CHAPTER ONE

What’s Being a Dick All About?

A famous Jesuit mystic by the name of Father Anthony de Mello once promoted the brilliant and counterintuitive notion that “everything is okay as is.”4 He believed that with God in our hearts, we’re in pretty good hands. It’s a fluid theory that I like to apply to a peaceful relationship with the world. We’re already okay, we just need to attune ourselves to recognize as much. We spend so much energy operating in ways that ensure that we don’t feel okay, and won’t in the future. We provoke others to treat us poorly and continually feel awful.

We can ponder, research, and explore the myriad reasons for dickery in others—in fact, philosophy, psychology, and sociology have hypotheses, theories, and answers galore for these questions. Religions imply that it’s a sin. Psychology labels it a protective measure against anxiety caused by vulnerability. Philosophy elevates and contorts dickishness into deep questions about the nature of existence. Obviously, attaining insight into why is only part of the solution. The real remedy to dickishness is to put insight into action.

That said, it’s smart to have a sense of why people act like a dick in the first place.

The unconscious reason is to sideline oneself from full participation in life. When we are unkind to people, they avoid us. Now, how could that be the goal? you might ask. The answer is that full engagement is scary, especially when it comes to relationships. So, being a dick allows us to avoid the riskier aspects of feeling connected to people.

Why is that a problem? After all, isn’t it wise to avoid situations that feel scary or dangerous? Maybe. But being a dick is not a safe way to be on the sidelines. On the contrary, it feels to others like we’ve kicked them in the gut, so they react accordingly. The only sidelining going on is that of our emotional connection to these people, places, and things that have overwhelmed us by threatening to matter. Knowing the isolation that being a dick causes, you might consider having more conscious control over how you treat others and how they respond. Ironically, being a dick invites others to yank you off the sidelines with direct emotional engagement in the form of conflict.

While dicks often misread other people’s counterattacks as having been unprovoked, if you bought this book (or someone bought it for you), you probably know that you provoke people. Misinterpreting the root cause of others’ aggression sets us up for a hostile relationship with the world, and to stop, your perception, attitudes, and actions will have to change. Unkind actions inspire bad attitudes, and bad attitudes fuel unkind actions. Before you know it, both can become features of your character—the essence of how you experience yourself.5

Let’s look closer at those underlying attitudes that cause you to be a dick.

Why Did You Get so Good at Being Bad?

Most dicks intend for their bad behavior to solve various social problems, especially those associated with being vulnerable, invested in, or close to people who might hurt them. Though not the inevitable outcome, being a dick is also common when you’re chronically stewing in resentment over feeling ripped-off, neglected, overlooked, diminished, or devalued. One of my now-sober alcoholic clients said, “Now that I’ve kicked the drink, resentment is my drug of choice.”

Where do those feelings come from? Simply put: anxiety. It inundates us when our sense of self contradicts what someone has communicated about us, be it through something they said or how they’ve treated us. Over time, an internal security system develops—what’s called the “self-system”—which minimizes our awareness of anxiety.⁶

Relationships are the primary source of anxiety. It exists on a gradient scale, but is particularly severe in dicks, who’ve crafted an entire way of life to manage its chilling effects.

We’re built to withstand all kinds of anxiety-provoking stimuli, but the real trick is to manage anxiety itself. That means not becoming so overwhelmed we cannot function (i.e., anxiety disorder), and not becoming so defended against it that we don’t feel anything at all (as with depression). To pull this off, we guard against anxiety triggers. The mechanisms to block our awareness of anxiety operate along a continuum that stretches from selectively avoiding things that bother us (simply not paying attention) to thoroughly blocking all conscious evidence of an experience having occurred at all. The latter is called dissociation. What these strategies have in common is an ability to numb our awareness of anxiety, fear, and pain.

And what becomes of those emotions we don’t consciously feel? Well, just because we don’t feel the fears doesn’t mean we’re not affected by them. Or to put it another way, not being aware of how we feel doesn’t mean we don’t feel. In fact, our behavior toward ourselves and others is generally more affected by unconscious feelings than by the ones we’re thinking of. And in the long run, feelings demand expression. Whatever it is that we’re pushing out of our awareness will eventually find a way through to us, and those around us.

