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Ep. 37: Responding To Criticism & Sabotage Resourcefully
196 Plays3 years ago
There are critical and sabotaging people everywhere. We all come across them. Yet some people fall victim to the sabotage over and over again. What would happen if you could respond to criticism and sabotage in ways that build healthier relationships and help you stay true to yourself and your goals?
In this episode, you will discover:
- Ways to interact with people that minimize sabotage.
- How to become more resilient and flexible in the face of criticism.
- Ideas for attracting more positive people into your life.
Heather McFall is a Master Hypnotist and Hypnosis Trainer with the Master Hypnotist Society. She is the director of Lake Hypnosis where she helps people lose weight, stop smoking and manage stress. Heather is also a passionate and entertaining speaker. Find out more at https://www.lakehypnosis.com.
To learn how hypnosis can help you reach your goals, go to https://www.hypnosistrainingcanada.com.
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Transcript
Defusing Negative Emotions
00:00:00
Speaker
If somebody is getting off on your negative emotion, the best thing you can do is stay really calm and centered and be curious because the emotion is what they're getting off on. You crying, screaming, defending yourself, feeling guilty, you're ashamed. Those are the things they're eating. So if you're just neutral and curious, then you'll become boring and they'll go pick on somebody else.
Hypnosis for Life Transformation
00:00:23
Speaker
You want to transform yourself and improve your life. You long to help people. You wish to become healthier, happier, and more successful. This show is your opportunity to learn how to use hypnosis to make your life better. Each week, hypnotist Robbie Spear Miller interviews people who have already changed their lives in amazing ways with hypnosis.
00:00:47
Speaker
These models can help you discover your path to making the most of your life. If you want to learn how hypnosis can help you reach your goals, this show is for you.
Handling Toxic Relationships
00:01:00
Speaker
Hello, this is Robbie Spear Miller, your host for the Hypnosis Show podcast. Today is part two of how to deal with sabotaging people with hypnotist Heather McFall. You will learn how you can become more confident in navigating relationships, more flexible and resilient in the face of criticism, and ways to build a more positive and supportive group of people into your life.
00:01:24
Speaker
Don't show any emotion because if somebody is getting off on your negative emotion, the best thing you can do is stay really calm and centered and be curious because the emotion is what they're getting off on. You crying, screaming, defending yourself, feeling guilty, you're ashamed. Those are the things they're eating. So if you're just neutral and curious, then you'll become boring and they'll go pick on somebody else. But don't try to change them. Just become boring and calm
00:01:55
Speaker
My husband calls it the power of invisibility. If there's somebody in the room that's getting jealous of me, or if somebody is trying to cause problems or distractions, I just kind of melt into the wallpaper.
00:02:10
Speaker
I just watch and it's really being emotionless. It's just watching, like I'm watching the whole thing, like it's a Friday night sitcom. So as you're sharing this, you know, I'm looking at this and going, I can relate to some of the experiences you've had from my own, you know, growing up experiences.
Shifting Social Dynamics
00:02:28
Speaker
And what I've seen is that sometimes we grow up with people and it could be family members or friends who bond over problems.
00:02:36
Speaker
And they think if you're not sharing problems, then there's nothing there, right? That's how you connect. And so you see how we feel, we might feel like people are gonna abandon us if we don't focus on problems or we don't join them in their misery. So there's some dynamics there. And one thing that I personally noticed is that there would have been times where I've created that dynamic with people who weren't even being like that.
00:03:03
Speaker
So if I was trying to please people or wanting to or felt like the way you bond with people is to share a problem, which I used to do, then I people would start to behave that way, even if they wouldn't have done it. So I think it's very important for people to listen who are listening to us to stand back and say, Hmm, am I creating this dynamic?
00:03:27
Speaker
What part do I have in this equation? Even if the person is a genuine narcissist, there's something that you're doing that's feeding that person. So when you talked about making yourself invisible or not reacting, that person isn't going to bother because you're not feeding their need.
00:03:47
Speaker
So if you're behaving, if you grew up with people like that and it feels natural to behave and respond that way, you will tend to attract people who are the other side of the coin. Exactly. And as soon as you start to shift what you're doing, then you start attracting different kinds of people in your life. And I've definitely found that for me.
Transforming Social Circles
00:04:09
Speaker
And it's something you can't quite put your finger on, right?
00:04:15
Speaker
It's definitely a confidence building thing. What you're talking about is the misery loves company. It's exactly the same concept as how smokers make friends. Smokers always get along with other smokers because they're standing out behind the dumpster because they're not allowed to smoke in the building or they're bumming a cigarette from each other at the bar. It's a common denominator.
