SPENCER: Shawni, welcome to the Clearer Thinking Podcast.

SHAWNI: Thanks for having me.

SPENCER: Do you think if someone does a lot of harm, but they didn't intend to do it, we should treat it really differently than if they intended to do it?

SHAWNI: Yeah, I've been thinking about this actually quite a bit. I recently took an interpersonal dynamics course. We talked a lot about self-responsibility, and it's really interesting to me because I think a conversation about intent and impact is also at odds with the idea of self-responsibility, which is something else we're told to think about. So self-responsibility means I'm responsible for the way that I interact with you, the things that I say to a certain degree, but I'm not responsible for the way that you receive that information. And then impact over intent says, "Well, it doesn't really matter what the intent is of what you're saying. The impact on me is what matters." So when those two things are at odds, it's very interesting for me because where do we draw the line of which one matters?

SPENCER: Do you think we can view it as a spectrum? On the one hand, we can say, "All the way at one extreme, it doesn't matter what you intended; all that matters is the consequences." At the other end of the spectrum, we can say you're completely off the hook if you have good intentions, no matter how bad your action was.

SHAWNI: Yeah. I'm sure there is some middle ground there. I think something I've noticed in my own life is there seems to be a little less acceptance of selfishness. As we move through life, we're expected to consider how this is impacting somebody. Consider what this person has gone through in all of our interactions, and it's almost like what matters to us or how we're feeling is the last thing on the list of things that matter. When do we get to be selfish? Is it okay if sometimes it's not a middle ground? If I am taking self-responsibility and articulating something in a way that's not explicitly harmful to you, is it okay for me to just be selfish and say that can land however it lands, and it doesn't really matter what the impact is on you?

SPENCER: It seems to me that the predictability of the impact matters a lot here too. If you go up to someone and suddenly start shouting in their face and calling them hateful names, I think you can predict that's going to have a harmful effect on them. That's going to be very upsetting, and unless you have really good justification for it, that's going to be unacceptable. But if you say something very innocuous, you say, "Oh, I like how your hair looks," and they freak out and get extremely upset, that seems like it's more on them.

SHAWNI: Yeah, I would agree with that. I think that gets really interesting, though, when we start to think about how, as a society or a culture, we care a lot more about the things that people have gone through. We're always told to not assume what somebody is going through. Put yourself in their shoes. You have no idea what's just happened in their day or what's happened in the past for them. You're almost walking on eggshells because you don't know what else this person has experienced. You don't know if my innocuous comment actually is innocuous. At the end of the day, there seems to be a lot of weight put on what their reaction is to what you've said, and if they perceive what you have said to be something that is triggering to them based on a past experience they've had, their reception of what you've said matters a lot more than you believing it's an innocuous comment.

SPENCER: Yeah, it seems there are both contextual factors that matter and historical factors. For example, if you say, "I like how your hair looks," and it's to a friend, that's probably pretty reasonable. If you say, "I like how your hair looks," and it's to someone that you're managing as an employee and they take it as a come-on, that's very different and may be very inappropriate. Or if your doctor says it while they're asking you to undress, that's maybe even more inappropriate. But then there's also this person's story. Maybe they've been abused, and maybe their abuser made comments like that, and that's going to trigger that for them. In that case, we can completely understand why they might have a really negative reaction to that comment, but you may not have had any ability to know about that.

SHAWNI: Right. And so, how much of that reaction is your responsibility then? If this thing has happened in their past and it's painted the way that they're perceiving your interaction with them as part of being selfish, understanding that having empathy for the fact that maybe they're reacting in a way that is rational based on what they've gone through, and despite that, how much of that do I then need to go home and think about what I've said and how I could have done it differently and how I could have approached the situation differently, and how much of that is on them to understand, "I've gone through something difficult and it will paint my interactions going forward?" Ultimately, I am in charge of how I react to these situations or the way I move through the world.

SPENCER: It's funny because at the end of the day, as much as we might say, "Oh, how much is on you versus them?" We only have control over our own behavior. So we can't make someone else take responsibility for something.

SHAWNI: Yeah, it's interesting. I think the reason it's on my mind so much is I'm very guilty of doom scrolling on Instagram reels at night, and I see so many now, and obviously it's a bit of an algorithm, so it's showing me what I'm viewing, but I see so many that kind of dissect relationships and interactions and pathologize what is happening in those relationships, and this is a huge one. That self-responsibility piece doesn't seem to come up quite as much as the intent versus impact. There's a lot of focus put on it doesn't really matter what you meant when you said it. The way I got it was X, Y, Z.

SPENCER: It seems to me that it really will hinge on the degree to which it's predictable. If someone could not have predicted your reaction, I don't see how we could hold them responsible for it. If they both had good intent and there was no way they could have predicted it, how could they be held responsible for the harm? On the other hand, if they had bad intent, or they could have predicted the harm, if they had good intent, they could have thought for a moment that it would cause harm. It seems to make a lot more sense to hold them responsible.

SHAWNI: Yeah, it kind of touches on something else I was thinking about, which is who gets to assign the meaning of what is being said? In the situations we're talking about here, is it the person that's perceiving what is happening that gets to assign what is happening, or is it the person that's saying it? When it's intent versus impact, how much of that is determined by who gets to say what the intent is? You can say, "The way you said that to me made me misremember something I've said before, and therefore I believe you are gaslighting me." And you could say to me, "Absolutely, I'm not gaslighting you. I remember it completely differently." Then we're kind of at an impasse because who's to say? There's no magical adjudicator in the middle of the conversation that says, "Yes, this fits all the criteria for gaslighting." I think it gets really interesting when we start to assign this therapy speak to these interactions because we're potentially pathologizing very ordinary relationship dynamics, interpersonal dynamics that are happening.

SPENCER: Well, at the end of the day, you could break it down into what you intended to say, right? You might have had an intention. There's what you actually said, the literal words that came out of your mouth. Then there's what they heard. They may not have heard it properly. They could have heard different words than you actually said. Sometimes we mishear things. Then there's the meaning that they attributed to those words. At any one of those points, you could have a breakdown in communication. You could intend to say one thing but actually use different words. You could say a certain set of words, but they actually hear different words. They could hear the correct words, but they interpret them differently than you meant. That's just part of the translation process. It's a little bit like someone trying to read the Bible and saying, "What does the Bible mean?" You have to consider the literal original wording, the English translation of the wording, the interpretation of the translator, and the interpretation of the person reading the translation, et cetera. All these layers of translation are happening. Where's the right meaning? There really is no right meaning. There are just different levels of meaning.

