Latest / It’s All Your Fault: High Conflict People / Trauma vs. Entitlement: Finding Balance in High Conflict Situations
Transcript
- Speaker 1 (00:05): Welcome to, it's All Your Fault On True Story fm, the one and only podcast dedicated to helping you with the most challenging human interactions, those involving someone with a high conflict personality. I'm Megan Hunter and I'm here with my co-host, bill Eddie. Speaker 2 (00:21): Hi everybody. Speaker 1 (00:22): We are the co-founders of the High Conflict Institute where we focus on training, consulting, coaching classes, and educational methods and programs, all to do with high conflict. Today we are going to be talking about trauma and entitlement. Is there a difference? Probably is, but we're going to dive into that. Bill, you've written an article called Are We Being Too Nice in High Conflict Situations or to High Conflict People? So let's start with that. Why did you write that article? Speaker 2 (01:01): Well, what we see, especially with professionals is that trauma and trauma informed methods of getting more and more attention and that professionals are nice people, and I like to think we're nice people. We want to solve problems and help people. But what we see in conflict situations, because we're not in treatment situations, we're not talking about how to treat mental illnesses, other disorders. So we're talking about dealing with conflict where there's more than one person involved. And what we're seeing is some people use the idea of trauma to be, in a sense, an excuse for bad behavior. And so especially when we think courts make a lot of decisions based on what's happened, what people's behavior are is has someone committed something illegal? Have they harassed somebody or abused somebody? And these are big issues today. It's important to know there are cases of harassment, there are cases of abuse, but there's also to an extent, people want to justify bad behavior saying, oh, I was abused or I was traumatized, therefore, you have to ignore how I'm treating you. Speaker 2 (02:32): And we see this in some marriages or partnerships see this in some business relationships. And this gets into high conflict behavior because people who may have high conflict personalities may have personality disorders, and there's maybe a 50 50 overlap with high conflict personalities and personality disorders. Not everybody with a disorder is high conflict, not who's high conflict has a personality disorder, but trauma is one of the contributors to the development of personality disorders. But also some of the evidence of that is in high conflict behavior. So let's say someone grew up in abusive household, they got hit as a child, their parents hit each other, more likely dad hitting mom more. Domestic violence is perpetrated by men. But some women engage in that too. And so as an adult, maybe they hit their spouse and say, well, but I was an abused child. You have to understand me. Speaker 2 (03:40): You have to forgive me. You have to tolerate me. And when a case like that gets into court, there's often a plea for sympathy. I had a terrible childhood. And that can be a mitigating factor like in criminal court murder cases and such. Why a terrible childhood? So maybe my sentence shouldn't be as long. So the judicial system of decision-making, but also relationship behavior. This comes in and people struggle with, I'm a nice person and I'm being treated badly. Should I excuse that bad treatment because of trauma or should I have set limits? Do I have the right to set limits on someone with a mental illness, for example? And the answer is yes. We treat people with mental illness with respect, which means we expect the same behavior that's so important to everybody else. Speaker 2 (04:36): And so it's kind of a balance almost is when are we going too far and when aren't we going far enough? So I wrote that article because I think in general, professionals see themselves as nice people. And in today's world, there's a lot of need for more setting limits and imposing consequences. So we developed a method called slick Setting Limits and Imposing Consequences in two and a half steps. First step is setting limits, second is imposed the consequence, and the third half is half the time you include some empathy and say, I really feel for your situation and I think this will help you and I really care about you versus getting manipulated. Oh, well, if you cared about me, you wouldn't set this limit. In fact, you would sign this check or you would do all these things. So half the time, you don't want to be using your empathy because setting your limit is necessary and people feel because of a diagnosis or a traumatic experience that they should be entitled to bad behavior and special treatment. And I guess what we want to say is no, you need to be treated like everyone else with limits. And then I think that's respectful to people. We don't tolerate bad behavior and we don't want to let them get stuck there. We want them to know that behavior is not okay. Speaker 1 (06:09): Yeah, no, that's excellent. And it's raised a lot of questions in my mind. So there's maybe true trauma, actual trauma that has impacted someone. And if we don't set limits on them, then it can become maybe turn into I'm entitled to special treatment. So I guess I would put that in one area. Another area might be someone who's not had trauma and feels very entitled to special treatment anyway. So my concern being that we as professionals, and especially here at High Conflict Institute, we're training professionals