00:04:39
Speaker
And that misery loves company becomes can be a habitual common denominator. But once your confidence goes up, and you start looking toward the positive, some of your friends will appreciate it. And you can like my mind was gossip. It wasn't sharing a problem. It was gossip.
00:04:57
Speaker
before i became a hypnotist that was my misery loves company thing and then i started as soon as like my first day of my first classes class when i realize that your emotions affect what you choose to focus on your whole world so then i was like i'm just gonna focus on what i want what i want to get instead of what i want to get away from.
00:05:19
Speaker
So my network of friends changed drastically. Like people just got bored with me because when they started gossiping about somebody and I said, well, that's not my experience of her. Interesting that you say that, but I haven't noticed that about her. Then they would feel ashamed for gossiping and they didn't like that ashamed for gossiping feeling. So some of them would let it go and then rise above, but a lot of them
00:05:47
Speaker
when go away because i didn't like that shamed feeling that it gave them when i would play along with the gossip.
Evolving Friendships with Confidence
00:05:54
Speaker
When i started telling my white my weight loss clients.
00:05:58
Speaker
As they entered a program, some of your friends are going to change. As your confidence level goes up and you get thin and active and you don't want to sit in front of the TV anymore and you don't want to complain about your weight anymore, your overweight friends are either going to come along for the ride or they're going to be bored with you. So just so you know, as you get more positive and active and healthy, you're probably going to start getting more positive, healthy, active friends.
00:06:27
Speaker
and just know, but I used to warn them, your friends are gonna change, because as you mature, immature people will either come along for the ride or they'll go to the wayside. So it's a normal, natural thing, but that when you were talking about your misery loves company, and I think that's a learned, that can be a learned behavior too, because I've watched mothers teach daughters that kind of, over the back fence conversation,
00:06:57
Speaker
But it can also just be an instinct. When you're a little kid and you're feeling like you don't fit in and then you have a problem and then somebody else joins in with your problem, it's a bond. That's an innocent habit. But also, it's an easy habit to get out of. As soon as you become aware of it, you can just cut it out. You've cut it out. We've never shared a misery story and I've known you for almost 20 years.
00:07:23
Speaker
So it's it's different it's different when that's why i was saying there's there's everybody has a bad day there's the habit of misery loves company with gossip and problems but then there's also people who just enjoy it so if you change the subject on the gossip and problem part. You can get them off of it and if you guys just start neutral and don't have anything in common than you got.
00:07:47
Speaker
That was the only thing we haven't done and that's okay and that's a friend can go away. But if they keep trying to drag you back into it and they're wanting to watch your negative emotion. So a shared negative emotion is bonding and that's normal and natural and it can easily be changed. What I was talking about is the dangerous people you just need to get out of your life because they love more than being happy. They love watching somebody else suffer and
00:08:15
Speaker
You don't want that.
Setting Boundaries for Well-being
00:08:17
Speaker
But if somebody has misery, loves company or gossip, or if you're feeling morose or sad, if you have the maturity to just look at your emotion and go, I don't like having this emotion, I want to change it, then that means you have a conscience and there is hope for you.
00:08:34
Speaker
So there are people, we've had a lot of clients and students who have maybe a close family member who really does like to cause pain and can say and do terrible things. And that's really tough because it's like their parent or their sibling or somebody who maybe their adult child. And so being able to do this just observing thing and letting it roll off you
00:09:01
Speaker
And also setting a boundary where you don't have to spend all the time with them is a really good suggestion for that. But sometimes we can't always leave, right, depending on our relationship with the person. Or maybe we can shift the boundaries so that we can still love them because they knew us when. Maybe it's a really old friend, but we aren't as close to them or we choose not to share certain things about our lives with them.
00:09:32
Speaker
Anybody who uses information against you to get you to feel a negative feeling
00:09:39
Speaker
Just keep the subject on them. Ask them more about themselves. Stay in the positive. Don't share any personal information and boundaries, timestamp. Give yourself an excuse to leave. I used to have to do that with my dad. I would only meet him in public areas and only for like lunch or dinner so that it wasn't allotted. I would never spend more than two hours with him.
00:10:07
Speaker
because it did not matter what the conversation was. He would pop some negative thing in the middle of a conversation that was perfectly positive. He would throw something out to make me compete with my sister or to make me feel bad about my self-image in some way or to discredit me. They would just pop out.