SHAWNI: Yeah, I agree with that. I think we do ourselves a bit of a disservice if we're really rigid in how we think about our communication, and if we close ourselves off to just believing point blank that intent doesn't matter as much as impact, and we end the conversation there, it doesn't allow us to unpack those other layers of the conversation, like you just explained, the meaning, the intent, all of that. I think we tend to look for something we can wrap up with a pretty bow. For example, I've been hurt by this conversation. I believe you've gaslit me. If you push back on that, are you gaslighting me more? Therefore, the conversation just ends, and it leaves a lack of space for that self-responsibility. If I believe that everything that's happening in our interaction is you having X, Y, Z happening, and it's causing this to happen, I absolve myself of any sort of responsibility for how I interact with the conversation. I'm saying you misunderstood me, therefore you're twisting my words. Therefore, this is toxic behavior. I don't have to take any responsibility for my actions and how they're playing into this interaction and the places where I can improve, or it makes it a lot easier to just shift that blame. I think self-responsibility goes both ways as well.

SPENCER: In a prior episode, I interviewed the famous psychologist David Burns, and sometimes he does relationship counseling. He tells his patients, "Look, the good news is I have a solution to your relationship problems. The bad news is that you're going to hate it." And this patient is like, "What? What are you talking about?" And he's like, "Yeah, you just have to admit that it's 100% your fault. Every problem in your relationship is 100% your fault. If both of you do that, both parties do that, then I bet you'll make really good progress." Which is kind of a funny idea because it's like, "Okay, what does it mean? It's 100% both of your fault." But the idea is that if both parties try to take responsibility for what's going on and really try to make it better, often you can make rapid progress. Whereas if it's just blame shifting, both parties are just trying to blame the other person; it's unlikely that you're going to get anywhere in the relationship.

SHAWNI: Yeah, I think that's really interesting. I think even sometimes in our friendships, we encourage that thinking. If a friend comes to you with a relationship problem and they say, "Bob did X Y Z and it was awful," and your friend says, "Oh, that sounds horrific! I can't believe he would do that to you. That sounds like he's gaslighting you." There's no one really pushing back on us in our interpretation. So being the one to admit that we're flawed and at fault, it's really easy to pass the buck and just make it the other person's problem. People around us will support us in doing that. There's a real lack of responsibility around that.

SPENCER: I actually have a term I call "light gassing" for when someone reinforces your false perceptions, so it's the opposite of gaslighting. Gaslighting is getting someone to doubt their correct perceptions or memories or senses. But light gassing is what friends often do. It's like, "Oh, he's such an asshole. He didn't deserve you anyway. Blah blah blah," which might be true. But when they do it when it's not true and they get to reinforce your false perceptions, that's light gassing. I think that's a big problem, and I think sometimes people don't do it on purpose. They do it because they're getting a very biased viewpoint of things, and they're trying to be a good friend. They think a good friend reinforces their friend, even if they aren't sure what they're saying is really accurate.

SHAWNI: Yeah, exactly. And how much does that lend to actually solving the problem? Because if we're perceiving somebody else to always be the problem, and it's up to them to fix it because they have X Y Z flaw, and we have no flaws at all, and our friends are reinforcing that. Yes, I see that same pattern. It's exactly like you're saying. We're not really solving the problem. Maybe if our friends said to us instead, "Yeah, that sounds awful, but also, what are you going to do about it? What's your autonomy in the situation? How are you going to handle this differently?" That would push us to a lot more change than that group mentality of seeing the situation.

SPENCER: It's tough because I think when someone is upset based on something that happened, they could be in different phases. Sometimes they're just processing it; they're still trying to figure out what's going on. Sometimes they're acutely in distress, and they just need to calm down. Sometimes they're getting over it, and they're trying to figure out what the next steps are. I think if we come in as a friend and treat them as being in a different phase than they actually are, it could be a problem. If we're asking them to take responsibility, what could you do differently, but they're in an acute distress state, I don't think that's helpful. I don't think it's helpful to reinforce false beliefs, but I also don't think it's helpful to jump to giving them responsibility right away. Maybe start by giving empathy, help them understand what happened, ask them open-ended questions, and then if they seem open to understanding their role in the situation, you could help them figure that out.

SHAWNI: Yeah, that's interesting, and I think that makes sense. It touches on something else I've been thinking about, which is people that tend to have a lot of things they need support with or understanding of things they're going through. I recently read Lena Dunham's book _Not That Kind of Girl_, and it set off this train of thinking. Lena has had some legitimately awful things happen to her, and she has a lot of things that are just everyday annoyances or irregular relationship occurrences, but she requires the people around her to have a very deep understanding of everything she's gone through, all of her background information in their interactions with her. I've been thinking about that a lot in friendships because I think a lot of us have that one friend or a couple of friends who always seem to have something going on, some difficult situation they're navigating, and it can be really difficult to constantly support them through all the different things they're going through. It can be challenging when we're always needing to help them unpack it, help them digest everything that's happened, understand the triggers and everything that's led into that. You can't really give concrete advice because this other situation has happened, and because of this other situation, it's informed how they're responding to this situation. We need to be mindful of the past situation, and it just becomes so incredibly exhausting to support somebody going through this. Sometimes I learn about new terms, and they become my hyper focus. It's like the punch buggy thing, where you see a white punch buggy, and then suddenly you see it everywhere. For me, it's these terms, and as soon as I learn about them, I want to dissect every conversation relating to these terms. I recently learned about — and maybe this is a really simple term — but I recently learned about locus of control. The idea of locus of control is that an external locus of control is the understanding that things happen to us; there's fate involved and luck, and all these things are happening to you. An internal locus of control is the opposite: you are largely the captain of your own ship. You're in control of your actions and how you navigate through situations. It's a very different way of understanding the world. I think I have more of an internal locus. Until I learned that word, I didn't really understand my interactions with people with an external locus of control, just because I'd never really understood that people could be perceiving things so completely differently from me.

SPENCER: It seems it can be very difficult when you're at the extreme of external locus of control. If you think that everything's just happening to you and you have no ability to control it, obviously there are some people that have that in maybe a more positive way; maybe they think the universe is looking out for them and everything's meant to be, and they are at peace with it. But if it's a sort of helpless version of that, where they think the world is happening to them and they have no control, that's very scary and upsetting.

SHAWNI: Yeah, for sure. I was trying to find some studies for this conversation, and there actually are a couple different studies that have been done about how much your locus of control impacts things like trauma and PTSD. That's not to say that if you have an external locus of control, you automatically experience PTSD deeper, or that that's some sort of flaw. But it does say that having an internal locus of control has some ability to shape your experiences moving through difficult things and can sometimes impact your resiliency. When we're talking about those friends that come to us with a multitude of problems, a lot of times that seems to happen if people are perceiving things happening to them. Rather than interpersonal situations that are largely within their control, as long as there's nothing malicious or abusive happening, both parties in a conversation have a relative amount of autonomy in handling it in a way that feels right to them. If we are someone with an external locus of control, you're much more likely to perceive things as happening to you and be back in that space where intent versus impact matters more than self-responsibility. Your perception is that this harm being done in the relationship is being done to you, rather than you both being willing participants in a conversation, both having some responsibility for what's said, intent, impact, and all those different pieces. It's a lot easier just to say, "Well, this person is doing these things to me."

