I have to admit, I was curious but dubious because any by-line that claims a single book can change your life seems too good to be true. To be sure, the authors realise this too, and the whole book is a conversation that plays on this suspicion.

So, let me tell you what’s good and bad about The courage to be disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, as well as my observations about how to avoid living someone else’s life by releasing the fear of being disliked.

The Good

Kishimi and Koga replicate a dialogue that they themselves undertook so that Koga could better understand Kishimi’s interpretation of psychology according to Alfred Adler, a peer of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Koga became obsessed with the writings and philosophy of Adler through a book that he stumbled upon years earlier, in which Kishimi overturns everyday Japanese wisdom with pithy simplifications of Adler’s thinking. The by-line of The courage to be disliked reflects this moment in Koga’s life and thinking, and communicates the hope that their book will also change their readers’s lives in a moment.

Kishimi and Koga make good on their promise to relay complex Adlerian psychology and philosophy in simple terms. This is a very readable book that you can power through in an afternoon thanks to the easy language. The examples used are also very relatable making the book accessible without the need to have any prior academic training.

There are certainly a number of simple and pithy statements that ring true in the book. For example:

• Each of us lives in a subjective world that we ourselves give meaning to.
• If we change, the world will change.
• We don’t change because the way we are living now serves specific goals that we are attached to.
• Life is not a competition; it’s enough to keep moving forward without comparing yourself to anyone other than your ideal self.
• One cannot change what one is born with. But one can, under one’s own power, go about changing what use one makes of that equipment.
• At their root, all problems are interpersonal problems that can be solved by knowing whose task is whose, and not intruding on other people’s tasks in the three domains of love, friendship, and work.

The philosopher in the conversation makes many claims (56 in total) and attempts to back them up against challenges from his interlocutor. For this purpose, they conduct their conversation through the use of scenarios from everyday life. However, the scenarios seem overly simplistic and cherry-picked to prove the claims in ways that do not admit alternative interpretations. And here lies the oppressive power of the blanket statements throughout the book because they contain an element of truth that is void of nuance and context.

The Bad

The introduction to The courage to be disliked feels like a set-up. The philosopher tells us that the reason the world appears to be a “chaotic mass of contradictions” is because we make the world complicated when, in fact, it is simple. It’s a circular argument that you can’t get around. Consistently, the philosopher will remind the youth that the problem lies with him (the youth) overcomplicating things and not with what he (the philosopher) is saying per se.

It is no accident that the pronouns I’ve used so far are masculine. The book speaks purely in terms of men. Perhaps this is why the authors so confidently assert that we can freely act as ourselves when we recognise that we are equally as valuable as the next person. While I agree that we all have equal worth, as anyone who does not belong to an elite group of men can attest, in the real world we do not all have equal power, a point that seems to be overlooked. There are moments in which the statements take on a more neutral tone with the formal use of “one”, but you never forget that this is two men talking to one another about men and traditional male and female roles in heteronormative families. Additionally, the tone of the conversation comes across as supercilious while they try to outsmart one another, making the reader feel like the writers are superior. 

Although the philosopher appears to be answering the youth’s questions about how to change, be happy and free, set boundaries, and have the courage to be disliked while also belonging to the community, this is really a utopian thought experiment more than a practical guide. There is no research to back up the claims, and little acknowledgement of the pitfalls you can encounter or the consequences that you may face as you try to implement the advice. There are no signposts for evaluating if you are succeeding, and the book contains a hyperbolic promise that anyone can change and be happy right now just by altering how they think and what they value. It’s as simple as deciding that your past does not exist and neither does the future! Live in the here and now as yourself.

The How To

Avoid Living Someone Else’s Life

“When one seeks recognition from others, and concerns oneself with how one is being judged by others, in the end, one is living other people’s lives.” Wow, that is a powerful invitation for putting people-pleasing behind me and daring to do what I think is right even in the face of the possibility I may be disliked.

In practical terms, the authors put forward an effective and useful recommendation for living your own life rather than someone else’s: know which tasks belong to you and which ones belong to others, and only perform your own tasks. I didn’t specifically go out looking for a situation to practice this for my blog post—I just got thinking about a serious situation where knowing whose task was whose worked for me. 

