The Upper Limit Problem (Katie Hendricks, PhD)
The Upper Limit Problem (Katie Hendricks, PhD)
Listen now (54 mins) | “The whole sense though, of the Upper Limit Problem, is instead of feeling good and then feeling bad, which is how we think it's supposed to work. You know, you feel bad..."
You can also find this episode on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Dr. Katie Hendricks is the co-founder of The Hendricks Institute and the co-author of 12 books, including the bestseller, Conscious Loving: The Journey to Co-Commitment. Katie and her husband, Gay, have been leading seminars and workshops for individuals and couples for decades—moving them from their definition of co-dependence into co-commitment. We touch on it in our conversation, but their definition of co-dependence is the only one I’ve heard that makes sense to me as they suggest co-dependence at its simplest is when your behavior is determined by someone else’s—when you are adjusting yourself around someone else in a way that is a disservice to the relationship. Instead, they argue for co-commitment, where everyone takes complete responsibility for their own actions and their own lives. They coach a lot of tools that I love to talk about on this podcast, including the Drama Triangle, and they also coined the concept of the Upper Limit Problem, which is our tendency—just when things are going really well–to self-sabotage. That’s a big focus of our conversation today, which we’ll turn to now.
MORE FROM KATIE HENDRICKS, PhD:
Conscious Loving: The Journey to Co-Commitment
The Conscious Heart: Seven Soul-Choices that Create Your Relationship Destiny
The Big Leap, by Gay Hendricks, PhD
Foundation for Conscious Living
Follow Katie & Gay on Instagram
RELATED NEWSLETTERS & EPISODES:
Do You Have an Upper Limit Problem?
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
ELISE:
I wrote a newsletter about upper limit problem and zone of genius, and people very much came alive in my newsletter because it's such a brilliant framing what we all encounter, if not daily, at least weekly in our lives. Oh,
KATIE:
Absolutely. And I do think that, I think that our major contributions to the field are the upper limit problem and what we used to call the microscopic truth, which I now call speaking from discovery. But I do think that the upper limit, we say that you can trade in all of your problems for one, which is how much love and positive energy can you give and receive? And part of our intention, my intention every day is to expand my ability to give and receive more love. And really that's the problem for all of us. And it's not a personal problem, it's an evolutionary problem that it's only been really in the last few hundred years that we've had the luxury to consider the problem of expansion because survival and wars and the sense of the universe is expanding. And when we are able to match that, we're able to expand that.
We run into, and I've seen it in every single culture that I've been in, that there's this sense of don't exceed the norm, don't stick your head up in Australia. It's the tall poppy syndrome. If you're a tall poppy, you're going to get your neck separated from the rest of your body. But when I was teaching in Europe, I would ask people how they experience what we call the upper limit problem is that we expand and then we top out of how much our nervous systems can actually handle. And if you think that we've had thousands of years that survival has been based on who could see the threat most quickly, who could respond to the unknown most quickly. And so that defensive, guarded, fearful posture we've had for thousands of years. So we don't come from thousands of years of flower children who are just lying around enjoying because they would get eaten by whatever the predator was in the vicinity.
So having now enough societal safety, which is questionable, but having enough that we can begin considering is it possible for us to connect with each other in a new way That's not who's going to have power over, but really how can we co-create and co-exist with each other supporting each other? I think that's particularly a message that women receive constantly, which is don't be too much. And men have their own versions of you can't be smaller, you can't be vulnerable, you can't cry. But for women, it's basically who do you think you are? And we're going to see a lot of that in the next three months with the attacks that are going to come toward Kamala I think are going to be ugly. And there are representation of basically you are taking a man's job. The whole sense though of the upper limit problem is instead of feeling good and then feeling bad, which is how we think it's supposed to work, you feel good and then you forget to go to your yoga class and then you start eating things that aren't good for you and pretty soon you're off and binging and that's over.
And in partnership, I'd say the most common upper limit problem is to criticize the other. So criticizing also gets over into contempt. So when your partner expands and you don't support that expansion, but you criticize them and then they come down again or you forget an agreement, I think those are the two most common is that people don't do what they say they're going to do and they get into criticizing. And we really have seen that blame and criticism are really relationship killers, but what's underneath that is our fear of expanding and our fear of going out into the unknown. Because even the upper limit, if you are expanding, you are going to go into the unknown over and over and we can stay safe and miserable in our familiar patterns of you'll eat too much and I'll drink at night and we won't challenge that in each other.