SPENCER: If you don't feel that you have any control over your emotional state, then when your emotional state gets out of whack, if someone makes you really upset, it's like, "Well, it's them doing it to you." Because you have no control. But if you view yourself as being able to control that first moment of emotion and react to it, calm yourself down, gain control, etc., then okay, they may have said something that upset you, but you were able to notice that you're upset, calm yourself down, and it wasn't a big deal. So maybe it changes your relationship to their actions.

SHAWNI: Yeah, and it allows for more actionable outcomes in any given situation. If you're always waiting on somebody else to fix a situation, you're reliant on somebody else, and none of us can control anything anybody else does. We can only control ourselves. Understanding our own power in a situation and our own ability to change the trajectory of a situation gives us a lot more control, and you actually are able to change your locus of control. It's not a hardwired thing that if you have an external locus, it's the only way you can ever be. You do have the ability to shift that thinking.

SPENCER: It seems these thoughts you've been having may have been born out of experiences you had. Do you have experiences you're comfortable sharing, maybe anonymized, that could give specific examples of what you're talking about?

SHAWNI: Yeah, for sure. I always say I've lived 20,000 lives in my 34 years. I think I've had a world of different experiences. Some very good, some very bad. I immigrated from South Africa to Canada. I have four neurodiverse children. I've gone through a divorce. I had a sibling pass away by suicide, so I've had these different things happen. The reason I started thinking about all of it a lot more was around the time of my second relationship post-divorce. I was a single mom at the time, working full time with four children, two of whom had autism, two of whom had very intense ADHD, and one had epilepsy. I was navigating life as a single mom, working full time, with nobody to fall back on. I had to pay my rent. I had to pay the bills. I had to do all these things, and I didn't ever really have a time where I felt overwhelmed. There were times when it was hard, but it never really felt like a burden because it was just my circumstances, and these were the things I needed to do to get through and be okay. I didn't want to just float through life; I wanted to have an enjoyable life. I also needed to do these things to have an enjoyable life. While that was happening, I had a succession of relationships with people who seemed to have an external locus of control. I can think of a few specific times. One partner got the flu, and this flu at the time was absolutely devastating. They couldn't go to work, couldn't leave bed; it was all-consuming. I remember coming home and being so frustrated because it's not a competition of how difficult life is, but the flu is something that happens to everybody. Here I am coming home from a 10-hour workday, picking up the kids from daycare, making dinner. People are screaming. There are doctor's appointments to make, and I never really felt like I had the opportunity to just lay down and say, "I can't do it anymore. This is too difficult." It became really frustrating in these relationships to have people experiencing what I perceived to be relatively minor life crises that completely debilitated them. The flu is a flippant example, but there were other examples of things that, in their perception, were really life-altering, and in reality, probably objectively weren't that impactful. It was always interesting for me to try to understand why some people find it so challenging to move through those difficult times, while for others, there are challenging times times ten, and they still manage to get through every day.

SPENCER: I think it's important to distinguish here when we're talking about actual lower resilience versus something that's sort of like after that. For example, one person could literally get a worse flu. They might get the same virus but feel much sicker. There's no test you can do to say how sick they feel. They could just feel really, really sick, much sicker than someone else who has the flu. Their resistance to that flu is lower. You could have that with life events too. To give an extreme example, after a school shooting, there would be a lot of kids who were there during the school shooting, and almost certainly nearly all of them will be very afraid, but some of them in the days after will start feeling better and they'll recover, while some will get PTSD. That is a resilience difference. I would distinguish that, which I think is some trait that is hard to define but is real and important, from something like, "Okay, the flu hurts equally bad, but their attitude towards it is such that they make it everyone else's problem," or they use it as an excuse to not do things, and therefore create a burden for others. Does that distinction make sense?

SHAWNI: Yeah, I think it does make sense. I think there are still some instances where resiliency is impacted by different things like locus of control. If you do have a PTSD reaction to something hugely traumatic, that's obviously a completely logical response to have. But I do wonder how much of resiliency is within our control, and how much is, as you said, just an innate thing that can't be explained and differs from person to person.

SPENCER: Yeah, and I don't mean to imply it's magic and couldn't be explained in theory, but maybe we don't necessarily have good explanations for it, and we don't necessarily have anything we can do about it. The child who went through the school shooting and did get PTSD doesn't want to get PTSD. They don't know how to not get it. So even if, in theory, it could be explained, or in theory there would be some way to stop them from getting it, it's truly not necessarily in their control. I guess I'm trying to distinguish here between things that are genuinely not in their control and things that are.

SHAWNI: Yeah, I think that's an important distinction because certainly in the experiences I'm describing, it's nothing on the level of those traumatic events, and it's not to minimize things that people are going through. It's just a curiosity about that resiliency piece and why some people are so overburdened by these things that happen in life. Why are people more likely to perceive themselves as someone to whom these bad things are happening? "I drove to work today, and somebody cut me off, and then my boss was rude to me, and then my lunch was burnt, and it's like all these things are happening to me, and why does the world hate me?" That view that carries on throughout the day feels exhausting, and it's certainly at odds with, as you said, the people who do go through really traumatic things and are able to come out the other side without it having a massive impact on their day-to-day lives.

SPENCER: Would you describe it as a victim narrative, or is that slightly different?

SHAWNI: Yeah, I think this one is very interesting, and I think even discussing something like victim mentality is a little bit controversial because nobody wants to feel like they're victim blaming or being the person to judge or decide whether someone's experience qualifies as something that would allow them to be a victim. Neither you nor I can say whether someone qualifies as a victim, but it's certainly really interesting when people go from being a victim in a situation or a victim of a situation to this feeling of being a victim throughout life, and that's really interesting to me.

SPENCER: So, being a victim throughout life would be related to this idea of external locus of control. If you're a victim throughout life, you don't have control over things happening. They're caused by other people doing them to you. Is that the idea?

SHAWNI: Yeah, it's the idea that these things happen to you, and you don't have a ton of control over them. Because you have that frame of mind, it's also really easy to find evidence that backs up that claim. So I'm going to take an example again from this Lena Dunham book. She had gone through difficult things, and she had friends and people around her, and she talked a lot about those things. She saw herself as a real victim of the situation. She kept discussing these things that were happening, and she kept asking people to treat her a certain way based on what she had gone through. Over time, people got exhausted or tired by the conversation, so they started to pull back. By them pulling back, it's another checkbox for her in this list of things she's been a victim of, "Now these people are pulling away from me, so I can't maintain friendships, and nobody wants to be my friend." Without having a piece of self-responsibility there, it's very easy to see it as everybody else that needs to change, rather than how you're interacting with people and how much of that is influencing how they're interacting with you.