My manager of a few years back was insecure and used many gaslighting tactics to make their direct reports feel inferior. Shortly after I joined the team, a team member entered into a heated confrontation with our manager, including a nasty grievance process with Human Resources, after which they eventually quit. The team member shared some of their experience with me and I told them they weren’t imagining things because our manager had done some similar things to me. The team member asked me to share these things with HR too and fight their battle with them, or perhaps even for them, so our manager would have to leave. At the time, I felt I did not have enough evidence and that it was not my fight to fight. I believed that the correct response in the moment was to let the person know that they were not crazy and that what they shared was believable. 

Thanks to witnessing what happened to my co-worker, I realised that my task on my own behalf was to document anything untoward that happened in my relationship with my manager. I knew I was documenting these moments to help keep me sane and not let my manager get inside my head. Unfortunately, a moment arrived in which it was clear my manager was sabotaging me and I used my documentation to alert the relevant people higher up in the organisation. The organisation has a policy to not force people to lodge a grievance against their will, so while the higher-ups asked me to do so, I declined. I realised that I was not being paid enough to get rid of this toxic manager, and that I did not have the power to do so anyway. I knew that if we went through a grievance process, even if the organisation found in my favour, my bridges with my employer would be burned and both my manager and I would have to find work elsewhere. I was not in the business of destroying anybody.

The higher-ups respected my decision to refrain from lodging a grievance, but they also knew that my manager was a problem and they had to do something about it. They moved me onto a new team and promised that I would never have to work directly with the manager who sabotaged me. Thankfully, they made good on that promise and I never worked directly with the toxic manager again. It is very uncomfortable to bump into them form time to time, and we actively dislike one another although we treat one another cordially when our paths cross.

When I chose not to launch a grievance because I felt it was not my job to get rid of my manager, I was in essence saying that my manager’s manager and HR had their own jobs to do. I chose not to live their lives for them, and only live my life which at that moment was to take care of my own employment and experience of employment. This was the same situation when I refused to get embroiled in my co-worker’s fight with our manager—I gave them the opportunity to live their life.

No matter how clear the tasks and roles in my story seem after the fact, at the time they were not. Regardless of what Koga and Kishimi claim, life is not simple. Additionally, as much as I strongly believe in justice, I chose not to fight alongside my co-worker and not to lodge my own grievance because I know that how people perceive me affects my future opportunities. And while it may make sense in theory that we will be free to act if we care less about what others think, it is a psychological reality that we understand ourselves through our relationships with others. Not only that, being seen and recognised is critical to our mental health and being able to move through the world.

Conclusion

The courage to be disliked comes across as a cheap trick that preys on recovering people pleasers with its catchy title. The whole book seems to be an exercise in juxtaposing two opposing views to prove a point using straw men, cherry-picking, blanket statements, and circular reasoning. It starts as a conversation that promises some insight into how to happily live your one true life but ends just offering reasons to adopt some catchy meme themes. That’s not to say there isn’t an element of validity or truth to some of the catchy meme themes. Those half-truths weren’t enough, though, to overcome my annoyance with the fallacious arguments and the lack of nuance. It also annoyed me that the book offered a seemingly universal solution to a universal problem, viz., how to be happy and free, in a very male-centred way. I feel certain the authors will defend their exclusion of the rest of us through omission by saying they are exercising their freedom to be disliked!

If negative stars were part of my rating scale, the categories I use to rate all the books I review would produce a minus 1. Instead, I’ve given this book no stars. But, if you’re searching for examples of fallacious reasoning for a paper you are writing on rhetoric, your search is over.

Interestingly, a friend of mine who read my post about the Barbie movie loved what Ruth says to Barbie. This friend told me that her mother always competes with her and makes her feel small. She just wishes that her mother would stand still and let her forge her own path. My friend has a point. I suspect that if her mother would learn to understand and love herself, she wouldn’t need to compete with her daughter. Imagine, they could both look back together and honour how far each of them has come.

I said in my last blog post that one of the messages from the Barbie movie echoes a theme that runs through the book Women who run with the wolves: integrate Life and Death, dark and light, the beautiful and not-beautiful. This is what we (and my friend’s mother) should do, but how exactly? One way I thought of was to embrace imperfection. This brought me back to Brené Brown’s The gifts of imperfection that I first read just before she became a TED-talk sensation.

Thirteen years later, I read The gifts of imperfection again for this blog post. My experience of reading the book now was very different from the first time. To begin with, I read it through the lens of many new life experiences. I also read it through the lens of my rating criteria and how I structure my blog posts. Not to mention that this time Brené Brown’s voice rang in my head as well.

