I’m keeping a secret from both Katherine and Lyssa. Neither of them knows that I’ve written a self-help book called How to Hold a Grudge or that I have a podcast on the theme of why holding grudges is good for us if we do it in the right way, also called How to Hold a Grudge. I’ve recently recorded Season 3. I forgot to mention that when I was describing my work commitments to Lyssa and Katherine. I think I was embarrassed to admit quite how many work projects I had taken on, in case they thought I was beyond bonkers.
In my second sessions with both coaches, I will not be discussing or even mentioning my workload. I’ve actually not been thinking much about it at all recently, because I’ve been so busy focusing on trying to solve my happiness mystery. As Brooke says, our thoughts determine our entire life experience, so if you never think about something – I mean, like, never – then for you it is as if that thing doesn’t exist. That’s the approach I’m adopting at the moment in relation to everything but this investigation. It’s working brilliantly. (Just don’t tell Poirot – I don’t think he’s noticed yet.)
It’s probably because of all the work I’ve done as the world’s only Grudge Guru (this is a true and official title, I swear) that I’m so keen to talk to Katherine and Lyssa about the always problematic issue of Other People. I want to see if they agree more with Brooke, who believes that everyone is innately lovable, or with Robin Sharma, who believes that some people are toxic and are to be avoided.
Instead of recounting the traumatic story of Charles and Brewster, which is a years-old and solved problem, I decide to pick my two currently-most-aggravating Other People dilemmas to discuss with Katherine and Lyssa. They can get stuck into one interpersonal conundrum each, and, if I’m lucky, I’ll end up with both neatly solved for the bargain price of approximately $300.
I’ve also resolved not to tell either of them that I’m trying to settle a debate between me and my two imaginary friends, Brooke and Robin. Not everyone needs to have a full overview at all times – and if that’s not one of the commonly accepted tenets of happiness, then it certainly should be.
K: So, how’s your work situation since we last spoke?
Me: Actually, I want to talk about something different today, if that’s okay. Though …
K: What?
Me: It’s about a friend. Well, an ex-friend. I mean … officially we haven’t fallen out, but I no longer think of her as a proper friend.
K: Why not?
Me: I need to be totally honest about this, even if it makes me sound horrible and mean.
K: Do you think you’re being horrible and mean to this person?
Me: Definitely not outwardly. But in my head, I think I might be. But then, whenever I think that, another part of me thinks, ‘No, I’m not. I do not have to like everybody. That can’t be a moral requirement.’
K: Tell me about your friend.
Me: I used to really enjoy seeing her and talking to her and then I just … stopped. I still care about her and want the best for her, but … The thing is, she’s still a good person, as good as she ever was, but I don’t think I like her any more. I’ve gone off her.
K: At a certain point, your thoughts about her changed?
Me: Yes. I started to notice something about her that I hadn’t noticed so much before. I don’t know if she became more insufferable or if I became less tolerant, but we spent a weekend together and after it, I thought, ‘That’s it. I don’t want to spend any more time with her.’
K: And do you understand why you thought that?
Me: Yes. This is the part where I’m going to sound horrible. She’s got a very weird and demanding ego. It’s not that she only cares about herself and no one else – she’s actually very kind and caring and selfless in some ways. But … ugh, it’s hard to explain. It’s like her ego is constantly bothering her and leaping up and demanding attention. And so for anyone who’s with her, it’s a bit like being with someone who always has a very demanding dog in tow. You’re trying to talk to them and have a nice day together, but they’re constantly being distracted by the endless demands of this high-maintenance poodle. And then you have to notice and respond to the poodle too, and the poodle just takes over everything. Not that I’ve got anything against poodles, I love poodles. I love all dogs. But it’s like her ego pops up and whispers to her ‘Make me feel better, quick!’ and then she does this thing – almost pathologically – where she makes everything about her. Every conversation, wherever it starts, ends up with her saying in dozens of different ways how brilliant she is, and woe betide anyone who doesn’t instantly realise that. And I end up, whenever I have any dealings with her, feeling as if I’m being sold a lie: what’s supposed to be a friendship feels like me endlessly servicing, accommodating and cringing at her weird ego. And occasionally being ticked off by it!
