Both the Cause and the Cure
I hope it has turned out to be a good thing that the person you bought this book for returned it and said, “You might want to read this too.”
One more thing. You’re going to wipe out. You’re going to get this wrong, blow it, tank, fail. Down in flames you’ll go. And that’s okay. It happens and there’s no way around it.
Don’t panic. When you first experience tumbling back into your dick routine, you’ll likely feel like you’re “wearing dog shoes”—a term used by SoCal surfer dudes for a person who just had a severe wipeout. Though slung about like an insult, being told you’re wearing dog shoes should make you proud. There’s something to be said about having the biggest, gnarliest wipeout—oh, and being seen doing so—because that means that despite not being the best surfer ever, you’re putting yourself out there. Cowabunga! You’re going for it!
It might seem odd that wiping out, and then trying again with the help of others, would be a goal for recovery. But breaking out of isolation can feel like breaking some kind of law, the law of dickery, which decrees that thou shalt not genuinely communicate with others, lest the anxiety that comes with caring about people befall you. So we wipe out, turn to each other for help in the recovery, and then do it all over again.
Initially, there’s an ironic dilemma to not being a dick:
1. You’re no longer good at being a dick.
2. But you’re not good at not being a dick, either.
There’s a lot of fine print in romantic relationship about how intimate we’ve agreed to be. While being a dick causes emotional distance, at times the heated, angry engagement actually feels intimate. In reality, this is but a substitute for intimacy. Wearing dog shoes in romance means exposing those feelings about ourselves that have historically come out through bad behavior—distancing, off-putting, downright dickish actions—and finally using what had been a wipeout as an opportunity to heal old wounds together.
Indeed, when wearing dog shoes as a recovering dick, the goal is to work through the dynamics that made dickery somewhat bearable. This road is one on which we can expect to wipe out often. Success requires immense amounts of perseverance, as we get back on the board, struggle to paddle through the breakers to a new set, and attempt to stand, knowing we may fall yet again.
One of my favorite quotes on this sort of tenacity comes from Samuel Beckett, in his novella Worstward Ho:
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Home to Roost
What happens when we do hit bottom? When we wake up, say, in a long-term relationship and realize the impact our bad behavior has had on ourselves and others?
“I can’t help the fact that for the past decade your financial contributions to this family have sucked!” said Jerome.
“What?” Gina yelled. “You apologize right now! You claim you’re making amends, but I’ve told you many times how hurtful it is when you hold your income over me. You constantly demean my contributions.”
“Okay, so I apologize, I take responsibility for my behavior, and I tell you I’m going to change, then you attack?” Jerome countered.
“No—you admit to some behavior,” Gina said. “I still have intense feelings about how you’ve treated me. You think you can just instantly take everything back?”
“No,” admits Jerome, “I realize it’s not that easy. And I wasn’t trying to withhold a full apology. I’m just not good at this.”
Look, the people in your world are likely to have feelings about your past behavior, and if they feel safe doing so, they may very well express them. That sounds scary, I know, but there’s a silver lining.
“I’ve hung in this for a long time believing there’s a good soul hiding beneath that awful attitude,” Gina said. “I’ve wanted to believe there’s more to my part, too, than stubborn masochism.”
“It has been scary to let my guard down,” admitted Jerome. “And expecting you to respond graciously to my amends, or else, maybe caused me to revert to my old, unkind ways.”
Hearing others share their experiences of what it’s been like to be around a dick is rough.
“I’m at my worst when I’m worried about money,” Jerome said. “I’m so afraid of being unable to provide for us that I take it out on you.”
“You do!”
“I don’t know how to deal with this,” Jerome said. “But I’m sure that dealing with it by myself is killing me.”
As we’ve explored throughout this book, when we’re dicks we invite engagement from others, but we’re overly protective against an attack, which eventually comes in the form of what is in fact a counterattack. Living that way can be the loneliest thing imaginable. And this is true even when we’re married. Sometimes, depending on how resistant we are to allowing ourselves to be cared for, we can feel isolated in psychotherapy as well.
“It isn’t just killing you,” Gina said. “It’s killing us.”
What this tension does, however, is create an opening to express the pain, fear, sadness, and disappointment we’ve been living with for all that time.
“Let me try this again,” Jerome said.
Repair
Developing a healthy relationship, with a strong, secure attachment, is not a linear process. In fact, some of the steps along the way to a functional relationship are painful fits and starts. We tend to think failures to connect, trust, or be empathetic signal doom and gloom ahead. Yet on the contrary, these are opportunities to right wrongs together and put the train back on the rails.
