Mindfully Masculine: Personal Growth and Mental Health for Men
Charles and Dan are just two guys talking about relationships, masculinity, and authenticity. Join them as they discuss books and media, as well as their (sometimes messy) personal stories, to encourage men to join the fight for their mental, physical, and emotional health--because a world of healthy, resilient men is a thriving and more secure world for everyone.
Mindfully Masculine: Personal Growth and Mental Health for Men
From Guilt to Growth: Holding Yourself Accountable for Boundary Violations
Can personal accountability transform your relationships? On the latest Mindfully Masculine Podcast, we peel back the layers of Dr. Faith Harper's enlightening book, "Un-F your Boundaries," with a focus on understanding the pivotal role of accountability in boundary dynamics. Through personal stories and experiences, we tackle the fine line between guilt and shame and explore how our surroundings subtly shape our actions. Expect engaging discussions on adaptive versus maladaptive behaviors and discover the strength of accountability as a catalyst for genuine personal change, fueled by insights from recovery communities. We've even thrown in practical scripts for apologies and strategies for reinforcing those often-overlooked boundaries.
Ever wondered why some apologies fall flat while others mend bridges? We navigate the complexities of effective apologies, emphasizing the art of acknowledging harm without slipping into excuse territory. Our conversation is grounded in real-life scenarios, showcasing how sincere recognition and a solid plan can turn an apology into a tool for healing. From addressing deep-seated issues like substance abuse to understanding the importance of respecting others' boundaries, we offer actionable steps for positive change. This episode promises to equip you with the tools to improve your boundary practices and foster meaningful growth on your journey to self-improvement.
Welcome back to the Mindfully Masculine Podcast. This is Charles. Okay, so this episode is going to be released on Monday, october 14th. I am recording this introduction on Monday, october 7th because I don't know if I will have power or internet or anything else on the weekend before we release. So this episode is our last one on Un-F your Boundaries by Dr Faith Harper, and topics that we will cover include accountability for boundary violations, personal stories about boundary violations, the difference between guilt and shame, the impact of environment on behavior, adaptive versus maladaptive behaviors, accountability as a tool for change, unpacking behaviors and underlying issues, apologies and accountability, tools from recovery communities, scripts for apologies and boundary enforcement and moving forward with better boundary practices. Please check out our website, monthlymasculinecom for any information we've got to share and enjoy the episode.
Dan:Good afternoon Charles. How are?
Charles:you Still doing well, dan, thank you. How are you? I am also still doing well. Okay, great, let's go ahead and skip our health and fitness and lifestyle updates again and just get into the material and we will be watching the view count. So if I'm looking for any excuse to ramble on for 20 minutes before every episode so the downloads go down, then we're going back to rambling. Rambling for a half hour before we get into the content sounds good. She's got a very short conclusion chapter at the very end of this book that I don't think we need to really spend a whole episode on. So this is going to be our last one. And this last chapter is again.
Charles:We're in Un-F your Boundaries, by Dr Faith Harper, holding yourself accountable for boundary violations. Nobody's perfect when it comes to respecting the boundaries of other people, and sometimes you violate their boundaries, and sometimes you do that in very sort of casual ways, like the example she offered was eating the last of the ice cream, even though you know that your roommate had a rough day and was looking forward to coming home and getting into that Ben and Jerry's. So I did that. Oh my God, dude.
Dan:Did you really? Oh man. So with an ex-girlfriend of mine, we were living together and she was she's training for a bodybuilding competition, so she couldn't eat her graduation cake. We a graduation party at her at the house and she set aside a rather sizable piece of that graduation cake in the freezer, but she still had probably like a month left to go before she could eat any of it. Oh and uh, yeah I, I ate all, but like a tiny little sliver of it. It was not mine. It was not mine to be eaten, but I would have cravings and knowing it was there, I ended up like eating a little piece after piece and after a month it was there really wasn't anything left, and I remember we had a pretty big argument and that was one of the things she threw in there. Oh my God, same game, wow, and I feel horrible. I still do so. If you are listening, I apologize. You know who you are.
