Ep. 2: Being On Your Own Side

Hello and welcome to the B&W podcast. My name is Forest Hansen and I am here today joined by Dr. Rick Hansen. How are you doing dad? Hi Forest, it's always funny to hear you refer to me as Dr. Victor. I'll try to get used to it. It's not how we normally talk to each other around the dinner table, that's fair enough. So today we're going to be talking mostly about the strength of compassion, focusing on the theme as it's kind of broken out in the foundations of well-being program, of being for yourself, to kind of set that up in the overall structure of your work. Why do you want to start people with compassion? That's a great question. The great wisdom traditions of the world and lots and lots of individuals start with suffering. Where does it hurt? You walk into the doctor, where does it hurt? And so there's something very poignant and human here that we start with feeling stressed, worried, tired. It's not the whole of our life, it's not gloom and doom, but it's a really important part of our life. What feels torn in a relationship? What calls for mending? What are you still carrying around with you into adulthood that's left over from childhood, but you're still lugging it around like an invisible stone. You carry every day. So it's really important to recognize difficulty, strain, irritation, stress, suffering in the broadest sense. And then what do we do with it? Do we just stare at it indifferently? Do we jump up and down? Yippee, suffering? No. We want to feel for the difficulty in other people or in ourselves who want to have empathy for it. That makes us humans not ants. And the essence of that response, that's a sensitivity to suffering, broadly defined, and a movement to help if you can. That is the essence of compassion. So in our own journey of well-being, if you're going to start somewhere, start with compassion. And then inside of that, under the general heading of compassion, is this fundamental position that you're on your own side? And it sounds trivial, perhaps. And yet, I've a long-term therapist, lived a full life in many ways. And what I see again and again and again is that people are not on their own side. They're not for themselves. They're kind of indifferent to their own difficulties. They don't take them seriously. They let themselves be pushed around. They let themselves be pushed around by their internal reactions to things. They are moved to take action to help other people feel happier, on to succeed more in life. But very often, it's really hard for them to sustain effort on their own behalf. Think about how people are inside their own minds of themselves. How do they talk to themselves? How do you talk to yourself? Both you forrest but people listening. And I don't know about you, but I have talked to myself in very harsh, whole dismissive ways. We tend to internalize and do to ourselves psychologically what has been done to us. So if we grew up in a home, let's say with criticism or the dismissal of our needs or even a kind of shaming of vulnerability or needing us or wants, or if we have peers in school or we go through life and coaches, teachers or later in adulthood bosses, it's really hard not to, as they say, internalize those oppressors in ways large and small. And so if you really ask yourself, how do you talk to yourself inside your own mind? A lot of people will realize that they're mean. They're not friendly toward themselves. And there's this middle place between being mean and hard on yourself or enabling yourself to be a jerk. There's this middle place where you're warm and supportive, like you would be with a friend. You might tell your friend where your friend has grown up and creating a mound out of a mole hill, but it wouldn't be done in a way that was mean. It would be done in a way that built up rather than tore down. And for me, that's the essence of being on your own side. Yeah. So you're fundamentally being self-supportive. You are being reasonable, but you're doing what you can to be caring towards yourself. These are all very, very important things. Just kind of thinking about this in terms of the broader structure of what we're trying to do here. How does being for yourself help promote well-being in general, resilience in particular? Why do I become more more steady in the face of life's various problems if I have this mentality of being for myself versus one where I don't? Because sure you have some cases with people who are relentlessly not for themselves. They're extremely negative towards themselves. And obviously that's a problem. But I think that most people who are kind of towards the middle of the distribution, if you want to sort of think about it that way, they're maybe they're not, quote unquote, "for themselves," but they don't have the most negative self-talk that anyone's ever had. For those people, how would moving in that more positive direction help support them just on the flow of their everyday life? It reminds me of times that I've been in the wilderness and I got lost or I was in a real pick all, I'd done a lot of rock climbing as you know and been out in the mountains a lot. And there's that moment where the situation sucks. What are you going to do about it? Yeah. Tapping into that kind of primal place inside where you're just going to do the best you can to survive and find a soft landing, find a safe landing. And that feeling of determination and being for yourself is very fundamental for any kind of coping. And if you want to be happy, you have to cope. You got to deal with real life. So that kind of muscular sense of being for yourself drives the coping that is a necessary condition for any