Overcoming Comparison and Accepting Ordinary | Being Well Podcast

hello and welcome to being well i'm forrest hansen if you're new to the podcast this is where we explore the practical science of personal growth and if you've listened before welcome back when was the last time you went through the day without comparing yourself to anyone without getting sucked into a social media rabbit hole comparing the fullness of your life to the highlight reel of someone else's or trapped by self-criticism over-focusing on how you could have done better if you just put a bit more effort in if you're anything like me avoiding these mental traps could be really challenging there's a huge value in our culture placed on not just achievement but on being a unique or special even extraordinary individual and with almost 8 billion people on the planet there are bound to be some outliers and we put those people up on a pedestal and compared to them it's easy to feel like you're coming up short the truth is that we're all unique and we're all ordinary and accepting that ordinariness can help us avoid the trap of constant comparison find peace with ourselves and actually get more out of life to talk about that i'm here today as usual with dr rick hansen and we're joined by a psychologist author and teacher dr ronald segal ron is an assistant professor of psychology part-time at harvard medical school where he's taught for over 35 years he also teaches internationally about the application of mindfulness and compassion practices in psychotherapy and other fields and he's contributed to editing and writing several books including professional texts like the second edition of mindfulness and psychotherapy and his most recent book the extraordinary gift of being ordinary finding happiness right where you are so thanks for joining us ron how are you doing today thank you so much for having me i'm i'm fine and delighted to be here ron i'm really glad we're doing this as you well know um we started this topic thread in joshua tree joshua tree park we were both there for a week you know several days overlapping hanging out and kind of bumping into each other in terms of our world views about this whole topic territory of being ordinary and we we came to a really really good place that was actually for me personally extremely valuable at the level of personal healing and growth so i want to name that and thank you for it and i'm sure we'll get into some of that here and i think to a degree that's unusual on this podcast you and i are good friends and this topic has gripped both of us quite personally so as a way into it i'm struck by a kind of irony that you uh teaching at harvard you have a doctorate you've authored books along a number of dimensions you've been also i should add married happily for quite a long time so already we have probably easily five dimensions in each one of which you're way out there on the positive end of the tail of the distribution you are not ordinary in a number of dimensions and yet you ended up writing a book about the perils of being extraordinary or seeking to be extraordinary and i just wonder how all that has landed for you and what you drew what drew you into this topic in the first place this book actually began as a self-treatment project because there i was there i was in my mid 60s having indeed been involved for some four decades in psychotherapy whether as a client as a psychotherapist as a clinical psychologist as well as some four decades involved in contemplative practice buddhist practices and the like and taking meditation and and this path seriously and you would think that after that and given this orientation that i would have arrived at something like a secure coherent stable sense of self but i hadn't i was noticing that you know if i were to be honest about it my sense of myself continues to go up and down you know i could uh have a psychotherapy session where i felt like yeah i was connected related that was useful i had some insights and i think i'm a gifted psychotherapist i'd have another one that falls that fell flat and i'd be thinking you know i could have gone into so many fields this is clearly not my calling and this is happening after decades of doing this and practice and yes it's true i have you know written books and done all sorts of things and i've had the privilege to teach all over the world and have wonderful friends and colleagues like you for example uh and yet the fluctuations were continuing either this kind of collapsing feeling of oh my gosh i failed oh i didn't do a good job their book is selling more than mine sorry folks i know this sounds like horrible but this is the truth you know i'm and i know how ridiculous it is but this was my felt and actual experience and i was thinking all right you know i know there's this mythology out there that if somebody were truly successful they wouldn't be feeling this stuff they wouldn't be going up and down based on whether somebody liked liked me or not or liked my work or not but this was my experience if i was to be honest about it and i had various hypotheses one was i'm fundamentally inadequate as a human being maybe this just maybe i'm just you know broken from the beginning another one was you know i never worked through what it was like to be picked last for kickball in elementary school and it's and it's still there and i've still got the trauma of that and there's actually some truth to that second one we can get we can get into that not kickball per se but the legacy of all the traumas and here i'm including very small t traumas but the disappointments the hurts this kind of thing and then another hypothesis which is that you know maybe there's something more universal about this i started just looking my own clinical practice and gosh virtually everybody i worked with had difficulties in this area and they fall into two broad camps either mostly feeling inadequate or feeling kind of special but constantly stressed out trying to not slip trying to hold on to this position of somehow being above the median or special or popular or smart or whatever it might be but that everybody was in some way struggling with this and i came to suspect that it's pretty close to universal and then i started reading the evolutionary psychology literature and realized that there's a consensus that this is a hugely powerful force in mammalian and primate life and the way it shows up in humans is with this kind of fluctuating self-esteem and our concern for trying to trying to keep it up pursuing the boosts and avoiding the crashes so i want to ask about the last thing that you said which is that evolutionary psychology literature and i don't want to take too long here because there's so much practical in what you're saying that i think is really interesting for people but when i first started exploring this topic to prep for the conversation my very first question essentially was is this a cultural problem or is this a human animal problem like is because it's really easy for us to relate to this on the level of the culture we all have or almost everybody uses social media we're massively over connected to each other there's always something to compare yourself to this is a modern problem is one way to frame it and another way to frame it is that there's something that's almost baked into