Care over Caretaking - Loving without Losing Yourself

If it ever crosses your mind that the person can't handle what you're going to say to them, what you want to say to them, if you ever think that they're too weak or incapable, those absolutely are key indicators that you're in it, that you're in the caretaking side of things.

Welcome to The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others that leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I'm Brett Kistler, here today with my co-host, Joe Hudson. What is wrong with making people feel better? When a lot of us think of codependency, we think of alcoholism, or we think of addiction, a lot of the extreme examples. But codependence is something that we really do a lot in our daily lives, and this happens in very subtle ways in relationships, personally and in business. So today we're going to talk about the difference between care and caretaking. So Joe, today I want to talk about something that we've all dealt with before, which is a really common scenario where you, you want to make somebody feel better and you think that this is going to help and you do something specifically with the goal of making them feel better and it actually just ends up making things worse in the long run. And we've, we've talked about that in your courses and that we've labeled it the term caretaking, which sounds a lot like care. And people think about care as a good thing. And then caretaking becomes this thing that kind of is a disempowering aspect. So what is caretaking and how did you come across this as a concept worthy of inquiry?

Semantically speaking, you could call it like codependence or caretaking. And just for the sake of this conversation, let's make caretaking the side that's in, the lexicon is codependence, more on that codependence side and caring for being something that's not in that camp. So just, that's how I use the word. So I just wanted to define that for everybody who's listening. If you heard, I was laughing as soon as you were talking about wanting to make somebody feel better, because that's actually the way that I would define the difference between caring for somebody and caretaking somebody is the idea that you're trying to manage their experience. And particularly, this gets particularly dangerous when you're managing their experience for your experience. For example, the wife who comes home and is doing everything she possibly can to make sure that her husband doesn't get mad at her. Is she doing that to manage her husband's emotion, or is she doing that to manage her own emotion? Is she trying to avoid fear or is she trying to avoid his anger? And if she's trying to avoid his anger, just for him, what would be the purpose of that? What would be wrong with letting somebody be angry? People get angry all the time. Humans are meant to get angry. All mammals have moments of anger. What would make you wanna stop it if it isn't for trying to manage your own experience? And so that's where codependence, or in this case, what we're calling caretaking, is it's when you are trying to manage another person's emotions through what we call care to make it so that you don't have to experience your own emotional situation. You don't have to experience something that you don't wanna experience.

So in a sense, it's taking care of yourself. For example, that wife, maybe what she's avoiding is being attacked in anger. By somebody larger than her. And so she's trying to make him feel better, trying to manage his experience, trying to tiptoe around, around the lava in order to prevent her experience from deteriorating or going in a direction she doesn't want.

That's exactly it. I'll give you an example. I had a woman come to me and she was talking about this exact same situation. She was talking about how my wife My husband gets angry at me and I don't know what to do and there's nothing I can do. And it was very much like she was not capable of changing her reality because she had this angry husband. And she genuinely felt that, right? This wasn't something like her mind was wanting to be a victim in this way. It was generally, she felt trapped. That's the feeling that she was having. And I said, ah, BS, you like it. And she, she didn't like me saying that very much, obviously. And I got a smile out of it and she looked perplexed. And I said, tell me what would happen if you, every time he started getting angry, you just got up and you just walked out. And you just consistently did this for, I don't know, let's call it 10 weeks. Every time he started losing his cool, you just got up and walked out. How long would he still be yelling at you? Like, how would this work for him if this anger thing that he does stopped working? Or what if every time that he yelled at you, you were like, "Yeah, baby, I like to see your anger. Give me some more. Tell me, like, tell me how angry you are. Tell me how frustrated you are. You have nothing to be ashamed of. I can accept your anger." Well, how, if you did that for 10 weeks, how long would it be that he was getting angry at you? Now, obviously, I'm not talking about if he's hitting her. If he's hitting her, then, or being, you know, physically abusive or even mentally abusive, that's not a relationship you want to be in. And even if you are in that situation, leaving is a far better situation than trying to make them feel better because you're just telling them that this works. If I get angry, you will stop being yourself and you will and you will try to manage my experience, which gives me all the power in the relationship. And so that's what codependence is. That's what caretaking is. It's when you are trying to make someone else feel better so you don't have to feel it. And that's an extreme version of it, but there's everyday versions of this too, which is the most obvious one that you see is somebody's sad and somebody else says, "It'll be better." What makes you want to take away their sadness? Is it that you don't want to feel their sadness? Is it that you don't want to feel your own sadness? What's the problem with them being sad? Sad is beautiful. Yeah. Good cries are amazing things for people. Is it because your mom and dad told you not to cry for whatever, 20 years? And so now you're just doing whatever you can to make sure that you never have to hear tears? So that's codependence. Whereas caring for, the other side of the equation, caring for is when you're moving not out of any desire to change the person. Your desire is just simply to relish and enjoy the feeling of caring for somebody. It is an unbelievable joy to care for somebody. And it's just a great experience to have, but you're not trying to change them in any way. Their reaction to your care is completely unimportant. And the way you can tell internally that you're in one or the other is resentment. Caretaking eventually will lead to resentment in you. You will start resenting the person and they will start resenting you because they have no choice but to resent you because you're treating them like they're kids. You're treating full adults like, I have to manage your emotions, I have to make sure you don't get upset, I have to make sure you're not sad. Eventually the person's like, screw off, I'm capable, I can take care of my own emotions. What makes you think that you're better than me? That's the reaction. And then the person who's caretaking is like, look, I've given you all this stuff, like I'm sacrificing myself every day for you. I'm not speaking my truth. I'm trying to position my truth for you in such a way that you can hear it, and you are angry at me? Well, forget you then. You know, like, this is the rigmarole that people put themselves through instead of just, I'm speaking my truth to you, and that's my responsibility. And your responsibility is to have whatever emotional reaction you wanna have to it, and I'm not gonna try to change that.

