This Phrase Will Ruin Your Relationships

So I was scrolling through Instagram when this video of Sir Anthony Hopkins popped up. In it, the interviewer asks Anthony about his relationship with his estranged daughter, and at first he doesn't want to respond. Do you hope your daughter reads the book?

I'm not going to answer that, no. But then he says this: Life is painful. Sometimes people get hurt. Sometimes we get hurt. But you can't live like that. You have to say, get over it. Now, if you can't get over it, fine. Good luck to you.

That phrase that Anthony uses twice, get over it, is a shutdown phrase, and that means it will kill your relationships. But it's not the only shutdown phrase. In fact, there are several more just in Anthony's short answer. You've got this one when asked if he hopes that his daughter will read his new book. Do you hope your daughter reads the book?

I don't care.

And this one that he says repeatedly throughout the interview.

If you want to waste your life being in resentment, oh, 50 years later, 58 years later, fine, go ahead. 20 years the offer was made, but fine.

Get over it, I don't care, and fine. If you use those phrases with the people that you're close to, you are putting those relationships in serious danger and they won't last long.

I don't have any close friends.

Now, to be clear, none of this is to say that Anthony is a bad person, and that's why I want to make this video because there's many good people, potentially you, who sabotage their relationships without realizing that they're even using those phrases. So let's start by zooming out so that we can see the real problem here because it isn't just words. You see, we all want to have happy, healthy relationships. The problem occurs when something happens that disrupts that. In Anthony's case, a serious something happened. He walked out on his daughter when she was only 1 year old and then reestablished contact when she was 9. That didn't go well, and then he tried again in her teenage years, but that repair of the initial abandonment was never fully made. So Anthony and his daughter are in the same place that many of us are with people that we love. There is a distance between where the relationship truly is with pain, resentment, and hurt feelings, and where we would like it to be. That gap does not close on its own. You either protect yourself and keep the distance or you climb the staircase of vulnerability step by step. Now, to start this climb, we have two options. The first option is to be vulnerable. It's to admit how much this situation hurts, how we'd like it to be different but that we don't know how. It's to let the other person see us in that vulnerability and to stay there even if the other person doesn't reciprocate. Now, that is really, really hard so what do we do most of the time? We make one pseudo-vulnerable offer and then withdraw when it doesn't go well. That is what happened with Anthony. You can listen to him describe it.

My wife Stella sent an invitation to come and see us. Not a word of response. So I think, okay, fine. I wish her well, but I'm not going to waste blood over that.

Now, to be clear, Stella is not his daughter's mother. So he had a stepmother who she wasn't raised with send an invitation after decades of not speaking. That is understandable as a strategy to avoid rejection, but it blocks your path to vulnerability. And of course, when his daughter doesn't respond, he withdraws into the language that we saw at the beginning.

You have to say, "Get over it. I don't care." Fine.

Now, something really interesting usually happens at this point. A lot of people will use stoicism as a shield when they withdraw from vulnerability. So they'll speak about it in ways that sound really grounded and mature, like this.

See, we can— I could carry resentment over the past, this and the other. But that's death. You're not living.

Dropping resentment sounds mature, but underneath this though, there is the pain of this unhealed relationship and the confusion of not knowing how to make it better. So if the best way to get what we actually want is vulnerability, but that's of course terrifying, how can we do it in a way that feels as good as possible? Well, there are 6 steps here, and the phrase first class will help you remember them. So the first part is that you take the risk of going first. First, that means you get vulnerable first. You reach out to them, no third-party reach-outs. Second, you need to show that you care about the feelings of the other person. That means you replace those shutdown phrases with phrases that demonstrate you care even if you don't know what to do next. So instead of saying, "I don't care," like Anthony does when he's asked if his daughter's going to read his book— Do you hope your daughter reads the book?

I don't care.

You can try something like, "I do care, but—" I don't know what to do about it. And instead of "get over it," which is what happens when Anthony talks about her resentment—

you have to say get over it—

you can ask, is there anything that I can do that would help us to move past this? And instead of "fine," which Anthony says often when describing his response to his daughter's silence—

20 years the offer was made, but fine—

you can try saying, I feel sad about that, but I'm going to respect her boundaries. In each case, you are not hardening into fake stoicism. You are allowing yourself to care about a situation that you that you cannot fully control or protect yourself from. That level of vulnerability is very likely to get the other person talking. So the next step is to just listen. Don't argue, don't attempt to fix things, or you don't even have to fully believe what they're saying. Just give the other person space to share. I did a whole video on how to hold space well, which you can check out after this, but the simple rule is to listen long enough that you can repeat their feelings back to them to their satisfaction. Next up, you need to acknowledge your part in their pain, and this can't be done dismissively like Anthony does, or it's back to square one.