And that way we'll kind of coexist and many, many relationships are that way, but it's also encouraged by society in that how's your other half? Of course she's the better half. And that sense that we have to be on a seesaw with each other. I was remembering doing a couples course in Europe and I realized, and it was about 15 couples and every single one of them experienced some level of, if my partner is not feeling good, can I be happy? Can I be creative and doing my and my partner's in a funk or do I have to kind of match that so that I don't upset? I kind of keep the structure of safety of our relationship. And so being willing to go into the unknown, both gay and I, when we got together, we decided that we didn't know anybody who had a really good relationship.
This was back in 1980 and the one couple that was kind of our model, they had just gotten divorced. And so we decided we were going to make it up. We were going to create a relationship that ran primarily on positive energy. And one of the first things that we made a commitment to do was to end blame and criticism because we saw over and over again that we would start to feel close, and then one of us would say something snarky to the other one, or Gay is super smart, he's a Stanford PhD, and he written books. And so when I got together with him, one of the ways that I would suggest something and he would say it back to me, but more slowly and more loudly, and I would go, I go, I am not stupid. And so we would get into this hassle with each other.
So when we decided to end blame and criticism, we made a commitment to that. And then it took us about two years where we would start to go into it and then we could blame ourselves. But we realized if we simply recommitted, and that's where we realized the great power of both committing like I'm in, I'm really in and I'm going to do whatever's necessary to really be connected with you, but also to honor my own individuality. So all of the things that we discovered, we discovered in what we call the living laboratory of our own life, and one of the big shifts that made the most difference was to shift from criticism to appreciation. And I think appreciation is one of the most undervalued skills. There's no downside to it, and it has this tremendous ROI that it's one of the most valuable things that you can do.
We've seen people shift their relationships by simply focusing on appreciation, but especially when you're in that criticism loop because we get adrenaline from that, and most relationships are based on an adrenaline cycle. You get from criticizing, you get that burst of ha ha, ha ha, and if you're being right, you get that burst of, but it doesn't last very long, so it diminishes. It has a very short half-life and it's not renewable. So what people do is escalate. So I think that's where a lot of people say, well, if we're not ling each other, we don't have any energy. And so finding a new fuel source in relationship that's been part of our treasure hunt over the last 40 some years of how can people fuel their relationships with something other than adrenaline? And what we found is that the power of authenticity really is so much juicier that really authenticity is sexy.
ELISE:
I love it.
That idea, I mean you write about unconscious loving that happiness invariably is paired with pain or there's a cap on how much good feeling we can contain or sustain or the hypervigilance that comes with joy in some ways of now is the come down now is the letdown, which we all recognize as part of any sugar rush or any great movie, it ends and you go back to some homeostatic balance. Yeah, just this. I went after my husband. It's funny, in light of having read your book and understanding what I was doing, just I don't know, to kill the vibe, Katie, to kill days of just humor and equanimity just to make it fun. Oh God.
KATIE:
Just to give yourself a challenge, just a little challenge
ELISE:
To keep it spicy,
KATIE:
But we think that that keeps it spicy. And what's just occurring to me is there's a process that I've invented called the Basic Toss, and that what I've realized in relationships is that we're actually having a game of toss all the time. That whatever is coming from your partner, you either receive it and toss it back or you don't receive it and it misses you entirely or it hits you and bounces off. But what really can create ongoing juiciness is tossing in a way of here's how I'm receiving this, and then having some response to that that keeps the connection going. So for Gay, he loves wordplay and he loves, he would throw something to me, he would give the first line of a song that he really likes, and he would say that, and I would receive it as he'd thrown a ball to me and I would just let it bounce off because I would be so scared that I wasn't going to be able to say something smart or clever enough that I would default and just let the ball drop.