kind of reliable happiness in your phrase. Any kind of sustainable happiness. The other thing is that there's a lot of research that shows that the sort of muttering commentary in the back of the mind. What people kind of ruminate on or the feeling in the back of the mind of irritability or uneasiness or a kind of a wistful hurt or background feelings of inadequacy that may well be covered over. That background, I call it the wallpaper of the mind, really affects your well-being over time. Terror's down mood makes people more anxious and depressive than they really deserve to be. So replacing that using the kind of tools that we're going to be talking about in this podcast, replacing that feeling with an attitude or emotion that has more of a sense of encouraging enthusiasm about who you are. Yeah, you have works. Yeah, you got to keep working. Yeah, I see this for myself. I'm still a work in progress, but there's a sense of seeing the good, celebrating even. And when you start having that more of that sense about yourself and toward yourself in the back of your mind, that definitely very directly supports your well-being. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. That's sort of the wallpaper of the conversation. That's the context for everything. How do we get better at being for ourselves? Kind of put very, very simply. It's great to think about things kind of in the abstract, but in the flow of daily life. I know that certainly for me. If I have an experience of having made a specific mistake, my brain is pretty quick to leap into action with then feeling bad about making that mistake or thinking that I'm dumb for making that mistake. What can I do to interrupt that process or get more in the habit is maybe a better way to put it of being on my own side. I'm pausing for a moment for us because I'm going to communicate if it's worth it that there's something very profound and existential about this moment or matter of being for yourself. There's a pretty well-known saying from Rabbi Halal many, many centuries ago in which he said, "If I'm not for myself, who will be?" And if not, now, when? And it's my observation as someone who's 65 right now because that'll long career in psychology and human potential, starting in my late teens. When I step back and look at my own life, and also when I look at the lives of many other people, I see a lot of drifting. It's kind of the you know the mopey middle where it's okay and on any given day it's pleasant enough and you don't want to change it. And yet if you look back, you can see that maybe starting five years ago or 10 years ago or one year ago, it would have been so good if a part of you had sort of turned on the jets on your own behalf. And if that would have been true then, when you're a go or five or 10 years ago, think how it's still true today, that feeling of rather than sort of drifting down the comfortable river of life, turning on the engine and putting your hand on the teller. So you start directing your boat. I mean that's a very fundamental matter. It's like you go outside and look up at the stars and you just kind of ask yourself, all right, this is the life I've got in this body. What in the world do I want to make of it? And if I really was here to help myself, have it be pragmatically and morally. as good a life as possible, not being selfish, taking others into account. How would I be toward myself about that? It's a very deep matter, actually. Yeah, and it's good to have that kind of, I don't know, for life a better way of putting it like more existential sort of personal crisis. - I just made it out there. - That was a weird cosmic moment. Sure, like a cosmic moment for your like, oh my god, what's going on in my life? No, it's ordinary. Sure, sure, sure. But that's what I'm trying to say is that I think that many people do have that moment, and that's an important moment to have. I think that most, well maybe not most people, many people know that they should do something different, but they have a hard time doing it anyway. And we've had Abnazium Constellation. And if you're not for yourself, you won't do anything different. Yeah, sure, exactly. So that's why it's so important. But for me, I know that I should have been more diligent or consistent or confident or whatever. I've known this for years and years and years and years. But it has nonetheless been an ongoing process of actually being that way, right? So once someone has had that moment of existential dread for lack of better way of putting it up, dread, both like the blessed opportunity, the blessed opportunity of life. Yeah, we'll frame it in a much more positive way. The blessed opportunity of your one human life, you know, really grabbing the reins. So once they've had that moment of crisis/opportunity, depending on your framing, I guess, depending on if you're a pessimist or an optimist, like what's the next step? Yeah, and what's more importantly, what's the step to be consistent about it? Yeah. Because anyone I think can. I think we've all. if you've had any involvement with like self-help processes, you go through phases. Yeah, you go through the phase where you're really good about it and you go through the phase where you're really bad at it. Yeah. So how do you move towards having more phases where you're really good about it? Maybe the best way to put it. I think being for yourself is essentially turning on the ignition in the car. No ignition. If you haven't turned it on, I don't care. I mean, you're not going to your own check. But once you turn on the ignition, now you're for yourself. The engine's running. Right now I'm for myself. You still have to put