the nature of being human that predisposes us to excessive unnecessary painful comparison to other members of our species and so kind of quickly here what do you think about that well i think it's both yeah and on the on the baked in human animal side of it uh you know if you go around if you go to the african savannah and on the so-called safari which means riding around in a jeep with the naturalist um the naturalist will point out you know here's a you know here's his grouping there's a dominant male surrounded by a reproductively promising group of females and over in the next field there's another group of males doing the species specific equivalent of playing basketball or soccer you know trying to hone their skills to be dominant as like huh species after species why are they doing that and kids you can take four-year-olds and put them in a room together and inside of a few minutes they'll organize themselves into what are called transitive dominance hierarchies the idea of transitive like in algebra if a is bigger than b and b is bigger than c then a is bigger than c this is very strongly hardwired and you might think well why well as it turns out if we think in terms of the selfish gene if you will the idea that that what we you know reverse engineering natural selection whatever was good for genes that's what got favored for genes getting passed on this dominant stuff got favored so we might imagine that there are ancient hominids hanging around holding hands singing kumbaya being only cooperative but their dna didn't win out quite as often as this other dna however lest we fall into total despair we also have instincts for cooperation we also have instincts for nurturing we also have instincts for connecting and those can be cultivated those can be reinforced and in fact that's going to be part of our salvation from this but the competitive stuff pretty strong and as you point out in social media in advertising across the board this is amplified by cultures but the interesting thing is almost all cultures amplify this um they almost all hold you know suggest in various ways that if only you could come up on top in various kinds of comparative measures then you would be happy and satisfied and live a good life so there's this juxtaposition here really of objective and subjective so objectively in various distributions height intellectual ability to some extent certainly other kinds of talents um acquired and then um innate as well people do sort out on these distributions whereas some people are out there on the tail we have a disconnect here between that fact and the subjective experience of inadequacy yeah that curling over your gut when you just feel that you were left out so there's this disconnect between object to reality and the internal experience of it much as it could be sensible obviously to think about the value to you and those you care about in attaining some kind of relatively high status or acquiring various resources that has its objective merit on the other hand there's the subjective problem of getting caught up in endless striving or let's say viciousness toward others i hope i'm not being overly abstract but i just want to flag the difference because there's a distinction between striving striving per se is not problematic it's the experiences we have around striving and getting caught up in problematic forms of striving right that's problematic we may well have some biological basis for striving and then throw in all the other cultural stuff the question isn't about striving per se right it's our attitude about strategies yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you know relationship destruction it's how it feels to be the key issue is that not correct yes that's the key issue well but it's also behavioral it's also being addicted to striving yeah because problematically for sure problematically addicted to striving right because there's a difference between uh let me tackle both of those many of us are addicted to striving because the the boost that we feel that feeling of hey i succeeded feels so good it's and we know you know it does seem to be this dopamine squirt right in the nucleus accumbens every time we succeed at something that feels so good and the collapse of the feeling of failure feels so bad that we keep striving even though hey we don't actually need to anymore we've actually we've actually arrived enough so there so there's that aspect of it and then there's this other aspect of it which is that in us as humans what we experience in our consciousness is either feeling worthy and good about ourselves or crappy and bad about ourselves in response to all these you know comparative winnings and losings these these comparisons and that is that is simply how it manifests how this pattern that we see in other animals manifests in humans it it manifests in this subjective experience could i do just a really quick exercise with er i i want to make it a little bit alive just think of a moment where you really felt like you had succeeded at something that's important to you and it could be that you did something and you felt that you were either intelligent or attractive or um well liked for what you did and just remember what that was like and take a moment to tune into the body like exaggerate it just for a moment and just breathe into it and just enjoy it for a moment because unfortunately it's not going to last and i'm going to now invite you to do the opposite and remember or imagine a time where the opposite happened where you felt like oh you know you were left out or didn't do a good job or people didn't like what you were doing and then exaggerate that posture and don't worry this one won't last either you can now kind of come back to neutral where you're neither better nor worse than anybody great or terrible but you're just here as an ordinary human being one of those states can feel so good and the other state can feel so bad that we really do get addicted to trying to strategize and arrange our lives to produce as many of the former the first states and as few of the second states as possible and you're talking rick about the kind of striving which is simply engaging your talents to do something useful to perhaps help the world and absolutely that is a wonderful aspect of being alive as a human being but it often carries with it this other subjective side of either inflation or deflation and it's the ways in which that starts to run our lives and all the things we do to hold on to the inflation and get rid of the deflation that makes us unnecessarily unhappy and in fact gets in the way of accomplishing things a lot of times because so often people are in situations you and i know this as clinicians right where i don't want to apply for the job a little bit of a long shot job because i don't think i'll be able to tolerate that collapsed feeling that happens from not getting it i don't want to ask that person out on a date because they're a high value person in my mind and if they turn me down i'm going to feel like i am really badly inadequate so i'm not even going to risk it because i want to avoid the painful feeling that is so super clear and i'm going to remember the squirt on the one hand of dopamine and the collapse around feeling less than others inadequacy shame really yeah there and um you know paul