So, being a dick is a psychological strategy to mitigate our experience of anxiety and stress. But as a side effect, our responses don’t allow others in who might help remedy the situation. In that way, being a dick isolates us, reinforcing a disconnection from awareness of that which we truly want and need from the world—emotional support. Because being a dick begins as a reaction to a world that feels out of control, assessing our current responses to stress helps us understand the behaviors and patterns that develop around these defensive reactions. The next section presents some of the mechanisms behind your dickish behavior that relate to anxiety.

You Might as Well Blame Your World

Interpersonal psychoanalysts believe we get to know ourselves through “reflected appraisals”7 of our environment, our relationships, and in particular our early encounters with primary caregivers. One’s whole sense of self develops through these appraisals, so in a sense, how people treat us becomes who we are.

When we take an early, unresolved relationship dynamic or conflict into our current relationships, that’s called enactment.⁸ You and I, in the dynamic patterns we use to communicate and interact, reengage in behaviors, thoughts, and feelings that repeat our essential early, unresolved conflict. Basically, our defenses are put into play in important relationships again and again. Our feelings then become enacted indefinitely. In new relationships and amongst strangers, we replay the unresolved conflicts and relationship dynamics that caused us to install our defenses in the first place. These enactments aren’t limited to our immediate family, or anyone who may have directly hurt us. When it comes to how painful and frightening experiences impact us, we tend to generalize, treating everyone in the world as if they’re the source of our hurt and fear.

Dicks work both sides of the field: offense and defense. In fact, those who think of their dickish behavior as defensive still enact it offensively, protecting themselves by attacking, provoking, playing the victim, and doing whatever it takes to knock others off their game to avoid being hurt.

If you’re a dick, the likelihood is that you run on obsessive fuel; your anger rationalizes your behavior as you think compulsively about the people who hurt you, and you simultaneously become the target of other’s obsessions, since the people you hurt retaliate. Again, all dicks mistake counterattacks for unprovoked attacks. But people trapped in what feels like a threatening emotional experience are not just your average, run-of-the-mill dicks. While they may seem naturally inclined to devalue others, they actually feel like they’re fighting for their lives. After all, if someone else’s behavior seriously affects how you feel about yourself—that is, threatens your very sense of self—you can be damned sure it’s going to trigger you to react as if your very life is at stake.

It’s not so hard to see how being a dick serves as a kind of preemptive strike against reflected appraisals—the way we see ourselves in the context of others’ treatment. How we experience ourselves influences how we navigate situations that might trigger anxiety, and those unconscious choices can feel like habit rather than reactive decisions. There can even be the sense that how you behave is simply who you are. As if being a dick is so essential, it feels more like fate or heredity than a juvenile defense developed from the perception that the world is scary. We keep acting like dicks to retroactively and preemptively account for other people’s bad behavior, all but ensuring that poor treatment indeed comes down on us in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It’s Not You, It’s Me

Dicks attract ill consequences from the people in their environments. Intentionally behaving rudely allows them to make sense of other people’s substandard treatment of them, yet that kind of retroactive excuse-making is often extended to the people who were unwilling or unable to effectively care for them as kids as well. Dicks are inclinced to believe that it wasn’t the caretaker’s fault, it was theirs. Acting out at a young age might have started as a protest against being treated poorly, but it winds up as resignation. A young dick might also be mimicking the bad behavior of their caretakers.

You might have turned the tables on your poor caretakers. But now your bad behavior—not their poor parenting—is the problem. In this process, you let them off the hook for not providing appropriate care. “It was all me,” says the regretful dick. “I deserved to be hit. I brought it upon myself.” Or: “Why would anyone have looked out for me? I was a terror.” In this way, we justify a state of isolated self-sufficiency, overlook the impact of others’ behaviors, and continue to give everyone a pass for never giving us what we want or need.