What about situations where the person really is dependent in some way? For example, it's a child or an elderly or sick relative, and there's some extent that you actually want to care for them and some extent that you resent it also. But if you don't, you're not okay with the alternative of them just being completely left on their own. How would you pick apart the care and caretaking within that kind of situation? And how do we know the difference?

Yeah, there's so many of these that are, they're very different from one another. They're very different from one another. A child is very different than say, an alcoholic father, which is very different than say, a mother who is bipolar, which is very different than somebody who's, developmentally disabled. So all of those are, they're very different things and everybody likes to clump them all in. And basically them clumping any of this in together is saying, wait a second, I don't want to stop being a caretaker because then I'll have no control. And what would my life be without control? Which by the way, is the same reason that the abuser or the bully or the yeller is saying like, I'm not going to stop yelling because then I have no controls. Everybody's got their control in different ways, right? Behind that question is mostly that. Behind that kind of question is like, "Wait a second, there are people that I really have to take care of." And behind that is mostly that fear of losing the control that one does have. So for instance, with a drug addict, you know, there's whole rooms of Al-Anon built to teach those living with addicts how to take care of themselves and not take care of the addict. So that one's an easy one. That one's a complete illusion. When I say it's a complete illusion, what I wanna say is not that the person is bad or ignorant. They might be ignorant, but they're not bad. Is that they actually just can't see through it. That they've been trained their whole life. They have been trained their whole life to take care of people emotionally. They think it's their job. It's like very hard for them to see outside of that thing. Yeah, but with children on the other hand, you actually do have like quite a responsibility to take care of kids. And yet a lot of people caretake kids. You know, please don't cry, Billy. It's a perfect example of it. And so the difference, the only way you can really tell when you're at the difference is when your resentment starts building, when you are trying to manage their experience so that you don't have to deal with a certain feeling that you're having.

I think back to the kid or the addiction example, this is where a lot of these topics get the response from people like, "Oh, this sounds really great in theory. This is probably true for a lot of people, but my situation is dire. If I, for example, if I don't take care of my addict brother, then the next thing that might happen is that he dies of an overdose." And that happens for real all the time. And so, Like somebody may be like, no, I absolutely cannot accept the possibility of my brother dying of an overdose. So I need to do at least the minimum amount of, you know, caretaking or care or enabling that should at least keep him alive. And that can make this really, really difficult to pull apart because a lot of people always feel like their situation is different. Their situation is not the textbook case. Theirs is actually, they're trapped. What advice would you have for somebody who feels that way they feel resentment and they also feel like they have no other choice.