gilbert's work on compassion focused therapy and so forth and he really talks about the expression that you see in primate bands you i think you know the research here better than i do where the subordinate monkey drops its head in shame curls around and it's it's an appeasement gesture to avoid being attacked further by the by the alpha monkey as it were and so we know that feeling you i just do it i'll just kind of toss it out we have a shared background in in early buddhism and you're familiar with the structure the buddha talked about the gratification the danger and the escape so you've sketched the gratification which includes the avoidance of pain right we've got that and then we have the danger and then there's the escape how do we practice with this and i'm sure we'll get more and more into that but that structure right there the gratification the danger and the escape is such a good summary but well you're pointing to one of the pathways out of this and first truth in advertising i'm not free of this stuff and i wrote the book so so so this is about inching toward freedom here part of the the pathway out one of the fascinating things and you alluded to this in terms of relationships is that probably one of the most reliable ways to step off this kind of self-esteem roller coaster is through safe deep honest social connection with other people when we're with a close friend and we're talking about our foibles and we're talking about our honest felt experience we go from being a me and you we become a we right i start to feel us in this and we're together in this process of you know trying to inch towards sanity if we possibly can and so safe social connection is a wonderful counterbalance and antidote to this and ironically there's a kind of reciprocal relationship here because when we're caught in this it actually gets in the way of safe social connection right as you were saying you know we do things that are about me and mine and you know winning or showing off or having people like us or something that gets in the way of really being a good friend so there's this fascinating thing where when we can have safe social connection it allows us to relax around this stuff more and when we relax around this stuff more we're able to have more safe social connection so there's actually a kind of virtuous cycle that can pull us out of this this can be boiled down into a phrase that i use in my clinical work a lot of people find useful which is make a connection not an impression make a connection not an impression and there's so many situations that we walk into we start feeling a little socially anxious how's this gonna go what are people gonna think we can actually proactively shift our attention to what if i just focus on connecting to this person what does being ordinary look like to you ron i have my moments where i actually successfully embody it so i'll report from those moments yeah in those moments i'm open-hearted because i appreciate that while i have a legacy of thousands of little disappointments traumas failures and feelings feeling less than moments so does everybody else and i have a sense of we're in this together and i'm interested in not injuring you if i can manage to not injure you and just noticing our our shared experience so that's that's one aspect of it and there's an openheartedness that comes from it another aspect is there a lot of experiences of what a workshop participant it was a mindfulness and psychotherapy workshop described as the cosmic chuckle these are the moments where we find ourselves we find our minds really doing something automatic that is fundamentally ridiculous is is not going to be helpful and we actually managed to chuckle with the oh there i or it goes again there's a kind of monitoring of all of the different ways in which my heart and mind are getting hooked on this stuff and it's not about i i mean um you know rick you're you know very important what you're saying it's not about becoming ascetic around striving it's not about you know never producing anything nor is it about not enjoying praise but it is about watching the whole process and and having a sense of there i go getting attached to that there i go avoiding that and and the kind of chuckle um that that comes from it and the other thing it's about it's about fuller engagement because at least what i find is when i'm doing something and i'm not super focused on how am i doing what do other people think about it what grade would i give myself i'm just more engaged in the process i feel it more fully because my attention isn't divided between what i'm doing and this constant evaluative chatter about how i'm doing yeah so there seemed to me that there is a lot or it seems to me that there are a lot of benefits that are very understandable that are associated with dropping what i'll call the myth of extraordinary here for starters like other forms of acceptance practice that we've talked about on the podcast and it can help us to use a phrase that rick has used in the past dropped the stone connected with a lot of these different concerns and considerations that we can ruminate back in the back of our mind about um it can help us lighten up about a lot of stuff lighten up about when we fall short when others fall short lighten up about our own nature as these funky human animals that have these weird baked in things that we wrestle with but there's often very little we can do about them on a nature level so we have to do all these other fancy practices of various kinds to try to break them down it can help us lighten up about self-criticism you were talking about where a lot of that uh slump that people experience comes from a very self-critical place um we can relax around selfing altogether hey maybe that's a pretty cool thing that we've talked about on the podcast in the past but at the same time people have a lot of identification with and attachment to this idea because we are all unique that's like a true fact we are unique and i think that part of the the the push-pull between the two of you maybe a little bit from my perspective is between the obvious narcissistic supplies associated with feeling unique authentically and we there's a certain amount of evidence that connection with those healthy supplies can actually be a really powerful resource for people and there's some evidence that people who suffer from like narcissistic personality disorder do so because they have a deep lack of narcissistic supplies that are healthy in nature things like that um and just in general getting off that treadmill can be a pretty painful process for people i think because this idea of ordinariness has such a negative connotation in the culture like nobody wants to be ordinary right oh my god we all want to be extraordinary so a lot of benefits to the practice but needed against it are these challenges associated with it so what do you think helps people come into contact with that ordinariness in like a healthy way or how people can think about this in a way that might be supportive for them you know these are great perspectives that you're that you bring up um one thing a small thing is cultures vary a bit about this um there are cultures that you know there's a japanese i understand to be a japanese saying that is you know the tallest shoot of bamboo is the first