K: Ticked off ?
Me: Told off. Chastised. Once or twice she’s directly criticised me in a ridiculously smug way for things I’ve done that are nowhere near as bad as the worst thing she’s done. Not that it’s a contest – I know this. But I would never dream of saying to her, ‘Please can you stop wiping your weird ego all over the place whenever we’re together?’ or ‘Please can you stop drinking way too much and massively embarrassing me in public?’ She does that too. She doesn’t mean to do any of it, like, at all. I think it might be a kind of deep insecurity, which has led to a constant need to prove and validate herself, and to make everything about her and her needs and her agenda. I get why she’s like she is – her parents divorced quite horribly and dramatically when she was little.
K: Sophie, there’s so much judgement in everything you’ve just said. Of your friend, but also of yourself: when you said how horrible and mean you were going to sound.
Me: Yes. This is what I want to talk about. I quite like having a brain that I use to make judgements about my own behaviour and other people’s. Like, I suspect this is a huge asset to me!
This is, in fact, what my self-help book How to Hold a Grudge is all about. It would be odd if I mentioned it now, so I keep quiet about it.
Me: And so, because I’ve always found this aspect of my thinking to be helpful to me, I’m wondering if it might be totally fine to just … go ahead and make some judgements? While totally accepting that I’m a fallible human who might be wrong, obviously.
K: How do you feel when you judge yourself as horrible and your friend as insufferable and embarrassing, and compare her ego to a demanding poodle?
Me: Um … fine? And I’m not saying I think it’s necessarily horrible of me to be thinking this way about her. That’s what I want to know: is it? I feel sorry for her, I don’t think she’s a bad person in any way – she is, without doubt, a force for good in the world. However, I’m also aware that … I don’t like her much any more. And … is that okay?
K: How do you feel when you think the thought, ‘I don’t like her much any more’?
Me: One third absolutely fine, one third guilty, one third intellectually curious – keen to solve the mystery of whether I’m the problem or she’s the problem. Have you heard of a life coach called Brooke Castillo?
K: Oh yes. She’s actually my hero.
Me: I agree. She believes that there’s no such thing as a toxic person – that the other person’s behaviour is never the problem. The problem is always our thoughts about that person, and we can always choose to cause ourselves less suffering and bring more love into our lives by thinking about people differently: by accepting them for who they are, and deciding they’re fine exactly as they are. And then we can love them no matter what they say or do to us, and we benefit from that love because, by feeling it, we’re bringing more love-experience into our lives. That all sounds great on one level.
Me: Yes. On several other levels, it sounds weird and wrong. And other life coaches disagree: Robin Sharma talks a lot about the importance of avoiding toxic people and eliminating them from our lives. And Kate Swoboda, who also goes by the name ‘Kate Courageous’, did a podcast episode recently about how damaging it is to describe someone as ‘toxic’, but it was clear from the episode as a whole that she totally believed that the person who’d called her toxic was pretty toxic, even if she was expressing that in enlightened life-coach language.
K: How would you feel if, instead of thinking that you don’t like your friend any more, you were to think, ‘I love my friend, no matter what, no matter how she behaves’?
Me: I’d feel worse. The thought that I have to like people equally irrespective of their behaviour—
K: Why equally? I didn’t say equally. We all prefer some people to others. And loving someone doesn’t mean you have to spend time with them. It can simply mean that you wish them well and don’t judge them for who and what they are. You stop defining their behaviour as wrong in some way.
Me: If you’re talking about a more general kind of ‘I hope she’s okay and I want the best for her’, then absolutely, I agree. But for me, that’s compatible with forming the judgement that I don’t enjoy spending time with her.
