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Episode #11 - There are no bad people · The BitterBuffalo Podcast

• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Bitter Buffalo Podcast.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Today I wanted to talk about communication.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we when I think about when I talk about communication with a lot of my clients, it's it start has to start with the motivations for communication rather than just the intricacies of what's the right thing to say, what's the wrong thing to say, what is the effect things have, how do I listen, all those kind of like strategy things, you know, that you do, and you got to kind of move to the broader picture, kind of like the meta picture of what's really going on in terms of communication.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I always hearken this back to um someone who I've learned a lot from in my life, and he's you know, died a while ago, Marshall Rosenberg, who is the kind of the creator of nonviolent communication, compassionate communication, however you want to call it.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: But uh he used to give talks on where did our communication go wrong?
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I think you know, I tend to think this is probably a good part of the truth, is it was probably about something like 5,000 years ago, with the idea that there are just bad people.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: So if there are bad people out there, what do we need to do?
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: How should we communicate with these bad people?
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what you can get to is well, I have to change them, I have to let, you know, say things to them to where they can see the error of their ways.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: I have to make them good in some way.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a project for me.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I have to take the also the moralistically um righteous stance and say, I have what you need, I know how you should live your life.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: You're living it poorly, you're a bad person, you have evil in you.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was the theologian Walter Wink that kind of like brought that to Marshall's attention, and now I'm bringing it to yours.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: So it's something like that in the in the past, you know, when religions started taking hold and things like this, it's like this idea that you're gonna go to hell, or something like that, because if you're bad.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I think this kind of way was a way of controlling people at the time.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: I because I don't know, I don't know about you.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: I was raised Catholic, I was raised, yeah, there's a hell, you gotta be good, and so you don't get into the hell, but I tend to not believe that now.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if there's a hell.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Why, why is that such a motivating thing not to go to hell?
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I can just, you know, always fear that rather than maybe just worrying about whether I'm being healthy or not, or knowing that it's going to happen.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to get to heaven.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have to worry about that.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I just need to kind of like work things out here and and do things in a healthy way versus um this idea that I gotta not do these other things in my life, right?
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: I d I gotta stay away from being a bad person.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: I've got to always be that good.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: What I'm saying here is that it kind of like guides us in a direction that I think is not productive, right?
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: But it also gives us the sense, too, that okay, if there is a hell, then yeah, there must be these evil people.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: And if I'm to be a really good person, maybe I should keep telling them how they're wrong and how they should fix their lives, things like this, because I have the shoulds for them.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: I know exactly what they should do.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, if you can kind of connect the dots there of all I'm saying, maybe it's clear as mud, but it's really affected our communication presently, right?
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: This idea that I can be a bad or a good person, or other people can be bad or good.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: That makes us take the stance that there's just these problems all the time.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: We must solve them.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: We must take on these people who are deficient in some way and correct them.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: So think about this within the microcosm of a relationship.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of I've seen a lot of couples, and uh probably one of the biggest things that uh present in relationships is defensiveness, right?
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: And where does defensiveness come from?
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: Defensiveness comes from one or both people taking a moralistically righteous stance about them being right.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's a competition.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: This is, for example, this is the way I grew up, so this is the right way to do it.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so when we see our husbands or wives or partners doing something that's outside of that, we say, that's wrong.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: I must correct them.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: I must make them righteous, I must make them good in some way, because I am the good person.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: They're just not seeing it.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I have to argue enough to so that they can understand that I am the good, I have what their best intentions in mind.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: I really want them to be good in some way.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: So that's kind of that idea that there's just evil people, you know, bad people from 5,000 years ago.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's still alive today, and it frames the way we see each other all the time.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: We become these analyzers of what's right and wrong, good and bad.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: But you see the inherent problem in that, right?
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: One person's good is one person's bad, one person's bad, one why do we even get in these binary, bipolar ways of seeing things, whether it's good or bad, because there's so much gray area that maybe we should be talking about.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: We how this is kind of a good way to frame any kind of communication, is when you can see a lot of the specifics within it rather than just getting into a black or white situation, especially about people, about our partners or whatever the case may be.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: So the idea that we there's just these evil people out there is a load of horsewash, however you want to call it.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's BS.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's what we've been told for our whole lives, and this is what keeps us at each other's throats most of the time, right?
