#19 - When They Go Low… We Go Lower

Welcome to Beyond Bitchy, mastering the Art of Boundaries with Vicky Tidwell Palmer. Do you think of personal and relationship boundaries as harsh, rigid, or bitchy, or do you feel clueless about how boundaries work? Whether you think boundaries are bitchy or baffling, we will give you a fresh vision of personal limits as a source of freedom and liberation. Every week Vicky shares expert information about how you can master the Art of Boundaries so you can get the space you need and the connection you crave. Hi this is Vicky Tidwell Palmer and welcome to episode number 19 of The Beyond Bitchy Podcast. This one is called When They Go Low We Go Lower. And it's all about what Piemelody calls offending from the victim position. This concept of offending from the victim position is so important. It is so crucial to understand that I want to dedicate this entire episode to Pia who coined the term and who has been one of my most influential and important teachers when it comes to learning about personal and relationship boundaries. So let's start with some definitions. I want to start off by talking about the word offend because often we hear words like offend or rejected or ignored and we tend to think of those words as data points or facts when in reality they are perceptions. So to be ignored is a perception and being offended is also a perception as well as being rejected and I could probably do whole episodes around being ignored and especially being rejected. Let's stick with being offended for now. So let's look at just the definition of being offended. To offend means to cause to feel upset, annoyed or resentful. And I actually love the fact that they put resentful in this definition because as you know, if you've been a listener to the podcast for a while, the definition of resentment is victim anger. It's a belief that we're a victim and we will talk a lot about that in this episode. And I want you to note as well that the definition of offend is an objective or a subjective experience that when we are feeling upset or we're annoyed or resentful, it's because we have the perception that someone has done something to us that was wrong or we have been wronged in some way and our thoughts about that have created the experience of feeling that we are offended. Now having said that, it is absolutely true that there are times when most of us would agree that a certain act or behavior or situation is just offensive. I do think there are situations where if someone, for example, physically or sexually abuses us or they say something that is, you know, they're screaming at us and they're yelling profanities and name calling, most of us would agree that that is offensive or that most people would be offended by that behavior and that is fine. However, for what we're going to talk about today, we're going to be focusing more on times that we may be actually are offended in some way, one of those real examples that most of us, that the collective would agree are offensive behaviors, but the many other kinds of situations and experiences that we have pretty much on a daily basis that result in us offending from the victim position. And so let's talk about what that means. What does it mean to offend from the victim position? So this is the way it works. Something happens in our daily life. Someone says something to us, someone, we hear something, we see something, essentially anything that we have experienced with our five senses. And again, this could be a real offense like the examples I gave of, you know, someone's screaming and name calling us, or perhaps not. And I want to give you an example from my own life that I'm going to use throughout this episode to illustrate how this is experienced for us most of the time. These are in the situations that are not included in what we would mostly agree are offending or offensive types of behaviors, okay? So several years ago, actually now that I think about it, it's more like about 20 years ago. I was in my, I believe it was in my late 30s or early 40s. And I had a somewhat distant relative. This was a person who was only related to me by the fact that their father married my cousin. It's a little bit complicated to explain the whole thing, but essentially it was not a blood relative, not that that matters. But the point is, this is a person that was not a close relative of mine. It was my cousin's stepdaughter. And she was getting married to someone. So what happened was she invited my mother and my sister, actually my half sister and my half brother, who are both much younger than I am. And it's actually an important data point in this story that she, meaning this daughter of my cousin, was definitely much more close to my half sister than she was to me because they were essentially peers. They were about the same age and much younger than I am. My sister is 17 years younger than me. So anyway, what happened was this cousin's daughter was getting married and she invited my mother, my half sister and my brother to the wedding, but she did not invite me or my husband or my son. So she didn't invite us. Now, this is one of those situations where for most of us, we would have been offended by that. And I will talk about it later, but I just want to give you an example of a situation that would result in us potentially reacting through this offending from the victim position stance. So it could be something like that, which is, you know, it's not a no big deal event, but it's also not a horrible event either. Now this can happen in much lesser ways, too, when we get triggered into offending from the victim position, most of us can relate to being in traffic and having someone cut us off or, you know, do something that we find offensive while we're in the car. I always try to remind myself when I have experienced situations like this that I'm sure I've done the same thing when I was in a city that I wasn't familiar with or, you know, I just didn't plan well or whatever, but anyway, you can probably relate to these