Over a period of time, I learned how to not only receive, but to keep the game going. So in most relationships we have our defensiveness is the main thing that we need. What do I do when I get defensive? What do you do when you get defensive? And that whole scale of my specialty, what I would get a little withdrawn and the Gabe would say, what's going on? I'd go, nothing. And then if he'd get persisting, I would get, well, nothing. And then we would get into this hassle of exchange that didn't really allow the flow of love and affection, but it created adrenaline. And the big thing that people will do is what we call a minus 10 because we have this whole scale and the minus 10 is calling off the game. And so the big decision I think, for people in their own lives, but also in partnership, not just in romantic partnerships, is am I willing to keep the game going, the toss, keep the game going, and to invent new games? Because the old game I find just incredibly boring. Now, the old game is really Karpman’s's triangle of what I've changed is the hero, the villain, and the victim. And if you look around, you see that everywhere, and that's how people are getting their juiciness. It's that running for the victim position or blaming the other one or rushing to rescue to hear
ELISE:
Something. You're out, Katie.
KATIE:
Yeah, well see. Most of us, I think that the hero is really the one who keeps the old game going, yes, because we rescue people, we feel so good
ELISE:
Without
KATIE:
Asking them if they want to be rescued.
ELISE:
Yes, God, it's good. I love the drama triangle. I talk about the drama triangle a lot because as you mentioned, I mean you can apply it to marketing, you can apply it to politics, you can apply it to everything. One of the things that I loved about Conscious Loving, which I know is a classic that endures is the basic premise of, well, one, I think that you guys have provided the only definition of codependence that actually makes sense. I've had a lot of resistance to that term, the way that it's used in dependency, the way that it shares a pathology of a disease, which in a way that's I think not helpful, but your definition of codependency applies to all of us or when we can drift into that pattern. So one, I want to talk about that with you, and then two, this idea of a co-committed relationship where you're both responsible for what you're creating, shifting out of victimhood and staying above the line feels so powerful and quite difficult. Katie,
KATIE:
I think quite well, first of all, I'd love to hear how you understand codependency and then I'd love to talk about the journey of how we Yeah.
ELISE:
Well, I think the way that I had always understood codependency was in the context of AA and NA and that anything, any way that you would move to assist your family member, your partner or your friend, is inherently codependent and you are attracted to codependency in your life and looking to enable. And so I've done a fair amount of podcasts over my career in the addiction space, and I love, there's this woman, Carrie Wilkins, who wrote this book called Beyond Addiction, where she's moves it past that frame, which I think can be very demoralizing for anyone who's involved with someone who has an addiction to a place of this is what it is to actually engage with that person, support that person without, these are the boundaries. Here are some constructs. Here's some framework for working in this process without letting your child die, even if that wasn't the intent. I think that's how people metabolize it, that any engagement is codependent.
KATIE:
Yeah, thank you so much. As you were saying that, what I realize is that for me, the big principle is moving into genuine responsibility. That responsibility is the antidote to codependency, which is basically living your life through somebody else. And it's a misunderstanding of our ability to make connections. I think of codependency as really a hero move is that we move into what somebody called being up in somebody else's grill without asking, and the ability to say, I would like some support. I would like some support right now, I'd really like your feedback. Our ability to be open to feedback is all part of this, but underneath it is, I think our cultural misunderstanding about responsibility. We confuse it with blame and burden rather than my ability to actually genuinely respond. And it moves me out of the kind of ritualistic, I say this, and then you say that, and we have this kind of ritual of aggression and adrenaline that ends in a certain way.
If one person stalking out or somebody else crying and then there's an apology, and then we buy a major appliance, or we do some form of dampening down the aliveness, or we have an argument and then have sex. It's what gay calls a orgasm that you resolve, that you feel. And if you look at any of the old James Bond movies, they're really perpetuating that mythology that sex is dangerous and that if you're going to have sex, then somebody's going to get killed. And it's almost always the woman, they have sex and then she gets killed. Those undercurrents of if you move out of the construct of compromise, it's dangerous. And so I think we, especially we women, get that message and it then ties into the upper limit problem, don't be so full of yourself. And there it is not only the upper limit problem, but what I think is underlying our not taking responsibility is that it's dangerous.
If I really step out, I'm going to get killed. And women especially have the cellular memory of that goes back thousands of years in Western culture. My sense is that if I'm going, oh, how did I create this? How did I contribute? How am I contributing to this hassle that we keep repeating and how could I do something different that's going to change the dynamic? And so I think that also has to involve us encountering and befriending. I've put a lot of attention in the last eight years or so to creating ways of befriending fear, and I call them fear melters and have a whole bunch of videos and explanations and how to do that and how to incorporate it on our website to really allow you to come home to yourself to restore resourcefulness and to find new ways of creating communities that are based on caring and connection rather than conflict and power over.