If you wanna waste your life being in resentment, oh, 50 years later, 58 years later, fine, go ahead. It's not in my can.

Instead, you have to own your contribution, saying something like, I see how painful it's been to have been left by me so many times, and I'm sorry for not being there for you. One note here is that you do not have to agree with their entire story. You just need to recognize the pain that they're in without without diminishing your role in it. Now, once you've listened and acknowledged your role, to restore the relationship, you will want to share your story. Because this isn't about one bad person making it up to one good person. It's about two people connecting over their shared humanity. And it's very helpful here to share your feelings and your history with them, not as an accusation or as an excuse, but as a bridge. For instance, Anthony shared in other interviews that some of the words that he said to his daughter, like, "I don't care," were the coldness of his grandfather coming out. Move on, no use crying, onward, which funnily enough is actually something he says in this interview.

20 years the offer was made, but fine, onwards.

Anthony could also talk about his own childhood feelings of isolation, which is actually something that he does earlier in the New York Times interview.

And I suppose on a deep psychological level, I'm trying to escape from what I was. I don't know. What were you?

What is the thing you were trying to escape from?

Well, that lonely kid, you know?

Sharing how he felt as a child unsupported emotionally by the adults around him would help the two of them to connect over that common experience. And this takes us to the final step and perhaps the most important realization in this video: the way that you treat others is the way that you treat yourself. So when you say, "I don't care," or "Get over it," to someone who's struggling and in pain, it is because you have spent a long time saying that to your own pain. So the final step is to stop treating yourself so harshly. Part of what makes it so hard to confront the pain of others is that it makes clear how you've been treating yourself. If you recognize that there's a more caring way to treat them, you have to recognize how cruel you've been to yourself. And so I wanna make one final point here. It seems very important that Anthony asserts that he's not a victim. Here he is saying it on Colbert.

Just do it. Sit down and write it. I didn't know what to say. I started, you know, in my childhood and about the loneliness, but never about being a victim. But about—

and here he is on Dax Shepard.

I've never felt, never felt like a victim, and I've got that attitude today. Get on with it, stop complaining.

And again, in the interview that we've been watching, I survived my loneliness, I survived those bullies.

Not that I blamed them, God bless them all. I mean, I'm not a victim. And, you know, if people choose to wallow in their— oh, well, okay, go ahead, but you're gonna die.

This refusal to be a victim is incredibly important for a certain stage of life. You can't get out of a tough situation by blaming others or wallowing in victimhood, as Anthony rightly points out. But after you have made it through the tough times, that revulsion to ever feeling like a victim is a very sophisticated coping mechanism. It is lying to you. It tells you that if you ever slow down and recognize your pain or another person's pain, that's just wallowing in victimhood, which is death.

As Anthony says, I could carry resentment over the past, this and the other, but that's death.

So this is so important. You can feel your pain, sit in it, and work through it for an extended period of time without dying. In fact, that is a requirement to show up lovingly for other people who are in pain. And I believe that the most mature adults, the ones who have had those hard times, they have a union of this stoic masculine part of them that says, "Let it go, let's move forward," and the compassionate feminine part of them that says, "It's okay to still hurt. I am with you in this." That journey of unifying those two is a long, confusing, paradoxical one, but I hope that this video has helped you to see that that union of forward-moving and compassion is possible. If you'd like to get started on this process, I am working on a program that's going to go deep on this and that will be available in a few months. But if you don't want to wait that long, there's another program that isn't mine but that I took and I absolutely loved it. It's Art of Accomplishment's Connection Course. Over 3 weeks, you will do real-time exercises that rewire your inner critic and the inner doubter so that you feel more self-love and more authentic love in your relationships. It helps make family difficulties, work conflicts, and leadership much, much easier. So if you'd like to check the course out, we have a special discount code for the Charisma on Command community, and you can just click this link, join the email list here, and I will send you that code with instructions on how to use it. If you're watching this video around the time that it's launched, there's actually a cohort of the Connection Course opening right now, so you can sign up today and join very, very quickly. Either way, I hope that you've enjoyed this video, and I look forward to seeing you in the next one.