SPENCER: There are all these borderline cases where it's sort of debatable whether someone was a victim or what their role was, et cetera. A particularly interesting thing here is even in really clear-cut cases where someone is clearly a victim. Let's say they were walking down the street one night in a safe neighborhood and they got attacked randomly. They're clearly a victim, no question. I think that framing themselves as a victim can actually sometimes be harmful to themselves, even though they're clearly a victim. For example, if they think of it as "there's nothing I can do to prevent this" and if that's what victim means to them, then that could be harmful because even though they didn't deserve it, they didn't cause it. There may be things they could do to stay safer in the future. That just might be wise. If, for example, in their area, there's a series of these attacks going around, they could take proactive action to try to reduce it, even though they're not responsible, even though they're not to blame at all. Sometimes we want there to be this dichotomy: either you're a victim and there's nothing you can do, or you're not a victim. But actually, you can be a victim, and also there's something you can do, and actually there's something you really should do just for your own benefit. Try to protect yourself.

SHAWNI: Yeah, and I think it is something that people feel really uncomfortable discussing because, as I said, even talking about it feels victim-blamey, and people don't want to be in a situation where they're socially perceived to be blaming a victim. But I think you can definitely say somebody can absolutely be the victim of something and still come out the other side without that completely changing how they then interact with the world going forward. In a lot of cases, it might be advantageous to actually change how they're interacting with the world based on the thing that has happened to them.

SPENCER: The unfortunate thing that makes this complicated is that there are a lot of people who do blame victims. I've seen this quite a number of times, and sometimes it's because people don't want to believe the bad thing about the perpetrator. The perpetrator seems like a stand-up person that people respect. Maybe they have a lot of accolades, and they do something genuinely bad, and then it gets turned around on the victim who's just trying to report it. I've seen this happen, and I think it's really horrendous, and I think it really does happen. Sometimes, though, it's actually the perpetrator who is trying to reverse victimhood. They're in the wrong, but by making themselves the victim, they try to protect themselves and harm the actual victim. It's really delicate because I think that to say that there isn't victim blaming is incorrect. I think it's a real phenomenon and actually an incredibly bad problem.

SHAWNI: Yeah, and we could even go back to the example of talking to your friends with a blind trust of what your friend is saying in a situation without all the contextual information, without both sides of the conversation. You're going into your conversation with your friend assuming that everything they're saying is true, and you're backing up everything they said, "Yes, that person absolutely is awful," but we're dependent on the person's perception of the situation. I think about this sometimes, and I don't know. This might not be something many people know about, or maybe it is. But there are these groups on Facebook called "Are We Dating the Same Guy?" In these groups, which are in all the different cities, people can post a picture of somebody that they've met on Tinder or whatever and ask if other people are dating them. Sometimes they'll just pop up on my Facebook feed, and the amount of vitriol that happens on them is incredible because when we're talking about everything that we've been discussing until now, perception and interpretation of actions matter so much. I can have somebody that I'm in a relationship with who is a bad communicator who doesn't really meet my needs, and we could just not be a good fit. I could also perceive that person's behavior as toxic or abusive and label it as that. Again, there's nobody there to say this is the exact line of what makes it just an unhealthy relationship or what makes it toxic. If I, the person who is perceiving it, then go on to one of these groups and say, "Oh, you know, this guy — nobody should date him because he is gaslighting, and he was narcissistic, and he did X, Y, Z," and then other people jump on and say the same things, it completely changes what might just be unhealthy relational habits into something really ugly. Rather than having the nuances of sometimes two people just aren't compatible, or sometimes communication styles aren't compatible, and it doesn't always mean that we've crossed the line into controlling or coercion. Sometimes somebody's ideals might just not fit with mine, but we go to the lengths of warning other people about this person based on our perception of them. It gets really dicey, I think.

SPENCER: That's true, but it's also sometimes true that people are actually really bad people who are really abusive and harmful. It seems to me almost like a false positive versus false negative rate thing. Would you rather have it be that more abusers get caught, but then sometimes innocent people get caught up in it and falsely accused, or that fewer abusers get caught, and more are just out there, and nobody knows that they're abusing, but you're protecting innocent people? There's a threshold. Where do we set that?

SHAWNI: Yeah, it's interesting. I think about my mother's relationship and her understanding. Without the therapy speak that we have today, her understanding was completely different. I wonder how it would have been if she was experiencing the relationship in this day and age. It is very helpful in a lot of ways to have labels and to understand behavior that is unhealthy and abusive and coercive, and it probably is better to err on the side of at least catching more of the abuse rather than not. But sometimes I do think it can start to veer too far the other way, where there is just an assumption that if somebody says it, it must be true. If I say, "You are a narcissist," it must be true. In fact, if you say that about me and I push back, it's really hammering home that yes, I am a narcissist because I can't even take accountability for what I've done. You really can't get your way out of it. You can't provide evidence to the contrary.

SPENCER: I've seen both real accusations and false accusations of these types, and it cuts both ways. Sometimes they're true, and sometimes they're not, or sometimes they're just in the gray area where it's kind of true. My preferred solution is precision of language. The more we can say, instead of saying someone's an XYZ, if we can say, "Well, what are they? What do you actually know about them? Can you be specific?" Or if you're using terminology like, "Oh, this person's narcissistic," I would prefer to use it in a more technical way. "This person meets these criteria of narcissistic personality disorder." They think they're superior to other people. They have low empathy, especially when others' interests are against their own. They have grandiose views of their own projects and think that they're superior to all other people," etc. To me, that actually helps clarify because words like narcissist by themselves, in the way they're commonly used, don't communicate that much information because we don't really know what the person's trying to communicate with them.

SHAWNI: Yeah, I'd absolutely love it if we could run around with scorecards and pull out the DSM for everyone. I think that would be great for someone like me who's more analytical and understands things similar to that. What is the exact criteria, and can you provide me some examples of when this person has met that criteria? I think that feels a lot better than just willy-nilly labeling a behavior as a certain thing.

SPENCER: Yeah, and obviously it's still not anywhere close to an actual diagnosis, but I think it's a lot more precise. Narcissist could just mean someone who disagrees with me confidently and rubs me the wrong way. Or it could mean someone who is a malignant narcissist and has a repeated pattern of years and years of certain narcissistic behaviors. It's a whole spectrum. Or take gaslighting. Gaslighting is sometimes just used to say someone says, "I'm wrong, and I'm really confident I'm right." That's not gaslighting. Gaslighting actually has to be a systematic denial of your senses or memories, or causing you to doubt your own ability to make sense of things.

SHAWNI: Yeah, I still wonder, without the diagnostic criteria, who ultimately in a situation gets to decide if we're both on either end examining a situation, and I feel confident that I wasn't gaslighting. You feel confidently that I was. Who ultimately gets to decide that? And why does it feel like we more often defer to the person making the accusation rather than the person doing the action?