across a white spectrum. And something I've observed over the years is that it's easy to latch onto trauma-informed training or the trauma-informed concept because it kind of brings up some empathy and whether someone's had their own trauma and now it's resolved and they're helping others, so they kind of have this more natural empathy. Or it could be someone who's just like, okay, I need to be trauma informed and now I have to treat everyone the same way with just a lot of empathy as opposed to no, some folks are in the conflict space feeling very entitled without that trauma. Is that a true statement? Is that a possibility, bill? Speaker 2 (07:35): It's all of the above as possible. So we have people who think that they have experienced trauma that really haven't, but because of their personality, and I might mention narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, especially histrionic personality disorder and antisocial see themselves as victims in life. And it doesn't mean that they're a victim in life. That's part of the disorder. Some people were victims of domestic violence, child abuse, workplace bullies, but a specific victim is something that we deal with like a trauma versus being a victim in life because you can't connect the dots between your own behavior and what happens to you. And that's what we see a lot with these cluster B personality disorders that I mentioned, narcissistic, borderline histrionic and antisocial. And so is this a characteristic of a personality disorder and the person has not been abused? And to some extent there may be genetic tendencies. Someone may grow up in a wonderful household and say, my parents were totally abusive of me over the years I've met people like that. They tell me terrible things about their parents. Then I meet their parents and find out that there's no history Speaker 1 (09:05): Of abuse. Speaker 2 (09:06): There never happened. Yeah, there's three other kids. They say no, Johnny always thought he was a victim, but he never was. In fact, he terrorized the rest of the family. So there could be that the personality based view of being a victim and being traumatized without it being true. There also are people who experience trauma, and that may be a factor in developing a personality disorder. They say a lot of people with borderline personality disorder were abused as children first five, six years of life, and that's a partial cause of their personality disorder. And we need to respect that and help them get treatment for trauma. Physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse by your own parents as a child is very, you can't handle that. It's overwhelming for a child. People may have experienced other trauma. I think of a counseling case I had once the man's parents died in a car crash when he was one years old. And that's certainly a trauma, losing your parents at 1-year-old, Speaker 1 (10:14): Even if you don't remember it. Speaker 2 (10:16): Right. But through his life in chaos, then his aunt and uncle raised him for two years. No, no, his grandparents raised him for two years. So now we're up to about three years old. And then they realized we can't keep doing this. So then his aunt and uncle raised him for the next 10 years, but this is traumatic, the change, the loss, all of that. Interestingly, he didn't have a personality disorder, but it messed up his couple relationship. And I think he was able to stay married, but he needed counseling to really work out his marriage. So you have people that may have had trauma experiences. And it's interesting today, one of the number one books on the bestseller list was The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel, who's a trauma expert, one of the most respected trauma treatment people. So part of this is people who experienced trauma need treatment for the trauma, not excuses for bad behavior and hold onto the trauma in a sense. So you could have both or one or the other. Speaker 1 (11:32): Right? Right. So the point being, we don't want to get so stuck in this only trauma-informed training. We have to think of it as bigger and broader than that. And in fact, I've added to my training modules from the beginning that this is trauma-informed information training, but it's also entitlement informed because I think we need to cue people to the possibility that, hey, we're going to have to set some limits here at some point, or we're going to have to use respect statements instead of just empathy statements. But it may be this plus some setting limits and imposing consequences. So I guess my concern has been around too much of a focus on trauma-informed only and not thinking of it in the broader context. Does that concern you at all? Speaker 2 (12:23): Yeah, and I think that's why I'm working on the book right now, setting limits and imposing consequences in everyday life that we hope to have by the end of the year, because that's what we're seeing. So the pendulum always swings with new ideas, new concerns, new knowledge. And I think that you've said it well, Megan, that it's really the setting limits is the alternative to empathy for trauma is that there's a limit to how far that needs to go and that we still, we can't excuse trauma related bad behavior. We need to understand it, have it get treatment and have it have limits. No one wants to be around somebody who's always yelling at people, for example, even though they say, well, hey, I grew up, I had a terrible childhood. My parents were addicts and alcoholics and they beat each other up and they got divorced 10 times and all