things. You're in the car, somebody cuts you off, you react to that, or it could be that you become offended when somebody shares their truth with you. So they tell you the truth about maybe how they experience you or how your impact, your behavior impacts them and you don't like it. Or they try to hold you accountable in some way or they say something like, you know, we had an agreement that you were going to be here at such in such a time or that you were going to do this, whatever this task was that you agreed to do and you didn't do it and then the other person says, well, that's offensive, you know, you're offending me by saying that. I've actually had people tell me that as a therapist that I would tell them sort of a simple truth about their behavior or observe their behavior in a very objective way and the response I got was you're shaming me and by the way, that's a great example and a minor example of offending from the victim position. So how it works is you experience one of these types of events like the ones I just named. And as a result of what you experience, you see yourself as a victim in some way. So you feel victimized and the truth is if the person truly did an offending behavior toward you, they have victimized you, but the victimization is usually a very brief experience. Pia has a great, Pia Melody has a great expression for this. She says, you are only a victim for a nanosecond. You are only a victim for a nanosecond and that is almost always the case. There are some exceptions to this, but there are very few. When we are victimized in some way, it usually happens sort of in an instant or a very short period of time and then it's over. And then we get information about what we want to do about that. For example, if someone's lying to us or we find out they've been deceptive in some way, once we find that out, that happens in an instant and then we get to decide, okay, what am I going to do about that? All right, and we'll get to that more in a minute. So, as a result of seeing yourself as a victim, you feel less than or you go one down. That's a way of describing what happens to our esteem when we feel less than. We go one down. And I think the worst part of all of this is that we feel powerless and there is almost nothing more painful than feeling powerless or just feeling like you don't have any options, you're stuck, someone's done something to you and there's really not much you can do. It can create a very strong sense of powerlessness and pain. So that's the second part of what happens. You go one down, you feel powerless, you see yourself as a victim and then this is usually what happens and this is the key part of offending from the victim position. Because it feels so painful, so bad to go one down, to feel less than, to feel powerless, one of the most, and here's another word for it too and it's worth mentioning as well as shame. The emotion of shame definitely goes hand in hand with that sense of being less than or powerless. You feel shame, you feel like a victim and a very habit kind of way or knee jerk response to feeling that is to essentially go in the opposite direction. So I want you to imagine that there's a horizontal line going from left to right, horizontal line and on underneath that horizontal line is that experience of less than. And the horizontal line itself is an experience of I'm okay, you're okay or I'm not better than or less than any other person and that is a very spiritual place to live. And frankly that's the place where we want to strive to exist most of the time because it keeps us from being not being in the one down or not being in the one up, which is where we're getting ready to go right now. So it's a very elegant and exquisite yet very not relational solution to feeling one down and powerless to pop up above the horizontal line into being one up, looking down on the other person being contemptuous, but essentially you immediately go from feeling or being one down to one up. And this is when we begin to offend from the victim position. Other words to describe it are we retaliate, we take revenge, we are very offended and we have decided that we are going to punish the person who we perceive has offended or victimized us. Now, again, I want to keep emphasizing here if you truly are being victimized by a person and this is not just a perception, you will need to do something about that, which is also an issue of boundaries, but for now I'm really talking more about those times when we interpret a situation as that we were offended. And then the next thing that happens is we retaliate, so we're one up now, we're contemptuous, we're looking down at the other person and we retaliate in some way. Maybe we start yelling back at them or we name, call them or if we're in, we're car, we give them the one finger salute or whatever we do, you know, all of us have ways of doing this. I'm sorry to admit that one of the things that I sometimes do is when I'm frustrated with somebody and I feel like they're wasting my time, like usually it's some kind of bureaucratic something or another on the telephone, I can get very snarky. And that's a mild example of retaliating. So I'm not sort of outright being rude, but I'm getting a bit snarky and sarcastic. And then what happens after we retaliate or we start taking revenge or we snap back or we react in some way, we get this very unfortunate experience of having this feeling of exhilaration or relief. And I say unfortunate because this is what makes offending from the victim position so powerful and seductive is that when we do it in the moment, it can feel really good. And if you think about like our inner child states, so any of you if you're familiar with like inner child work or the reality that all of us are capable of slipping into a younger version of ourselves like a teenager, this is absolutely being in the teenager. And so it can feel pretty good like, you know, you're not the boss of me and I'm going to tell you off. And anyway, so it feels really good, which makes it even more tempting