonstrate respect or consideration for you?
I had a friend, a grown man, whose mother (another Karen, coincidentally. I can’t make this up. It really was her name!) moved his furniture around whenever she came to his apartment. If he told her to respect him, she would likely not understand his ask. She thought she was loving him by “fixing” his furniture and making it better arranged based on the way she imagined herself living in that space. But her furniture arrangements didn’t work for him. Furthermore, he’d move them back every time after she left, and when she came over again, she’d start all over. The second he walked into the bathroom or the kitchen, he’d come back to find his furniture in different places. He loved his mother and didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but didn’t know how to talk to her without upsetting her. Upon my suggestion, he asked his mother to respect that he had things arranged in his apartment as he liked them and in ways that worked for him. He asked that she not move his furniture unless he had requested she do so or unless he solicited her decorating advice with his own needs in mind. He told her he wanted to be a man and if need be, move his furniture himself so she could enjoy a relaxing visit with him when she came over to his home. He very effectively communicated his needs, his feelings and his desires from her going forward. He learned that talking to his mother this way wasn’t scary or painful. She understood and wanted to respect him in the ways he clearly communicated once he learned how. It also helped him later to branch a harmonious relationship between his wife when he got married and his mother who had meddled and hurt his past relationships while he once stood silently by. How can you make your asks specific and measurable? Write them down.
Now, that you have those written down, share them with someone just outside this circle of relationships you described. Find someone whom you know can hold you accountable for taking these actions by a given date on the calendar.
Here’s a sample of past and present asks and agreements I have made in my own life.
With my husband, I am making a commitment when he comes home tonight to step up and do three more loads of laundry a week, so he isn’t always trying to do laundry after working all day.
With my mother, I will share my vision of what I would like our relationship to be the next time I talk to her and ask if she would also like to work toward that relationship by calling me if she has to cancel our plans. I will also ask if she has any input on how I can help make the relationship closer to what her ideal may be.
With my father, I will call him tomorrow and ask him if going forward he would commit to not sharing details of my life with my sister whom I have no relationship.
With my sister, things have gotten too bad. I no longer want her in my picture, and I commit to myself to release her, not pick up the phone to call her or answer when she calls me. I will look around my life and recognize the better sisters I have met in my life. I will cherish them for what they bring as I would have wanted from my actual sister. I will name these wonderful women my sisters over the next two weeks.
With my kids, I will commit starting next week to spending two days per week with them outside the house, somewhere in nature. I will ask them starting next week to spend two days a week helping me folding laundry and cleaning dishes without complaint.
All of these actions are specific, they are timely, they are measurable. There are videos on YouTube on creating S.M.A.R.T. goals. Watch them and bring these tools into your relationships. Watch how much more fulfilling your relationships become!
I will not lie to you. The asks with both my mother and my father on this list were what ended our relationships over time. It became more concrete to me that my father wasn’t keeping his commitment even though he said, “yes” to my ask. My mother heard my vision and told me plainly that she had no desire for a better relationship with me. She was frank in telling me she didn’t want any relationship at all with me if it required any effort on her part. She said after she was done raising me, she didn’t want to have to work for our relationship anymore. Who expects to hear that?
For years, I thought either she didn’t mean that or that I could continue to suspend the illusion of our “relationship” by taking on all the effort. Eventually, I came to realize she gave me a gift in telling me her intentions and desires (or lack thereof). I realized my life could be happier and more full of energy if I was no longer investing 200% of my effort (for her part and mine) into a one-sided relationship. I let her go, and my life has had a yield of 2000% more supporting, loving, friendships than I ever had before. So, yes, you will be more fulfilled. Yes, it does take time and acceptance. It also takes some grieving. No, it doesn’t mean that this is a magic pill to make ill-behaved or disrespectful people into something they are not. It can help you create the life you want to live, just sometimes with better, more deserving people. I always say, with a clear vision for your life the people around you will either step up or step out of the way for their betters to step in.
The last thing I want to repeat: this list is not me saying, “be nice to me.” These are specific ways in which I know that I have made my ask clear, I have made my demands on myself clear, and I know whether I or others have held up our end of our agreements to create the relationships we truly desire. We can spend a long time wondering if we were clear enough. We can torture ourselves wondering if we didn’t say something in just the right way. This list helps me determine what I can do going forward and helps me decide, based on the results, what is worth prioritizing in my life. It removes any sense of guilt on my part or gaslighting that when agreements of others are not kept or accounted for, it’s somehow my fault. It set me free! It gave me the biggest gift of my life: all the resources I needed to create great relationships.
It will for you, too!