of that. If they tell you that and you go, that's terrible, but that doesn't excuse you yelling at everybody or hitting everybody or engaging in addictive behavior that harms other people or even yourself. We're not helping you by tolerating your bad behavior. And I think that's the key. And it's the key in relationships, not just professionals, people in relationships. Oh, because of his childhood, I guess I better not complain about this when you should. Speaker 1 (14:01): Well, in fact, you nailed it, bill, with we're not helping if we allow the bad behavior to continue. And that's why setting limits is so, it's vital, and I think it's a big piece that so many people miss because it's hard. It's really hard to set limits, and often we're just, we are walking on eggshells and we are worried and we are scared and we get frozen and stuck and we don't know how to deal with, let's say you have that one child in the family, like you mentioned, who seems to just always have this perpetual victim mentality where the other kids are fine and yet we're afraid to say anything to this child, and this child can make the other people miserable for years because we don't want to set that limit. And I guess we have wishful thinking about maybe there's just going to be a wake up call one day and they're going to be fine. Speaker 1 (14:56): But I think if we think about, we've talked about this on the podcast before in nature, in the animal kingdom, there's a lot of setting limits. I mean, you have the environmental limits, their weather and heat and hail and tornadoes and snow and all those things force us, squeeze us into, those are limits that squeeze us into different things. The animals within their own prides and animal groupings, I guess they're setting limits on each other all the time, and they're still kind to each other at times. So it's kind of this mutual, this balance. But I think in human behavior over time, we've lost some of that setting limits piece and we're all trying to be nice to each other, and we're afraid to set those limits. Speaker 2 (15:51): Yeah, it's tough. And it's interesting to me, having been involved with the mental health field really since 1980 in training to be a child and family counselor and individual counselor, marriage counselor, and psychiatric hospitals, outpatient clinics that we discovered in a sense the importance of mental health, of helping people feel better, helping people overcome child abuse, domestic violence, all these things. And it's interesting to see that in some ways we've been too successful because we're now trying to treat everybody with counseling values. It's like, oh, okay. It's okay. I won't complain that you're acting badly in my family. And there's this tolerance that we've developed and combined with social change, the rules have changed. And in some ways we have fewer rules. And so people feel in danger from other people who are unrestrained. And in many ways, high conflict personalities are unrestrained personalities. They do yell and hit and do things like this. Speaker 2 (17:09): What I've learned is the behavior, especially with people with personality disorders, is their behavior kind of pushes you to set limits on them. They kind of point you to where they need to be stopped because they can't stop themselves. And I think that's what we're on the cutting edge of the setting limits culture. Now that societies kind of picked up a lot of the mental health culture and kindness and counseling and all of this. Empathy is wonderful, but some people have to have empathy at a distance. And I think this is a concept I want to promote, which is I have empathy for people with bad behavior who are falsely accusing me of doing bad things or falsely harassing or just harassing other people, but I can't show that to them as an excuse. It's like, okay, I have to tolerate how you treat me that we need to get better at saying, if you keep treating me that way, I'm going to end this conversation, or I'm going to end this relationship, or I'm going to not work here any longer. Things like that, we have to get better at that. Speaker 1 (18:24): This doesn't work for me. I heard someone say that a few times in the last few days about different situations in their life, and it's like, well, this doesn't work for me. Which I think we hesitate to say that stand up for ourselves in high conflict situations because we're afraid or we don't want to push someone over the edge or we don't want to offend someone. But if you flip that focus to Here's what I'm doing because this doesn't work for me. Speaker 2 (18:55): Yeah, it's I statements and that's really good. And there's, oh, so many good mental health treatments, counseling wonderful. And I'm not criticizing that, but I think we need to add this setting room. Its piece like what you're saying and saying, this doesn't work for me is a really excellent way to say it because you're not saying you're a bad person or this behavior is wrong for everybody and you're doing it too. Hey, this doesn't work for me. And you can't argue with that because people are saying their own experience. I'm feeling this is a difficult relationship. I'm experiencing it that way, and you can't tell me It's not a difficult relationship if that's how I experience it. Speaker 1 (19:42): Yeah, excellent. I love how, haven't heard you talk about mental health culture, but that's really where we are. We've been sliding in that direction for a few years now, and especially with the expansion of social media and so many experts, so-called an expert these days, and that