K: Why is that? Why don’t you like—
Me: I’ve just told you. Demanding poodle ego taking over everything all the time.
K: That’s the part that we need to look at. You think the reason you don’t like her is because of her.
Me: Oh, I get it. It’s because of my thoughts, you’re going to say.
K: Yes.
Me: Same as with my busy work schedule?
K: It’s the same in every area of our lives. And once we realise this, we have complete freedom to create whatever kind of mental and emotional experience we want. This is what I don’t think you understand yet on a deep level.
Me: Right. So, if I change my thoughts about her, I can like her as much as I ever did, without her changing her behaviour at all.
K: Exactly.
Me: But what if I don’t want to change my thoughts? What if I want to like people who don’t make me feel irritated and slightly used for ego-building purposes more, and people who do, less?
K: So you think your friend makes you feel irritated and used? It’s her behaviour that’s making you feel that way?
Me: (sighs) You think my thoughts about her make me feel irritated and used?
K: I know that it’s your thoughts. That’s how the world works.
Me: Yes. Right.
Me: It is?
K: Yes, because it gives you back all your power. She’s not making you feel any way at all. She’s just being her, and she has no power over what goes on in your brain. You have all the power to decide what you want to believe and how you want to feel. And I guess my question to you is: why would you choose to think, ‘I don’t like her’, and feel less affection, when you could think, ‘I love her, no matter what’, and feel the benefit of that love in your life? We are the ones who experience the love or lack of it that we’re feeling when we think about others. Can you see that? Can you see that it would benefit you to love her no matter what, without judgement?
Me: Yes and no. Yes for all the obvious reasons that you’ve been saying, and that Brooke says, but also no because … I don’t want to like amazing people and annoying people equally. I want to prefer better things to worse things – and that goes for people too.
K: Do you think there are better and worse people?
Me: Not innately, in terms of … I don’t know, their soul’s potential …
(This is what happens when you spend too much time chatting to American life coaches, folks. Be warned.)
Me: … but in terms of behaviour, and enjoyableness to be around? Yes, I do. Having judgement and using it to improve my life experience and the world if possible … ultimately, that makes me happier than adopting an equal-love-for-everyone-and-no-judgement approach would.
K: Yet you feel guilty about your current feelings towards your friend.
Me: Maybe. I can’t decide if I should or if it’s totally fair enough. The thing is, I borderline worship Brooke Castillo, and agree with 99 per cent of what she says. So the few snippets I’m inclined to disagree about probably bother me more than they should.
K: You use the word ‘should’ a lot.
Me: Is that bad? Should I stop? Oops.
Me: Also, Brooke says that when we judge other people’s behaviour as negative, we’re the only ones who feel the effects of our own negativity, but … that’s not true. I know from my own experience that it’s not. For example, I once behaved in a cowardly way, and people judged my behaviour negatively and I lost a friend over it – and it was useful to me to feel the impact of that, and to have that consequence: losing the friend, having people obviously think worse of me. It all helped me to realise that my cowardice was wrong, and was causing me more problems than it was solving. I addressed it, and … I’m not a coward any more. And in other situations, people think I’ve done things wrong and I’m certain I haven’t, and that they’re wrong. I mean … the ability to judge is useful. That’s why it’s better to be a human being than a … I don’t know, a goldfish. Brooke often says that we’re lucky to be the only animals with a prefrontal cortex or higher brain – and part of what that brain can do is form judgements, create value systems and decide that it doesn’t like certain things.
K: We can always use our brain in whatever way we choose to – that’s our privilege.
Me: Exactly. And … there is such a thing as objective truth, right?
K: I still think it’s worth asking yourself why you’d rather think ‘I don’t like my friend any more’ than think ‘I love my friend, no matter what’. Which thought would make you feel better? Which would bring more love into your life?