Charles:One of the things I did like that but my ex-wife, it bothered her rightly. She didn't hammer me too hard. She could have, because it was one of the worst things I did was I was up in Philly on an exchange tech job. I was up in Philly on an exchange tech job and in the office building I was in right downtown downstairs there was like a chocolatier that had a shop there and I got a six-pack of Dom Perignon truffles. Who were they? Yeah, those chocolate truffles that actually had Dom Perignon on the inside.
Dan:I've not had these. I did not know they even existed until now.
Charles:Crazy, they were really good. So I did not know they even existed until now. Crazy it was, they're really good. So I got her a box of those. And I told her that I got her a box of those and that on the Southwest flight home it was one of those deals of we're not going to serve any peanuts because somebody on board has an allergy and I was like man, I really could use a snack and so then I ate all all six of her truffles. This had to tell her. I'm sorry they they didn't serve snacks on board the flight, so I ate these instead, but I'll order you some. And then I never did. Oh no, and yet that was really. That was a really crappy thing to do. Yeah, I saw you roll your eyes about the peanuts, but you don't want. You want people peanut allergies to die. Dan.
Dan:I felt like my boundaries were being violated just hearing that story. I love peanuts so much.
Charles:No, they haven't served peanuts on planes in, oh my God, years. Yeah, this is probably 2008, so it was a long time ago.
Dan:Thankfully, they have upped their game on a lot of flights. Now they have some decent snack choices.
Charles:You know who had my favorite snacks was Air Tran, before they got taken over by Southwest. Okay, they had this trail mix that they served. That was a real sucker for my trail mix. Yeah, do you love those trail mix, especially when it's mostly candy, and they had one of those.
Dan:They had a candy-based trail mix. Yeah.
Charles:Oh, wow. Yeah, I think it had peanut M&Ms in it. Maybe not peanut M&ms because of the peanut situation. Might have been regular m&ms, but it was a good still. It was a solid trail mix and, wow, I would target that cook zero and trail mix so I would fly air train whenever I could, but then they got bought by southwest so that went down the tubes anyway.
Charles:So there are boundary violations even worse than eating cake, or not possible. Yeah, that that lets us keep in mind. If you're hearing this and thinking about somebody's boundaries, you could have something that immediately pops into your head of something wrong that you did to a person, and you'll usually respond to that with either guilt or shame. And again to to restate the difference between those two guilt is usually associated with feelings of I did something wrong. Shame is I am something wrong. Guilt can lead you to address your behavior and correct it in appropriate ways, where shame will usually just lead you to feeling worse and not having the energy or the drive to turn things around in a way that's better for you or the people you're around. And that's why shame is such a destructive emotion and feeling to experience, because you don't get better in really any significant way when you feel shame.
Dan:For sure, yeah, and I think for me, with eating that cake, I feel shame and not guilt, because it wasn't a one-time thing, it was like something that I did over and over again and just yeah. So yeah, I feel yeah, that's, there's something wrong with me yeah, I get it.
Charles:I get it. Oh, but uh, that feeling of there's something wrong with me when you're put into that, a similar situation. It's not going to help you not do it and we, we think that it will, but it won't. Oh, no, it's the yeah, yeah I, I made a mistake, or look, you couldn't even argue that was trickling in sweets and yummies guilt-free on a schedule that my body was happy with. Yeah, maybe I wouldn't feel like I've got to gorge myself on these when they arrive.
Dan:I didn't set up my environment the right way, Clearly. Yeah, Because I was probably underfeeding myself or restricting myself unnecessarily, and or I should have I don't know put a padlock or something made it more difficult for me to get into the freezer to begin with. There's things that, yeah, as I've gotten older now realize hey, so much of it is setting up your environment and the way you function. It will determine your success and the actions that you're taking.
Charles:We find that with our behaviors, we can look at our behaviors and say that was a bad thing to do which I'm not scared of using the word bad but when you apply it to behavior, you do have to be careful. Okay, did you do something bad or did you just do something maladaptive?
Dan:Does it contribute towards your goals or take away from your goals? That's how.