And so I think we're at this inflection point in our society about how we're going to be together. And I'm such an advocate for us taking genuine responsibility because if I am, I'm actually reclaiming my creativity because we use our creativity mostly unconsciously. So I'm doing the same old thing, that insane thing of doing the same thing and expecting a different result. And when I actually get curious like, oh, wait a minute, this is about the thousandth time I've done this. Then I get to explore not just from a head sense, but from a whole body sense, a whole body thinking sense of where did I learn to do this? That's always the questions I find really helpful are, is this familiar? How is this familiar? And then where did I learn to interact in this way? Where did I learn to see men or women or partnership in this way?
So that allows us to see that it's not something that I just am. It's something I learned. And if I learned that I can learn something different, and I'm remembering one moment that was early in our relationship, we started working together right away. That was part of our intention is that we wanted to have our relationship be a living laboratory and to share what we were learning. We were giving a talk to a group seated, and we were behind a podium. And when he speaks, he's often very expansive. And he started putting his arm out to the side, big wingspan, and I was right next to him, so I was sort of ducking and he was unaware that I was adjusting to him. And so at a break, I said, Hey, I have some things I'd like to share also, I wonder if you would make some space for me.
And he said, no. And the moment I went and he said, listen, if you have something to share, you take your space. So you take up your own power, take up your space, stand up, say something, interrupt me. And I was so challenged with that, but it was really a turning point for me, like, oh, I don't have to be diminished. I don't have to ask permission. And so I had learned that that was the cultural norm. So I started really taking up my own space and it allowed me to use my whole body in communicating. And so I started considering myself a translator for the kinesthetically challenged. And so I would often gay would be speaking and I would just be letting my body respond while he was doing that. And so it allowed me to invent whole new ways of communicating instead of trying to speak as if I were also a Stanford PhD.
ELISE:
I want to come back to Codependence and co-commitment, but I want to take you on a little bit of a sidetrack. So my work in the last four or five years has been about women and internalized patriarchy, and I wrote a book about women and goodness and the way we police ourselves and police each other, and the structure is the seven deadly sins. So there's a lot that's relevant to what you're saying, pride, envy, and hearing you talk about women and the upper limit problem more globally. And I think about Kamala or I think about Hillary or what would've likely happened if Nikki Haley were the Republican candidate on the ticket as well. I write about envy and this idea of not knowing what we want, seeing that reflected back at us as being projection trigger cycle for us to strike women down. But I'm wondering too, if it isn't this idea, I mean it very much goes to this, why her and not me? Who does she think she is? How would she possibly allow herself to do that when I would never allow herself to do
KATIE:
That? She wearing how could she? Yeah. Yeah.
ELISE:
So is this the upper limit problem for women in terms of seeing that if a woman ascends to the highest political office in this country that we no longer have a wall to push against, it becomes quite scary? Is that what's happening? What's happening? I mean, I know there are a lot of things happening.
KATIE:
It's a wonderful question, and I think there are lots of answers to that because I mean, this is paradigm shift. I think that this is an inflection point that is going to have just enormous ramifications and the competition. There was a study just recently from Stanford, one of my friends was telling me about it, where they were looking at competition and different groups and where was there more competition? And so men and men and men and women, and of course they found that the highest was women to women. So I think that competition is actually encouraged. It's totally encouraged by society and it has that you can't all share the same space. You can't all be wonderful. There has to be that hierarchical structure I think is invented that the alternative to that is to support what we call people's genius. Each of us has a unique quality.
It doesn't have to be a particular skill, it's a quality that's easy for us. I know genius is easy, but working on stuff, zone of excellence and competence and incompetence, those are things they have to work on. But genius is something that we've been doing since we were kids. It's basically what you love to do and that you get more energy from doing it than you had. So when I'm working with people and I'm facilitating at the end of a 10 day training, I have more energy than I did when we started. And people are always amazed by that because I'm in my genius, which is collaborating and bringing forth, and I love it and it gives me energy, but I am also an excellent organizer. So we get a lot of praise for being able to handle the bills and put the manuals together, whereas gay has never balanced a budget in his whole life.