SPENCER: When you say "gets to decide," do you mean gets to decide on behalf of the people, the third parties hearing about it, or what do you mean by "gets to decide?" Because obviously each person can decide for themselves. There's no contradiction there. You can decide one way, the other person can decide the other way, however you want. But maybe you mean sort of like as a society, who gets to decide who's right?

SHAWNI: Yeah, as a society, and if we take those examples of the Instagram reels, a lot of the advice from the pseudo professionals on those reels is, if you're experiencing this behavior, which is gaslighting or narcissism, this is how you need to react, or this is what that person needs to do to rectify the situation. And so, if we're at odds deciding what the behavior even is, that means that ultimately, to fix whatever has happened and to take a step forward, somebody needs to do something. So, if repair needs to happen, it's almost always going to fall on the person that has been told you have gaslit me. You need to fix it by doing all these things.

SPENCER: I think blame can work as a concept when everyone's on board. If something bad happens and Party A says, "You did this bad thing and harmed me," and Party B says, "You're right, I feel really bad about it." Blame works in those scenarios. I don't think blame as a concept really does anything in scenarios where nobody's taking responsibility. In those kinds of situations, I wonder if it's actually more helpful to switch to another mode and say, let's not talk about blame. Let's just talk about where do you want to go from here? Given what you believe about this person's character, what do you want? Do you want to be friends with them? Do you want to ever see them again? You can choose because blame doesn't really work unless there's someone, or you could have blame, maybe if you had a judge that you agree to follow, and then the judge could decide who's to blame or something like that. But just between two parties that don't agree, I don't know that blame really works as a concept.

SHAWNI: I think at that point is where the selfish piece comes in. If we don't ultimately need a label of what the behavior is, and we do practice self-responsibility, we also get to decide for ourselves what behavior we will and won't tolerate. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what the label is on the behavior. If it's not something I'm willing to be a part of, I have the opportunity and the autonomy to leave that situation. I can say, "This is just not something that works for me." I think that it's kind of difficult to be selfish sometimes because there is the expectation that there needs to be a reason for that selfishness. That's when the labeling has to happen. It's not okay for me to just say in most situations, "I just don't like how this interaction is going. I'm going to go." It feels a lot more clean cut for me to say, "You were gaslighting me. Therefore, this is toxic. Therefore, I'm going to take a step back, or I'm going to remove myself from the situation."

SPENCER: Yeah, it seems it helps if everyone realizes, "Hey, you don't have to keep interacting with a person." You don't need to explain it. If you don't like a person, or you don't like the way they treat you, or you don't like the way they make you feel, you can just say, "I want to end this relationship." Ideally, you would communicate that to them and try to explain why if they're willing to listen. Obviously, if they're unsafe or severely abusive, that's another matter. If they're a friend of yours, you try to explain it to them and you say, "Look, I don't like being around you, and here are the reasons why, and so I decided I don't want to be friends anymore." Fine, you don't have to have a label for it. You don't have to prove you're right. You can just say I just don't like the way I feel, and that seems to sidestep a lot of this.

SHAWNI: How important do you think it is to be likable?

SPENCER: Well, I think each person values it a different amount. Some people really don't care about being likable at all. They're indifferent towards what others think about them. Then there are people for whom how others view them is one of the most important things. You can see it in all their interactions. They're constantly trying to get people to like them. That's one axis. Another axis is just how useful it is because having people dislike you can be harmful to your life, and having people like you can be helpful to your life. Even if you don't care about it for its own sake, you might care about it because it's helpful to have people like you. I would say it's almost this two-axis system of how much you intrinsically value it versus how much you view it as something useful that you need to have, and yeah, I think you could fall anywhere in there. What do you think?

SHAWNI: Yeah, in that interpersonal dynamics course, it was interesting because it was for a work setting. I went into this course really not caring how likable I was. That was the last thing on my list of things that were important. I was going in for certain things that I wanted to learn, people that I wanted to meet, connections that I wanted to make, ways I wanted to understand my interactions with people. But in the workplace, especially, I don't find it to be super important how likable I am. Obviously, there's a part of that that has to do with influence, and there's a certain amount of likability that needs to happen in order to be influential in workplaces, but it was very interesting in this group setting of about 12 people because there was a real lack of authenticity that I found in the group because people were so nervous to say something to upset somebody else, so the likability prevented some really real conversations from happening because everything that was said, people were being really careful. "How is somebody going to interpret this? How is somebody going to perceive this? In a previous conversation, this person has mentioned this other thing that's happened. When I talk to them this time, I'm going to be really careful in how I have this interaction," and that filtering really prevents these cool conversations that I think can happen if we just let likability take a slightly more of a backseat. It doesn't mean we don't have to be likable at all, but I think that's where that selfishness comes in as well, because it's okay if I prioritize myself in a conversation sometimes. It's okay if I prioritize my needs. It's okay if in a relationship it's not something explicitly wrong that's happening, but it just doesn't feel right for me. It's okay for me to step away from that, and I think it's really important to be authentic. I value people in my life the most based on how authentic they show up for me, and so they can be really persnickety, crotchety people. But if that's authentically who they are, I implicitly almost trust them more, and I enjoy our interactions more. To me, I don't know that likability is the most important thing.

SPENCER: Certainly, being disliked can cause a lot of problems. At work, it can cause problems, but even in friendships, if your friends' friends don't like you, or if your partner's parents don't like you, it can cause lots of issues. On the flip side, focusing on being liked too much really does reduce authenticity. It can lead you to act the way you think others want you to act, rather than being who you really are. That can get people into a bind where they develop friendships they don't actually enjoy very much, or they feel like imposters, where they feel like they're playing a role rather than being themselves. They can make friends, but the friendships don't deliver on what friendship ideally should deliver on.

SHAWNI: Yeah, I would almost argue that likability or dislikeability in friendships is not important. It's just information. It's just a data point. If I am in a group of people and they dislike me for whatever reason, that's probably information for me to understand that this is not the best group of people for my thoughts and views, and maybe I would be better suited to a different friendship. I don't know that it means you need to be likable because, as you said, then you might end up in situations where you're not really meeting your own needs. You're not in friendships that are serving you and relationships that are serving you. If showing up authentically means that people dislike you, I think very quickly you'll be able to find where you fit in and the people that understand you and your views.

SPENCER: I think there's an important distinction here, which is when people don't like you because of who you genuinely are. That I think is the case you're talking about. You're being your true, authentic self, and people don't like that self. If everyone didn't like that self, maybe that presents a really big problem for you because it makes it difficult to have social connections. But if there are enough people that like your authentic self, then maybe you just need to gravitate towards those people, which I think is what you're advocating for. On the other hand, there are things people do that get others to dislike them that are not really about being authentic. They could be annoying behaviors or saying things that are offensive, but it's not really that it's authentic for them. They just literally wouldn't have said it if they'd realized the implication, but they didn't think before they spoke. I think that kind of thing, where you're not being inauthentic, you're just being a little more cautious not to be an asshole, is probably good to try to be likable in that way, as long as you're not sacrificing authenticity.