I would say first, look at the other choices that you have and really ask yourself the question. So for instance, with the addict, if I don't pay for this addict to live, then they'll be homeless. Or if I don't take care of them, then they'll die of a drug overdose. What makes you think that they're going to not die of a drug overdose or not go homeless if you're taking care of them? Like, how does that work in your brain? Do you think that every single person who has a drug overdose is because their brother/sister/mother/father stopped caring for them? Do you think that every one of them that's homeless is because they stopped caring for them? So taking a look at the other side of your logic and deconstructing it is an incredibly important tool. The evidence that I have seen is that the caretaking drives the person into the addiction further. And there's evidence of this where the, the alcoholics who have the hardest time to break alcoholism are the people who have independent wealth and they have nobody particularly depending on them. So they have no bottom to hit to get out of it. So most of the time, the codependence is just making it so that the person doesn't hit their bottom. And so you're actually hurting them. You're not giving them— you're again trying to avoid somebody from feeling pain so that you don't have to feel the loss of your loved one, right? And if you're being honest with yourself, and here's, here's the trick, if you're being honest with yourself, feel the loss. Feel the loss before you even make your decision. I'm not saying stop or start, just feel the loss. Like, oh yeah, if I stop this, they're gonna die. Feel your person's death, mourn it, go all the way through it so that you're making decisions that are based on what's best for them, not because you are trying to avoid the grief.

Right, that was a really good point you brought up there about hitting the bottom because a lot of these difficult emotions, their purpose is for us to feel them so that they can teach us the lessons that they're meant to be teaching. And if you're protecting somebody else from feeling their emotion and receiving their lesson, while also using that as a tool to avoid yourself feeling the difficult emotion and learning your lesson, then you really can't get out of the pattern.

Yeah. And take a look at it the other way. So occasionally I get to meet these beautiful people who have dedicated their life to caring for a mother or father who is passing, or a child who has such bad disabilities that they, you know, can't leave their wheelchair, and they've dedicated their life to these people in a way that's healthy. Like, there's a care for it, and that you, you can spot them a mile away. And the reason you can is because they have just gotten so soft and their heart is so big. There's a way in which they have used this experience of caring for somebody to dissolve themselves, to sandpaper their edges. And they're just soft people. I don't mean soft like not strong. They're far stronger than most people. I mean soft as in that they're not rigid. And if that's happening to you, that's a pretty good indicator that you're in the caring for camp. And then there's other people who, even if they're caring for those same people, but more likely they're caring for an addict or they're caring for somebody who's abusive to them and they feel like they can't get out of it, they're not getting softer. They're getting more and more neurotic. They're getting more and more spun up over the years. They're losing friends, they're becoming more isolated. And so that's another way of, in the long term, that's another way to tell the difference between which camp you're in. Is it softening you up? Is your heart getting bigger? Is there less resentment or is there more resentment and more feeling of trappedness and more, spinning.

So let's talk a little bit more about some of those subtle forms, because, you know, it's pretty common to talk about like alcoholism or some of the, like some of the deeper forms of codependence. And for many people, I think that just feels like a separate category. Like, oh, I don't have these problems. That's not in my life. You know, my life is great. Everything's good. And then just not seeing that there are always, like, there's only asymptotic reduction of these, you know, habits, it seems over time. And everybody does, you know, at least a small amount of it. And most people are doing some amount of it. So like in a romantic relationship, for example, how can you identify the smaller forms of subtle caretaking that are occurring and codependence and transform that into care?

I had a friend once and he was asking, he had a strong faith and it was a Catholic faith and he was a sweetheart of a human. And one day he came to me and he said, I have a hard time, Joe, Knowing when I am supposed to take care of myself and when I'm supposed to take care of others. And I said to him, "Wow, so your God's a masochist." Hmm, explain. What I'm saying is that if your God has set up a world where it's binary, where it's either self-love or the love of another, then something is, the design that this God has created is one that's masochistic. It's one that is to torture. And it's not the way that I see the world working at all. What I see is that the thing that is true in us, that's the compassionate treatment of ourselves, is also the compassionate treatment of the person across from us. Now, everyone says, "Well, what's best for me is, you know, I just wanna go out and drink, but I gotta take care of my kid." Like, is you going out and drinking or partying, is that really what's best for you? Like, I'm talking about what's really best for you. And what's really best for them? Or somebody says, "Well, what's really best for them is if I'm just really nice and I take care of them." Is that really best for them? Or is what's really best for them, for them to learn how to be independent, for them to be told the truth? So that's, I think, the overarching way that I look at this is that the most compassionate thing that you can do for yourself is also the most compassionate thing you can do for someone else. And I see this all the time when someone finally breaks through into But this is what I want. And then when they're in a relationship where they're constantly caretaking somebody, and then they're like, oh wow, this is what I want, I will almost always then ask the question, and so what about that is not the most compassionate thing for the person who you've been caretaking?

