Ruff Around The Edges
Ruff Around The Edges
Mindset Episode 028 | I Would Never Let My Dog Behave That Way; Verbal Condemnation
A chat at the airfield turns into a round of “I would never…” and sparks this episode on what I call verbal condemnation.
From “I’d never rehome my dog” to “My dog would never bite”, these statements often hide fear, not fact. I explore the defense mechanisms behind them, projection, denial, moral high ground, and why they sting so much when directed at us.
Awareness isn’t about brushing things off. It’s the first step toward understanding what we’re really afraid of, and deciding what to do with it.
Episode website:
https://kajsavanoverbeek.com/mindset-episode-028-verbal-condemnation/
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[00:00:00] Kajsa: Welcome to The Mindset Podcast for guardians of dogs who are just a little rough around the edges. I'm your host, Kai Erba, a life coach dedicated to making life with your challenging dog. Feel less challenging both by sharing stories of other people's similar experiences and by showing you how you can harness the power of your brain to make it work for you instead of against you to.
[00:00:42] It's time for another mindset episode, and today the topic is what I call verbal condemnation. I don't know if this is a real term. I don't know if this is something that already exists out in the world, but this is what came to mind for me when I was thinking about it. So what do I mean by verbal condemnation?
[00:01:02] It is someone else, or you, yourself saying something along the lines of. I would never do whatever it is that the other person is doing. I would never rehome my dog. I would never euthanize my dog for behavior. Or when you see a child throwing a temper tantrum in the supermarket and you go, I would never allow my kid to behave that way, or somebody else says, I would never allow my kid to behave that way.
[00:01:38] I. Maybe another way of talking about it is, is self-righteousness or righteousness, but expressed verbally. Now, the reason I wanna talk about this is, well obviously because these types of remarks tend to sting, they tend to be able to hurt us deeply, and it's the kind of remarks that we play over and over in our minds because we're thinking, is it us really?
[00:02:03] Did we do something wrong? Is this something about me? And you know, if you've been listening to the podcast that I always say that whatever the other person is doing, and that includes saying, is a representation of them, their values, and their lived experience. So it's not something that we should make mean something about ourselves, but already from the word, should you realize that.
[00:02:35] You know, it's, it's what we do. It's not easy to be able to let what somebody else says not get to us. And to be honest, sometimes we do need to let it get to us. Um, this idea of it says something about the other person is something that can help us deal with, say, verbal assault more easily. But I always think that the, the more ways in which I can explain it and the more different sort of.
[00:03:04] Angles that we can come at it, the easier it becomes for us to actually, I wanna say, emotionally distance ourselves from the verbal condemnation and the easier it becomes to, you know, take a step back and really say, okay, no, this is not for me. This can stay with the other person. Or yes, this is for me, this is something that I need to act on.
[00:03:31] So that's kind of where I'm coming from. I wanna give you an additional tool, or maybe it's not so much an additional tool, but additional insight that may help you deal with this type of verbal assault, ver verbal condemnation, whatever you wanna call it. Better. Now before I get into it, as I hear myself saying this, I feel kind of obliged to add on a little something that the whole idea of somebody else saying something, being verbal assault or a verbal condemnation is already a thought that sort of triggers, uh, defensive mechanism in us, right when we are feeling assaulted or when we're feeling.
[00:04:12] Um, condemned and I should probably, well, maybe it is a feeling, I should probably say. When we believe that we are being assaulted or when we believe that we're being condemned by someone else, it triggers our response and the response has to do also with us seeing that action by the other person as assault or as condemnation.
[00:04:35] In a sense, what we are doing is trying to. Shift our thinking and away from seeing it that way. And we can do that in a lot of different ways. But what I'm gonna be talking about today is one of those ways. Okay. Little sidetrack thingy. So what triggered this line of thinking for me? Well. An event in which I thought verbal condemnation was taking place.
[00:05:05] So I was, uh, spending the day at, uh, the airfield in Zza here in Austria, and I was talking to the airport geezers, as I called them, lovingly. If you've been hanging around at air airports for any period of time, you know that there's always sort of a. A set group of people that are always there, that are always, you know, giving their best, helping everybody out, um, putting planes in hangers and pulling them out and just doing all of the things in addition to flying themselves usually.