to do it in the future. But the problem, there's a lot of problems with this, but the immediate problem and a consequence of doing this is that most of us will have an emotional hangover. We have an emotional hangover as a result of doing this because 99% of the time it's, we do something that's outside of our value system. It's something that we don't think is appropriate to do like name calling or yelling. And you feel that the emotional hangover is about feeling guilt or shame about your own behavior. Here's another thing that people sometimes do is that they completely check out. Like some people will say, no, I don't have an emotional hangover when I do this offending from the victim position thing, but what they do is they check out. So they may numb out in some way like they may start distract themselves with, you know, gaming or drinking or eating or I've even known of people who would go to sleep. So I remember one situation where a person, they actually were physically abusive to a spouse and within 30 minutes they went to sleep and I don't think they went to sleep because they were very calm and just felt like taking a rest. What I make up about that is that they were checking out and numbing out probably to avoid the emotional hangover because there is a cost to doing this. And so, you know, as I mentioned before, it is so tempting to do this. It's tempting to retaliate to take revenge or to go low when the other person is gone low or we just perceive that they've gone low or offended us in some way. So it's tempting because you feel so powerless and you feel so one down and you're trying to get your power back. And you also can be very tempted to use this as a strategy to get your power back if you tend to view the world in terms of winning or losing or as a constant power struggle about who's going to win or who's going to lose or who's going to come out ahead or behind or on top or not. And you want to make sure that you're the one who comes out ahead. And so temporarily, it can be a great solution to living in a world that's about winning and losing or about who's going to have more power. And I would call this not authentic power. Authentic personal power is the kind that we want to cultivate. It's a very healthy form of power, but this is about power over. And the other reason it's so tempting to do this is that like I said before, it just feels good in the moment. And I believe it's one of the most problematic parts of this whole dynamic and this whole habit that many of us have of offending from the victim position. And if you grew up in a family where one or maybe both of your parents, but usually it's just one because most families can only kind of deal with one, if you grew up in a family where one of your parents frequently used this strategy for you, it may just be simply a learned behavior. We tend to repeat what we see and we don't know that it's not healthy. We don't know that it's not relational and we just do it because that's what we learned. And if that's the case for you, you're probably going to have to work a bit harder to learn and practice alternative responses to retaliating or taking revenge and also learning more about what is authentic personal power because there are ways in order to get authentic personal power on board when it comes to a situation like this. And I'm going to talk about that in a moment and also just learn more about power in general. One of the past episodes of the Beyond Bitchie podcast talked about power because identifying your power center is step three of the five step boundary solution process and if all of that is not familiar to you at all, go back and listen to step three of the five step boundary solution process and if you don't know what the five step boundary solution process is, you can get a downloadable PDF on the beyondbitchie.com website, it's on the homepage. So let me move on here and let's talk about reasons to avoid doing this. The reasons that we need to as much as possible avoid offending from the victim position. I think the biggest reason is that you are almost always outside of your own value system and your own integrity when you go to the level or even lower of the person that you believe has offended you. So, for example, I remember one time someone told me that they got some really bad news or they discovered something really painful about their partner. And they walked over to their partner and they put their hands around the neck of their partner. They didn't choke them, but it was a threatening gesture. And I knew because I had known this person for quite some time that being physically violent was completely outside his value system completely. But this is the kind of thing we do when we believe that we have been offended. We step outside of our own integrity and our own value system. And that is 100% on us. If we get into blaming the other person saying, well, the only reason I put my hand around your neck is because you did such and such that is a way of avoiding responsibility. And it's distorted thinking nothing that we ever do or say is the responsibility of another person. So the first reason to avoid it is that you will have an integrity failure and you will be outside your value system most of the time when you do this. The other reason, and for me, this is a very powerful one, is that one of the laws of physics is that it has to do with cause and effect. And sometimes people refer to this as karma when they're talking about it in a spiritual way. But the truth is that every action will have a certain ripple effect. So for everything that we say, everything that we do, there is some type of consequence or whether it's negative or positive. And often if you remember that, it's easier to avoid it. But it's a reason also to avoid it to begin with because you can rest assured that that person, you may not see the result of the karma that they create. And it may not even be obvious to them, but there is no way you can escape universal laws that when a person does something, there is going