00:10:28
Speaker
It was devastating for me until I learned how to have a proper boundary. And then the leveling, the reason I fell in love with Virginia Satir is because it made a world of difference. When somebody said something like that, instead of feeling the pain of it, I would just get curious. Well, that's interesting. Why did you say that?
00:10:51
Speaker
It seems like, you know what? I probably took that wrong because it made me feel guilty and crappy when you said that. And I don't think that's what you meant. What did you really mean? Right. And that's lovely. They stammer and go, oh, that's because they meant to make you feel bad. None of us are beholden to our family. Our parents are just supposed to keep us alive until we turn 18.
Building Emotional Resilience
00:11:13
Speaker
That's their only job. And then they're not our parents anymore. And our siblings, same way. When we grow up,
00:11:20
Speaker
and we're not in the same household with these people anymore, clear boundaries and surrounding yourself with people that promote your success is the best way to go. But don't ever feel obligated because they're family.
00:11:35
Speaker
Yeah, and so to take that a step further, if I'm in a situation where somebody makes me feel insecure, guilty, or ashamed, or things like that, it's really helpful for me to stand back from that and say, is there something I want to change here? Is there something for me to learn? Or was that just some insecurity that I still need to grow through? So it can be feedback for you, because really what we want is to grow to a place where when people do things like that, we can just let it.
00:12:03
Speaker
roll right off us for real, right? And you wouldn't want to be surrounded with people like that all the time because eventually it would get to you, right? If somebody's having negative, sabotaging feedback over and over all the time, it would get to anybody. But if we're just seeing people every now and again and we fall victim to these kinds of comments, there's always something for us to learn. Oh, for sure. Yeah, useful or useless, but all feedback.
00:12:32
Speaker
You can try on all feedback to find out if it's useful or useless. I used to, I tell my clients in screenings, if I say, Robbie, your hair is blue. Well, you know your hair's not blue, but you might look in the mirror and see if your shirt was reflecting and kind of made it look like you had blue highlights because the shirt reflected off on your hair or maybe check your hair, make sure you didn't bump into a blue, fresh painted wall or something.
00:12:58
Speaker
So you can try it on, you can look in the mirror and go, nope, I don't have blue hair, she must just be colorblind. Or even if you did have blue hair, you could have a sense of humor about it and go and change it if you want to change it. So it's a really good check to see how much have you grown through what you need to grow through. Loving curiosity, staying in loving curiosity is the key. This is a great conversation and not often had.
00:13:25
Speaker
Thank you very much for doing this podcast, because I think this is incredibly important information. But yeah, if you're having a negative emotion, check to see what it would take to change it, and then just look at the outcome. And people who, and this wasn't, because yeah, you want to take any, try on feedback to see if it'll make you a better person. But repetition, authority, and trauma are the three ways we're hypnotized.
00:13:54
Speaker
You don't want to be around it too much because if somebody keeps repeating the same negative thing over and over again, your subconscious will believe it. If those negative comments are coming from an authority figure, it hits you harder than a random stranger. And if they're doing it, if they're traumatizing you and then putting you in a negative situation, like my sister and her first husband, he was putting her in traumatic situations and then laughing at her for not being skilled enough.
00:14:23
Speaker
So by the time she came back home from that overseas marriage situation, her self-esteem was in the crapper. And it was because he kept using trauma and then in the trauma, reinforcing her ignorance. And it made her very insecure. Turns out she's amazing.
00:14:44
Speaker
She's amazing. She teaches graphic design at private school. She's head-hunted all the time. She's an amazing human being. And the fact that somebody could make her feel small and insignificant just seemed impossible.
Limiting Negative Influence
00:15:00
Speaker
But he had authority, he had trauma, and he was repeatedly doing it. So be careful not to let yourself be hypnotized by negative people.
00:15:09
Speaker
and check in with your emotion. Make sure that it's a good positive emotion. If you want to grieve, grieve. If you want to feel sad, you can feel sad. But give yourself an allotted amount of time. I give myself 15 minutes to be angry or sad.
00:15:25
Speaker
If I'm really sad about it, I would just go, okay, I'm just going to cry this out. I'm going to be sad for 15 minutes. I'm not going to make it affect anybody else's life. I'm going to go off and kick dirt or whatever and be sad for 15 minutes. At the end of the 15 minutes, I got to get the show back on the road. So sometimes if you really need, if you want to, if you're one of those people that needs to feel your own emotions, give yourself an allotted amount of time to go feel them somewhere else.