Me: I mean … but, like, Eva Braun could have adopted that approach when she was choosing between the thoughts ‘I love Hitler no matter what’ and ‘I’m starting to worry that Hitler’s not so great and maybe I should steer clear.’ Even if you want to leave moral judgement out of it and think only about what’s going to make Eva feel good, the first thought led to her ending up dead in a bunker. The second would almost certainly have given her a longer, happier life.
K: Your friend is not Adolf Hitler, though, is she?
Me: No, of course not. I’m just trying to establish some basic kind of … logical guidelines. Look, let’s say I do feel guilty about not liking my friend any more: maybe that’s fine. I don’t want to like her as much as I did or hang out with her, given her behaviour, but also I feel a bit guilty about that from time to time. Isn’t that just human? I mean, the world isn’t perfect.
K: Isn’t it? What if it is? Is it possible that the world and your friend are perfect just as they are?
Me: Oh, my God.
For Lyssa, I choose a different dilemma – another one involving a friend. This friend loves me to bits and would drop everything to help me if I were critically ill or dying. When I’m healthy and basically okay, however, she shows no interest in me or my life. Like, zero interest. Not even a glimmer of curiosity once a year. I can and regularly do ask her question after question about her life and the lives of her husband, daughters and dogs, and she’ll answer (though not in much detail), but she never reciprocates.
It’s very weird. Another mystery, in fact. Maybe she’s just not much of a talker and is happy to be more self-contained.
Once, when I received a horrible email while at her house and burst into tears, she responded by standing up and saying, ‘I’m off to bed’. Another time she was at my house watching TV and someone exciting who I was about to start working with appeared on the screen. ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘Look, it’s X! That’s who I’m working with on Y.’ My friend acted as if I hadn’t said a word. She didn’t even glance at the screen. She pulled her phone out of her bag and started scrolling through her Facebook notifications. In my opinion, that’s not how a good friend ever behaves.
Are these only my thoughts, though, or are they facts? Could it be my beliefs about her that are causing my frustration, rather than her lack of interest in me? Could I solve the problem and feel great about her immediately by thinking, ‘She never asks questions or shows any curiosity about my life, what I think or how I feel, and that’s totally fine’?
This might seem like a strange topic to be spending so much time on, dear sidekick, but it feels important to get to the bottom of whether or not other people can or cannot make us happy or unhappy. I hope you can see why. Anthony Seldon, author of Beyond Happiness, certainly believes that they can. So does Robin Sharma. Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie disagree: they’re more in the Brooke Castillo camp, and think that it’s only the stories we tell ourselves and then believe that make us unhappy. I need to know who’s right before I can move on in my investigation.
Lyssa has an interesting take on the situation. My first question to her is: how can you love and care about someone and show zero interest in them? Is that possible? I’ve told my friend about fourteen times, for example, that I’m planning to launch a coaching programme for writers called Dream Author. Every time, since the very first time, she’s said, ‘I know’. Not once has she asked what it’s going to involve, or any questions about it at all.
L: You seem certain she loves and cares about you in spite of her disinterested behaviour. Is that definitely true?
Me: Uninterested.
L: Huh?
Me: Never mind. Sorry, go on.
L: Maybe she doesn’t care at all.
Me: No, she definitely does. Whenever she’s in a terrible state, I’m the first person she comes to and wants to talk to.
L: That might mean she thinks you can help her in those circumstances.
Me: I do help her.
L: Right, but that help is for her. That’s her taking from you, for her own benefit. She could do that for her own sake, without caring about you at all, couldn’t she?
Me: Oh, I see. Yes, but … Yes. I suppose so.
L: I’m not saying she doesn’t love you. She may well. Different people love in different ways.
