Episode 14 - Navigating Relationships & Political Differences
Thanks for tuning in today. We are going to dive into a topic that is a tough topic to talk about. How do we know when to end relationships when we have political differences with someone? So, you know, I think we all know what's going on in the United States right now. We seem to be at a time of like peak polarization. And I see this question being asked everywhere. Even during Trump's last term, this came up with a lot of people, you know, do we end relationships with people who have different political opinions than us? And so we're gonna dive into it today. I was trying to decide if I wanna give a little bit of a trigger warning for today's episode. We're gonna talk about some real life issues and some real life situations that are both happening now and that people are kind of coming to terms with. So there may be some threads when I give examples about instances of trauma, abuse, just wanna give that little notice.
So a lot of the questions I see online right now are especially coming from people who tend to be on the side of being more conservative, kind of on this far right side of why do people have to cut me off for my political opinions? Why are people losing relationships over this stuff? It's just politics, right? I've seen people say things like, you know, the left leaning people who are more progressive, they claim to be so inclusive and accepting of people, but look at them now, they're not being inclusive if they're cutting people off.
So today we're gonna kind of get into just the nitty gritty about relationships. How do relationships work? We're gonna talk about navigating differences in needs and values. And I'm gonna bring in, of course, as always, a mental health perspective on this. There's a lot of myths about relationships. We're gonna bust through some of those. I'm gonna try to give you some ideas for navigating these differences. And we're also gonna look at the emotional aspects that come up in relationships when it comes to differing values and needs.
So, you know, we're talking about the idea of intolerance and cancel culture is kind of part of this where, you know, if someone is supporting something or promoting something and it's harmful or it's hurtful, a solution that people have been taking is to cancel that person. so intolerance is sort of part of that.
One thing I really want to clarify about relationships and especially understanding multiple perspectives. So I'm a big teacher of dialectical thinking. My next podcast is going to go deep into that. have a blog post if you want to read that right now that explains what dialectical thinking is. Basically understanding differences, understanding different perspectives, different opinions. Understanding someone else's perspective does not mean an absence of personal boundaries. So this is what we're going to get into today. Also teaching things like acceptance, inclusivity, mindfulness, non-judgment, a lot of the things that I teach that does not mean an absence of boundaries and limits and advocating for change, saying no to things when things are harmful. So there's a polarity right there. We can accept and understand and say no and ask for change at the exact same time. It's not all or nothing.
So let's just start with like what makes a relationship. There's all kinds of relationships. We have friendships, we have family relationships, we have romantic relationships, work relationships. I'm gonna leave work out of it, work like professional relationships for the sake of this conversation. But some things might tie in for sure. And so, you know, we typically choose our relationships based on who we have commonalities with. And this is just kind of a natural thing, right?
If we share interests, if we share values, we like to do the same things, then we tend to have fun with those people and connect with them and feel validated with them. And this is just a normal part of relationships. Now, family members, you've probably heard the term, you don't get to choose your family, and it's true, we're born into our family, and a lot of times we soak up our values from our family, but we're not always a relationship fit with family members and I'm sure many of you can attest to that. So there are times when people might decide a relationship is no longer healthy, it's harmful or it's ineffective and at the end of the podcast we're gonna get to that. Because the truth is not every human on this planet is meant to be in close relationship with each other. Not everybody is meant to have deep close relationships and that's just how it is, right? So one of the core things that really pulls people together are shared values. So we're gonna spend some time talking about values.
Something that I've really noticed throughout my career is that not a lot of families actually talk about values with their kids growing up. So they might be kind of implicit in the way the family operates and things that are promoted in the family. But in terms of sitting around and having discussion, like what are our values? So values of course are things that are important to us. They're like guideposts in our life that we want to live according to. So you could Google online, what is a list of values and probably find many lists of many different values that are out there. There's dozens, hundreds of values. So people can value.
Family people can value hard work people can value friendship people can value honesty people can value Giving to others and helping others people can value physical appearance and health or There's all kinds of things finances being financially secure. There's all kinds of values and Values are just values. So we're going to maintain our non-judgmental approach throughout this have another podcast I'll link that's about non-judgmental practice, there's not one correct set of values. Humans have been debating this from the dawn of time, okay? And we get our values from our family a lot of the time, or from media, from our friends, kind of glean them, we're taught them.