SHAWNI: Yeah, I would agree with that. I do think that if you're saying offensive things and people around you are pointing that out, and you choose not to act on that, then you have some self-responsibility to take that information and make of it what you will. If you absorb that information and decide to make changes, and then are likable to people, great. If you're not, then maybe that group of people isn't the right group for your offensive thoughts.

SPENCER: Right. For many people, there are different sides to them, all of which are authentic. Like, "Oh yeah. With this group of people, we joke a lot. Maybe we tell inappropriate jokes, but I wouldn't tell that around my step-parents; they'd be offended," or whatever. And that's okay, I think, because it's one side of you, and you don't need to show that side of yourself to everyone, but a different side can come out in different places. I think that's fine. I actually tend to do less of that adjusting, code switching, than most people. I once had a friend say to me, "I'm so confused how people like you," and I was like, "What do you mean? That sounds like an insult. I don't know." She's like, "No, I mean that as a compliment because you don't do much code switching at all. You act so similarly in different situations. I would assume that it's impossible to be liked if you just act like one person," because she has this thing where she feels like she has to constantly adjust who she is around different people in order to be liked, and it's impossible to be liked otherwise. So that was fascinating to explore.

SHAWNI: Yeah, that is actually very interesting because I would say I'm probably pretty similar. I think I show up pretty much the same way across the board, and it does get me into trouble. I can be pretty blunt. I can come across as unempathetic because I'm more on the analytical, logical side, but I don't think I'm lacking in empathy. In the workplace, that can sometimes come across as a little bit intimidating. I've received that feedback a lot, but also it's been really advantageous for me in my career to have that kind of personality. I might not be universally liked in the workplace, but I've still been successful in my career. With groups of people and friends, I show up the same way, and I have a lot of people that have massively gravitated towards that. On the flip side, there are people who are extremely put off by me and the way I come across, and it's not something they can ever be okay with. In that interpersonal course, we had to split into smaller groups and become a support group for each other. It was really wild because the feedback I was hearing quite often from people was so dual. There was a lot of duality. Either people perceived that they really enjoyed talking to me and wanted me in their support group, or I had a huge group of people that did not want me anywhere near this support group because they felt that I couldn't be supportive, that they were extremely intimidated by me, and wouldn't feel comfortable sharing their inner thoughts. I've always navigated through the world knowing I'm not everyone's cup of tea, but despite that, I do think I show up pretty consistently in all the different facets of my life.

SPENCER: Why do you think they weren't comfortable sharing their thoughts? You think they thought you would judge them?

SHAWNI: Yes.

SPENCER: Were they right?

SHAWNI: Yes, I would. I would judge them.

SPENCER: So they were right. Okay [laughs].

SHAWNI: Yes, I would. I recently learned another term, and it's called decoupling, and it can get you in a lot of trouble apparently because if you strip away the context of a situation and just come down to the core issue at hand, people can feel really dismissed, as if their emotions don't matter as much in a situation. For me, if I'm going into a situation in a group like this, where the whole premise is that we're supporting each other, providing feedback in real time, then I'm going to do that. So if you say something and I disagree with it or I have a thought, I'm going to tell you, and that can come across as really judgmental. I do know how to filter myself, and there are certain situations where I would know to filter that. But ultimately, in most situations, I feel quite comfortable sharing my true thoughts about a situation or how I'm understanding it. I don't feel the need to soften that by adding all this other language on top to make it more palatable for people.

SPENCER: And why not? Why not make it more palatable? Is that inauthentic in some way? Because I think I could see that for some people, but for others, they say, "Well, why not just make it more palatable? What's the harm? It just makes it easier for them to hear it."

SHAWNI: Honestly, that just sounds exhausting. It sounds like a waste of time for everybody in a situation to be reacting and thinking about how everybody else is perceiving it and how I need to soften my tone. I'm going to watch what I say. I'm going to add these extra words. You're going to do the same thing. In a five-minute conversation, the amount of brain power that goes into all those different social aspects just feels like a waste of time when I can just tell you what I'm thinking, and I would like for you to do the same, from that we can draw our own conclusions.

SPENCER: See, that's interesting. I think that is fundamentally a value judgment, which people can differ on. Some people can say, "No, I'd rather have me and my friends all be thinking about the impact we have on each other and trying to say things in a kind way, even if we're giving negative feedback, trying to say it in a kind way that will be received well." Yeah, it takes some extra brain power, but it's worth it. That's just being a kind friend to each other. But I could completely see your perspective of being like, "Well, that's a lot of effort I don't want to exert, and we should all just be able to take that kind of thing. I want to be around people who can take it, where I don't have to constantly do that work." It's worth observing that different people may take different amounts of work. I do wonder whether that takes more work for you than average, because let's say it took less work than average, maybe you wouldn't even perceive it as a burden.

SHAWNI: For sure. My answer was definitely about myself and not a judgment on people that do the opposite. I just know for myself, naturally, that is never going to happen. It will take effort to do that, and it's okay if people that need that emotionality aren't drawn to me because I'm not able to provide what they need in an interpersonal relationship. I'm going to seek out the people that are going to be authentic in my view and just tell it like it is, and we can get through these conversations like this. You can tell me exactly what it is you're thinking. I'll tell you exactly what it is I'm thinking, and for me, that does feel like less work. But I can certainly understand that is not universal, and many people will feel the opposite.

SPENCER: How do you react if a friend has something really terrible happen to them, where they are a victim? How would you react in that situation?

SHAWNI: I do think it's easier for me with the people that I truly hold in high regard to give that emotional empathetic language too. It is a lot of work for me to remember that there are certain steps that go into it. First, you need to be there for somebody emotionally and check in with them, "Are you wanting to talk about it? Are you looking for solutions?" I know for myself, I'm solutions-driven. It's very easy for me to go into those conversations with, "Okay, here's how we're going to fix it. I'm going to do X, Y, Z, and we're going to go to this place, and this will all be sorted." For a lot of people, that's not helpful and can actually be harmful if they just need to speak about it. When I go into those conversations, I try to think quite a bit about how somebody needs me to show up for them, and maybe that's why those conversations can get exhausting for me over time if somebody is showing up like that a lot. If there is more emotionality required around it, for the most part, I think it feels okay.

SPENCER: I find that often what people want to bring to those conversations when someone else is in need is what they would want in the same scenario. For example, with someone in my life who I know very well, they don't like empathy when they're going through something difficult. They find empathy makes them feel worse. Whereas often the first thing I want is empathy. If I'm feeling really bad, if something really bad just happened to me, I usually want empathy as the first thing, not a solution right away. But they actually want optimism right away, and then solutions. I don't like optimism. If someone's really optimistic when something bad has happened to me, my brain argues against the optimism, so it backfires. We just have different things we want, and we've learned over time to get better at providing what the other person wants, even though our first instinct is wrong because what we want is our first instinct. I'm wondering, do you feel the need to just give what you would want in those scenarios?

