Mental Health Matters with Evan - The 7 Deadly Verbal Vices ⚠️

What's up, Cadre fam? Evan here, your resident mental health and addiction therapist. This is another episode of Mental Health Matters where we talk about matters in mental health, certain topics that matter, because mental health matters. Anyways, I'm really excited about this topic today. We've sent the beacon out. I just got my own notification, so hopefully we. We could have some join today. If not, it's okay. It'll just be another lecture that I'm sure you all love. Anyways, so today I wanted to talk about some communication tactics.

So for those who know me, know that I'm writing a book I've been working on for many years about communication and giving a roadmap to using effective communication for extremely difficult situations. For things like conflict, deescalation. But any of these tactics, skills, whatever you want to call them, I call them many different things, principles, skills, they're broken down into different ones, but they can be used for a lot of different things. So, for example, conflict de escalation. And that could be any type of conflict or relationship work.

Now, a lot of this is based on my experience as a therapist and drug and alcohol counselor, probably especially more as a drug and alcohol counselor because you are dealing. Well, I don't want to, like, compare the two with mental health, but, like, pretty consistently with addiction, you're dealing with some pretty difficult situations. People. However, there's folks with severe persistent mental illness, for example, who can present with very difficult. Now with that is a lot of deescalation stuff.

With addiction, it becomes a little trickier because. What up? Alright, we got someone with addiction, it's a little trickier. And that is because often. God, I'm like trapping myself here. But often with folks with addiction, let's just say they're. Let's just call it, they're a little bit more high functioning. Hey, Chris. So Chris could probably understand quite well, given his experience, but, you know, folks with addiction, they're often, when they're in active addiction, or even early recovery can be in a very.

Can be difficult presenting with difficult behaviors. And one of the reasons for that is, like this element of extremes. When folks are in active addiction, they're not always themselves, right? Especially even in early recovery, they're not always themselves. They've kind of been trapped in this really in depth pattern of behavior. Anyways, I'm kind of digressing here, but anyway, so that's where some of these experiences come from, where I teach about different elements of communication. And in my book, I organize it into separate ways.

So, for example, different steps, how to de escalate situations. So, again, it's deescalation. It's resolving complicated conflicts or easy conflicts, but also being able to support people. So a lot of these skills as a therapist, that's part of the job. A lot of the job we do is like being supportive but also having a healthy influence. So all these skills can be used for all of those things, which is a different way of talking to people, a different way of looking at problems, a different way of looking at relationships, and using our words in the most effective and even ethical ways possible.

Because when you start getting into communication skills, you get to start getting a little bit dark. And I could if I wanted, but a big part of the book is avoiding that and not using communication in, like, manipulative ways, you totally could do. But I guess that just comes down to your intention. And I think, as I'm talking about it, maybe Chris could relate. It's like, it's very tempting to use communication in a way that could be manipulative when you're dealing with a difficult situation.

Like, for example, it's like fighting fire with fire. Let's say I have a child who's, like, deep in addiction. They're just. They're just doing dangerous behaviors. And, you know, well, maybe I could trick them a little bit. I can coerce them into going to treatment or something. And, you know, it's something I still talk about avoiding because I think there are effective ways to doing it without having to do that. Because some of those things which I call striking tactics, that often work, but they come back, right?

Having that equal, opposite reaction, that fire, putting fire forward, you get that back. So, anyways, in one section of the book I talk about, and I recently said I would call them relationship blocking behaviors, but then I realized it's not like a great name. It's too long and not catchy. But I came up with a new one. I call them verbal vices. These are things that we can rely upon. Vices like smoking to feel better, but these vices that maybe work in the short term or they don't work at all, but they're just very tempting to fall back on and things that we want to avoid.

Because in my seven step process or six step process, that's one of the first things I recommend. So the first is to pause, right? So in that process, to pause and reset, to find you have to be in an emotionally cooled place. And we'll talk about that in a minute in order for these things to work. And that's part of the pause and reset. Now, seven verbal vices. So I'm going to go through each one and just do a brief overview of it, describe it a little bit. And so you can watch out for that because the next step, that's what I was getting at in the first place.