Charles:I think. Does this help you become the kind of person you want to be or does this help move you away from the kind of person you want to be instead of this was right, this was wrong, this was good, this was bad. Now again, I'm by no means a moral relativist. Where there is no good, there is no good, there is no evil, there is no right, there is no wrong. I'm not saying that. It's just. When you're looking at your own behavior, particularly when you're looking at it in hindsight, with how you dealt with other people and how you treated other people, it is healthier in most cases to look at it as okay did. Was that behavior that helped me or hurt me? Was a behavior that helped the other person or hurt the other person not? Was it bad, was it good? Was I bad? Was I good?
Dan:that, yeah, those, those words have different meanings.
Charles:So there's a drastically difference, drastically different between good and bad versus helpful and not helpful and and when it comes to making those changes, whether it's the food we're putting in our mouths or the way we treat other people, that's really where the only secret weapon for seeing progress is accountability. It's being willing to take a look at what you're doing, how you're doing it. Is it moving you toward your goals, is it moving you away from your goals? And being able to ask yourself tough but honest questions of okay, what did I do? What was my intention, what was the impact of my action? And getting into the nitty gritty of those kinds of questions, because without doing some level of disassembling your behaviors, are you going to be able to change it.
Charles:Like we had that exercise this morning where we went what seven levels deep into okay, why are you? Why have you taken on this goal or this thing? What is it that you're looking for? And then just keep interrogating yourself to really get to the bottom of what's the core need that you're trying to address by doing 75 hard, or by getting this diet or, yeah, buying invisalign or whatever the thing is that you're doing. What is it your core level?
Dan:get out of this change that you're looking to make yeah and without doing that it's, you're just, you're on autopilot and yeah, and it's easy to get distracted, and when things are challenging, if you are keenly, or you never, even if you didn't go through the exercise, just a why that isn't that deep is just head centered versus heart centered. A lot of times it's easy to dismiss and go all right, it's not really that important to me. Go all right, it's not really that important to me. This discomfort I'm feeling right now, right, is worse than my thoughts about why I should continue to feel that discomfort versus getting into that.
Dan:The feeling level which happens after those seven levels okay, look, it's a lot more valuable and important to me to finish this challenge or to not eat this graduation cake. It's a deeper level. I feel I'm now on the same sensory level. Right, there's discomforting feelings that are physical, but now I've got the physical feelings that are driving me also, because they're both on that physical level, they stand a chance of being able to counterbalance each other. I feel like, yeah, absolutely.
Charles:I get where you're coming from with that and it's hard work though it's, unpacking some of this stuff is not. It's not comfortable, it's not comfortable at all and it'd be so much easier. And there may be ways to make these changes happen without having to unpack that stuff, but I've not found them. I mean, you know it's not really possible to just outsource all of your decision-making to someone else so you don't have to do things, you don't have to do any of this work. It'd be nice if you could do that. But I've even there's been celebrities and stuff where I know that they've talked about their struggle with drugs and chemical dependency and they will hire like sober coaches who live with them like 24 hours a day to help them not use drugs. And what happens? They usually figure out some way to use drugs anyway, even even with them being there, yeah, they figure something out. Or people go to prison and still figure out how to get drugs and alcohol, and, yeah, it's. If you're not willing to address some of the deep underlying issues or figure out what's going on under the hood, yeah, you're just treating symptoms does not seem to get the job done, even when you do have a struggle like drinking to excess or using drugs. It's yeah, it's possible that you can just quit those things cold turkey. Just decide I'm not going to drink anymore, I'm not going to smoke anymore, I'm heroin or whatever it was, or eating or exercising relentlessly or whatever. The thing is that you just decided to drop. You're going to find some other way to replace that with other behavior If you're not really opening yourself up and seeing what got me to this point where I felt like I had to self-medicate with this behavior, with the substance.