to be cut now that's yeah nail that stands up gets hammered down right that's not a celebration of of you know be the standout one so i do think we in america here live in a highly individualist culture and a very materialistic culture that really doubles down on this idea that you know if you're not you know an internet influencer or have started your own startup by the time you're 30 you know you're toast and you know you know so so there are cultural aspects to this however i'd like to address the uniqueness part and separate out our wonderful uniqueness from special that has a value judgment valence to it yeah it feels like a lot of your issue here ron is with hierarchy it's more certain with extraordinariness of that kind of thing i mean the fact i'm digesting lunch right now like that is amazing like how am i doing that you know the chemistry the oh my god you know the the the millions of years of evolution that that make the you know i'm like a really cool dude this is this is like the most sophisticated thing so so we're all extraordinary and we're extraordinary in our uniqueness too the you know it's just when we look at a field of dandelions and they're all beautiful we tend not to go you know it's a really beautiful field of dandelions but the model dandelion the ones the others want to be like and are striving to usurp is the 237th in from the left 87 rows from the front now that that is a special dandelion unfortunately that's how we operate as humans we're hooked on this so absolutely appreciating you know the particular constellation of strengths and weaknesses and culture and identities that's each of us fantastic it's the it's the putting value judgments on it and the emotional experience of getting attached to the ups and avoiding the downs that's what seems to be problematic and it's really about shifting which of our instincts are we going to lean in on are we going to mostly lean on in on the instincts that are about competition and dominance and and winning in this way and and i've been mentioning a lot of there is some genderedness to this you know to some degree at least some women are more concerned with am i being a good enough friend you know am i being a good enough parent there's some differences in terms of how we this so it's not all about material success you know external success or that kind of thing but um what's what's so interesting is that we're all hooked on one criteria or another even if it's not always the same criteria well what so what do you think helps people get off of that hook essentially connecting with their ordinary nature stepping off of the treadmill dropping the stone choose your analogy of choice here these are very strong instincts and they're very powerful so i think we have to approach them in a multimodal way i think i think we have to tackle them in on basically at least three levels we've got to work with our heads our hearts and our habits with our heads it's about noticing what are my beliefs about this where did you get your rating scale from how did you learn that you know for me for example like being intelligent or articulate was what i was going to hang on to because it wasn't going to be my skill as a kickball that that clearly wasn't going to work same boat very much same boat so you know so you know so how'd you get hooked on this particular criteria and who were the people in your life that pointed this out how does the grading system work and and the fascinating thing we see about this is gosh our grading system is pretty weird it's really what just happened you know that that we could have had we could have done you know all sorts of wonderful things that we felt good about ourselves for before but something goes wrong now collapse you know we're back so just beginning to examine that like what are the assumptions what are the core beliefs how did i get hooked on this how is my society reinforcing these and the more we can see where this come from how am i being fed these messages that's going to help so that's kind of the head level of it and also reflecting on does it work or not the head level we start to see that i can't really win at this game and there are two reasons for it one is something that um i made up a name for it narcissistic recalibration and it refers to the fact that things that used to float our boat self-esteem wise no longer do remember what it was like to put those multi-colored plastic or wooden rings in that were each you know they were like donuts and they fit on a pole and you got it in size order so you got this rainbow cone at the end you know this is a childhood boy that that both your generation forest and and rick and mine i and it was quite an accomplishment and look mommy look daddy and you know this is it but if you were to do that this morning it probably wouldn't float your boat quite as much what used to work stops working because we to everything and we habituate to whatever our levels of accomplishment are the other thing that makes it not work consistently is what goes up goes down so let's say that we're really great at something we won the olympic gold medal what are the chances of doing it four years from now eight years from now so we can use our heads to see hmm it's not going to work our grading system is insane and you know we learn this this isn't this isn't about the fundamental nature this is something that we learned in some way on the heart level it's mostly about slowly developing the courage and resourcing ourselves in the way that that rick that you've taught about so eloquently over the years reason resourcing ourselves to be able to visit the pain with an open heart so that when when something goes wrong for me today and i start feeling the sinking feeling i will close my eyes and i'll ask myself what does this remind me of and if i'm in an opened state particularly if i've been kind of meditating more or just less defended you know i'll remember what it was like to be the little kid trailing after my brother and feeling i wasn't as good as the big kids one of the things that keeps us trapped in this is when the new disappointments happen today they resonate with the old injuries and they take on extra power because they remind us of the old injuries so working with our excuse me working with our hearts involves really examining and really doing some therapeutic work with ourselves to heal some of the the past hurts and on the habit level it's really about once we notice that i can't maintain this this isn't really contributing to my happiness then we start to see what are the habits that i'm engaged in that are really mostly about trying to keep my self-esteem afloat and can i experiment with letting go of some of those and developing other habits that lead me in the direction of more sustainable things like engagement like safe social connection like generosity and gratitude the kinds of habits that are simply more reliable and aren't subject to this very conditional kind of self-esteem we need to tackle it on all three levels and um [Music] you know and and be kind to ourselves when it's slow progress because these are strongest things so we have this structure right head heart habits maybe i'll just toss in a couple of things here that i got out of talking with you and hanging out with you and joshua tree related to my own history which