It takes great empathy to forgive others for dropping the ball and deem their actions humane instead of a form of assault. But truthfully, being a dick doesn’t allow for that kind of empathy to develop; we can’t accept others, nor they us, in all of our fallible, sometimes not-very-nice humanness, so the conflict continues.

Seeing What I Can’t Stand in Me, in You

Seeing what you can’t stand—what you downright hate—about yourself reflected in others is among the most primitive and common psychological defenses. It’s called projection, and like all psychological defenses, it’s a survival mechanism. We mitigate anxieties simply to function. But for dicks, this reaction can be disastrous.

Say you’re walking down a busy city street and your blood begins to boil as you dodge and weave between all those people happily nodding their heads along with whatever music is playing in their ear buds as they type on their phones. You start mumbling and giving them dirty looks. You call someone a jerk. You tell yourself all these people are entitled, selfish, narcissistic assholes who, when they come close to running into you, don’t deserve to live. You stop in front of one or two of them and they actually bump right into you, mumble something—“sorry,” maybe—and move along. You’re just about to punch the next person who bumps into you when your cell phone buzzes. You get a message that you promptly begin to reply to as you weave through pedestrian traffic.

What happened? Clearly, other people’s bad behavior worked to fuel your own. You started name-calling, you got physically aggressive, you were convinced that everyone else was in the wrong. And perhaps they were, right up until the time when you were the asshole. But whether or not that was dickish behavior is beside the point. The point is that we see unacceptable qualities in others as a defense against acknowledging and doing something about our own. When we use projection and see our horrible qualities in others, our dickishness gets rationalized in a way that makes it very hard to register. This makes it difficult to change. In fact, sometimes we’ll only see it when some other person stops in front of us when we’re the ones texting on a crowded street. But nah, we won’t see it then either. In that case, it’s that other person who’s the dick, right?

Sounds pretty rough, huh? It sure can be. And that’s why people in relationships with dicks project their own bad qualities onto their partners. These tend to be people who:

1.  Were born into poor treatment, and hence built a tolerance for other people’s dickery, believing the things being projected were true, as in I really am a ‘bad person’

2.  Were raised by people who blamed themselves and their childrearing skills when problems arose with their children. By claiming failure, they become scapegoats for their child’s belief in what was wrong with him or herself

3.  Don’t see the poor treatment they receive coming, and due perhaps to unresolved dynamic issues, believe they can handle anything. This person tends to absorb the burden of perceived wrongs and is often a rescuer-type who seeks out “lost causes,” another category of dick

4.  Believe it is their job to help dicks, even if that entails getting cornered and having their ass kicked psychologically

That’s just the short list of people attracted to dicks. Family members, lovers, and therapists tend to be the best receptacles for projections of what we despise about ourselves. We often see character defects in others more easily than we do in ourselves. Combined with our compulsion to repeat old, unresolved dynamic patterns in current relationships—our enactments—this blindness to our flaws makes our relationships hotbeds for projections run amok.

The good news is that when we’re honest about how our issues complicate our lives and lead to problems in our relationships, the urge to project onto others diminishes. When we feel safe with others, we recognize that our dickery corresponds with qualities we’ve been unable to face in ourselves. On the other hand, if we never accept responsibility for the character defects we project onto others, we risk walking through life unaware that other people are not the problem—we are. That is very bad news, because there’s nothing we can do about the problem if it’s not us.

Sometimes owning up to our dissociated and denied self-experience obstructs how we need to see ourselves. For instance, Jerry was brutalized as a child, and rather than see himself as an abused person, he sees himself as someone who can take and deliver a punch. He won’t allow himself to remember how unsafe and vulnerable he was; instead he sees himself as “tough” for overcoming early pain and difficulty. He needs to see himself this way; it’s how he survived. Whatever it is that we’re blocking can be serious. For people who’ve been traumatized, their off-putting behavior may be meant to thwart relationships that cause them to reexperience old pain and fear.

Someone who was badly hurt in early life, like Jerry, can be triggered into highly self-protective behaviors by relationships that make them feel vulnerable. In fact, in Jerry’s last relationship, when he started to feel safe enough to open up, he saw his partner as “weak” and left her. He had identified in her what he most deeply feared and could not accept in himself.