Developmental theorist Edward Tronick believed “rupture and repair” was the cornerstone of health.40 It’s not the smooth flow of harmonious interaction that leads to healthy attachment, Tronick stated. It’s disruptions between the two parties that eventually lead to mutually agreeable resolutions or repairs.
As psychologist David Belford explains it in his paper “Breaks in the Flow:”
Attachment theory tells us that when parents respond to their infants cries in a more or less consistent, predictable and nurturing way, the infant will begin to build a sense a [sic] trust and safety in their world (“I know I will be taken care of”). The repetition of these types of experiences of being responded to builds and reinforces “healthy” neural pathways in the infant’s brain. In much the same way, through the repeated process of disruption and repair, the infant adds to his knowledge or blueprint of the nature of relationships, increases his tolerance for stress, and begins to realize a sense of agency in the world. The disorganization or dysregulation that follows a disruption and the subsequent repair of that disruption is part of the infant’s development and crucial to building secure attachments. It is the chief mechanism by which the infant begins to make meaning of relationships.
My client Tyler dealt with the impact of an insecure attachment style for decades. “I couldn’t stay in a relationship for longer than nine months,” he said. “For the longest time, it felt like something was wrong with me, some basic capacity was missing. At that point, my interest—sexual and otherwise—completely fell off. Of course, it didn’t feel like something was wrong in the moment. It seemed like the flaws were hers. And that’s when I’d act like a stereotypical dick.” He paused. “Then I met Isabella. Funny thing about her—she could be just as big a dick as me.”
Eureka!
As a partner, Isabella continues to interest Tyler. But as much as I believe in the importance of a good fit, their compatibility has less to do with mutual dickishness than it does a relational dynamic that frequently requires both participants to put down their weapons and diligently repair the damage they’ve caused one another. They argue, fight, and trigger bouts of insecurity and conflict in one another. And these patterns of relating finally did allow them to see and experience their ruptures as opportunities to repair together.
Rupture, ironically enough, is the royal road to the kind of repair that allowed Isabella and Tyler to heal from the dickish damage they were causing each other. When they got a good foothold on doing inventory and committing themselves to the process of rupture and repair, they could look into their own histories and discover the real damage of their dickery was to themselves.
“She kicked my ass—and my heart,” Tyler exclaimed.
Love as Transformation
If you think about it, the very first form of love we experience is attention. Without having it from birth and in something approximating the right dose, we will die.
Is being a dick therefore about seeking love? Is it like Goldilocks, a matter of finding one that’s “just right,” or when starved, going to dramatic and often backfiring lengths to obtain such attention?
Maybe, but most of all not being a dick allows us to love and be loved—what my colleagues and I have refer to as “relationship sanity” in our book by the same name. Relationship sanity is contingent on functional dependence on one another. The truth is, we can adjust to difficult circumstances, so when we’re hating deeply, it’s less about whatever seems wrong in others and more about what we cannot stand in ourselves. It’s human nature to judge each other. But if we recognize and accept that this is as much a judgment of our own shortcomings, failures, and dickery, we’ll be far more willing to have compassion and empathy for others and ourselves.
EXERCISE: IMPLETIVE—ONE LAST TIME
Once I understood what being a dick was all about, the time between me recognizing someone as a dick and reacting to them dwindled down to nearly nothing. What do I care, at this point, if you’re a dick? I have zero control over that. Me on the other hand, with Don’t Be a Dick at the ready, I can prevent myself from having a bad day, each and every day.
So one last time, without overthinking it, write down the words you’ve used to fill in the blank for #@!%:
Stone Cold Dick
I haven’t been speaking about physical violence, infidelity, or criminal behavior because the ways of the dick are such that everyone in the world knows they’re a dick. Everyone, that is, except the dick. And the above-listed extremes don’t qualify as subtle or easily hidden from the self.
It’s possible that being a dick has worked fine for you, that it gives you street cred or money from the passive income you gain through doing minimal work at the expense of your underlings. You don’t kill people, cool. But you don’t empathize with others, either. So along with wielding what feels like superior power, you maintain emotional distance that protects you from those gut-punches in life that occur when someone you care about goes through a hard time, especially when all that can be done is to listen and love that person.
You won’t have to worry about vulnerability; it comes from trusting others will not hurt you due to past harm or envy. And even though being a dick invites counterattacks, our armor is strong. Security flaws are unlikely because no one can exploit what they know about us. No one knows a dick.
So many common, easily overlooked (or, self-justified) ways to be a dick, right? Glaring at people who annoy us, line-cutting, sulking, silent scorn, making unreasonable demands, and offering uninvited “constructive criticism.” They all seem to do the same thing: Put us dead center in other people’s line of fire. Being a dick makes you a moving target, and as a moving target you won’t have to worry about sinking roots into a relationship. And the sum of this mighty effort—as we’ve seen, it’s actually tough to be a dick, especially a stone cold one—is that intimacy, accepting ourselves and others as we are, is out of the question. Being a dick is a powerful defense against that most stereotypical human fear: intimacy.