But the next step is removing the verbal vices. Right. And each step of this communication formula or algorithm, as I'm going to call it, each step is in hopes to reach the goal that you have. Right. A goal of what I call conscious communication, which is the model that I'm putting forth, which is obviously to resolve a conflict in a healthy way, to be able to, you know, move forward in a relationship and have it be fulfilling. Change my bluetooth here. So with that being said, here are the seven deadly verbal vices.

Number one, one of the worst ones is controlling. We talked about that. As far as in these situations, we want to have a healthy influence on others. And, you know, some things like coercion. One of the things that we look at with controlling is we use something punishment. So, for example, if someone doesn't do what I want them to do, I then punish them. Now, that could mean a whole bunch of different things. That can be me yelling at them. It could be me having an extreme emotional reaction if I'm not getting what I want because I know that the other person will then give in.

So just finding different ways to manipulate a situation to try to get something to do what I want them to do, sometimes what I want them to do may actually be the healthy thing. Like, let's just use the example of someone with addiction that really needs to go to treatment. But that could be even just telling someone, you need to do this. That's one of the best examples, or one of the most consistent examples of controlling. If you've had people that are controlling your life, they say, you need to do this, you have to do that.

It doesn't become a suggestion. It's not a conversation. You need to do this. The reason I put that in there is, number one, is because that just raises people's walls. It just creates a great deal of resentment. Even if that works, even if you're controlling works, you know, that person, like, let's say you're a boss, or let's say you're like a dictator, you know, of a country, right? You rule by fear, maybe you get your way, but often that comes back to bite you in the a** because people don't like you, they don't respect you.

And then at that point, they just use you for whatever means that is, whether that's for a job or for whatever you could give them. But the second that you're not useful or they could do something else, they're going to, you know, whether it's work, they're going to leave or they're going to usurp you as the dictator because of that type of behavior that is really dysregulating. So with each of these, I have a quote. So I'm going to read you the quote. I probably should have done that at the beginning for this one.

Controlling. But here's the quote. So letting go helps us to live a more peaceful state of mind and helps restore our balance. It allows others to be responsible for themselves and for us to take our hands off situations that don't belong to us. All right. And that's Melanie Beatty they're calling a babysitting this dog. I should probably remember to put this on do not disturb. There we go. Sorry about that. So, yeah, so that quote was by Melanie Beatty. She wrote this great book on codependency.

And so that quote is about. Is kind of staying in our lane. And I'm going to talk about that. That's one of the other verbal vices is crossing lanes as well. But, you know, instead of trying to control others, focusing on ourselves and what we bring to the table and contributing in a healthy way with any relationship, you have to, you know, for any healthy relationship, you have to be healthy as well. So focusing on yourself, and that's one part of having a positive influence on others. All right, let's go to verbal advice number two, which is deflection.

So here's a quote. This is kind of a funny one. So avoiding responsibility is like kicking the can down the road. Eventually you'll run out of road. Now, I don't know who we could attribute this quote to, so I just made it up and said someone's grandpa. So deflection, you know, it's like a form of procrastinating. Okay, so there's a couple ways we could use deflection. One, and the most common one is to avoid. Okay, that's another one. Okay. So deflection is taking the responsibility off of yourself and putting it onto someone else.

And one of the reasons that this could be extremely damaging is you never resolve an issue. You never resolve an issue one thing at a time. So again, an example, this is what about ism? So, like, you see on the news who people are having a political debate, which usually goes nowhere, but anyway, someone says, well, what about this issue? And da da da, instead of that person resolving the issue, they get defensive and say, no, here, what about this? Right? So a better example would be, you know, let's say you were approaching this in a healthy situation.

Be like, hey, honey, I know we talked about it means a lot to me. If you could take dishes and unload the dishwasher, that would be really helpful. And then she goes ahead and says, well, hey, what about how you never take the garbage out? Well, now we never resolve the dish issue, and you just deflect responsibility. And now it becomes this circular argument that's not going to go anywhere. So saying something like, you know what, honey, you're right. You know, I definitely want to address the garbage issue, but can we please work on this first?