And something that I think is really important once we reach adulthood, there's this sort of transitional age we go through, is we have to actually look back and reflect on our own values and decide, are these really my values or are these values that I was taught from society or from family that actually don't really align with me? They don't really settle in my soul as something that I want to follow. This happens a lot. And a lot of people don't actually take the time to explore their own values and whether they're actually their values or their values that were picked up from other people, family, or society.
So we can have our individual values that are important to us. And there's also collective values that are sort of understood as society, like we're all gonna agree on this value. So let's take harming others, right? Obviously there's laws and regulations in place when it comes to certain forms of harm. Assault, we for the most part agree as humans, assaulting other people is not okay. We do not value that. We do not sanction that. Sexual assault is harmful. Stealing from others, we mostly agree that is not something that we want to condone and sanction as a society. So collective values are ones that are for the most part accepted by the collective majority of people. Now, obviously, there's a lot of people out there who don't share those collective values. And we can see where there starts to be these conflicts of what's really important.
So here's the thing about values. They don't mean anything if you don't act on them. So values require action. If we don't live according to our values and our behavior matches our values, we're supporting things that are in alignment with our values and it's just like, it doesn't mean anything, right? And so when you think about relationships and how we're kind of evaluating, are we a good fit? Do we share values? A part of it is also, does this person align with their values? Is there integrity there? So are they saying one thing and then doing another? I've seen a lot of situations recently where we're talking politically here, right? Someone... says, ‘yeah, I love hanging out with my gay friends. I have a lot of fun with my gay friends and they're really cool people and I respect them’. And then goes to the voting poll and votes for policies that are gonna specifically harm gay people, right? It's gonna remove maybe employer protection or inclusivity. We're seeing that happening. There's a very real push right now to end gay marriage eventually.
So if someone's saying one thing in a friendship, yeah, you I love my gay friends, but then going and voting and supporting something that is against that, that's a lack of integrity. And so if someone has the value of integrity, what you do matching what you say, if they see someone in their friend group that is now not showing integrity, then that's gonna be something that might make them say, hmm. Can I really feel close to this person? Do I really wanna spend a lot of time with this person? And once we move into this section where we talk about emotions, this is gonna make more sense when it comes to urges to pull away from relationships or set boundaries in relationships. But I just wanna give some examples of how our values are where we start to kind of decide where do we have commonalities with people.
So I hear a lot of people talking about how, you know, it's just politics. Like why it just, it's just politics. And it's more than just politics, right? When you're, well, it is politics and politics is kind of life, right? We live in a society that is governed. We can look back hundreds and thousands of years to societies that were ungoverned or starting to become governed. There's still places in this world that aren't governed well or effectively, right? And so politics really is how we as a society, if there's a democracy in place at least in a rule of law, how we come together to determine how we want life to be for each other and for ourselves, right? And so when we vote, it might not seem like much, I just voted for that, like I didn't do it, I'm just voting for this.
Voting is like waving a green flag for something. You're saying, go, do this thing. I support this thing. You're tying your name to that thing. So you're associating yourself with those values. So when we look at the values we're supporting and we say, that's just voting, what people often don't understand is that that turns into real life consequences for people. It actually creates change. And so making light of it is we should just look at it as just politics and not care about differences in relationships, then that doesn't really line up.
Now here's what I will say. I think that we have gotten to a point where we have gone into the extreme of intolerance. I think we need to be having more conversations with each other, listening to each other, trying to see other perspectives of each other. So I'm in full support of leaning more into maintaining relationships when possible.
The challenge often comes that I see where if you're trying to have these conversations and all relationships are basically an ongoing conversation, a negotiation of needs and limits and values and preferences. And if you're trying to have this conversation and negotiation around what are your values? What do you support? What do you like? What do you not like? And someone is completely inflexible or unable to open their mind and see your perspective or consider changing their own perspective, consider admitting maybe they were wrong about something. When someone becomes so rigid and inflexible, mindfulness practice, we call that willfulness and we all have willfulness to an extent, right? Every single one of us, so we don't judge that as bad. There's a skillset we can learn to work with our willfulness where we can learn to relax and surrender and open a little bit more so that we can listen to someone else and consider where maybe we were wrong or we need to do something different.
But if someone in a relationship is becoming so willful and unwilling to see another side or they're not willing to respect boundaries that you've set up, then that's when we might start to consider, do I need to distance myself from this relationship? And we're gonna get more into nitty gritty with that in a little bit.
But relationships do have to be, it's two people, right? It's compromised, it's shared values, it's shared understanding and negotiating. So if one party shuts that down, then of course the relationship stops being a two-way street.