So I'm the money person because I'm excellent at it, but it does not bring me joy. I think part of our change here is to be appreciating others because appreciation is a gateway to finding genius. One of the things that I can feel from you is the depth of your listening, the quality of listening and exploration that you're doing inside there as I'm speaking. And I'm imagining that that is a genius quality for you that really has other things emerge out of your whole person, whole body listening. And it's easy for you to do that. And as we support each other with appreciation, each of us can flower. I like to think of us as different instruments in an orchestra. And if we're each playing our own instrument, we can make beautiful music together. We can also pay attention to the other instruments and the timing and how we can co-create together. But now this whole hierarchical and there can only be one and everybody else has to be pushed down. I think that's what we're deconstructing right now.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, I love that. And I think that I love the zone of genius. I love that whole construct because I think so many of us where our genius doesn't necessarily come from something that's socially ordained or approved of or monetizable. And I think that many people who are gifted men, women who are gifted with children, with caretaking, with baking, whatever it may be, feel deprecated. How can that be my, I'm supposed to be doing some sort of big lofty,
KATIE:
I'm supposed to change the world or have my symphony or my American novel. Yeah.
ELISE:
And just purely by the way that our culture is structured and meanwhile that it's a paradox and it's sounds so stupid, but everybody's special. Nobody is special. It's the great part of being alive when everyone is fulfilling their core genius function or what they were designed and born to do.
KATIE:
Yeah. And as you're saying that, I wanted just to interrupt you because what I was experiencing and what I experienced more and more is the joy of being here in life moment to moment, the joy of expressing, the joy of connecting, the aliveness of discovery, of learning something, of sharing that with someone else rather than our societal. You've succeeded when you arrive, and the arriving is always out there in the future. It's not now, it's not the connection and the aliveness I can experience right then. It's always, well, it's okay, but what about what are you going to do with that? And I'm seeing that now. There was one of the commentators today, James Carville was saying, okay, Democrats now don't get too giddy. The Republicans are going to come back with all of this. And it's like, Hey, could you let us have 10 minutes of celebration?
That again, I think of as an upper limit, like, okay, don't get, because it's going to be bad, it's going to be ugly. And that prediction rather than, oh, this could be new. And I think that that's the possibility here of we could have a completely new way of relating to each other that is based in connection. I was watching Kamala the other day, and she did what I call presence connect play, which is a sequence that I've been focusing on to replace the drama triangle, which is I presence. So I'm fully here, and then I connect and then we play, we collaborate with what's wanting to emerge from our connection. And I saw Kamala do that when she was thanking the staff in Wilmington. She let people see her. She first was just there and breathing, and her body was open, and you could tell that she wasn't guarded. So she presence herself. And then as she was speaking, I saw her looking at different people, acknowledging different people, timing her pacing to how people responding rather than talking over them and then playing with them. Like someone would say something and she would be able to respond to it in that playful collaborative way. And I thought, here we are. This is the new model being demonstrated right now.
ELISE:
I hope so. I think so many of us are ready for something different and are just fatigued by the extremes of both parties and the vitriol and the fighting and the lack of listening. I would say too, and this, I'm going to bully you. I'm going to condemn you. I'm going to pre cancel you, whatever variation we're talking about to get you into line and right
KATIE:
To control
ELISE:
You, you control you. And this idea that Americans are lemmings, who must be controlled, who can't think for themselves, who can't be trusted to make their own decisions, I think we're just so tired of it and it has no foundational joy, loving compassion, desire to understand.
KATIE:
Oh, absolutely. But what you were saying was, it reminded me of it's not all light and flowers. I think that what women really need to be able to discern is the difference between fear, responding from fear and responding with our legitimate anger. When you say, I'm so tired, is it really, I am just so effing tired, which is I'm so angry. So fear runs up the front of the body, and so often I'm just thinking of for an image of that. I dunno if people will remember, but I certainly do. When we were having the Brett Kavanaugh testimonial and they were interviewing in the Senate when he attacked Amy Klobuchar, she shrunk
And also Diane Feinstein. And so they were responding. He got him, and that has been going on for thousands of years. If you stand up, we're going to kill you. And if we don't do that outright, we're going to do that with blaming and shaming and name calling and all of the stuff that we see. And it keeps us from accessing the hackles. Anger comes up the back of your body and is an organic response to a fundamental unfairness. So when we've had our toes stepped on, it smashed for centuries. My experience is that most women are not aware of how deeply furious they are. And if you begin to really play with where am I experiencing sensations in my body? Like am I'm in a conversation? Am I scared? Then befriend your fear and open up to getting support and moving your body and breathing so you don't freeze in your fear and then access and liberate your anger. Because I think that's really the only thing that has ever really changed society is collective anger. This will not stand, this is going.