So, let’s consider what I think is good and bad about the book before I explore cultivating courage, connection, and compassion that can flow out of imperfection.

The Good

Brené Brown tells a good story in simple, accessible language. Not only that, her book benefits from her experience as an educator. Every chapter follows a similar structure that builds from the previous one. Brown uses headings well, makes links backwards and forwards, and ends every chapter with some practical things you can do. Additionally, she provides clever—or annoying, depending on your taste—acrostics to help you remember what you are learning. In other words, you always know where you are and what to expect.

Another benefit of Brown’s experience as an educator is her ability to model what a healthy alternative to shame and blame could be. Without this, many of us would have little idea of how to change our inner dialogue. We also wouldn’t know how to work with the many layers of our stories until we get to the root story underneath. And she reminds us through the stories she tells that every individual is different; what might be courageous for one person could turn out to be cowardice for another.

All in all, Brown does a good job of making her 10 year’s worth of research digestible for everyday people. She groups the qualities embodied by people who are good at wholehearted living into ten categories that she calls guideposts. She gives each quality it’s own chapter which makes it easy to choose to focus on only one at a time. Each guidepost chapter describes the quality as understood by the wholehearted, what barriers the research reveals, and some practical steps you can take towards reaching the guidepost.

Lastly, Brown’s appeal to her credentials as a social-work researcher using Grounded Theory to analyse over ten thousand accounts adds weight to her arguments. But don’t be deceived; there are some flaws.

The Bad

Brené Brown’s deep engagement with her research, and her year in therapy as a result, seem to have made her a bit cocky. The tone of The gifts of imperfection can come across as overly confident and categorical. If you’ve listened to her on podcasts, Instagram, and TED, you’ll know Brown speaks forcefully and her book comes across the same way. Consequently, there is a subtle undertone of judgement that undermines the most important message of her book: worthiness of love and belonging has no prerequisites.

One example of a subtle judgement is the statement that babies should come with a warning label not to trade their authenticity for safety. Crikey! This is a total (categorical) lack of nuance. Brown omits that we develop all the tactics she’s found get in the way of wholehearted living as bids to stay safely attached to the adults we depend on to reach adulthood ourselves. She also fails to acknowledge the trauma that often informs these tactics, or the distress that trying to let go of them can unleash.

So, this book fails in a very important way. It posits that you will live wholeheartedly if you follow the ten guideposts of authenticity, self-compassion, resilience, joy, intuition and trusting faith, creativity, play and rest, calm and stillness, meaningful work, and laughter, song and dance. It doesn’t inform you of the risks linked to embarking on the journey towards these destinations. It doesn’t identify the signs that tell you when you should seek therapy or urge you to do so. It doesn’t mention the preconditions needed to do the work.

Brown never tells us about the life circumstances that enable her research subjects to live wholeheartedly. She writes as if we are individuals who, like her, are white and privileged enough to have a loving family, a stable job, a group of trusted friends, and the finances needed to take on this work. Nowhere in her book does she discuss the social injustices that so many people face daily due to their various identities. The gifts of imperfection never recognises how society traps so many people in not-good-enough boxes not of their making.

These caveats are unfortunate. Forewarned, though, now you can engage with all that rings true, and there is a lot.

The How To

Embrace imperfection

Brown tells us that people who manage to live wholeheartedly are people who embrace imperfection. They know in their bones that they are worthy of love and belonging in spite of their imperfections. Therefore, when they encounter human imperfection (and the shame and fear that comes with it) they respond with courage, connection, and compassion.

How do they do that? To begin with, they know that shame and fear get bigger with secrecy. So the solution is to tell our story. It’s to choose the right person at the right time to connect with courageously. According to Brown, courage means sharing honestly about who we are, our experiences, and how they make us feel. Courage means risking being vulnerable. It means risking making other people feel uncomfortable by setting boundaries, and risking being disappointed by their response.

Still, this authenticity makes us own our story and integrate the part of the story we think doesn’t belong. When we do this, we meet others as our equals and communicate we are worthy of love and belonging. Plus, it makes it possible for us to be present with other people’s darkness and that is the essence of compassion. Finally, by measuring authenticity as our goal, we set ourselves up to still be okay even if the other person chooses not to like us.

So, how did this work for me?