So that gets almost into a different topic of like, what is the deeper want? You might think that what you want is just to keep the peace and the harmony in the relationship and just not to get yelled at or not to have somebody be sad at you. But is that what you really want or?

Yeah, exactly.

Do you really wanna be authentic?

Yeah.

I've run into this a number of times in my relationships.

That's exactly right. Yeah, so it's how deep are you gonna go down that want hole? How deep are you gonna go down that compassion hole? If you're gonna go down compassion to the place where everybody everybody's nice to each other, this law doesn't work. But if you go down to the deepest level of compassion, which is, I am willing to sacrifice our relationship for my love for you. I'm willing to sacrifice what you think of me. I am willing to sacrifice this person, you, who I love, because I know it's what's best for you. Then the law works. Then God isn't masochistic. But you asked a question, so I started with this, this story, just so that I could say that when people are like in the more gentle forms of caretaking each other, there's some pretty easy signs. One is you notice that you're managing how you're gonna say it. So if you're worried about how you're gonna say it so that the person across from you can hear it and accept it, and you've run over multiple solutions, multiple ways of talking to them in your head. So with the hopes that you're going to get it so that they'll have a different reaction than they normally do, then you're definitely in it. Then you're definitely caretaker.

Yeah, I resonate with that. I've experienced a lot of times where I'll have some issue or challenge in a relationship and then I'll go to a safe space to process it and like where they aren't present. So it's not really vulnerable to them. I'm just kind of doing this processing with whatever my group is. And then I'm like, "Oh, okay, great. Now I've gotten to my core wants. I've gotten to my authenticity. I know what I want. Now what's the way that I can say it in a quick paragraph that I can hide behind?" Yeah, that's exactly right. And that will exactly get this point across without me messing it up or having to hold my ground in a sense, or truly feel into myself in the moment. I think a lot of that comes from being, from there being fear of constricting in the moment. Like this happens a lot of times where when you're away from the person that you're having this challenge with, you feel relaxed, you feel loose, you feel open, you can feel the love for them. And then the moment you're with them and perhaps you're being accused of something or you're being, there's emotions that are uncomfortable for you that are being either thrown at you or they're just coming up in the other person and they're uncomfortable for you. Then we constrict, and then all of a sudden it seems as though we lose access to all this stuff.

Yeah, that's the trick in all of this work. All of this work is those moments of defensiveness, those moments of resistance. How do we fall in love with them? How do we fall into them? How do we open up and allow them to permeate us? The more felt sense of it is how do we open up and let it permeate through us? And that is the kinesthetic or the somatic experience. And the other way to look at that is to say, oh my gosh, when I get in front of them, I'm totally gonna go constrict and I'm totally not gonna say the right thing. Great, fantastic. That's like wonderful news. It means it gives you practice. It's like the best batting cage in the world. And you can even start off the conversation and say, hey, I'm nervous that in the middle of this conversation, I am gonna constrict and I'm not gonna bring my full true self here, and I don't want that. What I want is to love you with my full self. And if you see me constricting, if you see me not being myself, please point it out to me and just give me a couple minutes or seconds or whatever I need to get back to being able to bring my full truth to you.

What about accusations or attacks that come as a consequence of, of speaking our truth in this way? And it may be not just from the person that you stop caretaking, but it may be from the your entire friends group or your family or everybody around you, like it may be normalized that what you are doing in this caretaking way is actually how you're supposed to be. And if you're not doing this, then you're a bad person. Like if you're not enabling your partner or like, I mean, we could talk about the addict again, or we could talk about elderly parents. If you're not taking care of your elderly parents in a particular way, and everybody around you is externalizing this guilt towards you. What's the way to process that?