It’s a Black and White World

In the earliest stages of development, the mind categorizes things that we depend on, from food to caretakers, as being all good or all bad. It’s a primitive way to manage anxiety and aggression; splitting objects into either/or boxes provides a basic sense of where bad stuff comes from and allows us to believe that bad things in the world (and ourselves) can be contained. The all-good/all-bad lens is called the paranoid-schizoid position.9 In this state the split between all-good and all-bad is so extreme, we quite literally experience things—say, Dad—as good objects in one instance, bad objects in another. It feels like Dad is two totally separate beings, since his bad side is so intolerable to us. We have the rationale we need then to be a dick.

A significant developmental step occurs when you experience the same person—a key caregiver like a mother, for instance—as no longer all bad or all good, but rather a modicum of both. This state is referred to as the depressive position. If we can reach this position in which we accept gray areas in our lives, each other, and ourselves, we can think differently about our hostility. For example, if being a dick is your way to protect yourself, it might help to learn that this attitude and behavior is not a permanent part of your character, but a misstep in your development that can be repaired. If you put your weapons down, you’ll likely see the world do the same. Perhaps in this way we reconcile with the world, one relationship at a time.

Unfortunately, most people caught in dickish routines have no inkling that anything is wrong until it stops working in their favor, despite having seemed to work well in the past. Our acting-out behaviors so effectively distract us from anxiety, we can’t imagine anything needs changing. We have no idea how afraid we are. And this unconscious fear of being vulnerable disallows change of any kind. Equally destructive is the possibility that our underlying fear drives us to change quickly, compulsively, and unreflectively, without allowing a new situation to prove worthwhile.

What Does It Mean to Act Out?

Once you can see what drives your behavior, the next step is to see how it manifests in you acting like a dick. In the realm of psychotherapy and analysis, the term acting out refers to any behavior that serves as a “substitute for remembering past events.”10 We sometimes act like dicks to suppress unpleasant memories, which may include experiences of trauma. In his seminal paper, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through,” Sigmund Freud introduced the concepts of the repetition compulsion and offered a systematic definition for acting out. Pointing to the relationship between memory and repetition, Freud wrote: “The patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it … he cannot escape from the compulsion to repeat; and in the end we understand that this is his way of remembering.”¹¹

Freud went on to introduce the term agieren to describe what happened when a client named Dora prematurely ended her treatment. He stated: “Because of the unknown quantity in me which reminded Dora of Herr K., she took her revenge on me as she wanted to take her revenge on him … Thus she acted out an essential part of her recollections and phantasies instead of producing it in the treatment.”12

The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan believed acting out to be a demand for recognition.¹³ For our purposes, the term will describe any behavior that lets an intolerable emotion to bypass our conscious awareness. As I’ve stated before, though, we do not eradicate intolerable emotions, only our awareness of them. This means the bad feelings we have about ourselves remain intact even when our behavior effectively gets rid of our conscious awareness of them.

It’s a vicious circle; the more you dislike yourself, the more you act out to eradicate that feeling. You behave like a dick, causing other people to treat you poorly or avoid you entirely. And this goes on ad infinitum.

It’s not just that we don’t want to see or accept bad feelings about ourselves; we are driven to get rid of them.

Cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek presents a brilliant example of the difference between this desire and drive in his book, The Parallax View.¹⁴ Describing a little girl who tries to grab a bright red ball, he explains that she wants the ball—capturing the ball is her goal—but her hands are small and the ball is big, so when she reaches for it, the ball slips away. Her desire leads her to chase it around the room, and at some point, her goal having been frustrated many times over, yet still having fun nonetheless, her desire transforms. Giggling as she chases the ball all over the place, she becomes interested in sustaining the process. Now, instead of wishing to capture the ball, she is driven to not capture it in order to keep the game going. Drive is not permanently connected to a specific goal. In this example, the situation demands that the little girl forget her original desire. The goal of drive can be to miss its mark, making it a powerful underlying force to sustain bad behavior and block awareness of anxiety.