Charles:And she talks about some of the tools for accountability and what you can do, and she steals not in a bad way, but she borrows from the recovery community in this chapter quite a bit. The recovery community has, I believe, all of the 12-step fellowships. They have slightly different versions of their steps and their traditions and things like that, but one of the things they have in common is at step four, you have to do some sort of a personal moral inventory where and I've seen this laid out in different formats in different ways in a 12-step program, whether it's Codependence Anonymous or Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous or whatever you make a list of who are the people or institutions that you hold resentments toward? What are your fears in life, like what are you afraid of If things go bad? What are the bad things you're afraid of? And then, third, who have you harmed as a result of any of your unhealthy tendencies or behaviors? Who have you hurt with your own behavior of trying to protect yourself or insulate yourself or medicate yourself?
Charles:And go through that list and that is essentially an exercise in accountability and I'm going to ask myself all these deep, hard questions and then I'm going to write down my answers and I'm going to tell them to somebody who is a safe person that will not judge me. And yeah, this is not a process that I've done, but I see the value in it, especially if you're somebody who's carrying around guilt or shame about ways that you have trounced on other people's boundaries. Before she covers getting into it on your own and what you can do to bring it up, like in the case of the ice cream or cake, she offers a script that sounds something like remember that time I ate your ice cream, I was thinking about it and I really owe you a sincere apology. You were saving it for when you had a hard day and then your day sucked even more when it wasn't there. I can't go back in time, but I can, and I can do and be better in the future.
Charles:So that's a great apology, because it doesn't include anything yeah from part of the some of the problems we had with apologies from the love languages book. You know it didn't include any kind of an excuse. It didn't include any kind of a justification. It didn't include even an explanation, for here's what I was going through that led me to feel like I needed your ice cream. I know I was wrong, but here's why I did it anyway, which is that's the hardest part to get into, where it's like it's hard for me to offer any apology to somebody without also offering a yeah, but here's why I did it, because the yeah but here's why I did it is the difference between me being a bad guy and me being a nice guy.
Dan:Yeah.
Charles:And so that's why it's so tempting to want to put that in there.
Charles:Yeah me being a nice guy, and so that's why it's so tempting to want to put that in there instead of just focusing completely on here's the impact that me behaving this way had on you, and I'm sorry. And then she offers an example of when you're asking for accountability from someone else. This is even tougher. I think I remember last month when we went out for drinks and I said I didn't want to have more than two beers, but you ordered a few rounds of shots and said don't worry about it, we're walking home, so it's no big deal if you drink them. I was really uncomfortable with that. I felt pressured to drink more and was frustrated that you weren't respecting my earlier request. I ended up drinking them then was obviously mad at you about it.
Charles:We can't go back in time, but I can be better at expressing my boundaries so you can be clearer on respecting them. That's really what? Yeah, boundaries. The clearer you are with respecting your own boundaries, the clearer and easier it'll be for other people to respect them too. Then she says that her personal soapbox is you need to apologize without justifying for your behavior. I'm sorry, I didn't have any money for lunch, so I took yours from the fridge my gosh it doesn't matter whether you had any money for lunch or not.
Charles:Yeah, be different than a good apology. Apologies, just without that justification. I'm sorry, I took your lunch from the fridge. Yeah, stop there, that's, that's all you need to. Uh, defensiveness about unintended consequences is also unhelpful. I ran your car into the light pole, but I didn't mean to. It is frustratingly unhelpful, even if you had a sorry in there somewhere in the mail instead. Try, I'm sorry, I ran your car into the light pole. It's my responsibility to have it fixed. And, yeah, her, even though this chapter is so brief, I really like that she's making that difference of good apologies and bad apologies. I think she's a better job than our previous author of our low languages book, because it can be as cut and dry as just don't offer an explanation or a justification, or certainly not an excuse. Yeah, just hey, this is what happened and I'm sorry for it, and here's what I'm going to do.
Dan:Yeah, I think that's where we landed when we're talking about that, which is, both of us were like all right, how are things going to be different in the future?
Charles:Yeah, absolutely. She has a great story about her husband who came in from the backyard to announce that her chiminea, which is I've had one of these before it's a clay pot for doing essentially outdoor fireplace type stuff on your patio or in your backyard, and he came in and announced that it was broken and when I asked what happened he said it dropped and it broke it dropped and it broke.