So shared values is one part of relationship. The other thing about each individual is we all have different needs and preferences, right? We are all individuals and we are living in this collective society. We are a part of society and we each have our own needs and preferences. So every individual has a right to assert their needs and preferences, to push for change, to ask for change from others, and also to say no to something. It's okay to have personal limits. Personal limits are really healthy. A lot of people struggle with knowing what their personal limits are and setting their personal limits.
So for example, you know, maybe you have a personal limit around someone pushing their religion on you and you want them to stop talking about their religion to you or maybe you have a personal limit when you hear a family member using racial slurs and you don't that doesn't align with your values and so you want to ask them to stop using racial slurs. I'm trying to give some like practical examples of how this comes up in relationships so we all have a right to try to assert our needs and limits and say no to things and set boundaries with each other. This is a natural healthy part of being human and in relationship. No boundaries becomes a major problem. We can also get to where we're over rigid with our boundaries and we're gonna talk more about that in just a little bit.
So there's a lot of myths about relationships, friendships or family relationships, and these myths are things that we're taught, again, from our family or for society. Let's talk about family. There's a myth that you have to always be loyal to your family. You have to never turn your back on your family at all costs. You stick together with your family.
And while yes, on one hand, we want to value and nurture relationships with our family, and the truth is there can be some very abusive, harmful, hurtful dynamics that happen in families. And so if we say you always have to stick with a family, always say yes to a family, do what family wants you to do, then we start to hit a lot of problems, right?
If there is hurtful, harmful or abusive things happening. So even in families, there may be a time where we say, I need to ask this person to change their behavior. And if over time they're not respecting that, I may have to distance myself from this relationship. And there's some extreme cases where when that relationship is abusive and really damaging and harmful, someone might have to actually completely end a relationship with a family member. So we can't abide by these myths that are like all or nothing ideas about relationships. That one can also be applied to friendships, right? You never, you never abandon a friendship or you never go against a friendship. Like, well, that'd be great, right? If there's like a perfect world with perfect alignment and never any harm done. But there are some times, we know people change over time. And that's the other thing about values. We may have a certain set of values in our teen years that changes when we're in our 20s, that changes when we're in our 30s and our 40s. So we are all constantly changing and growing and evolving. And sometimes our friendships are on that same path with us and they're doing similar sorts of evolution and growth. And sometimes you grow in different directions and...
This is just a fact of life, right? So we wanna be able to bust these myths about how things should be or supposed to be, those are judgments. There's myths like you should always say yes to someone or saying no, setting boundaries is rude and cruel and harsh. You need to keep the peace at all cost. That's a myth that a lot of people jump into.
I have to be everybody's friend and I have to be really vanilla and mute everything and try to see all sides so that I don't actually have a voice or a side because I want to keep the peace. So we've got to bust these myths so we can just get really clear about how do we as individuals relate to each other with our differing needs, values, and preferences.
Okay, let's shift into talking about emotions that come up in relationship to our people with differing values or differing needs or ideas. So emotions, I talk about this all the time. Emotions are another sense like vision, hearing, taste, touch or smell. They're hardwired into our nervous system. They're a natural healthy part of being a human and they get triggered for really valid reasons. There are no bad emotions. We do want to learn to understand them and work with them effectively, because certainly they can cause problems if we don't know how to work with them effectively. But emotions are healthy, normal things that come up that are sometimes very justified. So we're gonna go through a few emotions that often come up in terms of our values and our relationships.
The first emotion I wanna talk about is guilt. And guilt is an emotion that's tied to our values. We feel guilt when we've done something to violate or abandon our values. And guilt is beautiful when it's justified. Guilt helps us correct our behavior. It helps us apologize and repair and do something different next time. So at a young age, I decided that Honesty was a core value of mine. My biological mom would lie a lot to me and my brother, lie a lot all the time. And I decided as a kid, I don't like that, it's harmful. And so honesty is a value of mine. Well, as a teenager, as teenagers do, in my friend's group, I found myself kind of like starting to lie a little bit, right? Wanting to look cool or wanting to embellish things. And when I started doing that, I started feeling this emotion of guilt. Didn't sit well with me. Kind of this creepy feeling in your gut. We feel our emotions in our bodies. And so I listened to that and I was like, no, I don't wanna do that anymore. I'm not gonna do that. And so I started just, this is who I am. This is how I am and just being truthful about things regardless in order to not have to feel that emotion of guilt.
