Someone challenged me years ago to think about each friendship I have and what role that friendship plays in my life. For example, I may be friends with my neighbor, another counselor in the community and my child’s best friend’s mom. I am friends with each of these people and they each have a different role in my life. My neighbor may be the person I like to walk with or the person I call to close my gate when I worry I have forgotten to do so and my dog may get out. Another counselor in the community may be someone I can refer other clients to or staff difficult cases with. And my child’s best friend’s mother may be someone I can hang out with and chat with when our kids are at a bounce house, a birthday party or some other event.
People often fall accidentally and easily into patterns of emotional blackmail, especially when the stakes are high. We have all had a time where we may have felt guilt tripped into a request by a family member or coworker. The request often prioritizes what they want over our own personal wants or needs. Susan Forward wrote a book titled Emotional Blackmail in 1997. She explains how often traumatic relationships or ones that impact us negatively, often involve one person attempting to control another using their emotions. Emotional extortion (a term often used interchangeably with emotional blackmail) involves an individual exploiting a victim’s emotional vulnerabilities to control their behavior (Forward, 1997). This control jeopardizes the person’s autonomy.
When I counsel clients about friendship, I ask them to imagine a swimming pool filled with large steps--maybe 4-5 levels total—descending into the water. I tell them that some friends we hang out with on the first step in the pool and others we swim with in the deepest part.
Even though the election is over, for many, the anxiety that the election sparked and sustained is not going anywhere. According to the American Psychological Association nearly 70% of Americans reported the presidential election of this year was a source of significant stress in their lives. We see it everywhere we look, still, it is hard to limit your content consumption or manage doom scrolling but that is a must.
Not everything about getting older is bad. In fact, some things get better with age, especially if we work on them. I am going to be incredibly transparent and say that in the past I was not good at treating myself or self-care, as described in the first part of this blog.
Our lives are a conglomeration of nature and nurture. We learn from our environment, how we are raised, our life experiences, and we adjust. Seligman and Maier in 1967 did a study which identified learned helplessness as a phenomenon in dogs. (Sadly) Psychologists did experiments on dogs and found when they were exposed to repeated shocks that they could not control, the animals abstained from taking action when they could prevent the shocks. This coined the term and theory of learned helplessness. Learned helplessness has been associated with and used as an explanation for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder in humans. The main features of learned helplessness are lack of motivation, difficulty learning from success and perceived emotional numbness.