SHAWNI: For sure, I would probably be alarmed if somebody came to me with empathy first because my preference would be, "Please help me out of this mess and tell me exactly how we're going to do it." That's definitely how I'm showing up in those situations. But I have learned over time to take a second and check in with somebody to understand. I think it would be a lot easier if we could all wear little name tags with some of these social codes written down. "Approach me with empathy," that would be lovely. But in the meantime, I guess the conversations are a start.

SPENCER: Do you consider yourself neurotypical?

SHAWNI: That's interesting. Okay, so yes and no. I've never been formally diagnosed with anything, and having kids that are neurodiverse, I know the pitfalls of people who start to label themselves as autistic based on a TikTok video or an Instagram video. "Oh, I arrange things, or I'm orderly, therefore I'm autistic," and that harms people who are actually diagnosed with autism and require substantive care. I feel like it's a tricky space for me to be in, and I don't really know how comfortable I feel pursuing a diagnosis at this stage in my life, but I definitely understand that my thoughts are not typical or are not what I understand to be typical. I think a lot of diagnostic criteria, especially in females, can be quite different. I can see how a lot of that stuff happens for me. Socially, I think I completely understand the mechanics of how socialization should happen. Therefore, I'm able to perform it. Is that the same thing as social differences? Because it's not the stereotypical way of going through social interactions.

SPENCER: You understand more on an analytical level – you practice doing it as opposed to it's something intuitive that you're new to.

SHAWNI: Yeah, so that probably is an answer right there. But I've just always had the sense that my brain doesn't quite work the same, and I haven't really had a reason for myself, because I know a lot of people are like, "Why do labels matter?" And especially as an adult, it's not like you're going to be receiving services or something where children need diagnosis because they need early intervention and all those things that aren't really applicable to a later in life diagnosis.

SPENCER: Well, some adults do need services, but yeah.

SHAWNI: For sure. Sorry. I'm thinking about myself in this situation. I'm not going to require extra support. So I don't know how important it is overall. But for me, I definitely prefer understanding when things fit into a neat little package. I think it would help me a lot to have a lot of understanding about myself if I was able to label behaviors as certain things. I was a very strange child. I wrote a blog the other day about how I went to Montessori school and I was reading by the time I was three years old. In Montessori, you get to choose what you do on any given day. You could pick math or you could do geography, whatever your interest is. My interest was window washing. For literally 12 months at school, I had a squeegee in a bucket, and I would just wash windows all day long.

SPENCER: They would let you do that?

SHAWNI: And nobody redirected you because the whole thing is child-led. So if you're going to wash windows for a year, you're going to wash windows for a year, and then after that, they had these china sets, and you could do tea parties, and so I would pour tea for six months at a time. So all of those, I realize that's not very typical. In grade one, they wanted to skip me to grade two, but then I did it for a little bit, and my mom was worried that I'd be socially awkward, and I was anyway, so it didn't really matter. But she moved me back, and then they put me in a bunch of gifted programs. The gifted programs for me were weird because I wasn't one of those students that studied and read all the materials and wrote everything perfectly and was getting these amazing grades all the time. I was just gifted in that I asked too many questions. I'd always ask why. Why are we doing this? Why did you get that answer? The teachers were probably just sick of me and trying to send me off somewhere else. But I did go to all of those programs, and I just skated by in them. I didn't do anything exceptional with them. That was a very long answer to me not knowing if I'm neurospicy at all.

SPENCER: Your window washing story reminds me of my story from childhood. My teachers would always give us writing assignments. The teacher started noticing that every time we had a writing assignment, I would always write an instruction manual on how to do something, and eventually they banned me from writing instruction manuals. So the opposite of letting the kid go with what they want to do, and I was like, "Oh, that sucks. I can't write instruction manuals anymore."

SHAWNI: Were they for new products that you had invented?

SPENCER: They were things like how to make a paper plane. I was really young, but I wanted to write an instruction, which is kind of funny because there is something about my brain I think is oriented to explaining things. That is very core to who I am. It's just funny that I was doing that at a young age. Before we wrap up, you're a parent, you've got four kids, a lot of experience, and it sounds like a challenging situation. I think you mentioned you have two kids that are autistic. Is that right?

SHAWNI: Yeah.

SPENCER: But you told me earlier before this conversation that you think sometimes good parenting can look like it's actually bad parenting from the outside. I'm curious about that. Tell us about that.

SHAWNI: Yeah. I actually pulled the real information about this, so I'm not just spouting off nonsense, but my oldest has a presentation of autism that is not widely recognized in the U.S. and Canada, but it is recognized in the U.K. It's called PDA, pathological demand avoidance, or some people refer to it as a persistent drive for autonomy. What this means is it's a combination of autism and severe anxiety that really needs a huge sense of autonomy to feel physically safe. The body's perceived threat is always super high, and everyday demands just shoot that into overdrive. Where a typical person has a cup and goes through life, they wake up, brush their teeth, get ready, and then something difficult happens at school, so that pours a little bit into the cup. They have a difficult interaction with a peer that pours a little bit into the cup. A PDA person will have a cup, and brushing their teeth is pouring some into the cup. Waking up is pouring some into the cup. Putting their shoes on is pouring some into the cup. Before they've even gotten to school, their cup is completely filled with demands. It is really interesting because what results from that is behavior that can look absolutely bratty, honestly. There are kids with a lot of tantrums, violent outbursts, meltdowns beyond what a tantrum could look like, name-calling, and all of these things typically happen around very low-key demands. Things that wouldn't even cross your mind as being a demand, usually surrounding hygiene, eating, sleep, and school. Things that for any other child would just be a given are a constant battle. It's not widely recognized in Canada or the U.S. It is in the U.K. There are some therapists in Canada, where I am, who are familiar with it. My daughter was diagnosed with level one autism, which, depending on where you are, sometimes they do use levels, sometimes they use functioning labels. She is high functioning, and it's problematic because I would argue she struggles more compared to my other daughter, who has level two autism, lower functioning. She actually struggles more because she appears completely typical. The concessions that are given for somebody with a visible disability or with behaviors that make sense when it comes to a disability aren't given to my oldest child because she doesn't necessarily appear like there's anything going on. The expectation for her behaviors is the same as any other typical person of her same age, and there's a real lack of understanding for behaviors that fall outside of this norm. It has been extremely challenging working with doctors and specialists and even within my personal relationships because parenting her can really look like I'm just giving in to a very bratty child. If I'm asking her to brush her teeth and that turns into a two-hour meltdown, I know that demands impact those behaviors a lot, and there are some really odd concessions you make. You have a waterless toothbrush, like those disposable toothbrushes, or you have a regular toothbrush, and you put both options there and say you can do either one or nothing, and that's okay. From the outside, it looks like, "Why are you giving options? It's teeth brushing, just like the child should just brush their teeth." It seems really odd to say you have all these options. For bathing, there are body wipes, skipping a shower tonight, bathing, showering. Again, from the outside, it's like, "Well, your child needs to bathe. You just tell them they need to," and from the outside, without that context of what is happening and what's happening inside the child, and understanding that it's a stress response and it's completely out of their control, it just looks like really crappy parenting.