Charles:When I asked where it dropped from, he said well, I was moving it and it fell out of my hands, so it broke. What it dropped from my hands? That is a piece of artwork.
Charles:For for him to be able to build a skill, he's really dancing around it yeah and she said we went round and round for 10 minutes of me saying so, you dropped my chimney in and broke it, and him arguing no, it dropped and broke. That's hysterical. When he finally said, yes, fine, I dropped it and it broke, but I didn't mean to, I replied with of course, you didn't mean to. You're not going around breaking people's chimineas on purpose. That's the beginning of a wrestling match. I feel like that's uh, look, I've as funny as it is to laugh at, I've been that guy that was doing the breaking of chimineas. No, I was doing simone biles gymnastics around it. I mean that I was the reason that something bad happened and yeah, I've definitely done that.
Dan:That's impressive that somebody would stick with that, because and continue to try to get that out of you, cause I think I probably would have given up. Yeah, I'm like okay, I see what's happening here. I don't want to push the envelope, but you had somebody who was interesting.
Charles:Yes, yes, yes, yes, I did. How different, she says, would it have gone if he said babe, I was trying to move your chimney and I broke it. I can try to fix it, but since it's made out of clay it probably won't air that well, so I'll replace it when I get paid on Friday. Yes, that's the best case scenario. That is the perfect thing to say in that scenario. That also gives her the chance to say you know what, instead of that 80 bucks on a new chimney, I'd rather you just take me out to dinner on Friday night. Okay, great, we'll do that.
Charles:It's got to be an apology with a here's the plan. I'm sorry for this thing. And now here's the plan where I'm not going to find myself in two weeks apologizing for this exact same thing again. Yeah, and that's what people want to hear. That's certainly what I want to hear. Yeah and yeah. So I like this chapter. And at the end she gets into some sort of tough questions on how you can do a better job in the future of respecting other people's boundaries. How specifically do you want to improve your respect for the boundaries of others? State this in positive and behaviorally focused terms. I want to listen to the viewpoints of others without interrupting, in order to understand where they're coming from, is far more durable than I want to stop being a judgmental asshole yeah, one one actually is prescriptive in terms of an action to take, versus just it doesn't really.
Charles:it's vague, it's very vague, but see some of the tricks we use to to make things easier for us. I'm going to be vague, but since I'm going to be deliberately vague, I'll speak in a self-deprecating way that makes it more harsh on me, and so that will free me of the heavy lifting of actually having to come up with and of making it better. I'm sorry, I'll try to stop. Being such an asshole is a lot easier to say than I've given this a lot of thought and I've even talked to my friends in recovery or my therapist or my close best friend in confidant, and here's what we came up with for, a way that I can do better at this. That takes a lot of work, but I'm sorry. I'll try not to be such a worthless asshole. It's actually a pretty easy way because, oh, he's being so hard on himself but he's not actually doing anything. That makes it easier for him to deliver on this pseudo apology. You're shaking your head like you've heard this before.
Dan:It wasn't me, was it no? But I'm just thinking of some specific people in my life in the past where that's been the solution and I realized why I was so frustrated at the time and I was just reliving that frustration right now, as you were describing it.
Charles:Yeah, it's a way to let yourself off the hook, it's. And now I know why I was super frustrated. I'm going to be pseudo harsh on myself and as a way it'll. It'll be an excuse for me to get out of having to actually do any work. I'll just paint myself with an unnecessarily harsh brush and I'll look like I'm willing to be the villain, but I'm not actually going to do anything to change. Yeah, and as a kid, I've. I've done it too. Thankfully not with you I'm not on your list but I've certainly done that.
Dan:And I'm thinking through it and it's just like that's one of the things that really get me, because it's I'm going to present this little game that I'm asking you to play with me, that I'm actually doing something about this and I'm actually sincerely apologetic, or sorry about doing, about what happened Meanwhile. I'm thinking you're too dumb to realize when I don't get specific Again. Maybe that's not their intention.
Charles:I was going to say I've never had that conscious when I've been doing this intention. I've never had that conscious when I, when I've been doing this.