Yeah, that's a good question. Before we get into that, there's something back a ways that I wanted to touch back on, which is how do you know when this is happening? And we talked about a couple of the ways that you can know it's happening, but there's a really, there's a key one, which is if it ever crosses your mind that the person can't handle what you're gonna say to them, what you want to say to them, if you ever think that they're too weak or incapable, and/or if you feel like, oh, if I'm gonna say this, they're gonna fly off the handle at me, those absolutely are key indicators that you're in it, that you're in the caretaking side of things. If you think they're too weak, then basically you're treating them like they're weak and they will get resentful. If you're scared of them getting angry, then they definitely have learned, they have definitely learned that getting angry gets them what they want and you're delivering it for them. So those are just two other indicators that really let you know if you're in a relationship that that's happening. And when you get really attuned to this, you'll just, you'll notice that it's, you said it's asymptotic, the way I'd make that very real is that you'll just notice how often, like, just listen, go to the person you love, listen very carefully to every sentence that you're speaking to them. Notice how many of them are subtle excuses or subtle hedges, not completely owning yourself, not completely owning your experience, hedging it, shaving it, so that they will think differently of you than what you're scared they're gonna think of you. If you're scared about what somebody's gonna think about you and you're modifying your behavior in any way, that is a form of caretaking. And so it just gets more and more subtle. It's subtle till you see it. It just gets more and more subtle.

A lot of what we've been talking about seems like it's a one against one kind of situation where there's a person that you're caretaking, But if you have, for example, a community, and you're concerned about what that community is going to think or how they're gonna respond, then you're actually caretaking them.

Yes.

As well as the entire situation.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And that can happen in a workplace. I see this in workplaces all the time where you have a group of people and they're just not speaking their truth to each other. And this is death, especially for, You know, if it's in manufacturing, it's not as much of a death. It just means you're giving up a massive advantage. But if you are in like a tech or a creative, this is death where people can't speak their truth and feel really safe about it and be just blatant and be able to be wrong. And for other people to say, I don't think that's right. And for having that open discussion, that's where great things happen. And if you're gonna be inventive or creative or do something out of the box, you need that. And there are companies, back to your example, whether it be everybody wants you to take care of codependent or alcoholic mom, or everybody wants you to, you know, work from 6:00 AM till 11:00 PM because that's what the company is doing. And if you don't do it, then you're gonna suffer the consequences. Whatever that situation is, there is a real possibility that you will be ousted from the group.

Yeah.

There's also an equally real possibility that you will force the healing of the group.

Right. Yeah. And bringing that into a business context, there's a real like tragedy of the commons-esque thing about this, where if an entire group is slowly trending towards optimizing for harmony, optimizing for fitting in, optimizing for If there's an unseen value around to be a team player, you are staying as long as everybody else is staying after work. And it's really getting to the point where it's not good for anybody individually. And then everybody also fears that if they're the one to speak up about it, then they'll be ostracized from the group. Then they're allowing the entire group culture to deteriorate.

Yeah, and there's no leader, meaning, there is somebody who's in charge, but there's no leadership happening. And the healthy cultures are the one where everybody is acting like a leader from time to time. And if you mute people as the boss, or if you, the employee, decide to be muted, you are killing leadership in the group. Because leadership comes from, I am going to lead the way into a new place. You don't lead the way into the place you're at. You, you lead the way into the place that you have not been or that you are going to. And the only way that happens is being the tip of the spear. That's how leadership works. And you can't be the tip of the spear if the whole thing is optimizing for harmony and/or optimizing for competitiveness and/or optimizing for intelligence even. Optimization is for what's happening right now, and that changes in business. And so the people have to change as well, and new places have to be led to.

From a leadership standpoint, how would you apply that to accountability or like discipline, like with regards to, say, if there's an employee that's not, that's not meeting certain criteria and maybe the coworkers are trying to protect them because they like the employee. And so everyone kind of hides each other's flaws or shortcomings.

