A LITTLE BIT OF A LOT #1

Feb 07, 2023

It’s here. ALBOAL is a monthly list of everything that made me ponder. A little bit, a small taste, short notes, bullet points, a little something curated by moi.

There is a lot of information being thrown at us. I want to make the best use of your precious time by finding the gems and sharing them here. Not all will be for you, and that’s ok, move along to the next one, unsubscribe or tell me to get fucked. Do you. I got this idea from something I started doing on Instagram alongside many others. In a roundup, I would share my favourite Tweets and TikTok vids of the week. I get lots of feedback on how much people love that, but here I want to add a little twist to the curation station. I am all for the laughs. I live for funny shit, AND I also want to share some of the stuff I come across that I found helpful while also sharing some of my life ponders with it.

I also hope this gives us a chance to build on what is being shared and that you will partake in the threads, Qs and As that will come from this, share some laughs, and have a think on some of the topics or ideas that were shared here—a wee community vibe.

I am not the only human doing stuff like this. People share what they read, make lists, list what books they like, and what podcast episodes they love. I want to take it one step further and break that down for those who have ZERO interest in reading a 300-page book recommended to them or listening to the two-hour podcast that changed someone’s life. I am not trying to reinvent the wheel, but I want to keep things short, sweet, and digestible, and if it’s worth the listen or read, you will feel the urge to do so. We can nerd out together. ALSO, you don't have to like or love what I love.

I will also be doing this by audio down the road because why the hell not? This is now my place to experiment. I will never call that a podcast. Feel free to unpack the WHY around that. I don’t see myself as the person who podcasts, which probably means I am exactly the person that podcasts. Soon enough, we will discover who finds my voice to be a snooze fest or a sultry delight.

Here we go, in no particular order, but maybe there should be an order for these each month. I will work out those kinks as we go.

“You can only shame me when I agree with you”

- Luis Mojica

Do you know how people generally say, “it’s not personal,” and you get that, but your body has other plans for how it lands when someone says something awful, hard to hear or offensive? I finally get it thanks to this way of framing shame, making it my issue to work through, and leaving the rest for the person who said it to work through what it brings up for them. I mean, sometimes there are some good constructive nuggets in what people say to us, and sometimes, it lacks SO MUCH nuance that it makes me nauseous that people claim to “see me or know me” enough to say what they just said. I find that shit exhausting, especially on social media. Nuance is lost when we think of people in binary forms or use black-and-white thinking to form a conclusion about someone.

Here are a few takeaways from his caption that I loved.

To be shamed some part of me must receive it and attune to the concept, words, or ideas you're shaming me with. Some part of me agrees with your shaming and then I feel shamed.
You might have said the very thing I’ve always feared is wrong with me and now it *must* be true because you said it.
Do you know how much agency comes with this awareness? Anyone can say anything to me and I don’t have to live in shame.
As children we lack this ability to inquire like this. Our nervous systems are dependent on other bodies. We look to them to get information about ourselves.
When we grow up with development trauma within our relationships it’s easy to continue seeking external validation in others. I never expect children or traumatized adult systems to simply not feel shame.
This is a practice.

Warthog At The Spa

Photo by Henning Borgersen

“Use your words”

Many of us say this, but this break down is interesting.

A child’s brain has the same response but at a higher intensity (because their frontal lobe is not fully developed). When our kids are dysregulated, their stress response activates and they don’t have access to their prefrontal cortex or “thinking brain”, which is why they have a hard time finding the words to use - even though we have heard them use these words in the past! When they can’t think of the words then we get frustrated and it escalates everything. A better approach is to literally give them the words they need to use and model how to use them. Give specific praise if they actually repeat the words. Giving them the words provided auditory input that can literally switch activation from the stress response back to the prefrontal cortex and thinking brain! Wild, right? For example, if a child is frustrated because they can’t get their shoe off and they start whining and screaming, instead of saying “use your words”, model “I need help please”. Praise any approximation of that. Even if they don’t repeat it, that’s OK. We’re using this opportunity as a teachable moment vs. a moment to get frustrated and fuel the fire. ** If you truly don’t know what they’re requesting or needing in that moment, we obviously won’t know the words to give them. In this case, prompt regulation first before they show you what they need. **Also, I’m definitely not saying that we avoid trying to build functional communication. Teach this daily and proactively when they’re calm. What I’m saying is avoid teaching this in a moment of dysregulation. (Taken from the caption of the her video shared)