So in political conversations, if you hear someone promoting a political idea or whatever, right, like a social idea, and you feel the emotion of guilt when you hear that, what you want to get curious about is, is this guilt justified? If you don't agree with that person, right? If you don't align with that value that they're talking about, well, hmm, is it justified to feel guilty?
If not, if you're like, actually I don't value supporting gay rights or I don't value human rights in terms of where they're held in detention centers, then I guess you don't have to act on that guilt and change your behavior. You can also explore, well, what are my values here actually? I'm feeling guilt. Like, is there something about my perspective that actually maybe is violating a core value of mine, like maybe there is a part of me that actually does see this action is harmful or hurtful to people. And so we can listen to that if that is the case and say, hmm, okay, yeah, I'm no longer going to support these policies or this direction because I do value human rights and respecting all humans and regardless of their differences or whatever, right? So that's how guilt works.
Shame is an emotion. People often get guilt and shame confused. Shame is an emotion we feel, it's a community-based emotion when we're being rejected by someone or the community. It's about fitting in. And if you think about it, we are a collective species and people here in the United States have forgotten it. We've polarized into hyper individuality so far, it's actually like, harming us at this point. We are part of a collective society and ever since the dawn of time that we can see in history, we've always relied on groups, on our village, on our tribe, on our clan, right, to survive. And if you get kicked outside of your tribe in the middle of a forest back in the day, you're on your own out there in the jungle, the chances of you dying goes up, right?
So shame is this emotion of belonging and we have to be careful with shame because we want to make sure that we're trying to belong to the right group. So let's take someone who maybe is a member of the LGBTQ population and they go into the majority of many churches they are gonna feel shame if that church is telling them they're evil and they're wrong and they need to change who they are. They're gonna feel this emotion of shame and what they wanna do is actually check and see is this the group I wanna belong to? People who are telling me who I am is evil and wrong and bad? And if not, go find your group, go find your tribe, right? Go find the church community that's gonna welcome you and see you as the human being that you are, right? And so that's the first thing we wanna do.
And the truth is, is that we won't find belonging in every group. And we have to realize that if we're trying to find belonging in every single group, we will lose who we are. Like you will lose your identity. Who are you? What are your values? What are your needs and your preferences and your hard no's? If you can live by thatbthen you can go and find the people who share that.
So shame gives us the urge to hide things about ourselves so that we can belong or maybe even change things about ourselves so we can belong. I've heard some people talk about not wanting to admit that they voted for Donald Trump, right? And they feel embarrassed, they're ashamed to even say it. And in certain circles, that would make a lot of sense. I live in California, so...you know, there's a lot of more kind of progressive, liberal-minded people here. There's definitely big pockets of conservatives as well. But, you know, if someone says they vote for Trump and the policies he's implementing and the things that he's creating and supporting in a group of people who have very different values, likely they're going to question that person and be like, what? How could you support this stuff? You know, these are our values and these are all going against these values, right? And so that person's shame is like, I'm not feeling a sense of belonging in this group. So again, here's where you get to decide if you don't want to belong in that group, that's fine. And you can find again, your tribe and your people where you can just feel, you know, supported for your values and who you voted for.
Now again, I think this is where we need to have more ability to have conversations with each other and open-mindedness to consider other ideas because otherwise we just ping, all go back to our tiny little groups and cluster into our tiny little groups and we go nowhere, right?
Anger is an emotion we feel when our goals are blocked or when our safety is threatened or even the safety and wellbeing of people we care about, our groups, right, our community. So we feel anger when there's a threat to our safety or those we love and care about. Anger gives us the energy and the motivation to try to overcome those obstacles, to set a boundary, to speak up about something, to push back on something.
And so when you hear someone say something that crosses your values or what you believe is important, when you feel anger, it's giving you that urge to kind of stand up for your values or speak against harm that might be happening to your group or your community.
And you can start to see here in relationships, if the differing values and needs and personal limits are so great that there are frequent triggers of guilt or shame or anger or a couple more emotions we're gonna go through, there's this kind of like, right? Is this really where it feels, you know, connection? Is this really where I feel connection and support and understanding and validation, which all of those things are kind of the basis of friendships and relationships, right? If you're looking for deep relationships. So the other thing I forgot to mention towards the beginning is that obviously we have different levels of depth within our relationships. There's people that we have more kind of shallow or superficial connections with. That's not a judgment. But I'm just saying like we might not talk about deeper issues with them or you know, really, you know, do soul-bearing conversations and it's just kind of fun, light, fluffy things, right? So those are kind of like surface level relationships. And then deeper relationships is where you build more trust, where there is more soul opening, soul-bearing, a sense of safety and connection. So that's another thing to kind of consider.