Can we please resolve this first? And being sure to do the same for yourself. So taking responsibility not to deflect yourself and not to do that to resolve, because that way you can actually resolve some, some of these things. But also one of the most important parts of that is taking responsibility. So deflection is usually your deflecting responsibility, and you're doing that. What about ism? You know, Vladimir Putin is extremely good at that one, too. You know, why did you invade Ukraine? Well, what about you?

When you did this, this and this, and you're like, you know, but, you know, it's just a justification. So usually when someone does that, they're kind of in the wrong, you know, but they don't want, they want to put it onto someone else. They don't want to admit it. So it's really important to put your ego aside and allow that. So this is what we touched about, too. So this one is about emotional imbalance. I call it too hot, too cold. And here is, you all be familiar with this quote. She tasted the porridge from the first bowl.

The porridge is too hot. She exclaimed. So she tasted the porridge from the second bowl. This porridge is too cold, she said. So she tested the last bowl of porridge. This porridge is just right, she said happily, and she ate it all up. So, you know, Goldilocks and the three bears. So it's finding the Goldilocks zone, as they call it, the just right. So example. If I'm too heated, I'm coming in too emotional, I'm too angry. And when I'm clouded with emotions, with passion, that usually leads to me making impulsive decisions when it comes to what I say, what I do, and almost always when, especially if you're coming from a place of anger, it's almost never going to be something that is helpful for a situation.

So that's something we really want to avoid, is this idea of coming into emotionally health. That's why the first step in my communication formula is to stop, pause, to reset, you know, to reset emotionally. I don't know what is going on with these headphones. I'm gonna. So we have that and the other end of that is too cold. Now, this one's a little more insidious, right. This one we don't think of as much because we think of emotion and a communication which we usually think of anger and that kind of thing.

However, to be too devoid of emotion, to be too cold could actually be dysregulating as well, because I do recommend taking a cooler approach, but not colder. So finding that balance, 70 degrees or something like 21 degrees here in Australia for Celsius or something around there, I always get that calculation. That's about right. So we want it to be around that temperature. We don't want to be too hot, we don't want to be too cold. We don't want to be devoid of emotion. Because if we. Because being devoid of emotion often comes off as uncaring.

And if someone has the belief that you don't care about them, you know, that's going to lift their walls up and what you say is not going to get through to them, that you're not going to be able to collaborate and find something there. So the next verbal vice is we touched on this as well, which is avoidance. So a person's success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have. Now, avoidance is more. What I saw before is this idea of kind of procrastination, which is, let's say I have a resentment towards someone, or there's this dynamic in a relationship that's not healthy.

I know I need to address it, but I continue not to. Therefore the dynamic becomes more ingrained. So the more I avoid these issues that could be. That confronting them could be uncomfortable, the worse the problem's going to get. So it's like, what's the quote? It's like a supposed to. So a problem avoided is a problem problem doubled. Right. So the more. Yeah, so if you. Yeah, so the english problem, if you avoid effectively dealing with the problem now, it will bite you in multiple ways. Oh, wait.

No, that's my explanation. Oh, now I use this one. A stitch in time saves nine, right? So it's like a you know, it's like a preventative measure to address issues at the beginning when they first come up and not pushing them down the road, and then it may become too late, your relationship may be damaged beyond repair. So part of that avoidance is having uncomfortable conversations, being a little bit more assertive. Some people maybe are too assertive. And this is not, avoidance is not an issue.

Maybe they need to calm down a little bit for the hypertype a type folks or more confrontational folks, which again, could be, is a problem in its own right, but can be a problem. Right. So it's, again, that Goldilocks zone of being assertive and not aggressive or passive. So don't avoid problems. Don't kick the can down the road. Don't let problems pile up and become overwhelming. Right. So there we go. Number five, defensiveness. So the trouble with most of us is that we'd rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.