mental health culture, while it can be wonderful, like you said, it has to be balanced with setting limits. And then you said pointing the high conflict person points us to setting where they need limits set. That's really valuable. Speaker 2 (20:19): Yeah, I learned that as a therapist. Another therapist will tell you about that too. And I think that's one thing that's exciting about methods like dialectical behavior therapy, DBT designed for treating people with borderline personality disorder because a lot of it is learning how to internalize limits on your emotional expression, on your relationship behavior. And so DBT in many ways teaches people how to set limits on themselves to be more successful, to be happier. And I think that's where we need to go. And therapists like DBT trained therapists are fantastic. They have this balance of limits and empathy. Speaker 1 (21:07): Empathy, they're the best in the world at it. Speaker 2 (21:10): And our new ways for families and other new ways methods were inspired in part by DBT because it was focused on skills. Let's teach skills because you can have love in a relationship, but you also need skills of setting limits and also restraining yourself so that you can be happy together. You can't just do anything you want. Speaker 1 (21:35): I'll go to an extreme situation here, bill, and that is someone who is you're afraid to set limits on them or impose any consequences because you're afraid of the threats, the impending threats of, well, then I'm going to harm myself. I think that's the touchiest area. So how is this handled in DBT or how should this be handled with someone, let's say parents who are dealing with maybe an adult child or even a teenager who they've had this pattern maybe of threats of self-harm or taking their life or something. If you do this, then this, here's what's going to happen, and then it'll be on your head. So whereas that balance of empathy and setting limits come in there, we know as we know, so many people say, okay, I'm not saying anything. Speaker 2 (22:23): Well, I think this is where it's important to get mental health assistance, to get a therapist, get a counselor involved, and DBT is good at handling threats of self-harm because it doesn't just say, oh my goodness, that's so sad or so terrible. We'll put you in the hospital for a week. We'll reassure you and take care of you and make you feel so much better because that rewards the behavior and doesn't help them learn how to redirect the thoughts that are leading them to self-harm. Marshall Lanahan, the developer of DBT, says that suicide isn't a problem, it's a solution to a problem, and we need to approach it that way. When someone says, I'm feeling suicidal, instead of saying, oh no, you need to stop, is say, what are you feeling suicidal about? What's that? And that's where therapists can really help people. Say, your boyfriend didn't call back for 24 hours. Speaker 2 (23:28): Well, let's deal with that in another way that keeps you alive so you can go on and have good relationships maybe with this boyfriend or maybe somebody else looking underneath. What's the behavior is also what therapists do when setting limits. And that's why DBT is so good. It's a combination of setting limits and helping you value yourself. DBT is a dialectic. It's bringing the opposites together. That's the dialectic. There's opposite poles and bringing them to resolution. So many mental health professionals are really understanding the need for this. I think of substance abuse treatment. That's all about setting limits. So I don't want to sound like I'm knocking mental health professionals. I think what's happening is the culture, especially through the internet now, everybody knows a little bit. They can diagnose themselves and they can diagnose their friends and neighbors and boyfriends and girlfriends, but a little knowledge isn't always a good thing. And that's why I say in the scenario, Megan, you describe someone's making suicidal threats. If they don't get their way, that's when you need to get some mental health advice. Speaker 1 (24:47): And if you can't get that advice or you can't get that person to go to counseling or getting some help and the threats continue, then where do you go with setting limits at that point? Speaker 2 (24:59): Well, this gets into really the concept of an intervention, since I'm including an intervention in the setting limits and imposing consequences book, let me talk about this for a couple minutes. My favorite example of setting limits with an intervention is the Betty Ford story. She in 1978, and the reason I know this is because I'm writing this section now, perfect timing. In 1978, Gerald Ford, her husband had been president and he was out of office for two years, but his term ended in 76. He finished out Richard Nixon's term, and Jimmy Carter had come in 76 to 80. So they were ex-president, ex first lady living out in the desert east of San Diego in the desert, Rancho Mirage I think. And Betty had somehow developed a pill addiction, and she was popping pills more and more. Her family saw her going downhill and they kind of rung their hands about that. Speaker 2 (26:20): And Gerald was gone a lot and maybe didn't see as much, but their youngest adult daughter, I think her name was Susan, for, was just really upset about this and said, we have to do something. And so what she decided to do was get the family together. So she's got three or four siblings and her father and talked with a treatment expert, Joe Persch, who worked for the Navy, I think, in their