[00:05:39] And then in this case, entertaining me at the air field with lots of stories. So we talked about flying a lot, but at a certain point the news became the topic because what had just come out or what had been in the newspaper was that a small baby in, in Pisco and an area in Austria had been hurt badly by a robotic lawnmower.
[00:06:06] You know those, those cute little lawnmowers that snip one millimeter, I don't even know what that is, an inches like. For all I care, 100th of an inch off of the top of the grass each time, and they drive around in those erratic patterns, and then they park themselves back into their little house when they're done.
[00:06:26] I love these lawnmowers. This is a dream of mine to have one of those lawnmowers. I don't know why. I just find it's almost as peaceful as watching a campfire. To watch one of those lawnmower robots do its thing and just follow the weirdest of patterns on the lawn. So I would never want one that goes in straight lines.
[00:06:50] I want one of those that just kind of goes crisscross, and you have no idea what it's doing. But anyway, the news was that. One of those robots had driven over the hand of a small baby and the baby was lying on a blanket on the grass in its yard at home. Now, if you are already grabbing your hand or going like, oh, I don't even wanna think about that, that is actually what we're going to be.
[00:07:20] Talking about today. The thing though was that most of the people at the airport were saying who would leave their child unattended on a blanket on the lawn. I would never do that. I just don't understand what gets into people. Why aren't you supervising your child all the time? You can transfer this type of remark to your dog as well, right?
[00:07:46] But you, you will encounter it at work. You will encounter it in your personal life. You'll encounter it with your dog, but it's this, I would never, and in the meantime, I was kind of thinking like, well, I can actually see how this is. Happening or how this could happen. Like who expects the robotic lawnmower to go do its little drive right when you go inside as the parent maybe for, I don't know how long it was.
[00:08:13] Maybe it was just for a minute. And who expects. The mower to be able to do this kind of damage because you would expect it to stop when it bumps into something like these were all kinds of the thoughts that I was having. And I was also thinking, would I have left my baby on a blanket in the garden?
[00:08:32] Maybe. Possibly. I don't know. I mean, it doesn't seem too bad to me. And the, the little baby's still full of dressing tables, but you know, a little baby on a blankie. On the grass while I get a quick glass of water inside or something. I don't know. I was having all these thoughts of would I have done that?
[00:08:55] Obviously the answer of the others was that no, they would not have. This is where I wanna come back to the incident because as it was being related to me, I did what I just described, namely, I immediately grabbed my hand, I went, oh. Because I could imagine it either being me, being my child, all of the thoughts were going through my head of, whoa, what is this?
[00:09:24] What about the parents? What about all of it? But I put myself in that position. There's been a lot of interesting research lately. Well, not really that lately. It dates back to the early 1990s about the concept of mirror neurons. Now, as I understand it, and I'm not a neuroscientist and I haven't been researching this, mirror neurons aren't necessarily separate neurons, but they are neurons that.
[00:10:00] Mirror something that is going on with another person, or not just another person. It can be an animal as well. There's interspecies mirror Mirroring has been demonstrated as well, but it is the idea that neurons in our body, or I should say the same neurons fire up in our body that fire up in the other person when they are.
[00:10:30] Either doing something or experiencing, for example, an emotion. So if we see somebody else in pain, there's neurons in our body that fire up. That would also fire up if we ourselves were in pain as well. So basically, we literally feel others', pain or others. Stress now, what the purpose of Mirror Neuron is and how everything actually functions is still a matter of a lot of research, as I have understood.
[00:11:05] But it is believed to have a link to empathy and to me that seems very logical. If we are able to feel somebody else's pain in a sense, then that would help us empathize with them. And hopefully you can see where I'm going with this because if we're feeling other people's pain and we as humans. Like to steer away from pain.
[00:11:33] We like to steer away from negative emotions. That's something that our brain does. It perceives negative emotions as dangerous. Then feeling other person's pain isn't something that we necessarily wanna do. It just feels icky. So we're gonna come up with a way, or our brain's gonna come up with a way to.
[00:11:53] Get rid of the icky guess how by using psychological defense mechanisms that can show up as verbal condemnation. So just to give you some examples of what kind of defense mechanisms I'm talking about is there's projection where what you do is that you attribute your own uncomfortable feelings to somebody else.