ELISE:
Yeah. No, it's interesting to hear you say that because I feel as a woman, I'm from Montana, I'm from a rural state, so I know a lot of it was a purple state. It's become more red, but the university towns are very progressive as you can imagine. But it's interesting as we continue to move forward and watching the way that women are interacting with each other, I do feel a lot of anger and frustration at the way that we are continuing to choose our identity factors in a way that feels like we just are leveling misogyny at each other. And I don't know, it's not a popular thing to say, it's a scary thing to say, but it's deeply frustrating to watch the way that we turn with so much viciousness on white women and how white women are just this punching bag and it lets misogyny go unchecked by everyone when we participate and treat white women as the problem. Instead of, I want to understand why Vance and Trump are more compelling, I want to understand, can we open the floor to hear each other and support each other? I don't know. This to me feels like a big opportunity at this moment in time of are we going to choose something different or are we going to continue to dunk on each other in a way that I think is fomenting more anger in me, to be honest? Yeah.
KATIE:
Yeah, I agree. And I really appreciate you focusing on that. My sense is with changes in my own behavior, they have needed, first of all, commitment, which is a whole body experience of, I use the image of if you want to learn how to swim, the first requirement is to get in the pool. If you want to learn how to play a new game, the first thing is to get on the field. And so committing is taking your whole self in, but that's just the start. So that gets you into the game, into a new game. But in order to get from here to there to a new behavior, you need to recommit for behaviors of mine. I can remember really learning to identify that I was angry, took and communicate that straightforwardly committing to that, gosh, several hundred times. Several hundred times. And so our willingness to practice, to practice a new behavior, to support each other in practicing a new behavior, like for instance, shifting from criticism, which I think is broadly what we're talking about here, is different forms of criticism and contempt and blame
ELISE:
And contempt. Yeah.
KATIE:
Yes. And which is making other people less than. I think that's the huge problem. Fear and contempt create hate. And so as we call each other out on, I've started calling. If I hear contempt, I will respond to that. I don't want that to let that be in the space. And it's often about a loss of respect. And so what happened that you now consider this other person less than you, but I think it's all based in a scarcity model. There's only so much attention and it's built on God, save the king, and then we kill the king, and then we bring another king up so that we can elevate them and then kill them. And that I think is now starting to happen with women. So if you want to play this game, you get elevated and then you get struck down. So really to realize that there's an abundance of love and particularly attention, and that if we're willing to give each other attention and to receive attention, we move into a nourishing of each other because we need attention just as much as we need food and water.
And mostly women only get attention for how they look, for how they're behaving for others, for how they're serving others. But if we begin giving people attention for their being, for what we recognize of their qualities for appreciating them is a form of recognition. And as we practice that, then we open up so much more of a sense of there's plenty. There's plenty. And I was just thinking about you live in California too, and two years ago, our reservoir here outside of Ojai was at 27%, and now it's at a hundred percent. And so filling the reservoir, filling our own reservoir with giving ourselves attention, with being willing to receive attention, with being willing to ask for attention. Because when I would teach workshops, someone would be raising their hand a lot, and I'd go, would you just like some attention? What kind of attention would you like or would respond with?
But early in my relationship with Gay, before I really got the whole attention economy, I could see I would want to interact with him, but he would be in his writing space. And when he's in his writing space, I could see it. His gaze would be off in another world, and I would be trying to get his attention. And then one time he just looked up and he said, would you like some attention? And I went, yes. First I felt very embarrassed, like, oh, I'm not supposed to need any attention. And he said, what would you like? And that was a whole other level that I hadn't really even considered. And so I said, I'd like a hug. And so I just went over, he gave me a big hug and I realized that, oh, I could ask for something that I wanted. I could receive it, and it filled my reservoir. And so our attention economy with each other, I think is one of the most basic ways we can shift this whole competitive scarcity model. Yeah.