Yeah, so the question is, how do you hold them accountable? The idea that holding somebody accountable, particularly accountable with love, could ever be a problem is a good determination that you're in codependence. So if I'm speaking my truth, I don't want to work with somebody who can't deliver on time, or at least tell me why they can't deliver on time and tell me how they're gonna compensate for it. I don't wanna work with that. My truth is I don't wanna work with somebody like that. I also notice that people, if they work like that, aren't happy with the way they work. So it's not good for them, it's not good for me. And to own that want and to say, this is the reality that I choose to live in, whether you're the boss or the employee, is 100% acceptable. Now, if you say it to your boss and your boss gets pissed and you say to your boss again and they fire you, then you are going to get exactly what you asked for, which is a work situation in which people are reliable. If that's how you want to work, it's a good thing that you're out of that situation with the job. And if you're the boss, then it's a good thing that you've lost that employee, even if it's a short-term pain in the butt, because you're going to have a long-term great team. If this is the reality. And you're also gonna create a culture where everybody knows this is how we behave in this culture, and then it just starts having a gravity of its own. The reason that you wouldn't hold them accountable is because you're being caretaking, and the reason that you wouldn't fire them is because you're being caretaking, and then they will become resentful of you. And that happens all the time in business where you see somebody who's been trying to be nice to their employees and the employees are resentful. And then you see the boss, you know, in the group next to them and they're dead straightforward and they're very clear about their wants and the expectations and they do it with love and gentleness and they are cared for and a deep sense of loyalty has been created by that kind of leadership.

So a lot of the times when people start working with a new tool like this, They will do what they think is actually working with the tool, for example, not caretaking, and they'll actually end up being avoiding and weaponize the tool. An example of that might be like, "You know what? I don't care about your feelings. I'm not responsible for them. It's not my job to make you feel better." And they'll say it in a way that actually pulls them away and creates distance. What are some ways to recognize that and what are some other ways that that might happen? As we start to work with this?

The first way that it's gonna happen is that you are gonna start judging other people who are being caretaking or caretaking of you. That's the first, uh, that happens in the process of learning about this. And what's actually happening is that you are judging your own caretaker, that you have started a war with yourself about your caretaker. You've seen that it causes you pain, you see that it's suboptimal, and then you've decided, let's make an enemy out of this thing and try to change it, which is, underneath the same thing that you're trying to do by being codependent is trying to change somebody else or change yourself. So that doesn't help, it doesn't do much. It's fine for a bit 'cause it's part of the process that you're gonna go through. And that's, it's okay. There's no reason to start a war with yourself over it because you're not gonna win. That's one of the ways that it's gonna start. Then the second thing is what I like, what you're saying is really true that people will start weaponizing it and say, now I'm just gonna cut myself off from you in a different way. And our society likes to tell the story that if you're caretaking, then you're not cutting yourself off of people, you're caring for them. You're not being arrogant, you're not being rude, you're not being dismissive, but you're still cutting yourself off from them because you're not telling them your truth. You're managing them just in a different way. And so then all of a sudden, if you decide to cut off from them in another way, like I'm not gonna talk to you, I'm not going to basically feel or have empathy, then it's just another way of cutting them off. And in all of these things, what happens is your body will start constricting, whether you're being codependent or whether you decide to be defensive in a more traditional manner or cut yourself off from them. You'll start feeling your body somatically start to tense up, and that's like the indicator. That's the main thing. And then The last thing that can happen is you can start going down that caring for route, which is a beautiful route, and you can start feeling how soft you're getting, the benefit of keeping an open heart and allowing them to feel anything that they need to feel or want to feel, and not trying to manage their reality, and at the same time, not closing yourself down from them. And that becomes this incredibly inspiring place. And you'd start noticing how much benefit you and the people around you get, and then you forget to draw boundaries. Then all of a sudden it's like, I can just manage myself to continually be open-hearted instead of, oh, I actually have to draw boundaries to maintain an open heart. You can't keep loving people without boundaries. A mom who doesn't have boundaries raises horrible children that eventually will be very abusive to the mom or dad for that matter. So those are some of the pitfalls that you can go into. But the biggest pitfall is people will get through one layer of how they're caretaking and they think they're through it. There's just more and more subtle ways.

Corkscrew.

Yeah, it's just the corkscrew. Exactly.

Yeah, that reminds me of another subtlety there. Like you were talking about how we will start judging the caretaking in others. So perhaps the progression is that we begin completely not aware of our caretaking and thinking that it is care. And then we start to become more subtly aware of the caretaking. We're like, oh shit, I'm doing this. That's bad. I can't be doing that. And then we start attacking the part of ourselves that does it. Which makes us judge the part of other people that are doing it. It seems there's another layer that I've experienced myself that happens, which is like, oh, you know what? I'm done caretaking. I'm not caretaking anymore. And what that means is that I'm over it. I'm done. I'm better. All these other people are expecting me to caretake them. And, you know, they just need to be experiencing their emotions. So I just need to let them experience their emotions because they need to process them. And then all of a sudden it becomes about everybody else having to do their process, their shit. And then I am just on this pedestal of like, okay, I'm good. And then that has always led to some kind of like heartbreaker challenge.