[00:12:18] For example, if you are already struggling with feeling guilty because your child spent so much time on the iPad that you were kind of thinking, ah, I don't think this is right, you then. Criticize somebody else and go like, well, I, I'd never let my kid, you know, like, play on the iPad for that much time, just to make yourself feel a little bit better, even though you're actually feeling guilty about the iPad.
[00:12:48] Rationalization is another one. It's a version of what I call fix it mode. So. Let's say a friend of yours comes up to you and they say, oh, my dog got out of the gate. They escaped and something happened, or something didn't happen. Maybe it's just an escape and they got the dog back. Luckily, let's not, you know, create doomsday scenarios for everything and then.
[00:13:16] You start to worry about, it may be happening to you and your dog, but you're just gonna say, no, that would never happen to me. 'cause I'm responsible like I would. I always double check my gates. It's them. They're irresponsible. By the way, my fence is super secure. All of that you rationalize a way your own fear of the same thing that could probably or possibly happen.
[00:13:41] To you. The, the lawnmower incident that I was talking about before that they were talking about at the airport, you know, you might say something like that could never happen to me. I have my lawnmower on a timer. I, uh, supervise my kids. I would never leave my kid outside unattended. All of those things.
[00:14:03] Um, if you are that parent who has never left their child unattended, I commend you. I can honestly say that I have, because I'm human. Ward there is, it's just to name another one. Displacement. That's where you basically, in, in normal terms, it's where you take it out on somebody else. So you are maybe super stressed out from your dog having been reactive the whole day.
[00:14:31] They've lunged at anything and everything. They've been barking the whole time. You're busy at work, you're freaking out. And then at the latest, lunch at a little. Whatever dog that comes up to you or just passes you a little bit too close, uh, for your dog's liking or maybe for your liking, you unleash fury on the poor other dog parent and yell at them for letting their dog get so close.
[00:15:01] And don't you see that my dog's having a hard time? Why didn't you cross the street or. All of that. Basically transferring your own freaked outness and stress onto the other person who obviously doesn't even know that they've done anything wrong. There's another lovely defense mechanism that we all know called denial.
[00:15:26] This is where if you hear about a bite incident, maybe a dog biting their own human. You go, and this would then be the verbal condemnation part of it, so to say go, oh no, my dog would never do that. My dog loves me. My dog would never bite. That's by the way, not one that I've ever uttered. I think I've even had people ask me like, well, your, your dog wouldn't bite.
[00:15:54] Right? My. Mainly non dog people. And I would say, I don't know that, I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that my dog's never gonna bite me. What do I know? What kind of situations can come up? Or maybe he's in pain or maybe I startle him or who knows what, right? But the denial part in this case, sorry, just, uh, got sidetracked a little bit is okay.
[00:16:20] My dog would never bite me. Something like that. Because you don't want to consider the scenario that it could happen and the pain, both physical and emotional, that has to do with that. So you deny that it could happen to you is another one. Or maybe in that same scenario of a dog bite or maybe of of activity when you wanna get out of feeling bad about it or when you wanna get out of feeling.
[00:16:51] Sticky that it could happen to your dog as well. You try to not feel the feeling at all by intellectualizing, is that a word? Intellectualizing what has happened? So you might say something like, well, uh, puppies that have missed a socialization window and that haven't been properly socialized before the age of 12, they're more likely to deal with this type of behavior.
[00:17:18] Just so you don't have to feel that it could happen to your dog who was properly socialized, for example, and again, properly socialized as a thought. We can argue about what that means because if your dog is reactive, despite proper socialization, was the socialization and proper, or are there links between the two?
[00:17:37] We can go all over the place with that, but that's not the point here. The point here is this idea of using a certain way of. Thinking or certain reaction, which is then verbally uttered to get away from feeling bad or to block the feeling altogether. And then a, a final one would be, I. So as a defense mechanism would be getting on what I call your high horse, just trying to pretend that you are morally superior to other people.
[00:18:10] And I say you, but I mean this can be us doing it to other people or it can be other people doing it to us, right. We're not, I. We're nobody's immune to this type of behavior, but we can get better at it if we gain more awareness. And that's something that I'm trying to do with this podcast episode anyway.