i've written about and it's quite out there of feeling like i grew up and i ended up with a big hole in my heart that normal range experiences of feeling connected and valued and included were for me kind of a thin soup and then i did a progressive path over the years of internalizing you know in a way that was a series of using a phrase you're familiar with a series of corrective emotional experiences that i really focused on internalizing that was that was a real journey for me and so a couple of things i've gotten from talking with you ron that have been really helpful for me and i'm not sure where they fit in the head heart or habits category first was this presumption of relatedness and in our conversations when we started talking about you know what's your deepest most internal sense of yourself for me for my history it's that i'm alone it's on me there are others around but the rescue is not on the way and it was it has been very reparative to start to explore what it's like to presume relatedness from the beginning from the beginning and presume it initially maybe conceptually like you recognize reality oh yeah there's friendship there's friendliness or other people were connected but to feel it the felt presumption as bedrock paradigm of relatedness from the get-go just had an extraordinary power to dissolve feelings of inadequacy in me still 50 years later that might swirl up and another thing i just wanted to flag related to our kind of shared background in the contemplative traditions in which there's a very serious critique of self in the narrow sense of ego distinct from the person process together which there is clearly a person process so one of the things that that starts to happen more and more is a kind of resting increasingly in ordinary mind you know the zen term just ordinary mind and in which there's simply the dustness the thisness the suchness of the moment and there really aren't comparisons i mean there's a recognition that there are mountains and and lakes and there's a some sort of distinction between them there's a ron process there's a rick process there's a forest process but it's some fundamental level there's just thisness in this moment of this and right there as well as soon as we start dropping into that felt sense of thisness dropping into that woof you know liberates all suffering you're you're you're sort of describing um where the book ultimately goes because it's where i ultimately go with this which sounds like where you ultimately go with this which is that that you know there's there's all the processes of sort of psychological healing and psychological reorienting in in the world but ultimately if we really look deeply at this we see oh my gosh all these narratives about me are constructed this is this this is all this is all a house of mirrors and it is possible to at moments for me it's not a sustained awareness but it is possible at moments to drop into this awareness of noticing how it is constructed and it is just dustness or thisness or ontological experience where there is this organism and there there's this tree and this organism's looking at this tree and it's beautiful and whole just as it is and uh um and it's it's it's um not in a realm of judgments at all uh so yes no i think that's it and you know this is one of the fruits of contemplative practice and um fascinatingly it's one of the fruits that's happening uh sometimes in psychedelic assisted psychotherapy where people will drop into this way of being in way of understanding which ordinarily takes quite a lot of discipline practice to notice it doesn't stay there and i don't it's not a panacea because people drop back into their old perspective as well but but yeah i know ultimately that is where we are freest i think um it's just well both you and i and our in our work are always involved in the dance between the sort of personal psychological and the kind of profound insight that can come from transcendent experience and and deep meditative practice yeah i think that's so much of what we're talking about here just to simplify it down a little bit is the classic what drives behavior and it's generally pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain and we're trying to avoid the collapse of the self-criticism the self-judgment the negative self-comparison to others all of that and we're trying to pursue the positive hit the squirt as you put it earlier of dopamine or reward chemical associated with feeling achieving feeling special feeling like our position in the band has been secured and this takes me to something really interesting which is that in my own life personally when i have been able to get to the place that i think you're both describing here which this kind of sea of enoughness may be one way to talk about it it has felt relieving it just felt fantastic it just felt great you know to to as a i don't know if i would describe myself as a achievaholic necessary but i would describe myself as maybe driven by some uncomfortable experiences with kids early in life somebody who has a pretty well tuned social radar and maybe a little overly sensitive to my own position inside of the social hierarchy and inside of that context it can feel really wonderful to feel like everything just is and everything's just okay like we're floating along in in the salt water bath and we're just kind of being carried about it and i just want to highlight that as a way in which everything we're talking about now about ordinariness is itself a remarkably wonderful and fulfilling experience and can be for its own psych even outside of all of the other benefits that somebody might get from it absolutely it it it really i mean it really is an extraordinary gift and it's a um that idea of dropping the stone it's like what if i wasn't an organism under threat anymore because at least for me the vast majority of the anxieties i have in the course of the day the vast majority of the threats are in this realm the daily fluctuations when i open my email and you know with some trepidation and i ask myself what am i afraid of here i'm afraid something's gonna come along that's gonna upset me to not have that be so important is um it's it's a tremendous delight and and it allows for very simple pleasures to be very rich and very fulfilling my feeling ron is that i'm probably a bit more like you actually in that i really feel the up and the down of this process i feel the good of the positive social comparison i feel the pain of the negative social comparison and i am seeking a balance between those extremes as a positive thing that i'm actively pursuing my sense of you dad really since i've been maybe about 15 years old or so is that you're just not that cut out caught up in that is that maybe the highs feel good and yeah you don't want people to rag on you and you don't want to negatively compare yourself but like it's just not so much a thing for you um and my sense with this is that this is super dispositional there are some people who are very caught up in this process and there are some people who are not and so that takes me to kind of a curiosity around okay is this just about different strokes for different folks different things that can aid different people or is there something dispositional inside of this process where some people really can get the the positives