For instance, when Erica’s fiancé cancelled their engagement she became what she calls a “serial dater.” Erica, an attractive, second-generation Chinese-American, grew up with a single mother who had been abandoned by her husband, Erica’s father, when they reached New York. Erica is now a successful entrepreneur with an MBA from a prestigious university. At first, she thought she was just having fun and getting over her ex. But what she really wanted was to get rid of her horrible feelings of rejection and abandonment. She had dated her ex, Ryan, since college, so she had in some ways lost sight of how men responded to her. In what became an increasingly driven process, she chewed up and spit out the men who pursued her. It was not simple naiveté that led her suitors through her dating game. Initially she would claim a genuine interest in the would-be lover. She was acting out a need to be wanted, longed for, and recognized. But beneath her awareness, these experiences triggered hurt and fear, and prompted a need for revenge against the same category of person who had hurt her.

It initially seemed like Erica was reenacting the emotions of her jilted mother, yet Erica now inhabits the role of her fearful father, the dick.

If by acting out you relive a past need for recognition from others, you’re doomed to repeat this most crucial emotional conflict in new relationships. Amazingly, we seem to not want to experience the parts of ourselves that we defend against, and in avoiding these feelings, often wind up missing essential knowledge of who we are. Crucial aspects of our self-experience are covered up.

Dickishness driven by the need to not feel blocks self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-love. It’s a highly effective way to distort an intolerable truth. But being a dick also defends us against things we truly want, such as being accepted, liked, and cared for by others. If we let go of our acting-out behavior, we will be confronted by truths that are so difficult to bear that our minds have gone to extreme lengths to hide them. Connecting our dickery to the past and present contexts in which it was born may be scary at first, but in so doing, we can experience a broader emotional life.

So, let’s give ourselves a chance to make some connections between our dickish behavior, thoughts, feelings, and general experience of ourselves.

The Dick Quiz

Being a dick is like that grade-school joke: he who smelt it, dealt it. Setting aside the zillion ways one can act out, there’s only one surefire way to know you’re a dick: you encounter them everywhere.

Are you one of those people who bought this book to help you deal with the other dicks in your life? Like an increasingly bothersome husband or a pesky roommate? If so, it may be worth considering whether you’re the dick in this dynamic. If so, you’re probably screaming “screw this checklist” right now. Still, I have to ask, do you:

•  Feel like you’re getting one over, tricking the world?

•  Feel threatened by others and the world?

•  Experience the world as a scary place?

•  Feel anxious both when alone or with others?

•  Act defensively?

•  Feel righteous?

•  Believe it’s your job to right wrongs?

•  Feel compelled to devalue others and put them down?

•  Want to be left alone, then suffer from isolation and sadness?

•  Feel out of control to the point where you knee-jerk react?

•  Feel chronically hurt and angry?

•  Lash out easily, but rarely feel bad about it?

•  Act adversarial with others and yourself?

•  Feel entitled and resentful?

•  Say or think epithets like “screw you”?

•  Feel uncomfortable with intimacy?

•  Hide insecurities and shame?

•  Exaggerate accomplishments and take credit for things you haven’t really done?

•  Act (feel) more important than others?

•  Believe you can achieve power through your unique relationship to beauty, success, and intelligence?

•  Believe you’re so smart and unique that only the best institutions and the most elite professionals can possibly understand you?

•  Have an excessive need to be admired all the time?

•  Have a sense of entitlement and expect to be treated differently, and with more status, than others?

•  Exploit others to get what you want or need?

•  Lack empathy and rarely notice what others feel or need? (Genuine empathy is having concern for others without an agenda for yourself.)

•  Become jealous and competitive with others or believe that others are jealous of you?

•  Become haughty and act arrogant and superior to friends, colleagues, and family?

If you answered yes to some of the above questions, you might be a dick. Checked off more than five and you’re likely a colossal dick because, come on, none of these attributes suggest a person who plays well with others!

“Dick” may or may not be a meaningful word to describe yourself, so let’s do an exercise to find other words that make sense of how you see yourself as we create a softer world to live in together.