Something I've been thinking about lately is what kind of relationships do I want to have and where do I want to spend my time? Do I want to spend my time in places where it feels primarily on the surface level or do I want to spend my time where there's a little bit more kind of meaning and purpose and connection at a deeper place? And so these are questions that people kind of ask themselves, right? Is there a determining how relationships might change over time, especially as political differences and really core value differences is what's there, tends to show up more.
So another emotion I want to go over is disgust. So disgust is an emotion that we feel when we risk contamination of something. So there's literal physical contamination. You know, you see dog poop on the ground. You don't want to go put your face in it, right? You could get sick. Or if you see mold on a piece of fruit, it's like, get that away from me. It's a natural urge in the body to repel something that could contaminate you. And it's not just physical contamination, it's also values or moral contamination. So let's take an extreme example here, right? And this might sound extreme, but this is life and we live on planet earth and this is the reality of how things are. If you know that your neighbor is beating their wife, right?
Or if you know that there's someone who's been found on child pornography websites or is supporting people who have been known to be connected to sexually assaulting people, right? Like all of these core value differences disgust gives you the urge to get away from that person because you don't wanna be contaminated by their values. You don't wanna be associated with those values. So if the whole community knows that neighbor Joe is you know beating his wife and was convicted of child pornography charges you might not want to be seen sitting at the bar with neighbor Joe having a drink because then there's this sense of like hmm do they share their values? Are they similarly like-minded in that way? Right?
And so this is a natural part of relationships when there are value differences. I know lately I've been feeling a lot of disgust when I see people saying they don't care about other people's pain or laughing at other people's pain, minimizing what's happening in our country right now and the harms that are happening. I feel disgust. I feel nauseous, and this sense of like, get away from me. I don't wanna be around or associated with that. And I want the people who are being harmed or who are feeling scared, like many people, people I know, people in all of our communities, I want them to know that I am not associated with that line of thinking and with those values.
So depending on the intensity of the values violation, that's gonna increase the intensity of the emotion, of the disgust and the urge to push away. you know, think about quote unquote politics as usual, up until, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago, like obviously politics has always had like two sides and, you know, differing opinions and infighting and all of that stuff. It shifted, it shifted significantly in the value discrepancy and what people are finding okay or not okay. And so in the past, maybe people are a little more tolerant of like, yeah, well, they're Republican, they want lower taxes for the wealthy or I support social service programs. And like the disgust urge isn't as high. We can kind of tolerate like being around or associated for smaller value differences. When the value differences get bigger, like I was explaining a minute ago, which is where I think we've really gotten to in the last 10 years, there are some major, major values violations that are happening for a lot of people right now, then that urge to sort of like, Whoa, I don't want to be around these people or kind of like associate gets stronger. Again, doesn't mean that we don't still need to be trying to have conversations with people and really exploring values and why people hold certain values and we can advocate to try to change values in a different direction, right? So I don't think that going into our corners is going to be the solution for most of these situations.
So anxiety is the last emotion I wanted to bring up here. Of course, anxiety is like fear, fear for our safety of ourselves or friends and family, again, people we care about. So if we just look at like women, right? I'm a woman, so I talk a lot about women's rights. Obviously there's lots of different areas that might, that need advocacy. The last time Trump was elected, of course, he packed a super conservative Supreme Court with some groups that were really pushing and wanted to reverse Roe versus Wade for their religious moral reasons. And so they did that, right? And so basically what that meant is that a woman lost the right to choose and that right was given to the state. And so now the state, the government actually has the right to choose for that woman. The woman doesn't get to choose for herself.