A friend and I had dinner a while back. I laughed in recognition when they showed me the plethora of draft messages in their notes app that they never intend to send. My laugh meant I had to prove that I do the same thing by revealing the four different drafts I have of the same message. After some discussion, my friend reminded me that something good could come of sending the message, but not sending it probably guaranteed I’d poison the relationship as I feared.

The next day, I wrote draft five of the message and sent it while my heart pounded, my hands ran cold, and my nausea rose. Why such a strong reaction? The battle I’d won was to honour my needs and feelings to the point that I felt strong enough to cope with a shaming response should it come to that. After all, my own internal shaming voice was judging me for being ridiculous.

The friend I was writing to had promised to get back to me within a week of me offering to do them a favour. More than a week went by and their silence should not have been a big deal really. In fact, it was their loss and saved me some effort. Nevertheless, it bugged me. So I sat with that annoyance for a while and learnt three things:

1. I feel triggered because important people throughout my life have created false expectations or have reneged on their promises. Then I become resentful and distrusting because of it.
2. I value the friendship more than I realised.
3. I should communicate my boundaries and expectations if we are to have a healthy relationships characterised by respect.

In my message, I explained what was happening for me and how I would like to know what was happening for them. They responded within an hour. They did not ridicule me or question the validity of my need. Instead, they met my bid for connection with an equally vulnerable response. Of course, this reestablished safety and connection for both of us. Now, if my friend had responded differently, I would’ve learnt that I can’t be authentic with them and that would’ve helped me create a new boundary.

Conclusion

Brené Brown’s book, The gifts of imperfection, summarises 10 year’s worth of research amongst people who live wholeheartedly. The book explains how to courageously reach out and connect in our moments of shame to increase the chance of reaping compassion. As these three qualities of courage, connection and compassion emerge in moments of rupture to our relationships with ourselves and others, they gain the power to repair and reinforce love and belonging, which all humans need and crave.

Brown eloquently and adeptly guides us through her research and identifies many practical ways to start putting the findings into practice. Unfortunately, writing to us as if we were her ignores many nuances and risks that people with other identities and life experiences face. These risks and barriers can stymie their efforts to live as if they are enough and worthy of love and belonging right now, just as they are. Brown’s shortsightedness makes her book come across as categorical and overly confident. Even so, many ideas and suggestions ring true. Just remember to have a therapist waiting in the wings as you go on this journey.

Tell us how it worked for you in the comments and tag a friend or share on social media.

Last week we talked about how to hold a grudge, and crazy making behaviour is definitely grudge worthy. Gasligting is crazy making behaviour by another name, and it’s what this week’s book is about. Here I tell about what’s good, what drove me up the wall, and my take on Sarkis’ strategy to document, document, document in her book Gaslighting.

The Good

Through Gaslighting by Stephanie Moulton Sarkis, you will learn in broad strokes what this popular term tends to mean.  You can use the tactic descriptions and case studies to identify ways in which you might be subject to gaslighting or you may be using it yourself.  You will also get a sense of the extent of damage it can do.  Know that you are not alone, that there are ways to talk about it, and measures to take whether you are on the giving or receiving end.

If you have been around people who serially gaslight, you may already have a good sense of the strategies laid out in the book.  You may be so used to it, though, that you see it as normal.  Sarkis explains how this happens.  She outlines what, how and why it constitutes abuse and is clear that abusive relationships do not improve over time, but rather escalate.  Having experienced the destruction wreaked by these behaviours, you may have decided to never practice them yourself!  But have you decided to protect yourself from people who do this to you?  There are many ideas, recommendations and resources in the book to do just this. 

The basic message of the book is to get out of an abusive relationship.  Sarkis helps the reader identify what both healthy and abusive relationships look like.  She is very clear that getting out is almost impossible to do alone.  Getting therapy, along with support and protection from family, friends and the justice system is consistently recommended.  A chapter is dedicated to different types of therapy so that you can select the one best suited to you.  There is also an extensive resource section at the end of the book.  It will be necessary to extrapolate the gist of what she recommends to your local context if you do not live in the US.

Sarkis is careful to avoid victim-blaming.  The experience of people who have been repeatedly gaslighted is also normalised.  This is a great antidote to the chaos and lies sown by someone who emotionally abuses others on a daily basis.  

Another great antidote to judging yourself, victim-blaming, and the paranoia that arises from being gaslit is Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Talking to Strangers.  In it he covers 3 effective human communication strategies that occasionally get us into trouble: default to truth, expectations of transparency, and coupling.  He concludes, “Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic.  But the alternative – to abandon trust as a defence against predation and deception – is worse”.