Understanding the “Impletive”

When it comes to being a dick, there’s a twist: all the poor behavior we perpetrate upon others likely reflects the way we also mistreat ourselves. It’s a screwed-up reversal of I’m rubber, you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you. Without realizing it, we talk down to and bully ourselves in ways that match the torment we wreak upon others. This being the case, it’s important to work through and let go of the ways we denigrate ourselves.

Negative self-talk impacts how we see and feel about ourselves in ways we barely notice, much less register. When we call ourselves “stupid,” or a “dick,” what becomes of that? It’s the same weaponizing of language that we use against others who hurt or offend us. Do we really think those words will have a different effect against ourselves? Probably not. So, we need to become more thoughtful, careful, and gentle with what we say to ourselves.

When I see #@!&*% on a printed page, as I often do in dialogue bubbles in comics or graphic novels when one character uses an epithet, I choose to read it as a substitute for the word dick. (After all, a dick is what I tell myself not to be.) The English language contains plenty of words that can stand in for “dick” (admittedly offensive to many people, including my parents). I could’ve use the word “jerk,” but for the behavioral dynamic I’m addressing in this book, I wanted a word with oomph. Now that we’ve got it, though, I want to dial things down. To be gentler to ourselves, let’s come up with alternative terms that coincide with our recovery. Coming up with your own expletive is part of the creative process.

You can put your substitute in your head whenever you feel like someone is acting like a dick. Though the point of your #@!% may be to thoughtfully lessen the degree of provocation likely triggered by an expletive like “dick,” (it also lessens the offensiveness to my mom and her church friends) any word can refer to the kind of person who, shall we say, does not play well with others.

Since “dick” is what we call an expletive, I’ll use the word impletive to refer to the bleeped-out version you may prefer. Though friends have suggested other names (the #@!% is commonly referred to as a grawlix, and other terms I’ve heard include profanitypes, obscenicons, and redactions), I offer impletive because it is an implied expletive. As such, it allows each of us to make clear, definitive, indubitable, and explicit as possible our term for a person at war with the world as well as with him or herself.

The transition from impletive (#@!%) to expletive (mine’s “dick”) will allow you to bring your #@!%-ery out of the shadows and analyze the way it sustains an anxiety-fueled, painful, and scary relationship with the world, and unknowingly places you in a position to be hurt every day.

Without overthinking it, write down a word to describe people, or yourself, when acting out:

Just for good measure, add two more:

Recognizing Internal Agreements

We all engage in unacceptable behaviors. These are unconscious commitments that come out as knee-jerk, cause-and-effect reactions. They tend to be anticipatory, like a life hack to deal with dread over future events, and are reasoned by if/then statements (if you do this then I’m allowed to do that) or ultimatums (I’ll end things if I don’t get my way).

I call these “agreements” because they guide our behavior in ways that justify being a dick and become acceptable to us over time. For instance, if someone cycles the wrong way in a bike lane I’m entitled to curse at them. Or if someone cuts in front of me in line I have the right to shove them away. These agreements usually result in a highly defensive state of being in the world; we believe we’re proactively protecting ourselves from being mistreated, but are actually placing a target on our forehead. In this way, the motto of a dick is always, “The best defense is a good offense.”

The problem is that these agreements are exceptionally hard to recognize or do anything about. We’ve likely been seeing them in everyday life: negative responses, actions, facial expressions, and rude treatment from others who are being dicks around us. But we don’t notice when we implement, and in turn invite, those behaviors ourselves.

Agreements developed early in life become a natural part of your character. In fact, as I like to say, your character is the sum total of your psychological defenses;15 each person’s concept of “me” is their most contemporary, up-to-date record of everything they’ve been through and everything that’s been done to them. It’s their reaction to all the people who hurt, scared, loved, and cared for them, an immensely complicated history summarized by the simple catchall “me.”

Since these agreements have been developing for years, they’re stable, sturdy, and not at all easy to change. A sense of safety is essential to change one’s nature, making giving up a defensive strategy in a difficult, often dangerous world a big ask. I’m not suggesting you put down all your weapons at once. But through assessment and understanding, I believe disarmament is possible, and as hard as this might be to swallow, doing so will allow you to feel safer in the long run.