Almost any circumstance in our lives can threaten us with intimacy. In the process of living our lives, there is always the chance that we might get to know each other. See and be seen.
Living the gamble of vulnerability—rolling the dice on acceptance or rejection in each new encounter—is harrowing business. Perhaps that scary question from kindergarten—Do you like me?—is still with us. In the crosshairs of other people’s responses to our need to be cared for and accepted, our most primitive terrors come forward. Uncertain outcomes that seem as random as a coin flip—heads you like me, tails you don’t—tempt us to be dicks. Hostility is an effective way to manage anxiety, as it dissociates awareness of the fear that vulnerability exposes us to. If you’re a stone cold dick, you might need to take creative measures to avoid this pitfall. Get a plant or pet fish, or something else to help commit yourself to keeping something fragile and vulnerable alive.
Though we all act like dicks from time to time, and while we have a tremendous capacity to inflict heartache and pain, we are also natural healers of the wounds we cause and bear in our relationships.
Satyagraha
Let me tip my hand, fully, and admit that writing this book has been my form of Satyagraha, a nonviolent resistance to my own dickery. While I’ve preferred to share anecdotes of other people managing their dickery, I can’t ignore my own reactions to a certain SNAFU that ground me down for years. Through analysis, I’ve discovered that I was recently driven by a terrible sense of being un-okay with the people I worked with. This anxious, counter-productive energy manifested in me trying to impose my will to get a collaborative project off the ground.
We’d experienced modest success in a previous project, and the next thing I knew I couldn’t let things happen as we had before. Instead, I felt driven to make success occur. We were a small rag-tag group of healthcare professionals trying to force our goose to lay golden eggs. But I forgot to that in simply coming together with people I admired for a project we all cared about, we were already okay.
I forced that project, the team, and myself to contort into shapes that made us all feel insecure, angry, unappreciated, and even vengeful. Eventually, we were all trying to make a fairly successful and enjoyable project become something else. At that point I started to despise the thing. I wanted to kill the project and my colleagues. Everyone was acting like a dick, I thought. And they thought the same of me.
When I found myself blowing my top at an East Village restaurant at a partner who, I believed in the moment, needed to “Shut the f—k up,” I was able to acknowledge that I’d hit bottom. In that moment, I became what an old mentor of mine called “sweetly reasonable”—willing to put the shovel down and stop digging.
It didn’t help that some family friends were sitting at a nearby table shielding their eyes to spare me the embarrassment of being seen acting like a dick. Finally, I paused and committed myself to Satyagraha, which is Sanskrit and Hindi for “holding onto truth.” A philosophy of nonviolent resistance to evil (or for our purposes, dickery), Satyagraha can be applied to civil disobedience, to seeking alternative political and economic systems, and to correct daily living. Satyagraha conquers through conversion, offering neither victory nor defeat but rather a new harmony. It goes beyond simply not harming those who we believe have harmed us.
Satyagraha was utilized in two of the most significant movements against oppression of the 20th Century: The struggle against British colonization in India led by Mahatma Gandhi, and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States led by Martin Luther King, Jr. Both Gandhi and King took inspiration from this nonviolent philosophy to accomplish what had previously seemed impossible. Even violence was met with nonviolence. And yet each man’s society resisted the dramatic cultural and political transformation away from violent oppression. The success of Satyagraha relies ultimately on the willingness of its opponent to relinquish power in favor of a higher ethical standard. Yet in systems of oppression, nonviolence is an undesirable, alien response. The assassinations of Gandhi and MLK sadly prove how challenging and revolutionary such a stance may be.
Neither leader wavered on his commitment to peace, and each remained conscientious of the well-being of his violent oppressor. Gandhi once told followers to desist from protesting at 2 p.m. each day because it exposed the fair-skinned British soldiers to harsh sunlight, an act of violence in his eyes. Depriving ourselves and others from positivity via dickish behavior is likewise a violent act.
As I see it, Satyagraha is a resistance to acting like a dick, especially when that behavior seems justified. Reframing what could be seen as passive aggressiveness, Satyagraha has the potential to transform stonewalling into something productive and constructive—a pause. The idea of Satyagraha is not just to “live and let live,” but to “live and help live.” Therefore, it wasn’t sufficient for my colleagues and I to simply walk away from our destructive business relationship. To commit to Satyagraha meant pausing what felt like a downward spiral, and during that pause we each kept the focus on ourselves. We found a willingness, then, to treat each other and the project with proper care and respect. But like in recovery from any other compulsive or addictive substance or behavior, what we got wasn’t some healed-for-all-time solution, but rather more of a reprieve we had to renew on a daily basis.