And so across this country, women have lost access to emergency contraceptive and most men, many women too, don't know the fact that abortions are used for many wide variety of procedures, atopic pregnancies, miscarriages that don't go all the way. And so those are illegal now in many places and it's costing women their lives. And so... Anxiety, when a right like that is being taken away, is really understandable. Especially when there is talk about large groups of people wanting to also remove access to birth control in general. so, you know, anxiety and fear is like, am I in danger? There's obviously a lot of deportations happening right now, you know, of sending people to Guantanamo Bay, which has a horrific track record for human rights violations and holding people indefinitely without charge. so anxiety is a really understandable emotion. Now, if you go to a friend or a family member, someone you're in relationship with, and you say, this is making me concerned for my safety or for safety of my community members, people that I care about, right? My fellow human beings even. Like we're all a member of that group, we're all humans. And then your friend or family member minimizes it and says, no, no, no, or says, well, who cares? Then that is a sense of invalidation of what your emotions are, what your concerns are. And when you're met consistently with invalidation, people telling you, nah, who cares? It doesn't matter. You know, just ignore it, that's not gonna happen, you're kind of minimizing things. Over time, that's gonna erode in a relationship. Because again, our friendships and close relationships are founded on this sense of understanding, shared values, shared concern. As a species, as a community-based species, there is normally, like within a community, this urge to keep each other safe.
Right, and so if you're getting from someone, actually they don't care about my safety or the safety of other humans, then there's again gonna be that urge to pull back and withdraw because then that person is showing you they are not safe and they are someone who might be willing to sacrifice your safety or the safety of others. So it's a natural urge to wanna pull away from that, right? So my hopes are that going through these emotions gives us kind of a natural understanding of where these complexities come up within relationships and where some of these urges to either withdraw or reduce or cut off relationships or even the urges to speak up more in relationships, try to change people's minds, try to overcome the obstacles or get safety established, right? Those urges come in and then that can become a conflict within a relationship.
I think it's an important context to have in terms of our emotions and these natural survival responses that then come into relationships.
So the last piece I wanna talk about here when it comes to a relationship that you're always having to navigate in balance are three specific priorities that you have to consider in a conversation with someone. If you're trying to get them to change or you're trying to say no or set boundaries. If you're trying to see if that relationship is salvageable, if it's still gonna work or whatever.
So these three priorities, the first one is your goal. What do you want? That can be anything. What is your personal limit? What are you saying no to? So I want this person to stop talking so much about this thing when I'm around them, or I want this person to change the way they're supporting this issue. I want them to see where this is causing harm, or our goal, what we want, can be literally anything.
The second thing you wanna consider is the relationship and how do you want that other person to feel about you whether or not you get what you want, right? How do you wanna try to maintain that relationship, approach the conversation in a way that's gonna leave that person walking away still feeling good about you? And this is important in any single interaction. If you have a goal that you're trying to meet, so if you're trying to get someone at the airline ticket counter to get you on a flight last minute, you want to be think about the relationship effectiveness and treating them in a way that's going to increase the chance of them giving you what you want in your goal, right? The third thing that you always want to consider is your self-respect. And self-respect is the thing that ties back to our core values. Am I approaching this conversation? Am I speaking up in a way, Am I being fair to myself and others in a way that maintains my self-respect? Am I being truthful? Being truthful for the most part is a big part of self-respect for the majority of people. And so in a situation, we always wanna be considering these three priorities and sometimes these priorities are competing with each other.
So, There may be times when your goal is the most important thing and you're willing to sacrifice how the other person feels about you, right? So you're gonna push really hard on it. And if the person walks away not really liking you, you decide that's okay. There may be times where the relationship is the number one thing, where you wanna make sure you preserve that relationship, you act in a way that's gonna preserve that relationship. And so you let your goal go, you let that down. There's times when self-respect is the most important thing. Whether or not you get what you want, no matter what happens in the relationship, your self-respect is the most important thing for you. So each person has to analyze these three priorities in any given conversation, in any given relationship. And I know for me, recently and over the years, speaking up about my values and advocating for certain things is really, really important to me. And there's times where I've said, you know what, if this makes people not like me, if this turns people off from me and they wanna withdraw from the relationship and not be as close anymore, that's okay. I'm comfortable with that. Because for me, advocating on these issues are so tied to my values that I'm willing to, if people fall away, I'm willing to accept that, knowing that there are other people who really share my values and who we all are kind of relying on each other, promoting these things to create positive changes, right? So we have to decide in each situation and only you in your given life with your relationships can decide.
We also don't wanna get into the habit of always or mostly prioritizing one of these things. So if we're always pushing for what I want, what my goal is, or saying no all the time whenever I wanna say no, then you're probably gonna lose more relationships and you might also lose self-respect over time, because you're just thinking about you and your goals and what you want. You also don't wanna polarize into mostly prioritizing the relationship.
