on "shoulds"

20 Jul, 2024

The word "should" has always left a sour taste in my mouth. A well meaning off-handed comment such "You should maybe tie your shoes...", would be met with my immediate negative aura. "Why should I listen to you? On what authority are you saying this?? Do you know better than me???" I struggle with this knee-jerk reaction even to this day. I've recently come to a theory on why it gets me so riled up, and how I can process it better, and I'd love to share it with you. It really helped me come to terms these, from the "everyday should" to some deep-seated internalized voices.

Note: this reads as if directly from my stream-of-consciousness, so it can be jumpy in places.

Should

For clarification, i'm talking about the definition:

used to indicate obligation, duty, or correctness, typically when criticizing someone's actions. (Google)

(i hate to use definitions in formal writing or speaking, it's pretty corny. I felt like i had to use it here though cause there's so many uses of the word "should".)

This use of the word should has a clear standard for, as it describes, "obligation, duty, or correctness". Let's consider the following:

You should tie your shoes.

The missing context here is the standard of "correctness" that I'm being comparing to. (It is socially accepted to have tied shoes.)

Aside: Taking things personally

Just taking the phrase at face value, there's a lot one can take personally here. Let's take it from an expert, Sir Takes-Everything-Personally, who's made a home in my head:

• Why should I conform to your standard?
• What if my standard of correctness is different?
• Who do you think you are to tell me to do something different?
• Do you think you're better than me??
• etc.

(Leave it to him to ruin the vibes. I'll maybe write about his behaviour another time.)

A lot of the problem here is me taking things personally. I'm lucky that I can say no one in my life that's close to me would seriously question my behaviour or intelligence through such an indirect statement such as this. Beyond that, there is a bit more to unpack here.

Let's consider another example:

You should be going to church.

As a kid this is so easy to follow. Sundays are for church, simple as. This leads to another failure mode: the recommendation gets blindly followed, without understanding what's behind it. Eventually they become internalized. But at what point does that voice stop? Well, to no one's surprise, these voices don't stop on their own! 😄🔫

Let's reframe!

Let's use our communication muscles for a bit here. If we're missing context in a sentence, let's leave a space for the speaker to put it in. Concretely,

You should X if Y.

Let's reword those examples:

You should tie your shoes, if you don't want to trip.

Easy enough. This speaker is looking out for you, and doesn't want you to break your nose on the concrete! How considerate.

You should be going to church, if you want to ...

Woah woah woah, pause. There's so many things you can fill here!

• If you want to be a regular church attendee
• If you want to see your church friends
• If you want to get out of the house
• If you want to be a good Christian (or whatever)
• If you want me to be happy with you
• And so much more!

This seems to be much more nuanced. (I guess technically the shoe-tying example can be interpreted in various ways as well, but I just showed the non-controversial socially accepted one.)

So... what do we do here?

Growing up, my train of thought and resulting behaviour was simple:

• clearly i'm not up to their standard of correctness.
• i want to be correct in their eyes.
  • i go to church.

This got me far. I was a very obedient kid, and got a lot of "grown up points" from the grown ups. So, I'd like to thank that part of me for its service. 🫡 However, now it's doing me more harm than good. So we're working on unraveling it, unlearning harmful behaviours and learning new ones.

Back to the example. Let's think about how this makes us feel. When someone says "You should be going to church.", it's left up to us to fill in the context. Without it,

1. we are left guessing what they mean.
   • (What this looked like for me (ruminating, introverted), was that I would derive some harsh/negative headcanon on why they might be saying that. "They must think I'm not a good Christian." Which is a harsh conclusion, because we are typically harshest on ourselves.)
2. Or, we don't question the motivation and blindly follow this advice.
   • Church = good! Drugs = bad!

Armed with this newfound ability to reframe this sentence (You should be going to church, if ...), it allows me to get behind the motivation of their comment. In practice, it looks something like this

• "You should go to church" -> My behaviour is not up to their standard.
  • (That's okay. I believe I am behaving appropriately, though I'm willing to hear out their reasoning [non judgementally]).
  • question: what is their standard of correctness?
    • they want me to be a regular church attendee.
    • Or, they want me to be religious.
    • Or, they think that by me going, it will look good on them (personal motivations, push their agenda).
  • question: do I want the same thing? do I hold the same standard?
    • Not usually. I might, but not in this scenario.
  • question: Is that okay?
    • Yes.

This is very mature, and requires a lot of various aspects of myself to come forth.

• It takes some courage to stop, think, and be grounded in yourself the whole time.
• It takes security to think that "what I've chosen up until now is best for me".
• But it also takes humility and openness to believe that "I'm willing to change if presented with new information".
• In the case that it turns out your actions are inappropriate based on the new information, it takes grace and forgiveness towards yourself to say "It's okay that you behaved this way, you didn't know, as long as we are acting differently from now on".

(I'm realizing now that being a human is a rounded effort, and you can't just speedrun one trait at a time!)

How did I get here?

It's always fun for me to trace back what went into something, such as a delicious meal at an overpriced restaurant (I can make this at home!), a beautiful portfolio website (oh never mind it was just squarespace), or what got me to a certain point in thought. Let's break down how we got to this point, which ultimately I think is the most interesting part of this blog post:

• Framing

  • visakanv talks at length about this in his wonderful book INTROSPECT.
  • I reframed the situation: zoomed out and looked at it, like printing out a case study and reading through it.
    • This is similar to the mindfulness practice of observing your thoughts as clouds. Or, as naval framed it, enabling "debug mode" on your brain and observing the logs (lol).

• No one "forces" you to do anything

  • IDK where I picked this one up. But essentially, "unless someone has a gun to your head, no one is forcing you to do anything, you are choosing your actions". (Of course this is much more nuanced, as there are things just as bad as putting a gun to your head, but I will not get into that).
  • If someone has a problem with your actions, that's their problem. I think I picked this up from "The Courage to be Disliked".
  • "Shoulds" are not holding you at gunpoint, and therefore no one is forcing you to conform.

• "Want for yourself, or else others will"

  • This is about having a strong enough conviction over what you want, or else other people will impose theirs on you. In this case, you internalize others' "shoulds" to the point where what you want is what they want.

• Don't take things personally

  • From "The Four Agreements". Highly recommend.

• Internal family systems

  • Taught me to thank parts of me for their service when they think they're protecting me, and "allowing it" to take a step back so others can help out.

• CBT (no not that one you dirty dog)

  • The importance of the words you use in your head. A part of CBT's "Cognitive restructuring" is word replacement, achieved here by playing with frames.

Closing

if you're still here, thanks! it means a lot. you can reach me... somewhere tbd. write your feedback on a piece of paper, fold it, seal it with wax, and leave it outside. sprinkle some Sunflower Hearts: No-Mess, No-Waste Birdseed on it and my people will be in contact.