Norman Vincent Peale. So he was an author. He wrote a book on crap. I don't know. I didn't write it down. But yeah, he had a couple big books, kind of self help books. He's a public speaker. So defensiveness is kind of an inability to be humble. It is deflect. You know, deflection would tie into this one as well, but it's essentially being unwilling or unable to admit wrong or fault. And that is one of the most powerful things you can do in a situation that is complicated, that is conflictual. And I guess an example of that.

Over the weekend I had a, people know I don't really drink, but I was out with some friends who did, and they took it a little too far. By that, I mean way too far. We were out on a trip and they went a little ham. So I was out with them and unfortunately became the defunct babysitter. One of my friends, I guess, gets a little angry and got into a little confrontation bit at the bar and things were starting to escalate. So I stepped in and I'm like, all right, I'm gonna use some of my communication skills.

I always like to test these. And so my friend was like, well, they're wrong. They did this. You know, you like, maybe spilled a drink on them or like nudge them. And they started going, I don't know. Anyway, I don't know. It doesn't matter. But anyway, he's like, he was kind of starting to get mad at me of like, why are you telling me? I gotta back off? And da da da da da. And just like, at that point, it didn't matter who was right, who was wrong. I mean, he was just in the wrong because he took it that far.

But I just said, you're right. They shouldn't have done that. I'm not stopping you because you did anything wrong, even though he did. But again, sometimes you got to take the gloves off a little in certain situations, and you wouldn't remember any of this anyway. But, I mean, what was most important was to avoid a fight, right? A safety. It became a safety issue. So sometimes that you gotta, you know, use a little bit of. Little. Little bit of coercion or something like that. But. But really, too, maybe, you know, he.

The other party also was in the wrong as well. So I have to acknowledge it and be like, look, I'm not. I'm. And it was kind of true. I'm like, look, I'm not pushing you away here. I'm not walking you away because you're wrong. I'm just doing this because it's not worth it. Right? It's not worth it. It's not worth being right in this situation. If you get kicked out of the bar in a fight, I don't know, these people can, you know, be part of a rugby team here in Australia, and I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna get into it with you.

I'll be like, I don't know. Anyway, so that's why we want to be sure that we can be open to criticism when necessary. And let's see, we got two more. And the next one is crossing lanes. So good leaders lead from the front. Don't tell people what to do. Show them. So think about this way. When we say crossing lanes, it's like, what I'm responsible for, what others are responsible for. So this could take a lot of different forms. Like, for example, some people can be a little bit controlling in that they, you know, they have the need to control.

So, like, let's say we. Me and my friends went on a vacation, and, you know, there's always the one person that's like this, the planner, and they kind of need everything, what they need. And then what happens is they start to take on all this responsibility for everything and planning, and then they, like, start to get resentful because no one else is doing it. But then they don't realize, well, the reason that is, is because you took on all of this to, you know, nobody really wants to take you on because, you know, it's like, okay, you know, like a group project, let's say, like in school and one person just like has to do it their way and then they get resentful that they did most of it, but everyone else just didn't want to fight them on it.

So. And then the problem with doing that is people don't learn, people don't get that experience. Right. So that's just one example of crossing lanes. But also many of these other verbal vices are about crossing lanes, you see controlling, you know, deflecting into what someone else is doing. Yeah. So, I mean, a lot of these are. So crossing lanes is almost like a general category that invites a lot of these things. Yeah. So, you know, criticizing someone else, putting someone else down, you're kind of going into their side and you're pointing out their flaws, what is wrong with them.

Now, maybe that's necessary, but there are more tactful ways of doing it, especially if you're able to take responsibility. Say, hey, you know, this is something I do, this is what, something I'm responsible for. But, you know, here's something I'm seeing that you're doing. Can we address that? What do you think? You know, and so all of these things that I do, any of these communication skills are very largely about removing defensiveness of others. That way you could have a healthy emotion exchange.

If the walls are up, if you're debating, if you're doing any, it's so delicate. It's like a house of cards. You say one thing wrong and the walls go up and you're done. And then you have to work to bring them back down. So it's harder in this case to bring the walls down than for them to come up. So I say things instead of criticizing your partner. Share the appreciating the household chores. Take responsibility for your contribution. Clean up your mess. Lead by example. If your child is misbehaving, instead of lecturing them what they did wrong, take ownership of your role as a parent.