On supporting people going through it or just a good practice to get into

“Do you want sympathy or strategy”- Rachael Rice

When someone is telling me about a problem and I’m not sure if they just need to vent or if they’re seeking solutions, I say this. It can also help people pay more attention to why they’re talking about the problem, and it can also train them to ask me the same before coming out with unsolicited advice. - RR

Something got me with this song. It's dreamy. It is giving me 2008 Romantic Comedy soundtrack vibes, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

The hierarchy of relationships (fuck hierarchy, love Ange)
- familial love
-romantic love
- platonic love/friendship
The importance of friendship
- our bodies have always known that we need an entire community to feel whole. And just being around a spouse, for example, only surfaces one side of ourselves.
  Two reasons it’s devalued
1. We don’t know how to make friends
2. the “paradox of people” we need people to help us feel healthy and connected AND people can be scary, they can hurt us, dismiss us, reject us and harm us.
Based on reading all the research on friendship, is something called the “liking gap,” when strangers interact and predict how likely the other person is to like them, they underestimate how much the other person likes them.
There is also something called “covert avoidance,” which is our tendency to show up around other people physically, but check out mentally.
- hanging out with people but you’re on your phone, or waiting for someone to talk to you.

There are three different dimensions of loneliness.
1. intimate loneliness, which is the desire for someone to be very intimate with.
2. relational loneliness, which is the desire for someone that feels as close to us as a friend might.
3. collective loneliness, which means I desire to be part of a group working towards a common goal.
Just having a spouse and that being the center of all of our connections, right, that’s maybe touching on our intimate loneliness, but not our relational, not our collective, right?
Those people that have that history of healthy relationships, they have an internal set of beliefs within them that allows them to continue to facilitate healthy relationships. This is where attachment theory comes in.
Harry Stack Sullivan is a psychiatrist that has a theory called the "theory of chums," which is basically that our chums or our friends earlier in life, provide us with the sort of relationship template that we take on into our future. Sullivan argues that when kids share their shame with their friends, and their friends are like, we still love you. We begin to accept it ourselves and bring whatever we felt shame about, to see it as just part of our personalities rather than antithetical to the personality we want to have. Those friends are there when we're so high in shame to help us integrate that and to help us connect to all sides of ourselves so that we sort of begin to become who we fully are.
Having outside friendships is necessary for having a healthy marriage. The research finds that if I make a friend, I'm not only less depressed, but my spouse is too. It also finds that when you get into conflict with your spouse, it negatively impacts your release of a stress hormone cortisol. But if you have quality connection outside of that marriage, that doesn't happen. Other research that finds that, particularly for women who tend to have more close intimate relationships, when they go through difficulties within that partnership, they are more resilient to it when they have this outside support. And so it's just like, if I can access this other person to center me during times of stress in my marriage, I can return to that marriage in a centered and grounded way.
Research done on long-distance friends finds that if we see our friendships as flexible, not fragile. Example "I haven't talked to this person in a few months, I'm going to assume that friendship is asleep, not that it's dead.
The all-encompassing tip: Assume people like you. If you don't talk to your friend for a while, believe they're still interested in being friends. This isn't about being delusional. If someone indicates that they're not interested in a friendship with you, move on. If you aren't sure, haven't talked for a while, but they haven't necessarily rejected you, or they still are responsive when you reach out to them," the running assumption is that they still want to be friends.