So then it's always, what do other people want? What do they want? What do they want? Let me just do what they think and what they want. Because you're basically then abandoning yourself. You're abandoning your needs, your values, your preferences, your limits. You're also abandoning your own self-respect. Like you don't matter, they matter more. So we don't want to always prioritize the relationship. And the same thing with self-respect. If we get stuck in always prioritizing self-respect, then that causes other problems too. So things that we have to really weigh and balance with each interaction over time.
Assessing whether it's time to end a relationship is something you always want to do when you're in your own wise mind. So your wise mind is the part of you that holds wisdom, it's your intuition, it's still, it's deep and it's knowing. We can contrast this with our emotion mind. When we're in our emotion mind, emotions have taken full control without any logic.
The other part is our reasonable mind, which is where logic takes full control and we've disconnected from our emotions or our values or empathy. We don't want to go there either, but our wise mind can consider, okay, here's my emotions. Here's what I'm feeling. Here's the challenge I'm facing. Let's bring some logic in here. What are my goals? What am I trying to accomplish? What's effective? Not just short-term, but long-term. What are my priorities here? And balance that logic in our wise mind can help us make decisions about relationships. And we might not need to completely end a relationship. Sometimes people choose to temporarily sort of pause or distance from a relationship and give themselves time to kind of come back to baseline or process through some stuff, get clear on how they wanna move forward before problem solving with another person. But ending a relationship is something that should be really considered.
And considering is this relationship damaging? Is it actually is it harming you? Is it something that is keeping you from reaching your goals? So consistently over time is this person sort of blocking you and holding you back and keeping you from reaching goals? And the next category is of course if the relationship is harmful, is it abusive? Is this person violating your values? Repeatedly ignoring your personal limits repeatedly and just blazing through them, at that point you might decide, okay, this is actually a harmful relationship and it's time to withdraw and end it completely maybe.
The last thing I wanna add in here real quickly is balancing the polarity between acceptance of others and asking others to change. So this is a dialectic and extremes that we can get into, acceptance versus change, relationships are the ultimate polarity, two different people, two extremes with different needs, preferences and values. So in a relationship, accepting other people for who they are is really important people are who they are for a whole set of reasons, right? Their whole life history, what they've been exposed to, what they've learned, what they've not learned has led up to them being who they are. And so we have to lean into acceptance of others for who they are. And at the same time, we can go into the extreme of acceptance where we tolerate differences or things that are hurtful or harmful more than we need to. So on the other hand, change, we do want to be able to ask people to change and relationships are hard work. Anyone who's been in a long-term relationship, long-term friendship, family relationship, romantic relationship, it takes really good communication. It takes the ability to problem solve, to listen, to take feedback, to admit when we're wrong. And so asking for change is this communication piece where you say, hey, when I hear you supporting these things, I feel disgust, I feel anger. These are the harms that I feel it brings. I've always seen you as someone who supported this different thing or whatever, right? So communicating in attempt to create change or...
You know, when you always come and you're talking about this and blah, blah, like, I don't like this. I need you to stop doing that, whatever. So we wanna be able to ask for change and we can also polarize into change. So if we're constantly demanding that people change and be different, then that wears down on a relationship, right? So we can both accept people as they are 100% and ask them to change at the same time. And this is the paradoxical work of dialectical thinking, that it's not either or, it's both and. And so in a relationship, we have to be able to channel both of these things at the same time. And over time, in balancing accepting them and pushing for change and negotiating and navigating differences,
It's either gonna work into a collaborative relationship with mutual respect and shared understanding, never perfect, never like exactly the same, that doesn't exist. Or it's gonna reach a point where you kind of realize like there's actually not a lot here and we don't have a lot of shared interests or values and they're not receptive.
to hearing me out, they're shutting me down, they're kind of willfully not wanting to open their mind to things, right? So things that we need to consider. I hope this episode was helpful for you to give you some ideas to think about as you're navigating this stuff and also understand other people and where they're at. What are the things that people are really going through right now in consideration of value differences and what their needs and limits are and coping with these emotions that are coming up around some pretty extreme differences in values that we're seeing. So my hope is that we as a species, we as a nation can start coming back to like, are our core values as a nation? You know, what do we really want to say is the most important thing?
And I think we can simplify that very much into, you know, human life and health and safety and wellbeing, right? If we can start to have these conversations of like, what does that look like? What does that mean? All right, that's all I've got for you today. As always be well, take care of yourself out there. We'll talk again soon.