Dan:I've never had that conscious to me. It's just, you think I'm dumb, that because you're not, you're actually not doing anything and you just want me to believe that you really care about this. Like now you think I'm dumb and you don't care about it. Now, I don't know. Now I don't feel like you.
Charles:You care about me and you don't respect me and, as a a side benefit, if I'm negative enough in my talk about myself, then I'll also get a little sympathy from you too. That will also take you off of the thing that you're upset about and that just makes me more upset because I see what you're trying to do here.
Dan:You're trying to manipulate me. Make it up to you yeah, it's not making it about you, but you're trying to relieve the responsibility of what you did by making me feel bad about you or feel bad for you. Yes, exactly yes, so yeah, okay. No, that's insightful for me, it is.
Charles:Yeah, for me too. Another question to ask is what is your reason for wanting to make this improvement? If it changes your life for the better, it's an improvement, and if it doesn't change your life for the better, it's not really an improvement. And ask that question how will your life change from bringing on this new behavior of respecting people's boundaries in a more complete way? How are you hoping these changes will improve life for the people that you care about? There's a good reason to concretely answer that one too Because you want to be better at respecting boundaries, because it's going to be better for the people around you as well, I think it's going to provide a base level of happiness and comfort and lack of anxiety with everybody around you.
Dan:If you're able to create a, help create environment where people are feel like they can communicate about their boundaries, right, I mean, yeah, all point in her last question what are your best practices for moving forward and what are the actionable steps?
Charles:And those are the ones we almost never like asking ourselves For me, when it comes down to limiting my unsolicited advice, I really do. I try to ask that question of do you just need to vet right now or do you want to? Do you want to try to solve this problem? And if you want to try to solve this problem, do you have some thoughts you want to share? Do you want me to share my thoughts? And I try to make that where I start on opportunities that I would normally just jump in with solving problem and offering my advice, I try to jump in with what are you looking for right now? And if the answer is you want to solve the problem, how do you think you can proceed in solving the problem? And then, after that, three steps down the road is I've got some ideas too. Do you want to hear them?
Dan:Yeah, yeah, I like that approach. I feel for me, I'm trying to go in always with the mindset of letting that person vent for as long as they want when there's a pause in the conversation. At that point, hey, do you need me to continue to listen, or do you want to brainstorm some solutions or something?
Charles:Yeah, and that three-second pause rule would definitely help out in those situations, maybe more than a lot of other ones. It may help out with that because, yeah, sometimes people don't know when they're done venting and if you just give them some space, they'll want to fill it with another concern that they had.
Dan:And the other thing that I realized, too, is maybe they need, they want both, right, so maybe they have to vent first and then, once that's all out on the table, they might feel like you, at least, are at a point where you're capable of giving some good advice because you have some more information from them. That's true, and I know I've jumped the gun, oh yeah, making assumptions about what's going on, and then they're like no, it's this, right, no, it's that, and that's why that's not going to work, and so it actually ends up being less frustrating for me.
Charles:Yeah, I've done that've done that too, where it's like, after a little bit of venting, I'm ready to solve the problem and it's like I haven't gotten to the actual problem yet. So me trying to jump in and solve the problem, the wrong problem isn't helping anybody. Oh yeah, well, that winds it up on F your boundaries by Faith Harper. Overall, I like this book. It was a little difficult with some of the irreverent language that she chose to use to make it feel like it's irreverent, which we knew we were getting into. But some of the colloquialisms and the slang and not even the curse words, but just the cool hip slang was a little distracting. But hey, listen, she's a published author and we're the people talking about her. She's in the ring right, exactly. Yeah, she got in the arena and we're the people talking about her. She's in the ring right, exactly. Yeah, she got in the arena and we're we're spectators, yep.
Charles:Anyway, I enjoyed the book. I thought it was a short book that explained boundaries concisely and directly, which I appreciate it. I enjoyed it too. All right, thanks, dan, we'll talk to you next time. The people that listened to our whole episodes are our favorite people. So thanks so much. We certainly appreciate it. Check out our website mindfullymasculinecom. You can find our audio episodes, our video episodes and anything else that we feel is important to share on our site. Thanks so much. Bye.
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