without having the negatives associated with it so much and so maybe i would start just by asking is that true to your experience dad well there's so much in this and i want to say certainly for a very long time i was extremely vulnerable to narcissistic injury little things would wound me deeply and it was because it was kind of like i didn't have any shock absorbers inside based on the lack because i lacked the normal developmental process of internalizing healthy social supplies to build up healthy you know mechanisms processes that would maintain an equilibrium of reasonable basic sense of worth and value and also having internalized a lot of uh criticism so i i had a lot of that going on so that's kind of where i started and then because i was aware of it i used a method that ron and i argued about there in the desert until we came to this wonderful relational union that transcended all differences but for me was extremely helpful to look for and let myself have the experiences that i longed for but were missing when i was young and in a kind of retroactive reparative process i worked my way including very all the way down to very young layers inside and for me that was a real healing now what ron and i argued about and i'm going to let you you know take this further on was that for some people their addiction to use that term their craving for narcissistic supplies was so intense that they couldn't use my method but but it still was a method that worked for me but i but i want to call out that exception for some people that particular path really taking in healthy supplies you know worked for me as a quick note just because we've used the phrase a couple of times and people might not be familiar with that dad would you mind defining narcissistic supplies yeah yeah the idea being that we have um natural needs for mirroring like the myth of narcissist and we have natural needs for praising every child needs to believe that they are the one and only special one in their parents eyes and right there their normal needs to to have you know to feel included to feel wanted to feel part of the group and as ron talks about very eloquently we are designed to crave that because those hominids and humans who didn't have that craving did not work really hard to be part of the group and to be kind of top dog in the group and they were less likely to pass on their genes so it's kind of normal you know that we have those those needs the problem becomes when people don't get enough of those normal needs met and then you toss in other variables like their particular culture toss in other variables that alice miller wrote about eloquently that is some of runs in my life story the drama the gifted child in which you are gifted in some ways but so you're both held up and you're constantly vulnerable to falling short anyway so i'm saying a lot about about my own personal journey here hopefully not too much but just to to answer your question from when you kind of knew me which is when i started to become much more successful one of the things i learned and i know you know this well ron is that as you start getting more approval if you move into selfing in relationship to it if you move into grasping or clutching or craving you immediately start to suffer so paradoxically for me this kind of run of success has both helped me kind of do the last little bit the frosting on the cake of internalizing retroactive repair and also it's been a great teaching that as soon as you get caught up in me bingo instantly you start suffering more and that's been a real teaching pursue excellence ignore fame and i think that's just a sweet spot where you pursue excellence which really fundamentally is about service if you're moved by service and you're lived by love that that's really your driving force and then that becomes what carries you along and i know this is where you're centered run if you're really centered in love and service and contribution and that's your primary current lifting and carrying you along then it's a lot easier you know to weather the winds you know enjoy them when they're warm and balmy and people like you try to steer clear from people who are jerks about negative feedback while trying to learn from it as best you can but at the heart of it all you're lived by love you're lived by service and that solves all kinds of problems yeah absolutely and service is one of the other paths out of this kind of preoccupation i just want to tease it apart one little thing one one thing and what you're talking about which is that um love versus again it's this idea of specialness i think we can love little kids as super special in their uniqueness without them having to be better than other little kids and that that's what's key is you know recognizing the other seeing the other clearly appreciating them you know so what are the applications or implications of this for raising kids and i think one fundamental one is that you know let's say um suzanne comes home and she's really bummed out because she didn't make the baseball team and one approach which is consistent with the individualism and the you know the sort of competitive comparison of the culture is to say oh honey i'm so sorry that it didn't work out but you know you were you were a star in the basketball team in the fall and you did great in mathletes and you know and you're you're a terrific kid you know the other one would be to say oh sweetheart i'm so sorry you know when i was about your age i was really into drama and i didn't make the school play and i really wanted to be in the play and i felt so broken heart i felt this horrible sinking feeling it was hard to be with that for a while let me give you a hug you know we all go through this stuff it happens to all of us so one of them is putting the eggs in the basket if you will of reestablishing the kind of narcissistic supply is you're a winner the other one is putting eggs in the basket of you are loved and perfect just as you are say mr rogers approach you know it's a little contrary to the thrust here and i think being careful about just like you said the the way that we offer feedback and acknowledgement is important including with kids that said i'm just astonished routinely at how bad most people are about simply acknowledging really quite wholesome effortful honorable sincere remarkable efforts by so many people whether it's just the effort that went into making a good dinner that night or taking another person into account or accomplishing something that's not easy it's remarkable to me how actually bad so many people are at giving appropriate acknowledgement and reassurance to other people that would actually not feed their egos and their vanities and their arrogances but would calm them down and help them know hey i see you i like you i appreciate you you're you're good you're fine and and i just want to come back for a moment for us to your really interesting question about are there temperamental differences here um i suspect that there are i suspect that there are differences that are that are shaped by our genes that are shaped by our upbringing and what happens in our family and you know you know rick was alluding to um being relatively introverted uh i i think that that may make for ups and downs that where the criteria are somewhat different than the ups