it in drive and direct your car down the road of life. Being for yourself is a necessary condition for a lifetime of well-being and healing and growth, etc., etc. But it's not a sufficient condition. You still have to do other things. So to your point. So, and I also want to emphasize, this matter of being on your own side, it's a daily matter like I'm on your side for us. And I know, Schmalsy, Maldonald, Lerd, that you are on my side. I know that. And I know what it feels like. I know what it feels like to be on your side and for you. And it's a daily matter. It's an everyday matter. And that's there's the opportunity for us to be that way with ourselves. Now, some ways to access it is the way we did it right here, which is actually for many people, a lot easier. It's a lot easier to access the felt sense, the feeling and the body of being for another person. So that's where I typically start with people. I say, you know, call up a memory or just bring them in someone in your life right now. You feel want to. You're for them. Maybe they annoy you, maybe they're whatever you don't want to spend every weekend of your life with them. I'm not thinking of you for some. I'm not thinking of you. But still, you're for them. You would stand up if you were called upon. So know what that feels like. Bring to mind a time in the past or know what it's like in the present. And then as with so many of the methods we use, once you get that experience going, stay with it. Get to know it for a breath or two or three. Know what it feels like in your body to be for someone, to be a friend to someone, to be an advocate for them and ally to them. What does it feel like? And explore the body sensations of it. Maybe there's some emotions in it. Maybe there's a typical posture like I'm sitting up straighter as I talk about this right now. I'm leaning forward more. My chest is coming out. They had's coming up like, yeah, I'm for it. I said, feel like, what are the thoughts that go along with that? The attitude like seeing the good in the person and recognizing injustice so much of being on your own side is about recognizing injustice or mistreatment that's come at you or simply bad luck that's come at you in the same way that we would have that attitude toward another person who was being pushed around or had been dealt at tough hand in the card game of life. And so if you know it, so first of all, know what it feels like for another person. Really, get a strong sense of it. And then in the second step, think about applying that towards yourself. Maybe you see yourself outside of you, kind of over there in a chair or across the room or across a valley or maybe you just feel it inside yourself and then you ask yourself, wow, what would it be like to have the same position or stance for another person and have it for me? Take some moments of that. Very often people are startled because they realize, I don't normally do that. I don't do that very much. And so what would it be like and then even imagine tough situations, situations like a really nasty, messy relationship or imagine something that you're trying to help yourself do. If you're trying to help yourself be more consistent or if you're trying to help yourself exercise more or not be argumentative in ways that are not going anywhere or downless someone or maybe you want to help yourself drink less or anything if you are desserts. What would it be like if you were for yourself with regard to that particular thing, how would you act? How would you be different? And you imagine that in your mind and then a great third step you could do is to see yourself acting differently or facing a challenge in some way or acting the way you want to act. See yourself doing that while also imagining how you would be for yourself in that process. The feeling of that. So in your brain, literally you're starting to associate how you're trying to be with regard to something in the future along with the feeling of being on your own side, of being an ally and help her and print yourself. I think that's a great process to go through to do a little recap as we get towards the end of the episode. Being on your own side is an important part of compassion, particularly it's an important part of self-compassion because if you're not on your own side for starters who will be to the point of the quote that you gave earlier and then also because it's really hard to motivate yourself towards any kind of lasting self-reproven if you don't care about how you feel. And so we have to get the engine on the car running before we drive it anywhere. I'm going to interview you next time. Okay, so we'll work on the format now. We're starting there. Then the second act we talked about that kind of aha moment that everyone has or that anyone who really wants to make real progress in terms of their personal development has where they look up at the sky and they say wait what the heck am I doing here? Or just frankly stirrather granola? Sure, breakfast or any and it's in every day matter too. It's not a one-time fix that's permanent. Yeah, it's definitely that recurring process of accepting that the work is ongoing and there is no quick fix here and it's something that we engage with in a process. It's kind of like I'm going to do the best I can today to help my life be a good one. And as part of helping do the best you can today it means you're going to take a break. You're going to goof off. You're going to slack a little bit. It's okay but on the whole I'm going to do the best I can today to help my life be as good as it can be. And then I'm going to go to bed, know that I did that and wake up the next morning and do it.