The Invisible Force Keeping You Down
Shining light on this will help you succeed!
Waaaay back in the olden days of the 1990’s, I was working on my PhD in clinical psychology. My dissertation research focused on cardiac rehab patients and the role that social support played in the patients’ depression, anxiety, and physical improvement over time.
I was especially interested in what I called “negative social support.” The addiction field calls it “enabling,” and a close relative of this idea in modern times is the phrase “toxic positivity.”
The concept is that when a person is trying to make a change in a good direction – they want to be free of addiction, they want to lose weight, they want to seriously grow their business, start an exercise program – the people around them will start to offer advice, guidance, and opinions about those changes.
You would think the people closest to us would offer encouragement and assistance to help propel us towards our goals. This is not what usually happens, though. It’s a bizarre dynamic, but what ACTUALLY happens is the people closest to us offer subtle “support” that undermines the changes we want to see in ourselves.
In the cardiac rehab world, this can be a wife whose husband has a heart attack telling her husband not to attend rehab today because he woke up more tired than usual. “Just stay home today because you don’t want to overdo your exercise.”
Or a best friend sees his buddy really moving in his business and starting to make more money, saying, “Hey, we haven’t had guys’ golfing week in a long time because you’ve been so busy with your company – take next week off because you’ve been working too hard.”
Or you start to lose weight and your friends notice. You go out to dinner with them and a few of them say, “Hey, you should reward yourself for all your hard work by having dessert! You deserve it!”
To bring a bit of theology into the conversation, it’s worth pointing out that Eve didn’t disobey God out of nowhere. She was prompted (some say seduced) into eating the fruit of the tree that “seemed” like a good idea. How could knowledge be wrong?? Susceptibility to bad advice that looks good on the surface is not a new problem.
These comments seem friendly and even helpfully supportive. These are friends and family members who have known you for a long time, and they genuinely care about you (except of course in the story about Adam and Eve – Satan actually hates you if you didn’t know).
But the advice and support they offer is in the wrong direction. If you took some of this advice, it could end up derailing you in unexpected ways. The advice sounds reasonable. However, it typically moves you in the opposite direction.
In the addiction world, one of the most important changes a person can make as they pursue sobriety is to modify two major things – the places they go, and the people they hang out with.
It is well known that you will not maintain your sobriety if you hang around the same people in the same places you went when you were using. It’s nearly impossible because our environment plays a massive role in what we do, what we do not do, and who we become.
This presents an extreme challenge because it is very hard to break old relationships, and often even harder to build new ones. You have to find people who share the same new mindset you are working to cement into your life, and then you need shared experiences over time to build trusting friendships.
Change is HARD, and it is not simply because we have to learn new behaviors and habits. We also must find ways to make those changes permanent. And it is at this point that sustained change breaks down.
Your own will power can make sure you do new things to create new outcomes over about two months’ time, on average. After that point, our will power wanes, and we require something else to boost our ability to not only maintain those changes but also keep making more of them in the right direction.
For years I have written and spoken about how our environment (the people we know and the places we go) acts as an invisible force working AGAINST your best interests.
Why does this happen?
The people in your life love you. This strange dynamic of them acting against your goals does not mean they no longer love you.
Your personal change and their reaction to your change is about THEM. Seeing you move forward and improving your life often makes those around you self-conscious about how they are not making those same changes.
They WANT to be supportive, they want what is best for you!
But when their own self-concept starts to feel threatened, most people do not know how to handle that tension.
This is the internal, subconscious dialogue that happens:
“I love you, and one part of me is thrilled that your hard work resulted in a 50% growth in your business. But when I watch you succeed, it reminds me that I am NOT succeeding in those same ways, and I am not willing to put in the same effort that you do. That makes me feel bad about myself.”
You can see how vulnerable someone would have to be to admit that level of pain. Therefore, it almost never happens.
Instead, people use extremely subtle, even positive-sounding strategies to pull you back into the orbit that makes THEM feel comfortable. And that means pulling YOU back to the status you were in before you made the changes.
You must understand that these subtle, damaging strategies are not conscious. Your family and friends DO love, like, and respect you. Intellectually and in their heart, they DO want you to succeed.
Their behaviors are not about you. They are about their own insecurities that are too painful for them to confront. So they repress them.
But because they are reminded of those insecurities every time they talk to you, their subconscious mind pulls up creative ways to make THEMSELVES feel better.
What is the solution?
You MUST build new relationships that support your new goals. This is imperative. It can be harder than making the changes you’ve made, but it will help you maintain and advance your progress.
You have to manage your older, more established relationships in new ways. Candidly, you might have to release some relationships that aren’t particularly healthy for you. That can be extremely difficult, but it might be in your best interests.
Most of the time, the best way to manage your more established relationships is to begin having new conversations. You may find yourself saying things like, “I know you are trying to help and you worry about me being too focused on my goals. But I need to put in this kind of effort for at least six more months to really make sure I sustain my progress. I am grateful for your support but I’m going to decline the dessert/guys week golfing/day off from rehab because if I do those things, it will move me in the opposite direction.”
When you achieve new goals, it means you have to do new things in areas of your life that don’t seem related to your goals.
This is the part of success no one (except me) really talks about. But mastering this invisible force coming against you is one of the most major shifts in mindset you can make to ensure progress. Incidentally, this advice is relevant for all goals – personal and professional.
Because this is such a big deal, I am working on a new project to offer you that will help you move forward in making this change in your life.
Stay tuned!
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To YOUR success,
Dr. Anita