Hey, what's up y 'all, this is Keir Gaines, your guest host for the week.
Welcome to Radio Headspace and welcome to Wednesday.
As you know, this week is all about men's mental health awareness.
One of the biggest issues I see as a therapist from my male clients is that they can get really defensive when we're talking about their mental health or things that they can do to improve.
Raise my hand, I too am guilty of this.
Now this resistance really prevents growth.
It can lead to shame and it's not good.
But there is something that can really help you with this situation.
And that's something that's called accountability.
Oh, scary word. So today I want to talk about how introducing more accountability into your life and owning your worst moments is a path of self forgiveness and self love.
So why do men get so defensive therapy?
I think there are a number of reasons, but first let's take it away from just being a male thing.
People in general have a tendency to get very defensive in therapy.
And guess what? That's perfectly normal.
It's a perfectly normal response to someone interrogating the way that you see the world and to someone challenging the things that you hold very close to your heart and that are bedded very deeply in your mind.
I think that a part of masculine ideology, the part that tells us that we're supposed to be protectors and providers, I think it mixes with this cognitive distortion, that black and white cognitive distortion, black and white thinking we were talking about the other day, where somebody challenging you
is somehow an indictment on your authority.
Somebody challenging you can feel like an indictment on your intelligence or your capability.
And I think it's very easy for these signals to get mixed and for someone to feel like they have to protect or defend themselves from those challenges.
You know, challenges don't always feel like an invitation to be better or do something different.
Sometimes challenges feel like a threat.
Now, even though it feels that way, that's not always the case.
Sometimes those challenges are an attempt to get you to see something that's just right outside of your periphery.
It's right outside of, yeah, right outside of your periphery is fine.
There's no need to use a bigger, a bigger, sexier word.
It's something that you just can't see.
You know, one thing that used to irritate me, my wonderful wife, who I've been married to for five years now.
Y 'all we've been married for five wonderful years.
When she was my girlfriend, she would do this thing sometimes where if I would tell her something, Hey, there's a grocery store up the street that sells pomegranates.
She sold the biggest pomegranates you've ever seen in your life.
She'd kind of let it roll off her back.
Oh, okay. That's cool.
But then she'd come back to me a week later and say, Hey, my friend Jane said that they sell pomegranates at this grocery store up the street.
They're the biggest pomegranates you've ever seen in your life.
You have to go get some.
Now in my mind, I felt like it was challenging my intelligence or my authority to be right or have credible knowledge.
Looking back, it feels so silly, but I felt like she didn't believe me, like I was being challenged.
And I thought that just identifying it with like masculine ideology.
I thought that it was stepping on me as a man.
Like I'm telling you something that I know is information.
I know it's right. And you don't believe when I say it, but you believe when someone else says it fast forward years later.
I do this to her too.
It's not just a man thing.
It's a human thing, but there's something about the way that boys are culturalized specifically in this country where we believe sometimes that we're old a certain amount of authority, or it's supposed to look a certain way.
And even though I get that that's a gender script, and that has been true for masculine ideology for a very long time.
And we'll get into this in another episode, but times are changing.
What it means to be a man today is far different than what it's ever meant.
The expectation of involvement, the expectation of warmth, what protection and provision means, man, life has expanded.
The world is expanding this movement very quickly.
But our idea of manhood and masculinity has not yet caught up.
So back to the example of my wife and the pomegranates, I had to come to the realization that that was more so about me than her.
Did it irritate me?
Absolutely. But I was also internalizing signals and believing that they were saying more about my capabilities as a man than they actually were.
It wasn't that deep.
It felt that deep to me, but in the grand scheme of things, it wasn't.
So how does accountability come to all of this?
How does accountability come to play in all of this?
Accountability is simply saying, Hey guys, this is my stuff right here.
I always liken it to being at an airport.
You know, when you're at the airport, everyone's least favorite time is when you're waiting for your bags at the carousel.
But once the baggage drops, what happens next?
You have to walk up, you have to grab your baggage, take it off of the boat and claim it as yours.
That's what accountability is.
Accountability says, this is mine.
It's my stuff. It belongs to me.
It's a part of my experiences.
It's a part of the way I see the world.
And I am going to own the burden of moving this around.
I'm not going to place it on anybody else.
And I am dedicated to figuring it out or helping to be part of the solution.
So two questions that you can ask yourself to help you get better at accountability.
One is why do I need to be right about this?
Why is it so important for me to be correct about this specific thing?
What is it doing for me?
What value does it have?
How do I feel differently when I know that I'm right?
And the second question that you can ask yourself is outside of the way that I think, are there any other perspectives that can possibly hold value here that can hold some merit and some truth, not in place of what I think, but alongside what I think?
I think if you can take that half step back and you can look at your thoughts that objectively, it gives you just enough of a gap.
It gives you just enough space to question what you think in a healthy enough way to say, hey, perhaps I'm wrong about this.
You can be like an NFL running back.
You can take your right foot.
You can plant it in the ground.
You can change directions and you can evade things that are meant to tackle you, put you in the grill and immobilize you in life.
When I was young, my mom had, like a lot of our parents had a really hard time admitting that she was wrong and this isn't to vilify her at all.
She grew up in an era where her mom probably had a really hard time admitting when she was wrong and modeled that behavior because my grandmother's mom probably had a really hard time admitting when she was wrong.
You see where this is going now because my mom had a hard time admitting when she was wrong.
I grew up into an adult that did kind of the opposite.
You know, we either run toward the behaviors that our parents demonstrate or we run away from them.
And I ran away from it.
I am very comfortable apologizing saying that I was wrong because I feel like it gives power to the situation and it allows everyone to have equal shared voice, feel heard, feel seen and feel validated, which is the bailiwick of family systems therapy.
But what I noticed is that in the world I will still struggle with people who have a hard time saying that this is my fault.
I will avoid them and it's really a burden on your life.
It can be and I see this in my clients a lot of times.
So when there's a history of people modeling behaviors that don't prioritize apologies, that don't prioritize accountability, you can grow to have a really dysfunctional relationship with it.
And perhaps you could be a person that puts too much pressure on the people around you to be accountable for every little mistake that they make with stranger relationships.
Or you can also be a person who does mental gymnastics to separate yourself from accountability or even let's take it somewhere else.
You could become a person who can't tell the difference between holding yourself accountable and beating yourself up for prior mistakes.
I see that a lot. I see that a lot where people will ruminate on mistakes that they made and they'll punish themselves repeatedly and needlessly in their minds.
They think that they're being accountable but they're really just being overtly difficult on themselves and it's not helpful at all.
Something to think about.
All right y 'all that's it for now.
Tomorrow I'll be back to talk about healthy communication skills especially within relationships.
Something I'm sure we could all use.
I promise that you're going to want to hear it so be sure to meet us right here tomorrow.
Take care and I'll see you soon.
Job well done.