SPENCER: Yeah, do other parents try to guilt you or shame you for it? Sometimes they're like, "Oh, just get a handle on your kid. Discipline them, make them do the thing."

SHAWNI: I actually have found it's not parents; it's people without kids. I think even for myself, before I had kids, I had so many ideas of what my life would look like, and I find the people with the strongest opinions don't really have children. I know as a single mom navigating relationships, it's been extremely challenging because people coming into a relationship without a ton of experience with children have this view of what those relationships should look like and how the children should act. If it doesn't fall in line with that typical, it's really jarring for them. There is a lack of context because for me, I've lived 11 years with my child and tried everything. I've tried literally everything. I've tried authoritarian, gentle parenting, rewards charts, sticker charts. I've tried literally everything. I have tried it, but they haven't been there for those. When they come and see where we're at today, it's like, "Well, why don't you try this? Why don't you try this?" They don't know that all those things have been tried.

SPENCER: Yeah, it seems the actual mental model of what's going on in the child's mind is critical to knowing how to parent well at the end of the day. Let's say it was just fear, and for some reason, your child feared doing these things. Well, normally, giving the option to skip things you're afraid of actually reinforces the fear. Best practices would be, "Okay, you help the child build a fear hierarchy, and actually do the things, maybe building up to it," and eventually they overcome the fear. But clearly, there's something else going on. It's not operating like normal fear, and if you put it in the wrong box, you could be doing something that's actually harmful, even though it appears to be the right thing.

SHAWNI: Yeah, and that's feedback that I've received a lot is that for typical anxiety responses, exposure therapy makes a lot of sense. If your child is anxious about going to school, saying they don't have to go just reinforces that, and they don't really get to challenge that anxious feeling and come out the other side knowing, "I made it through, I'm okay." That advice is given to me constantly that you have to push those anxiety responses, and I did that for a while. I pushed so hard, and I sent my daughter into complete burnout to the point where she was completely mute, couldn't speak at all, wasn't bathing for a week at a time, couldn't eat at all, not even her safe foods, was just a shell of a person just lying there. That was the result of pushing, and doing a ton of research into PDA and understanding how to support that, and understanding that pressure was making the whole situation so much worse. I was able to see that it's kind of weird that the things that I've tried in the past that have been really helpful have actually been in line with this way of thinking, and I've just naturally arrived there through trial and error. But in her case, removing those demands completely and giving a lot of options, there's something called declarative language. They say to use declarative language, which means instead of saying, "Are you hungry?" or "What do you want for dinner?" you would say, "Food's here," and you just kind of place it there. It completely removes that interaction and that perceived pressure. Saying, "What do you want for dinner?" there's the pressure of, "I have to decide what I want," and so on. It's a completely neutral situation of just the food is here for you when you're ready. Learning all those different tips and tricks has been completely life-changing. It has helped so much for her, but it's even more challenging now when people come into our lives because coming in at this stage and seeing the way that we operate, it does look like absolutely horrific parenting from outside standards of what a typical interaction should look like.

SPENCER: This reminds me of an interaction I had recently where someone who bought my new book, _The 12 Levers_, asked me how you help someone who has misophonia, which is typically triggered by mouth sounds, but it could be other sounds as well, other everyday sounds. It sometimes gives people rage or extreme disgust. It can be really intense. Many people have a more mild form of it, but some people have it to such an extreme degree that it's really disruptive to their life because maybe they have to be around people eating near them, and if they're filled with intense rage, that's really unpleasant for them and might cause them to act inappropriately, or at least in a way that is really upsetting to others. I was thinking that kind of sounds like maybe exposure therapy would work, but I don't know, and I told them I wasn't sure, but maybe exposure therapy is relevant. Afterwards, I did a little bit of research on it, and actually, I think exposure therapy doesn't work. It's not that well studied. I think probably more research is needed, but at least the initial evidence is that maybe exposure therapy doesn't work. It suggests that whatever is going on in the brain is a bit different than the kind of things that happen with exposure therapy, where you get accustomed to the thing and then it starts bringing you less negative emotion over time. Here, somehow you don't get accustomed as you get exposed to it, which is fascinating and suggests you need totally different strategies. I think it just goes to the point that you need a deep mental model of what's really going on sometimes to solve things, and if you pattern match, you can end up with a completely backward solution. Maybe even make it worse.

SHAWNI: Yeah, I think the scary thing for me has always been something that people bring up a lot, which is people say to me, "Don't you think that by doing this, you're basically doing her a disservice? As she gets to be an adult, the world is not going to cater to her in this way." The world is not going to tell her, "You have these three options for brushing your teeth." Yes, she would, but maybe at a workplace, she's not going to be presented with all these different options. One of the big things is if negative behavior happens, they say something verbally, really rude or whatever. Pushing that can actually make the situation a lot worse. It's better obviously to let them regulate before you have those conversations. Some people will see that and say, "Don't you think that that's teaching her that it's okay to react in that way? What are you teaching her about the world?" That has always been the scariest thing to me because at this moment, I'm doing everything that I believe to be right based on my understanding of what the problem is. I might be wrong, but I might be right, and I can't really predict how that's going to impact her as an adult. One thing I do know is that for her to be dysregulated to the point where she's not able to speak, not able to eat, I can't see a way for that to continue indefinitely and turn into a healthy, well-adjusted adult. My hope is at this age to support her, regulate her by providing her with these options to lower demands so that I can slowly over time teach her the skills to be able to regulate herself to then carry that into adulthood.

SPENCER: They might be right that she will face those challenges, but they might be wrong about the best approach to take right now. It's intuitive. If she's going to face those challenges, then you need to present her those challenges now. But that might be completely backwards. It might be that that is just going to leave her in an overwhelmed state where she can't function, and that's not going to help her. They are still operating under the mental model that you have a challenge, you present the challenge, and then the person learns to overcome it, and then they're stronger because of it. Not that you present a challenge, and then that actually makes the person more and more dysregulated to the point where they can't function. It seems to me that there's a common pattern in some of what we talked about today, which is that we sometimes come into a situation with a certain perspective on it, but that perspective may not be the same as the reality of the situation. Having the wrong perspective can actually cause a lot of harm either to ourselves or others. What would you want to leave the listener with today after this conversation?

SHAWNI: Just one sentence, which is to ask yourself, "What am I treating as obviously true because I've stopped noticing the assumptions underneath it?"

SPENCER: Shawni, thanks for coming to the Clearer Thinking Podcast.

SHAWNI: Thank you.