ELISE:
Today I think we want to go where we're wanted. We want love. We want attention, and we will take attention where we can get attention in many ways
KATIE:
And any kind of attention. And I think that's where what we call personas come from. If I can put my best foot forward with my positive personas, then that works. But if that doesn't work, then our number two personas come forward. Our troublesome personas like the loner and the cynic and the hypochondriac, because it gets us attention and we got to have attention. Humans have to have attention or we die. And I don't think we have a healthy relationship with attention. We give attention to people and then we take it away from them because we're moving on to somebody else with that kind of light, the spotlight of attention. And we don't realize that attention is much more than a spotlight. It's really the light of the sun. It is really what nourishes us. And the more that we're able to really give and receive attention freely, the healthier all of us are going to be. There was a book several years ago called A General Theory of Love. It's a wonderful book about what really works, how humans actually operate, and it deconstructs a lot of Freudian and stuff. The conclusion is if you have people around whom you feel really good, go and be around those people.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, and I think we're only willing to give attention, well, this isn't entirely true, but we're only really willing to engage deeply or give attention to people who confirm our point of view or make us feel comfortable, affirmed, et cetera, rather than challenged. And I think in general, we need to expand collectively, expand our ability to recognize, well, we're not getting anywhere in this. You must have a perfect Venn diagram with me, otherwise you have nothing to offer me. And most of us go to the Loretta Ross world of I can work with most people. We have enough in common that I can have a substantive, illuminating conversation. I think I could have an illuminating conversation with 90% of people.
KATIE:
Yes, I agree with you that our ability, to me, this also ties in with learning how to speak from my own experience. I think of telling the truth is saying something that matches my experience and that authenticity is it interrupts patterns, it balances out any kind of whitewashing or everything's fine, that loving attention, because it gives sometimes feedback has that kind of wait a minute quality to it, or I felt angry when I heard that. It reminded me of all of those things allow us to create a fabric of connection that has both the structure of integrity and the openness of discovery.
ELISE:
Can you say more? I can't remember what you said, you reframed telling the microscopic truth as, but can you talk us through that a little bit?
KATIE:
We actually have a module on the foundation for conscious living. I really call it matching. And it is that I am describing what as closely as I can, what I'm experiencing and what that is, is unarguable. So if I say as I'm listening to you, I was just feeling a heaviness in my chest and a little kind of antsiness in my feet. And it doesn't have to be profound, but what it does, it's real, and it's right here, and it opens a flow of realness and truthfulness between us.
ELISE:
And so as you guys point out in conscious loving, it's so hard to tell the truth. Most of us have been trained,
KATIE:
We've been punished for telling the truth. And I mean, it's a huge subject. We know we could do a whole podcast on that. It's also the one where we've gotten the most pushback. So when we talked about telling the truth, we've gotten so much, I couldn't possibly do that. It's not safe to do that. We had one woman say this was on some television show. She stood up down and she says, I've been lying to my husband for 29 years and it's preserved the quality of our relationship, and everybody clapped. And I went, oh, we're in trouble. We're in trouble.
ELISE:
We got sidetracked, and we will do that again because there is so much in conscious loving for all of us, in all of our relationships. And I wanted to offer you guys their definition of codependence because we sort of left that and didn't return. So they write, codependence occurs when your behavior is determined by someone else's, when others rely on you to maintain their destructive behaviors and addictions. And when you are subordinate to others and thereby not true to your own feelings, relationships can only exist between equals. Inequality is a hallmark of codependence, and I like this definition much more. In part, they go into it in a lot more depth. And it's, I like it because it's just to that this is sort of part of our own part of every dynamic, every relationship dynamic. And they also write about it. Codependence is fostered when two people unconsciously agree to be the partners in each other's dramas and unconscious bargain is struck. If you won't make me change my self-destructive patterns, I won't make you change yours. If you will let me project my childhood issues onto you, I'll be the target for yours. And it sort of moves this idea of codependency into the framework of a pattern that I think we can all exhibit, but not a definition of who we are. And I think that's why I have struggled with it as a concept before.
It seems like a part of a process actually in the way that the Hendricks define it versus an identity. And it's as they write, part of this unconscious deal that many of us strike with our partners or in our relationships, let's both agree not to look into certain areas of our lives is one. If you don't change, I won't either. That's a big one. Let's focus our attention on alcohol or food or drugs, or I would add work or any other thing instead of on solving our problems. And this is a good one. This goes to some newsletters I've written about over-functioning and under-functioning, which comes from Harriet Lerner. If you do all the thinking, I'll do all the feeling. That's good.