The people I see who really care for, who are really able to care for others without any kind of abandonment of themselves, they often feel people's emotions when the person isn't feeling their emotions. You'll see them weep at the— these are rare folks, but you'll see them weep at or take in the sadness that the other person is avoiding.

Yeah, I've seen that.

Any way that we are defending ourselves is an opportunity to lean in, love more, and accept ourselves and others.

So let's say somebody around you has started to address their caretaking habits and they're doing this thing that we were just discussing where they're starting to be blunt and rude with you. What advice do you have for anybody who's working with that?

Yeah, I mean, cherish it. That would be the— if you're listening to this podcast and you see somebody who's finally standing up for themselves, they're gonna be wonky and weird about it and it's gonna be clunky. And it will change just like, and that's guaranteed to change, meaning that the person who has been codependent or caretaking and they stop caretaking, they're gonna be harsh for a while, most likely, they're not gonna go straight into loving. And the reason that that's the case is 'cause they're so sure that if they don't care for people, people are gonna attack them. Because their whole life they were attacked when they didn't abandon themselves for their mom or their dad or their sister or whoever it was. So they're very sure that they're gonna be attacked. And so they're preparing for that attack. And so what looks like they're being dicks is really them preparing for attack.

Yeah. In another sense, it's like courage of them challenging their inner assumption.

That's right.

And just hoping that it gets proven wrong.

Yeah, so if you see them doing it, the best thing you can possibly do is just say, I'm so glad that you're asking for what you want, and I just want you to know I'm not gonna attack you. There's no need to be defensive. And then it's super short-lived. That's the trick. The other side, which we didn't get to talk about too much, which is when you are starting to draw these, when you are starting this new way of being of not caretaking, most likely you are gonna be a little defensive, which is gonna make people attacking you more likely. So one thing that you can do is to hold yourself with love and care as you're doing it and not need to defend yourself. You're just gonna say what you've got to say, and if the attack comes, you're going to allow yourself to use it as sandpaper, to use it as a way to, to clean yourself out or to cleanse yourself, purify yourself. So that's the best way to approach it. And at the same time, people are going to get upset with you, and they're probably going to get upset with you even more the second time, or even more the third time. If you stay in a loving, non-defensive stance, then the most likely scenario is that they will see that there's this other way of being, and they want to be that way with you. And sometimes that won't happen and you'll lose people. But either way, in a year or two, you will be surrounded by people who want to hear your truth, who don't want you to manage them, who don't want you to caretake them, who want to be sovereign and empowered next to you, not in you or through you. And it might be a hell of a transition, but it's unbelievably worth it.

So I've got one more question for you. This came from somebody within our community. If you had to pick between a vaccine for coronavirus and a vaccine for caretaking, which would it be and why?

Wow. Oh, I don't want to answer this question.

We don't have to. We could cut that whole thing out.

I know. I know. Yeah, I don't want to answer the question because my answer is I wouldn't pick either. I wouldn't pull the butterfly out of the cocoon because it won't be able to fly afterwards. For me, it would be like, do you build a vaccine for crawling or do you build a vaccine for, in a capacity to do mathematics in an 8-year-old? There are developmental steps that we need to go through. Like all systems require something to challenge them so that they can grow and be strong and evolve. If there's no challenge, there's no evolution. So I don't want to get rid of our challenges. I want to learn how to embrace them, how to learn how to embrace the death that we face, to learn how to embrace the caretaking that we do, to learn how to embrace the the innocence that tries to get us to manage other people to feel safe. Like, that's what I want. It's not to get rid of it. It's to learn how to embrace it.

That's amazing. Well, thank you very much, Joe. And I just realized that right when I asked you that question, I caretook you by giving you an out. So I'm gonna sit with that until our next week. Awesome.

What a pleasure to be with you again, Brett.

Yeah, same here. Once again, thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and rate us in your podcast app. We'd love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions or comments. You can reach out to us, join our newsletter, or check out our courses at artofaccomplishment.com.