“One day at a time,” I sometimes said to myself. “I won’t hit the self-destruct button on this project today.” Satyagraha allowed us to take inventory and arrive at respectful collaborative solutions to the issues that arose between us one day at a time.
This book has been my response—not reaction—to a dickery that temporarily derailed and nearly destroyed a project I loved. I’m showing up. I understand this is the first and most essential step to being okay—living comfortably in my own skin and accepting the world and myself exactly as we are.
How Will You Be Remembered?
“Loving, kind, and generous,” says Mike. “That’s how I want to be remembered by my kids and grandkids. My grandmother was that way to me, and thinking of her has me wondering what words or feelings will come to mind when others remember me.”
There is a shorthand way we’re held in other’s hearts.
Think about your parents, grandparents, childhood friends, teachers, and a person who hurt you, like say your first love. How do you describe them in conversation? How do you describe them to yourself? Who is this person to you? If each of us gets just a few descriptive words in the hearts and minds of those we care about, we should act consistently in accordance with what we wish those words to be.
Like my client Mike, it’s good to consider what our legacies will be now. “I talk to my wife, Hannah, about it when I realize I’ve been critical of my kids,” he said.
That might sound like a suggestion to constrain your behavior to that of a good, upstanding, wholesome person. Just, you know, to not be a dick. But it’s not that simple or easy. How we’re held in others’ hearts and minds is not just about what we give—that is, the good or bad we express—but how we accept what others offer us, bond, and allow each other to matter. Letting others contribute to our experience has a different value than simply spraying our supposed generosity all over everyone while we keep the significance and value of what others provide to a minimum.
Mike knew this. As a teenager, he argued frequently with his parents, and at one point he ran away from home and moved in with the group of friends that he and his parents had been fighting about. Predictably, with those “rough kids,” he partook in all kinds of destructive behavior.
“I didn’t know how to stop,” he once recalled to me. “Nor could I ask for help. Within a month, I felt like I was dying. I’m not sure how she found me, but one day my grandmother knocked on the door. Some wasted kid opened it. She asked for me, and I stumbled downstairs, and she said, ‘Mike, you know I could really use some company.’”
Mike shared this through tears.
“That was all she said. Something about this coming right when I felt completely betrayed and alone got to me. She wasn’t trying to play the do-gooder there to rescue me—my parents actually forbid her from interfering—she made it clear I would be helping her feel less lonely. We would get through what was happening in our dysfunctional family together. I was on a dark path, but this changed that trajectory for me.”
Perhaps not being a dick comes more naturally to people like Mike’s grandmother than it does to others. But when we consider the impact our behavior has on others, we might think once again about how an inventory doesn’t have to be scribbled in red ink. We might pause to remember that not being a dick is not just about preventing ourselves from getting our asses kicked, it’s also about inviting care, concern, and love from potential allies.
“There were many times in the early years of my marriage and when I first became a parent that I harped on the message to, ‘Look at everything I do for you.’” Mike said. “I went on and on about the time and money and career moves I’d sacrificed to be a more involved father and husband. I focused narrowly on how much I gave rather than on what I received. I was insufferable, a complete dick. I had to pause—as you suggested—and remember how my grandmother became the warm, loving presence that lives on in my head. The last thing she would ever do was try to convince me of all the good she’d done for me—how loving and generous she was. Instead, she showed me.”
Mike’s grandmother was about as far from being a dick as is humanly possible. But she still was somehow able to get the message across that not being a dick can leave a legacy that inspires others to be kind to each other. Actions like hers have a domino effect through time, influencing how people in her orbit treat others, as well as the responses invited by those people’s better nature. Loving legacies can even help us catch ourselves in the act when we behave in ways that run counter to the good role modeling we’ve received.
“My grandmother’s generosity was not about showing off or proving to others how kind she was,” Mike said. “Inherently, she was a sweet, loving person, and she made it emphatically clear I was a source of great joy to her. That to me is the pinnacle of generosity. She made everyone feel like they mattered.”
Again, say Hello!
As I said at the start of this book, you are going to run into that guy—the one you think is a dick. You’re going to run right into him. It’s written in the stars that he’s your new love interest’s good pal. And that woman whose kid your child is desperate for a playdate with? Oh yeah, she thinks you’re a jerk because of the time several months ago when you didn’t say hi. Now you’re going to have to sit next to her on a bench by a playground for the foreseeable future.
Some part of you knows, admit it, that when you smile at that person, when you take that mighty effort to be nice, you’ll find out they’re super kind. They always are.
So, go on, say hello.