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, these people did this to us, they deserve to die.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if we go to the nth degree about war and stuff, they deserve to die.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: And then since we did that to them, now they're coming back at us and killing us because we're wrong, and it's just about this big competition because there's just bad people out there.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: There's countries full of bad people, and they're terrorists and whatever the case may be.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: And it prevents us from seeing the truth in them.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like Jesus was saying way back in the day, resist not evil.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's a profound statement.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think Jesus would have said there's evil people out there, don't, you know, try to correct them.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: He tries to understand them, walk with them, not trying to correct them or make them into something better, right?
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: You must be a successful person, right?
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: Is one of the Ten Commandments.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: You must die with a BMW.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: Those kinds of things, right?
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: So what happens is, you know, we just kind of like do this unconscious thing where we transmit it through the generations, this idea, this concept that there's problems, you gotta solve it, especially within people.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: People are problems, you must make them see the light.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: You must keep uh form your communication in a way that helps them see the truth out there, that they are wrong, that they are bad, and they must bend the knee, and then they'll have salvation of some kind.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: What we really need to get to is understand each other and accept each other as they are, without definition, without the idea that there's just bad people out there.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because the truth is everybody loves and cares for each other.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: For some people, this is this is a hard thing to understand or to take in because what we've been taught is so much different, right?
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: But that's the truth.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody loves and cares for each other.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: If you've ever seen the movie The Whale, great movie, by the way, difficult to watch, but I really love the concept of the movie.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I think he sums it up in this statement.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to ruin it for you, but definitely watch it.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: But if you don't want to hear it, put your fingers in your ears for a little bit.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: But what I'm gonna say is um the main character talks to his friend Liz, and he says, Liz, I get the feeling that people are incapable of not caring for each other.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the truth.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Even through things that like are difficult, like someone's taken advantage of someone, someone is hurting someone in some way emotionally, physically.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: It really is about love of some kind, or it is about care of some kind.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: But you see, it's so hard to see that truth because we just want to break it down into some simple, well, they're bad, I write them off, I I cut them out of my life, I do that kind of thing.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: And you see that in families to the nth degree now.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: There's so many things about don't put yourself through any struggle, you know, or discomfort.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: Just cut yourself off from a family member you don't like because they're bad people.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: This is very concerning to me because it's it's about the idea here is run from your problems.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: Don't deal with discomfort in a direct way where you actually talk about it responsibly.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Run away from the bad people because they're bad, they're never going to change, right?
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's the idea when you cut off from someone in a family or or in some kind of relationship or something like that, right?
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: This idea permeates and becomes the unseen, unconscious motivator for communication nowadays.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: And we really need to change this to the idea, again, that everybody loves and cares for each other.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not this facade thing of, you know, that there's evil people out there.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: Look at it, think about it in your life, how it kind of like presents in your life.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: Have you cut off from someone?
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: Has people in your family cut off from each other because they believe, well, that's the problem child, or that's the problem person, they're the alcoholic, they're the, you know, insert some kind of bad person moniker in there, right?
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: And what happens, right?
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: So the challenge, I think, of our society is to not victimize ourselves, to not run away and avoid the bad people.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's to go towards that person, not as a bad person, but just to understand first where the heck are they?
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then we can truly work together when we really understand each other, rather than just coming to snap distinctions like there are bad people.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: Hopefully that makes sense overall.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I just wanted to put that out there that the idea is that we really need to take a step back and look at communication as a whole with each other in terms of what is motivating us to communicate.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: Is it to correct each other?
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: Or as Marshall used to say, he says, we're used to a culture where purchasing, winning, and deserving are conventional modes of exchange.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, we're often ill at ease with simply giving and receiving.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: So you're a good person, no matter what anyone says.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody out there is capable of doing good things, but at their core, they are good.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: They were born that way.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: They are born people who are inherently worthy of everything.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: And we have to see that.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for joining me on the podcast today.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we'll maybe talk about this later.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: We'll have to keep this going.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: If you'd like to reach out to me, lmftweaver at gmail.com, but you have a good one, and you are a good person.