to be some kind of consequence or ripple effect. And speaking of consequences, another reason to avoid offending from the victim position is that when you do that and especially when you step outside your own value system or your integrity, you end up creating additional negative consequences for yourself. So this is like your own bad karma. The other thing that happens too is that you're a steam, how you feel about yourself, is probably going to suffer because if you really look at the way you behaved, you will feel what I believe is appropriate shame around your own behavior. And one of the gifts of shame is that shame reminds us that we're human and it also sort of keeps us in our place. It keeps us humble and it reminds us that we're human and that we need a connection to higher power or in this case, it's just a wiser way of being. So let's talk about how you can avoid doing this in the future. And let me just say here that I don't want you to do this perfectly. The truth is that all of us, including myself, we are going to offend from the victim position in the future. It's just part of being human. You are going to have a bad day or something that happens is going to trigger you or activate you in a way that kind of touches you in a maybe very vulnerable place, like some kind of vulnerability or sensitivity that you have from your past of some kind. An example of that is, you know, if you grew up in a family where this happens to, it doesn't happen so much now, but it used to happen in the past a lot where if the family didn't have a lot of means, they would send their boys to college, but the girls didn't get to go. And so often when that happens, the girls and a family like that, they have wounding and pain around education or their own intelligence. And so in that case, for a person like that, if something triggers that part of them, they will be more likely to, perhaps, offend from the victim position or maybe, you're just having a bad day. You know, you've had a series of negative things happen and you're not feeling well or you're getting over the flu or whatever and you're just not at your best. And when we're not at our best, we tend to do these things. So number one, just count on it. This is going to happen in the future. No harm, no foul. And that you should just plan on it. So some of the ways you can avoid doing this in the future is that you really make a decision in advance that it's not how you want to respond, that you have an intention to respond differently, even if it's only to maintain your serenity. So in the simple example of the traffic or someone cutting you off in traffic, if you make a decision in advance, you know, no matter what happens in the car today, what I really want for myself is to stay in a place of peace and calm and serenity that when a person cuts you off or whatever happens, that you are in a better position to maintain that. And maybe even say, you know, I think I could show some grace here because, believe it or not, I have done that very thing in the past. And most of us have. We've all cut somebody off in traffic or we've made a, you know, a strange turn on a road because we didn't know what we were doing or whatever and people were honking at us. So, you know, we can show some grace. The other thing that you can do if you've already gotten triggered is if you perceive that you've been offended in some way. So like in this example that I gave you before about this wedding, I have to say that by the time this happened, I was old enough and maybe wise enough that I didn't really take offense. I was more just kind of perplexed, but let's just say that I had been offended. So let's say that I felt like I was offended by the fact I wasn't invited to this wedding. What I encourage you to do if that happens to you is that you take time to process what happened and the very best way to do that is to take step one from the five-step boundary solution process, which is simply a reality exercise. What did I experience with my senses? What did I think about it? What did I make up about it? And how do I feel? What emotions do I have? And so often when you just take a moment to do that process, you will get clarity and it may actually completely change your perception about whether or not to be offended. And I also want to add here, and I've talked before on the podcast about this tool, it's one of my favorite tools. It's called the least pathological explanation. And this can be another way for you to process what happened. So let's use the wedding invitation example for this one. Let's say that I walk through that first step and actually I'll share that with you so that you'll have an idea of what that would look like. So if I use the first step of the clarifier to walk through that particular situation, the first part of it is I identify the data. And the data simply is my sister, my brother, and my mother were invited to this relative's wedding, and I was not invited to the wedding. The second part of that would be what do I think about it? And let's just pretend for the sake of this conversation that I was offended by it. And I have some pretty strong feelings about it. So what I make up about it might be something like, I made up that this relative doesn't like me. Or I say, well, my thought is that that was rude of her not to invite me. Or I might say she's intentionally leaving me out and trying to shun me. Or they're just countless different types of thoughts that you could have in a situation like that. But based on those thoughts, let's say that the most powerful one for me is that she doesn't like me. So based on that thought, my emotions are going to be something like pain or shame or maybe anger. So that's how it would look if I walked through that first step of the clarifier, which again, just as a reminder is a great reality exercise that you can use independently of the clarifier. So as I walk through the reality exercise, and then I want to go to the least pathological explanation. And so what could be some other reasons why she