substance abuse treatment program. This is before many programs really were well known. Well, Susan, first, she and the personal secretary of Betty Ford and a psychiatrist, the three of them got together, came to her house and said, Betty, you have a problem. You have to stop. You're taking too many pills. Please, please, please stop. And her response was, you're all monsters, get out of my house and I never want to see you again. Speaker 1 (27:25): Oh dear. Speaker 2 (27:26): That didn't go so well. Then Susan Ford figured I got to get the whole family together and I got to get some professional help with this. So she talked to Joe Persh and figured out how they would do an intervention. And so she and her brothers and her father and a few other people as a personal assistant got together and Joe Persch, and they all went to the house. And I might add first one of her brothers had given up on Betty for, it's just like, I don't want to deal with her. It's hopeless. And is that kind of situation like you're describing, what if people just insist on having their problem? And so I guess he was the one to go to visit to knock on the door, and they're all waiting in the bushes, I guess. And she's like, oh, surprise, good to see you. Speaker 2 (28:22): Come on in. And then everybody came in and they sat down with her, and Gerald held her hand and said, Betty, we're here because we love you, and we're going to take turns to tell you some things. And they did. And they poured their hearts out to her and basically implied, we can't keep supporting you being this way and we love you and we want you back. And it was successful after a couple hours and she agreed to go into treatment and Joe Perch guided her treatment. She just became aware of how she become addicted to drugs and became a different person and was out of control. She needed setting limits. This was a classic, they setting limits, but also imposing consequences that you're going to lose us if this continues. And they had a lot of empathy. That was a case where empathy worked well and she got into treatment and now she's, she's passed away, but she's famous for Betty Ford treatment centers. So that's the story. So the situation you described when someone seems out of control, insists on their bad behavior, maybe self-harm behavior, I think we need to do more with interventions. And that's the people that love someone get together all at once and get some professional guidance. And I think with high conflict behavior that that's sometimes necessary as well. And we need to learn more about that and help people do that. Speaker 1 (30:02): Yeah, I agree. Because you might have just one random or one person that doesn't set the limit, says they're going to set it or impose the consequence and then they don't. And that can cause things to fall apart. So trying to keep together as a team, as a concerted effort is really, really important to keep those limits in place if we really want to help someone. So well, this is interesting, bill. It's been on my mind for quite a while and I am glad we got to talk about it. So we'll put the link to the article. Are we being too nice? We'll also put a link to some DBT resources if people are interested, and a link to the slick book, which is forthcoming here in the next several months. So that'll be exciting. We are just really grateful, all of you listeners, for taking the time to spend with us today and to listen to us. If you have any questions, please send them to high conflict institute.com/podcast or write to us at podcast@highconflictinstitute.com. Speaker 2 (31:20): And let me squeeze in one more thing. Let's put in a little information about trauma treatments. So there's EMDR and there's Body Treatments and Vessel VanDerKolk's book. The Body Keeps the Score because this isn't trauma or entitlement, this is trauma and entitlement treatment. And so we're working on limits and having empathy even though it has to be at a distance sometimes. Speaker 1 (31:48): Yes, yes. Good. Okay. Excellent. And I should also mention conflict influencer.com is set to launch in July, which is just a few short weeks. Well, it's tomorrow actually from the day we're recording this. But the website a lot launch in a couple of weeks. And in fact, I'm teaching a conflict influencer class in a couple of days, and we're focusing on setting limits in this class and kind of understanding how all the pieces fit together because the confusion seems to be in these individual relationships with when do I use ear, when do I set limits, do I use them together? And so we're going to practice a lot of those things. Now I have some new information as well. Speaker 2 (32:32): And Conflict Influencer is geared to individuals rather than professionals. So if people are individuals and want help and skills, this is the place for you. Speaker 1 (32:43): Yeah, we're going to have all kinds of skills, coaching classes and community where people can really learn to support each other, which we've found is pretty vital in high conflict. So check it out. It'll be live soon. We'll put the link in the show notes today for all of you. So keep learning and practicing the skills, be kind to yourself and to others while we try to keep the conflict small and find the missing piece. It is All Your Fault is a production of True Story FM Engineering by Andy Nelson. Music by Wolf Samuels, John Coggins and Ziv Moran. Find the show notes and transcripts@truestory.fm or high conflict institute.com/podcast. If your podcast app allows ratings and reviews, please consider doing that for our show.