Me: She would be a wreck if I died. I know she would. She’s just not interested in me while I’m alive – which makes no sense to me. Like, I know that if I died, if she didn’t have me any more, she’d be properly devastated. Yet … here I am, and we meet regularly, and she never even asks me how I am or what I’ve been doing lately. Actually, to be fair … maybe one time out of five she will ask me one question. But then, if I start to answer properly, her eyes wander and she starts kind of going, ‘Yeah, yeah’, in a clipped, distracted way, and it’s clear she’s not really listening. She quite often looks away or walks away when I’m in mid-sentence. So then I think, ‘Why bother even trying to talk to her?’ and, next time she asks me a rare question, I answer in three words or less, and she never asks a follow-up question. I mean, she never seems to actually want to know what’s going on in my mind or life. I would wonder if she secretly resents me, but we have a mutual friend who says she shows the same complete lack of interest in her stuff.
L: I think it’s so interesting that you’re obsessing about what her behaviour means as if it’s a mystery you want to solve.
Me: It is! And also … there are lots of people whose lack of interest I genuinely wouldn’t give two hoots about, but … from her, it actually makes me sad. I feel as if … This is going to sound melodramatic and I know it’s not true, but I feel as if she’s cut me off, even though I see her regularly. When I’m in her company, I feel as if my existence is being negated. Like, cancelled out.
L: There’s an obvious way to try to solve the mystery: talk to her about it.
L: Why?
Me: Isn’t it obvious?
L: Not to me.
Me: Oh.
L: You could work on solving a different mystery: why do you keep doing this to yourself?
Me: With my thoughts, you mean? I could definitely work on feeling not negated when she’s around, that’s true.
L: You could. But what I meant is that you could choose not to see her any more.
Me: That would be more painful than the current situation. I don’t want to lose her from my life, even though I don’t feel she’s properly with me even when she’s with me. There’s a strong sentimental and symbolic attachment, though, and I don’t want to break it. I love her, I guess, even with the total lack of interest factored in.
L: Why don’t you want to talk to her about it?
Me: It wouldn’t make me feel better. She’d give some reason or excuse, and she’d insist she does care and is interested in me, and then she’d make sure to ask, like, six pre-arranged questions every time she saw me from then on—
L: Sophie, you don’t know what she’d say or do.
Me: True. Not the specifics, but … I do know that whenever I’ve been angry or upset with anyone and talked to them about it, I never ended up feeling better. Like, not even once in 48 years.
L: Wow.
Me: I know, right? As Jerry Seinfeld said: ‘People. They’re the worst.’ That’s a joke! I think people are great. Well, some of them. But … whenever I’ve gone from feeling terrible to feeling better, it’s always been me that’s made me feel better by … making a new decision or resolution or something.
L: That’s actually always true, for all of us. Our thoughts create our reality.
Me: So you agree with Katherine and Brooke. Have you heard of Brooke Castillo?
L: Everyone’s heard of Brooke! She’s the highest-paid female life coach in the world, I think.
Me: Brooke would say that when I feel sad about my friend who shows no interest in me, it’s only my thoughts that are causing my sadness, and not in any way my friend’s behaviour. Do you think that’s true?
L: If I answer yes, you’ll misunderstand me.
Me: What do you mean?
L: Well … your thoughts are what cause your choices, right? You choose what to do based on what you’re thinking.
Me: Yes.
L: It seems to me that you keep making choices in relation to this friend that guarantee the continuation of your suffering.
Me: Huh!
L: You won’t talk to her about it and you continue to see her, and you tell yourself over and over that she’s injuring you on a psychic level. How will your pain ever end, then?
Me: Maybe it won’t. If it doesn’t … you’re saying that’s my fault?
L: It’s never helpful to look at relationships in terms of fault.
Me: All right, not fault, then. My doing? I’m causing my own pain?
L: Somewhere deep down, do you think there might be a thought you’re having – maybe one you’re not conscious of – that begins with the words, ‘I want to carry on suffering because …’?
Me: No. Honestly, I don’t.
L: Humour me. If there was that thought somewhere in your subconscious brain, how might that sentence end? ‘I want to carry on suffering in this friendship because …’
Me: Erm … to prove myself right that people are endlessly disappointing?
