Do you know someone who gossips? I do. It's not a great quality and I have to check myself on it occasionally to not develop this way of communicating. These excerpts I recently read helped me understand a little why the people I know who gossip do it.
BelenLy et. al, (1986). "Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice and Mind"
Here is a talk that was recommended to me about a researcher in social services about Vulnerability. I've never been one to like to dive into the psychologies but this one was quite interesting to me and I realized that I'm starting to feel like a researcher. Here's the link and the highlights:
Brene Brown
The Power of Vulnerability
TedDXHouston
It “changed the way I live and love and work and parent.”
“If you can’t measure it, it does not exist.”
“Life’s messy, clean it up, organize it and put it into a
bento box.”
“Lean into the discomfort of the work” is a motto in social
work.
“I am interested in some messy topics, but I want to make
them not messy. I want to understand them. To hack into these things that I know are
important and lay the code out for everyone to see.”
“Connection is why we’re here. It’s what gives purpose and meaning to our
lives.”
When you ask people about love, they tell you about
heartbreak. When you ask people about
belonging, they’ll tell you their most excruciating experiences of exclusion,
and when you ask people about connection, the stories they tell you are about disconnection.
Shame is the fear of disconnection. Is there something about me that if other
people know it or see it, that I won’t be worthy of connection? It’s universal. We all have it. No one wants to talk about and and the less you talk about it, the more you have
it.
We all have that feeling.
I’m not _______ enough.
Vulnerability…In order for connection to happen, we have to
be seen. Really seen.
This is my chance to beat it back with my measuring stick. I’m going in.
I’m gonna figure this stuff out.
The one factor from the thousands of data and stories is
that A sense of worthiness. They have a
strong sense of love and belonging.
There was only one variable with people who had a believe they are worthy of love and
belonging. That’s it. They believe they’re worthy.
The one thing that keeps us out of connection is the fear
that we aren’t worthy of connection.
Wholehearted people...
What they had in common was a sense of courage.
Courage, the original defiintion was to tell the story of who you are with your
whole heart.
From her research all the people had:
The courage to be imperfect
The compassion to be kind to yourself first, and then to
others. We can’t practice compassion with others if we can’t treat ourselves kindly.
They had connection, as a result of authenticity. They were willing to let go of who they thought
they should be in order to be who they
were. You have to absolutely do that for
connection.
They fully embraced vulnerability. What made them vulnerable made them
beautiful. They didn’t talk about it
being comfortable, nor was it excruciating, they just talked it being
necessary.
The willingness to say I love you first. The willing to do something where there are
no guarantees. The willingness to invest
in a relationship that might not work out.
I couldn’t believe that I had pledged allegiance to research
where I couldn’t control and predict.
Research is “to control and predict”
Vulnerability is the core of shame and fear and our struggle
for worthiness but it appears also as the birthplace of joy, of creativity, of
belonging, of love…
Why do we struggle with vulnerability so much?
We numb vulnerability.
We are the most in debt, obese, addicted, and medicated
adult cohort in US History. You can’t selectively
numb emotion. Here’s the bad stuff, here’s
grief, here’s shame, here’s disappointment.
I don’t want to feel these.
You can’t numb those hard feelings, without numbing the
affective.
When we numb those, we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb
happiness, and then we are miserable and
we are looking for purpose and meaning
We need to think about why and how we numb.
We make everything that is uncertain to certain.
Blame is “a way to discharge pain and discomfort”
We perfect.
We perfect most dangerously our children.
Children are hardwired for struggle when they get here.
When you hold those perfect little babies, our job is not to
say look at her she’s perfect. My job is just to keep her perfect. Our job is
to look and say, You are imperfect and your wired for struggle but you are worthy
for love and belonging.
She hopes:
To let ourselves be seen, deeply seen, vulnerably seen
To love with our whole hearts even when there’s no guarantee
This was very interesting in a photo-editorial format. The photographer, Gabriele Galimberti says about his"Toy Stories" project...
"Everyone remembers their childhood toys....Indeed, when Galimberti hit upon the idea of photographing children from around the world with their toys, he was not expecting to uncover much we did not already know: kids love dolls and dinosaurs and trucks and cuddly monkeys, and will construct worlds around them before eventually, inevitably, disregarding them for ever. “The richest children were more possessive. At the beginning, they wouldn’t want me to touch their toys, and I would need more time before they would let me play with them,” says the Italian, who would often join in with a child’s games before arranging the toys and taking the photograph. “In poor countries, it was much easier. Even if they only had two or three toys, they didn’t really care. In Africa, the kids would mostly play with their friends outside.”
Chiwa – Mchinji, Malawi
Yet even children worlds apart share similarities when it comes to the function their toys serve. Galimberti talks about meeting a six-year-old boy in Texas and a four-year-old girl in Malawi who both maintained their plastic dinosaurs would protect them from the dangers they believed waited for them at night – from kidnappers and poisonous animals respectively. More common was how the toys reflected the world each child was born into: so the girl from an affluent Mumbai family loves Monopoly, because she likes the idea of building houses and hotels, while the boy from rural Mexico loves trucks, because he sees them rumbling through his village to the nearby sugar plantation every day.
Ultimately, the toys on display reveal the hopes and ambitions of the people who bought them in the first place. “Doing this, I learnt more about the parents than I did about the kids,” says Galimberti.
Ben Machell – The Times Magazine
Botlhe – Maun, Botswana
Pavel – Kiev, Ukraine
To see all the photo's by Gabriele Galimberti's project titled Toy Stories, go HERE