00:15:50
Speaker
Yeah. One of the things I've observed with some clients who have been in these situations with true narcissists is they really blame themselves. When they're finally out of the situation, they look at it because they're usually these really like awesome people who end up just being in that dynamic. And when they get out, they blame themselves. They say, how can I allow that to happen? How can I let somebody do that to me?
00:16:15
Speaker
And that makes it worse because then they're upset with themselves and they feel they don't trust themselves. And so getting some if you're somebody who's in that situation, helping getting some help and feedback so that you can learn how to grow in a way that you can be nice to yourself and learn from it can be very useful.
00:16:36
Speaker
learning how to look for the red flags. So we've covered some red flags today. Knowing that ahead of time, or even the yellow flags, that maybe could be a problem, but you need to see. Huh, interesting. I wonder what's really going on here. Can be a way for helping people to trust themselves as they move forward. Because sometimes they get gun shy, where they're like, I don't trust myself to be in relationships with people because I keep attracting people like this.
00:17:05
Speaker
And so that growing through it and forgiving themselves and getting out of all the guilt and shame and just being in that learning mode is really what is helpful for people. Absolutely.
00:17:19
Speaker
And there is such a thing as holding yourself to two highest standards. So sometimes we just need to have a sense of humor about certain things, about ourselves. Because if we're with somebody who wants us to be perfect and will criticize everything, even if we did do something that's not necessarily the best thing to do, or it could be better, we're also choosing what matters to us.
00:17:45
Speaker
So I think that my son who's 16, we were at a store the other day and I walked in the outdoor and he was like, mom, do you realize that was the exit door? And I was like, oh, your mother. She's never paying attention to things like that. And then when we left the store, I walked out the indoor and he's like, mom, now you're really actively trying to be defiant. And I was like, you're giving me way too much credit. I didn't even notice that that was the indoor.
00:18:13
Speaker
So I think modeling that or learning how to do that is a really good thing because if you're always feeling like, I made a mistake and you're walking on eggshells about it, even if it really is a mistake, you got to really choose what matters to you, right? I think we all need to have space to just be ourselves and choose what we want to make better and what we can accept.
00:18:36
Speaker
And so that is definitely one of the features I look for in people I spend a lot of time with is that they can be easy going about that and have a sense of humor about it too because who wants to live that way where you have to watch every move or make sure you're getting everything right. Oh no, a healthy sense of humor. And our quirks are what makes us who we are.
00:19:01
Speaker
our funny little things, as long as they're not hurting us or somebody else and it's just a funny little quirk, it can be a charming thing about us and who we are. I don't have the best balance in the world. And when I eat dairy, I can't tell if I'm whispering or screaming, but it's not hurting anybody else. And if somebody goes, Heather,
00:19:23
Speaker
Thank you for telling me.
Embracing Personal Quirks
00:19:27
Speaker
As long as your behavior's not hurting anybody else, it's really okay to have a healthy sense of humor about yourself and to question all the rules. If you're sticking to rules just because they're a rule, maybe find out why you need the rule. Is it really necessary all the time?
00:19:44
Speaker
Well, thank you. This was a great conversation. This was, I think, very valuable for a lot of people. And so whether, as you're listening to this, whether you realize, hey, I need to set better boundaries with people, or, oh, wow, I need to grow myself.
00:20:00
Speaker
Or maybe you need to learn how to do both. I hope that the ideas and the suggestions and the reframing that we've done today will help. So thanks so much, Heather. This was a really important conversation to have for people. Thank you. All right. So go ahead and share with people how they can reach you.
00:20:22
Speaker
I'm Heather McFall. I'm in Lady Lake, Florida. I own Lake Hypnosis. My website is lakehypnosis.com. You can contact me through the website. It has phone number and email and everything there.
00:20:37
Speaker
likehypnosis.com, Heather McCall. Awesome. And if you want more information about hypnosis training, you can go to hypnosistrainingcanada.com. We've got lots of free resources there for you. And if you're ready for a live training experience, you can set up a time to meet with you one on one so we can see if this training is a good fit for you. So you can just go to hypnosistrainingcanada.com.
00:21:01
Speaker
Tune in next time to learn about how hypnosis can help you let go of stress, get in the zone to attract people and business to you, and calmly and confidently move through a busy life. And to learn more about how hypnosis can help you have more of what you want, check out HypnosisTrainingCanada.com. Until next time,
00:21:24
Speaker
You've been listening to The Hypnosis Show with Robbie Spear Miller. Tune in next time to learn more about how you can change your life with hypnosis. And if you are interested in learning more about training opportunities, go to hypnosistrainingcanada.com and schedule a free consultation.