may not have invited me to the wedding? And I have to say that in reality, this is really where my brain went, rather than being offended, is that she's much closer to the rest of my family than she is to me. And there's some very understandable and frankly, kind of neutral reasons for that. She spent way more time with my sister and my mother and my brother than with me. That might be a reason. Or maybe they have a budget for their wedding and she had to really make some hard choices about who she was gonna invite. And she decided to do that. So those would be two less pathological reasons as opposed to she doesn't like me. And I encourage you all to use this tool of least pathological explanation very generously with yourself, meaning use it a lot. lot. And I encourage you to get some feedback from other people, because what I find when doing this one-on-one, so like sometimes I'll be in my office with one person, a client, and I'll say, "Well, can you think of any other reasons why this person might have done this?" And if we're highly offended or triggered or activated, we often can't think of a least pathological explanation because the front part of our brain is just not online enough to do it. So this can be really good and actually kind of fun to do it in a group or to brainstorm with other people about it because they will come up with things that you would have never thought of. And often, the explanations they come up with, or you can come up with it when you get a little calmer, make way more sense to you than what you first made up. So that's another tool to avoid getting hooked into this, offending from the victim position. And once you have done all of this, whether it's the first step of the clarifier or least pathological explanation, you've spent some time processing it, then you get to decide, "Okay, what do I want to do about this? Is there anything that I want to do about this?" And if you come to the realization that the offense that you have taken by whatever the situation was, was really more of your making than it was of what the person actually did, you probably choose to say nothing. So going back to my example of the wedding, I never set a word to this relative. And in fact, I saw her and her husband many years later, she and I co-hosted a birthday when my mother turned 70. The two of us co-hosted a really nice dinner for my mother. And I enjoyed spending time with her. And I never set a word to her about it, because there just was no reason from my perspective. It just wasn't important. She's not someone that's in my life on even an occasional basis. But there may be times when you do want to say something. And truly, if there's been something that was like someone was being boundaryless with you, you probably do want to say something to them. So if this is something that you have trouble with, if you know that you have this pattern or a habit of reacting rather than reflecting and responding, which ends up resulting in you offending from the victim position or really wanting to take revenge or retaliate on a regular basis, I recommend going back to episode 12 of the podcast where I talked about step three, which is the one I mentioned before about power, the step three of the five step boundary solution process, identify your power center. Because offending from the victim position is just truly a misunderstanding and it's a misuse of power. So you'll probably gain more insight about how you may be abusing power or how to use power appropriately by going back and in listening to that episode. So I wanted to share with you today this concept that PMLD created around offending from the victim position because you know, it's really rampant in our culture today. There is just so much tribalism, there's so much divisiveness and I'm sure you've noticed that people are losing containment left and right and they do things that they used to accuse the other side of doing or they say, well, you know, it's okay that I did such and such because look at what you did and all of that is offending from the victim position. It's such a common, it's very common in our culture and I think we've become somewhat desensitized to it. And what I really want you to take away from this is really why it's so attractive or seductive to do it and how it takes you out of your integrity. It's one of the most challenging things that we do in life is that either when someone truly acts in an offensive way of some kind, not maybe not in a really horrible way that we need to defend ourselves physically or sexually, for example, but it's just all too easy to have something like that happen and excuse yourself for losing containment or to essentially do to them what they did to you. And so to be able to maintain that place of your own integrity and to adhere and stay strong in your own value system, I truly think that it's a spiritual practice. And so I encourage you to look more deeply at this and find out, you know, do I have a tendency to do this and take some of the hints and the tools in this episode so that you can stay in that place of integrity and avoid offending from the victim position as much as possible in the future. So if you'd like to get your own copy of the five-step boundary solution clarifier that I mentioned in talking about, especially step three, identifying your power center, there is you can get a downloadable PDF that will walk you through a process of identifying and creating your personal or relationship boundaries and you can head over to BeyondBitchy.com to get the link on the homepage or in the show notes for this episode. Until next week, I invite you to embrace the power you have, the authentic power you have to create the boundaries you want to create so that you can get the space you need and the connection you crave. See you next time. Thanks for listening to BeyondBitchy Podcast. Head over to BeyondBitchy.com for show notes, the BeyondBitchy blog and other resources to help you master the art of boundaries. Until next time, remember, boundaries aren't bitchy.