L: Yes! That sounds true to me.
Me: You agree? I thought you were going to argue with me. People are just so disappointing, aren’t they?
L: That’s not what I meant, Sophie. I meant that I agree that you’re probably wanting your theory to be proved right, your belief that people are endlessly disappointing. It always feels comforting to have our long-held beliefs proved right.
Me: Wait a minute. You said ‘if’. If my subconscious mind contained a sentence that began ‘I want to carry on suffering in this friendship because …’, how would that sentence end. I was answering conditionally. And creatively. That isn’t my actual subconscious thought.
L: Are you sure?
Me: Yes. I have many conscious thoughts: I love my friend, I don’t think she treats me very well, and I’m sad about that. I also don’t want to lose her, crap though she might be. Those are my thoughts. And …
Me: I’ve trapped myself in a suffering situation, and I keep insisting that all the possible ways out it are impossible and can’t be considered. Just like with my work situation.
L: Yes. Precisely. And you know what?
Me: What?
L: That’s enough. Understanding that that’s what’s going on for you is enough.
Me: No, it’s not.
It really isn’t. Not if I want to solve the mystery of happiness.
Is it possible that I do want to carry on suffering so that I can continue to believe that people are disappointing? No, I don’t think so – genuinely. What’s more likely is that I don’t trust anyone but myself to make me feel better, so when I’m feeling sad or angry or suboptimal in any way, the only person I ever want to talk to about it is myself. Or paid experts, like Katherine and Lyssa – professional solvers of people’s individual happiness mysteries who aren’t part of my real life.
I don’t want people I know to know too much about what I’m thinking or feeling if my emotional state contains any element of sadness or anger. If I’m feeling great and thinking cheering, jolly thoughts, that’s something I’m always happy to share with everyone, from close friends and relatives to the postman and my dental hygienist.
Weird. Maybe I need to talk to a psychotherapist instead of a life coach – someone with a framed photo of Freud or Jung on their wall instead of a framed motivational motto.
Later that evening I listen to an interview with Brooke Castillo on someone else’s podcast, in which Brooke says (unaware that a happiness detective is monitoring her every word) that the things she teaches now about how to thrive and live your best and happiest possible life are the direct opposite of everything she learned when she studied psychology at university. This makes me think again about ‘proper’ therapy.
Wait … didn’t Brooke also do a podcast episode about the differences between therapy and coaching? Or did I imagine that?
What if all the therapists think all the coaches are wrong?
If I’m being fair, I must admit that therapy changed my life hugely for the better long before coaching did. For a few months in 2011, I had several psychoanalytic hypnotherapy sessions with a lovely woman called Juliet. In our first few sessions, I talked a lot about a man who had behaved for many years in a way that had terrified and oppressed me. I kept stressing, however, that he had not meant to do so; he was genuinely doing his best in life, including in the way he treated me. He wasn’t very psychologically strong, and simply wasn’t capable of better behaviour.
Juliet always seemed rather cross with him on my behalf, which I appreciated. Then one day I was feeling unusually raw as a result of the therapy, and less inclined than usual to being understanding about everything. I said, ‘You know what? He actually persecuted me for about fifteen years.’ Juliet raised both her hands in the air and shouted, ‘Yes! Hooray! Finally, you can see it!’
Juliet definitely didn’t think that it was only my thoughts that had persecuted me for all those years.
Suddenly, I am desperate to talk to my friend Helen, who’s an existential psychotherapist. Helen is a regular guest on my How to Hold a Grudge podcast and she contributed significantly to the book too. She has told me many times that she could never be my therapist because we’re friends, but we can and do discuss psychological matters, often involving grudges, regularly.
I need to talk to her. Why didn’t I think of it sooner? It seems to me that Helen could be a key witness in this investigation. I remember her, in a previous conversation we had, saying that human interactions are relational. Does that mean that she believes we cannot be happy if, for example, our nearest and dearest are secretly plotting to kill our dog?