Share your life experience, but reinforce their autonomy and ability to decide regardless of the consequences that may follow. Rather than blaming your co worker from a project's failure, take ownership for your own role in the assignment and think of ways you can improve in the future. Offer constructive feedback. So that's one of the things that we talked about. So that is that one, I'm sure. Keep talking about it, but let's end it with one more. And this is one of my favorite ones to talk about, and that is labeling.

Alright, so here is a quote for that one. The danger of labels is that they could cause you to underestimate someone who exceeds your expectations or overestimate someone who falls short of them. So labeling someone as saying, you are this, you're dumb, you're lazy, you're selfish, you're a drug addict, you're something. So you're saying somebody is something. Now, in some situations, maybe someone, you're an alcoholic, maybe someone is in the hospital for liver failure because they drink a bottle of whiskey a day.

Okay, that's a fair assertion. However, it's not helpful to do that, to label someone as someone. So you could say something like, this person has an alcohol use disorder versus they are this. Right? Because we can be many things, right? So this is about focusing more on behavior and less about the person. And one of the reasons we do this is, again, labeling. Again, this is all in the context of. Of conflict resolution, deescalation, and having healthy influence by labeling. Even if we are right by some measure, it's not helpful, right.

And it's also. It's more of an ethical thing, too, and a thing of kindness. And I know some people are like, oh, that's weak sauce, and da da da da da. But look, I have a whole chapter about that here about different ways to change your language. Actually be more passive that a lot of people would not like or agree with. And I acknowledge that. But again, it's for those three purposes, because I could go around and say, look, you're an alcoholic. I could be right. But, you know, is that going to help that person change?

What's going to be the outcome of that? Is this going to help in any way? So I make a joke in here about the use of the passive voice. So it's basically like a literary faux pas in many ways, to say something like mistakes were made, or instead of someone made a mistake. So it's removing the subject and it's focusing more on the behavior, which I do a lot because of my job. I have to, again, from an ethical standpoint. So I get dinged on that if I put my stuff through a grammar editor or something, which I think is kind of funny, but I think that there's actually made me think about, hey, there's actually a use for this, even though it's not a literary, even though it's a faux pas, it's actually.

There's actually a use for it. So I kind of. So it's kind of meta to have my grammar editor edit that passage in any way because it's like, because I'm talking s*** about the editor. But, yeah, so things like mistakes occurred versus you screwed up, misunderstandings happened versus. You don't understand. There may be some confusion. You're not making any sense. Right. So again, the more assertive people, you know, we're all about directness and assertiveness. Maybe like an east coast kind of person versus a midwesterner, we'll get kind of annoyed by this in this type of speak.

But again, a lot of this is for, like, deescalation. If I'm dealing with, let's say I'm in like, a hostage negotiation, I'd rather say, look, mistakes happen, not you screwed up. You know, it's like this person's got a gun, right? So sometimes this is a safety issue, but sometimes this could be used in an effective manner when we're trying to de escalate a situation and build relationships to, again, focus on the behavior, because nobody is one thing or another, people. And that also takes away the ability of someone to change.

If I start putting labels on someone, there's research behind this. Like, if I told a kid, you are really smart, and everyone said they're actually going to act smart, they're actually going to perform better because they believe that they're smarter. Right. If I keep labeling a kid or screw up or something, then it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. They take on that label and then do more of that. So it's actually tangibly unhelpful and damaging to do so. That's something to stay away from. And again, this is just for the purpose at its very core of lowering defensiveness.

Because when you start labeling people, you start being overly accusatory, overly direct. You're not going to have that healthy, productive exchange, therefore not helpful. Which is the key test that I talk about in the book, is if you could run anything through a singular yes no litness test. And should I say this? It is. Is this helpful? So anyways, threw a lot at you there. I hope you got something out of that. I'm excited to get this book out. Hopefully we get you to read it at some point. But anyway, you all have a great afternoon or a great evening.

I'm going to try to have a good afternoon as it is barely afternoon, five minutes after noon. All right, folks, take care. Cheers.