In New York, examples of this are innumerable. There’s hardly a day that someone doesn’t come into my office discussing some infraction perpetrated upon them by some other sidewalk walker, subway rider, driver, or bicyclist (we’ll cover this more thoroughly in the Patrolling Dickery chapter). A lot of New Yorkers have the same pet peeves: people walking too slow, people eating smelly food on the subway, people cycling the wrong way in a bike lane. I also find that most of us have “agreements” to excuse our own bad reactions. An agreement may be as mild as When someone comes charging onto the subway before I exit I’ll complain under my breath to the more serious If someone bumps me, I’ll slap them. Agreements with ourselves often resemble if/then statements. We’re often unaware of them, despite their potential to trigger severe righteousness and justify all kinds of outlandish dickery.

Some agreements are more interpersonal. When I met my client Naomi, she told me, “My girlfriend Gigi likes to ask serious questions about our relationship at night, after turning out the light, when I’m eager to fall asleep. So, given what you’ve asked me to consider about my personal ‘agreements,’ I can see that mine relate to a need to wind down before bed—not get worked up in a heavy conversation when I’m trying to fall asleep.

“The agreement is that if Gigi starts discussions about our relationship late at night, I’ll politely let her know that, though I’m interested in what she has to say, I need to sleep, so now is not the time. That’s the agreement I want to have, the one that works for both of us when I’m in a good headspace. But when I’m not, when I’m groggy and exhausted, my agreement becomes: If you mess with me, I will snap, complain, or be dismissive even though you have important concerns you need to air. In this version of the agreement, I’m angry, she’s upset, and no one is sleeping well that night.”

We tend to make two kinds of agreements:

1.  Ones we consciously make when in a good place

2.  And ones we unconsciously make when we’re not

It’s quite possible that unless we’ve reflected on our agreements, we don’t know they exist. And even if we do, we may not spend much time looking at the differences between ones we think we have with, say, our partners, and the ones we actually exhibit. If we gain awareness of our most deep-seated agreements and halt their worst manifestations, our world will change. Your primary task then is to understand your existing agreements and renovate their expressions.

EXERCISE: AGREEMENTS

Agreement	How this agreement plays out in my relationships	The long-term impact on how I relate to others
Example A: Since I’m the only one who provides decent care in the relationship, I won’t allow others to contribute to my well-being.	One of us feels burdened and resentful, while the other feels rejected and devalued.	No one I’m involved with seems invested in dealing with problems that arise, so I act out to avoid getting close to others.
Example B: I accept whatever others offer me, whether it’s what I really want or not, but stew in resentment and feel ignored and hurt afterward.	I feel misunderstood and cannot imagine staying with my partner long-term, though for some reason I’ve been unable to leave.	I sense my partner doesn’t value me, so I quietly resist accepting what he does for me, just like he refuses everything I offer him.

Now, using the above examples as a reference, write down one or two of the agreements you’ve made with the world. Then think about the following:

•  What do your agreements suggest about how you use attitudes and actions to guard against other people?

•  How rigid are these agreements, and the attitudes and actions that go with them?

•  Is it possible these agreements have put you in a position to be hurt?

•  How malleable, given what you’ve learned so far, might these agreements be?

•  Can the transformation we seek come from changing these existing agreements between us and the world? What might that look like?

Dickery as a Relationship with the World

Being a dick puts us into a destructive relationship with the world. But we’ll learn to understand and address how being a dick is something that happens between ourselves and others, rather than something that happens solely within one’s self. Our “inner dick” suggests bad behavior. But it’s our “outer dick” that expresses it and manifests in toxic relationships with the world.

Dicks abound. We can be affected by them directly, as with a spouse, family member, colleague, or boss, or indirectly, when they’re politicians, administrators, insurance companies, law enforcement, or other institutions. All of these—be they humans or organizations—are in relationships with us. And without our realizing it, the relationships act as mirrors, reflecting our sense of self-worth.