and downs that are central for extroverts right that sure totally has more to do with how am i doing with my inner process here and a little bit less with you know who said something positive or who said something negative yeah i know i think that's a really insightful observation actually because i would totally categorize myself as an extrovert and maybe inside of that there is a certain external locus of control that can happen sometimes compared to somebody who maybe has more of an internal sense of the ability to change their life or derive values that fill them up from the inside or whatever it might be so maybe with that as a good setup we're talking a little bit about positive aspects associated with positive self-esteem or feeling special or healthy narcissistic supplies all of that good stuff there's obviously a huge self-esteem movement broadly in mental health psychology the whole thing uh we can have a conversation about whether or not that's a good thing maybe or whether that's compatible with with all of everything that you're saying here today ron but my uh massive oversimplification is that there are probably some good things associated with having some good self-esteem and also there are probably some challenges associated with feeling with this whole uh comparison culture that we've fallen into so what do you think helps people get the good benefits without getting sucked into the psychological traps well uh two two things one is what we really know about is that negative self-esteem is a problem like if we're hooked on some kind of narrative some kind of core belief that i'm less than worse than um uh below others that has all sorts of implications either as you force pointed out earlier on either we wind up compensating for it or we wind up shrinking being depressed avoidant all that so no question about that the observation that people who are in bad situations in life often feel negative self-esteem actually led in in the 1980s a um a group of psychologists and others in california to have this huge task force it was a a government task force on self-esteem and social responsibility and they got a quarter million dollars in funding and the idea was it would be a social vaccine against everything that goes bad uh goes wrong so you know they they discovered that you know people who are in gangs actually if you really talked to them felt lousy about themselves um people got pregnant at a young age often felt not so good about themselves these kinds of things so i know we'll do this and the government even thought the legislature actually thought it'll be revenue neutral because when we improve people's self-esteem they'll be more productive citizens and we'll get more tax revenue so it actually won't cost anything the net result of several years of study was it didn't work and one of the reasons it didn't work was because they got the causal arrow wrong when you're actively engaged in your life and you are accomplishing things you do tend somewhat to have the feeling that you got with the multi-colored rings right you get some of those positive feelings of i'm doing okay here but the idea was that if we could only boost self-esteem then we would have people avoid things like incarceration yeah but here we're talking about this particular kind of self-esteem which is comparative self-esteem not what i think when when rick's talking about narcissistic supplies you're talking about a sense of worth a sense of basic value in the world which we might call a profound self-acceptance like i fit into this world so i'm we're really talking about this comparative self-esteem stuff that's actually not so helpful however recognizing our skills celebrating them engaging them especially using them for the benefit of ourselves and others but not with the hey look at me being the main thrust of it find when you're two with the rings not so great when you're professional the hey look at me part that is is you know is very sustaining so it so we're we're in this tricky territory where it's both about loving ourselves right and taking in the love and taking in these resources and not being attached to the whole narrative about self at the same time so feeling the love but not not not taking it personally in a bizarre way i i don't i know that sounds bizarre no i i think that makes total sense yeah what do you think dad it's the seeking and the clinging to social status messages of worth that's problematic and i think there are multiple really powerful ways to release that seeking and certainly one of them you know it's been one for me has been to lean into actually receiving ordinary simple everyday uh experiences of feeling appreciated included befriended liked loved uh capable and so forth that's been actually really helpful for me one has to be careful about it that of course it doesn't trigger uh the longings that are problematic um so if we could kind of summarize this i think of this saying that works really well in print uh love yourself just don't love your self separate it out yeah in a nutshell yeah yeah yeah and i don't know if this is part of your experience rick because you you know you've studied so much about different ways of taking in the good in essence of allowing in the narcissistic supplies it feels to me like when i'm blocking that when i'm resisting somebody saying that was lovely what you did or i appreciate it or i like the way you said that or something like that and i'm starting to deflect you know there's this concept from psychoanalysis called reaction formation and it's when we sort of do the opposite of what we want because we're so afraid of the desire and i think this is what happens i think i think the blocking of it which actually does rob us from the pathway that you're describing and that has been a terribly useful pathway for you of letting in the love and the acknowledgement we block it out of a kind of reaction formation because we're so afraid of our i i am so afraid of my hunger for this and the part of me that can be a total junkie a total addict going after the stuff that i don't want to even let it in less i do what you're talking about if it's dangerous which is getting hooked on it yeah for me an immensely useful practice has been feeling normally worthy just as i'm not extraordinary in my goodness i'm probably not extraordinary in my badness and one of the phrases that i've heard from my dad is negative grandiosity and that's a phrase that has been also super useful for me because we can build ourselves up as these problematic figures in much the same way that we build ourselves up from in narcissistic ways where we think that we're just oh so special um and just as we're not special in our goodness a lot of the time we're not special in our badness either but we are normally worthy we are worthy simply because we are here not for who we are but that we are here and that's been very very useful for me and and that's that's such that i'm so glad you're you're you're highlighting this because that's also one of the extraordinary gifts of being ordinary we're not so bad yeah it's really not so bad we're just we're just like all the other you know eight billion organisms on the planet trying to figure this out and yeah sometimes we're sweet and lovely and wonderful and yeah sometimes we grab the bigger chocolate chip cookie