[00:18:27] The, the high horse situation would be you hear that a dog has gotten sick, maybe, or has intestinal problems, something like that. And that obviously something that you don't wanna happen. To your dog. It again, it doesn't feel good neither to your dog nor to you because you have all kinds of thoughts about what that means about you as a dog guardian.
[00:18:51] You get on your high horse and you say, well, I never feed my dog whatever low grade kibble. I only feed them the best of the best of highly balanced raw meat. What? I don't know, whatever, because. You know, you care about your dogs gut health. That's sort of the, the high horse type thing. But you see that in all of these defense mechanisms that play out in, in, again, verbal admonition, condemnation, whatever you wanna call it.
[00:19:30] What is actually going on is that we are trying to get away from feeling bad. We're trying to get out of feeling. Bad. We're trying to get away from the idea that something that we can control might happen to us as well, which might lead to a whole truckload of pain, which is something that we don't wanna feel.
[00:19:55] So instead we shield ourselves with some kind of phrase. That we utter, or in this case, if we're talking about ourselves and if we are on the receiving end that other people utter to us. And so why do I think that this is important to know? It's both so that you can take the sting out of somebody else's comment because you can tell yourself, oh, I heard about this on, on the podcast.
[00:20:25] This person is just trying to get away from their own pain. This person is realizing right now that something like this could happen to them, or this person is empathizing and is feeling all the feels as if the thing had happened to them. And is trying to, you know, rationalize their way out of it, get on their high horse to get out of it, deny their way out of it.
[00:20:51] And it came out as them saying this phrase, it has nothing to do with me. It has everything to do with them and their pain. When you can stop and pause and, and think about that. And when you have that awareness, I hope that that can then take. Like I said, the sting out of it for you, it can be easier for you to let go of the remark, right?
[00:21:20] When somebody tells you, I would never let my dog do whatever it is that your dog's doing, you can then go, alright, that person is using verbal condemnations, what is my term? To get out of feeling the pain. That's okay. In the same way you can, of course. Course correct yourself as well when you feel that you're going to do something like that, or maybe also even realize or use it to figure out what the things are that you are afraid of so that you can work on them.
[00:21:58] Maybe you realize that by your reaction or by something that you said, that you are actually afraid of the same thing happening. So maybe when you tell somebody, well, I always double check twice before I open my front door. You realize that one of your fears is your dog escaping from the house. And maybe hurting someone because they're reactive or they're aggressive, or maybe just, you know, stepping in front of a car.
[00:22:28] When you realize that for yourself, then you could take action on it. A lot of that, of course, is what we do in coaching where we, you know, look at our fears and figure out what do we do with them? What are our thoughts about them? How do they impact our lives? Do we wanna change that? But always, always, always, the first step is awareness.
[00:22:50] So I hope that this little ramble has created some of that for you. And maybe you can take some of this into your everyday life and realize that when you feel like, you know, getting maybe on your moral high horse, that that is a way for you to also avoid pain. Maybe then you can figure out like, what are the things that you're afraid of?
[00:23:15] How do they impact your life? And what can you do to make it a little bit more bearable? And how can you react in a way that's also less likely to hurt other people? Because even though we can say, oh, it's all about how you think about it, and um, you know, sticks and stones may hurt my bones, but words can never hurt me.
[00:23:36] That, of course, is bull. And if you're listening to this podcast, I imagine that you're the type of human who wants to show up. Let me say, well, in the world who does not want to intentionally hurt others, even though obviously we always will, there's no way around it. But being aware of this type of mechanism at play in your life can help you maybe avoid some of those situations.
[00:24:03] Um, I would love to hear back from you if this resonated. Um, you know, send me an email, drop me a line. Paul is welcome. If you have your own stories or maybe your own examples that I can use in, in a next podcast or maybe in one of my emails or to help other people out, also feel free to share them with me.
[00:24:22] Um, that's what I have for you. Today, thanks for listening.
[00:24:32] You can find the show notes to this episode and everything coaching on my website, Kai Fun over big.com. Or you can go find us on Instagram at the Rus Cattled dog, or maybe even Facebook. Kai Fun over baked coaching. If you like listening to this podcast, might I ask you for a good review on whichever platform you're listening to the podcast to?
[00:24:54] Because it helps us move up in the rating, which helps us be found more easily so that more people can listen to this, more people can benefit from it. More people can feel, as I always say, less alone in where they stand with their dogs.