and we feel bad about it but you know we're not so terrible we are we're not uh what was the phrase um rambly negative what was the negative grandiosity negative grandiosity yeah no it's great you know we're not especially horrible you know we're just like ordinarily horrible and we're my friend and we're among friends and we can hold hands and we can joke and we can and we can support each other yeah well i think that that's probably the perfect note to end the episode on for a wide variety of reasons ron it was totally great doing this with you today thanks so much for taking the time an absolute pleasure and thank you both for your your perspectives and i've been marinating in this you know thinking about this having done a book but really lovely to hear your thoughts your thoughts about the territory also rick and i had a great time talking with dr ronald segal today about his new book the extraordinary gift of being ordinary finding happiness right where you are and we began the conversation with ron's personal history where it's kind of ironic that he's objectively an extremely accomplished person he's a lecturer at harvard he's written a number of books he's a very successful guy and yet he identified being ordinary as an incredibly valuable resource for people and some of that came from his personal history where he felt that regardless of how much he accomplished well he just sort of wanted to accomplish more he just wanted to have those hits of dopamine keep rolling he was still looking around him for things to compare himself to he was still feeling all of the ways that he felt that he fell short so even as we rise and rise and rise through life even if we are objectively very accomplished even if we are objectively pretty out on the tail end of the bell curve to use my dad's language well that doesn't free us from suffering here it doesn't free us from painful social comparison and we see examples of that out in the culture all the time where there are these people who are objectively overwhelmingly accomplished and it does not seem to have freed them from chronic comparison to other people often in very painful ways and so i asked ron is this a cultural thing or is it a human animal thing and the answer is probably a little bit of both there are certainly features inside of our culture that drive us toward excessive comparison with others but there are also things that just come down to being an animal animals rapidly establish themselves into dominance hierarchies of various kinds and there are a lot of evolutionary incentives for caring about our position in the band relative to others and one of the things that can free us from this is accepting our ordinariness now throughout the conversation we did a lot of parsing of what ordinariness means exactly because of course we also want to internalize our positive aspects and trust that there are good elements in our nature receive those healthy narcissistic supplies have reasonably good self-esteem all of that good stuff most of the real problems that ron talked about come from sorting people into dominance hierarchies and comparing ourselves to others constantly trying to figure out where we are in the pecking order accepting our ordinariness is just about aligning ourselves with reality we're all unique we're all special in our own way and we're also all ordinary we've all got our problems we've all got these weird processes that happen in the mind no one's without fault so why are we holding ourselves to a unrealistic standard of constant accomplishment that can never be met and orienting toward that ordinariness comes with a wide variety of benefits it helps us lighten up about our own nature when we fall short when other people fall short it helps us calm the voices of self-criticism and critique that can live inside of the mind and it can also help us create some separation between the thoughts that emerge inside of the mind and whatever we think of as ourselves where these thoughts are things that are happening not things that we are and in this way accepting our ordinariness can be a total relief one of the benefits of this can be a little counterintuitive and it's that we step away from the roller coaster of life we're not chasing the high as much of people really pumping us up telling us how special we are or what a great job we did and at the same time we're not fallen to the lows the slump that ron described of feeling like we have really fallen short in a meaningful way and instead we're just kind of marinating and being good enough being worthy just as we are ron talked about a number of ways that we can work with the myth of extraordinary inside of ourselves and he broke them into three different categories your head your heart and your habits on the head side we can see how our narratives around this are just kind of crazy how we're holding ourselves to an unreasonable standard how we've hedonically adapted to our circumstances and our current level of achievement and we can start breaking down some of the stories that we have around accomplishment altogether then in the heart we can work with the emotional residues of previous painful experiences particularly those associated with a feeling of a lack of belonging or really intense experiences attached to how we feel like we might have fallen short in a variety of different ways and then in our habits we can look at the tendencies that we have that pull us into excessive comparison with other people for me so much of this comes down to feeling normally worthy accepting myself as i am while also understanding that there are probably some ways that i could keep on growing and changing for the better knowing that because i'm not extraordinary in my goodness i'm not extraordinary in my badness either and there's something about that that to me is immensely freeing that helps me get off the treadmill drop the stone and just release so much held tension related to excessive social comparison and connected to this whole territory if you enjoyed this podcast you'll probably enjoy ron's book again it's the extraordinary gift of being ordinary and i've included a link to it in the description of today's episode also if you've made it this far we'd really appreciate it if you would subscribe to the podcast through whatever you're listening to it now on and if you can maybe even leave a rating and a positive review it really does help us out also you can find us on patreon it's patreon.com being well podcast and for the cost of just a couple cups of coffee a month you can support the show and you'll receive a bunch of bonuses in return things like transcripts of the episodes and expanded show notes where i go into the research behind every episode until next time thanks for listening and we'll talk to you soon

Channel: Forrest Hanson

Views: 10,245

Keywords: Mental Health, Personal Growth, Self-Help, Psychology, Forrest, Forrest Hanson, Being Well, Being Well Podcast, Rick Hanson, Resilient, self esteem, self-esteem, Ron Siegel, Ronald Siegel, Dr. Ron Siegel, inadequacy, ordinary, social connection, dominance hierarchies, dominance hierarchy, comparing, comparison, connection, grandiosity, extraordinary, mindfulness, compassion, Overcoming Comparison and Accepting Ordinary

Id: eaPC8-a7sNo

Length: 65min 6sec (3906 seconds)

Published: Mon May 30 2022