Many of the articles found on-line, or videos available on YouTube, address gaslighting on an interpersonal level.  Looking at it on a collective level is what Sarkis’ book adds to the conversation.  The discussion shows how it plays out in politics, the media, the internet, cults, and destructive groups like gangs and terrorist cells.  Here again, the importance of strength in numbers is highlighted.  

The Bad

Sarkis has been criticised for using a term that does not appear in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and she is the first to admit that.  She is a seasoned psychologist whose work regularly brings her into contact with this kind of behaviour.  By not using a DSM term, she removes the temptation for her readers to make an unqualified clinical diagnosis of Cluster B personality disorders (like narcissism) while giving the reader language to name and describe what they are experiencing or doing

In the introduction Sarkis explains how the book is structured and urges readers to read all chapters because they each have something useful no matter your situation.  This is true.  However, by structuring the book according to arenas where gaslighting plays out, the reader is invited to skip to the chapter that talks about the context they are in.  I would have found it more helpful if it were laid out according to tactics/strategies that comprise gaslighting.  This would have provided the intellectual space to deal with them in a more complex and nuanced manner.  Each chapter could then include case studies and examples from different contexts to illustrate it more, followed by strategies for dealing with the behaviour in question.  Also, the tactics could be arranged in a way that show how they build and escalate into something surprising, unbearable and abusive.  The information about what healthy relationships look like could be a chapter on its own.  In addition to their modus operandi, a chapter on the profile of why gaslighters (sic) do what they do would be useful.  The creativity in applying gaslighting tactics is as endless as we are unique.  Once we understand what motivates a person to use these strategies along with what they hope to achieve, we will better be able to see through this creativity.  It’s not that this information isn’t in the book.  It is.  It’s just that it is scattered all over the place.

Chapter 1 is a catalogue of behaviours that can be considered gaslighting.  The sketches are caricatures, emphasising one aspect and ignoring or downplaying others.  For almost all of the behaviours mentioned, I could think of a more complex, subtle and nuanced way that I have seen it played out.  I once supervised a twenty-something person whose boundless creativity with employing these strategies was impressive to behold.  

I experienced this book as a relentless onslaught.  The book feels vitriolic.  Although the author admits in passing that we all use gaslighting tactics from time to time, there is little if any compassion for people who do it.  She employs splitting and stereotyping:  people who consistently gaslight are given a label, gaslighters, and they have no redeeming qualities while the people on the receiving end are victims.  Life is much more complex than this.

It seems that her intent is to help people who are victims get away.  By the time I got to the end of the chapter on families (halfway through the book by the Kindle meter) I got the sense that everyone who gaslights is a  psychopath waiting to happen and that extreme measures are warranted always.  Bombarding readers with so much overwhelming and catastrophizing information may just paralyse them more… or make them put the book down and miss some important information.  She talks about how the abuse ramps up over time and that it can end in violence and quite possibly death.  I don’t doubt this in some cases.  It is ironic, then, that Sarkis seldom makes explicit the dangers inherent in taking the actions she lists in the book. 

The How To

Document, document, document — this is one of the strategies that Sarkis is emphatic about.

From personal experience, documentation can be a declaration of war.  This is because documentation belies both the personal image and narrative that are so important to people who gaslight.  I do not recommend using it to hold someone like this accountable on a daily basis. 

Documentation is important first and foremost because of what it does for you:

• It gives you something to refer back to as proof that you are not crazy!  
• The pattern(s) will begin to emerge as you flip back through all the incidents that you have written down.
• You will be able to identify how many qualities are present and how persistent they are.  
• It will reveal whether you need to take steps to protect yourself, and which ones.  
• It will give you material to work with in identifying your beliefs and values, and affirming that you deserve to be treated with dignity, kindness and respect. 

Sophie Hannah’s process for How To Hold a Grudge is a great way to document what is happening, assess the seriousness of it, identify the right thing to do, and affirm your worth while acknowledging that the person who is harming you is a human being worthy of compassion even as they are to be kept very far away.  (You can read my review of this process here).

There are times, however, when you will want to take legal or disciplinary action, and then documentation following the correct format is required.   Writing down the incident as soon as possible is best since memory plays tricks on us later and is influenced by conversations with others.  A very helpful app is Talk to Spot, which will walk you through all the categories that protect you in a court of law.  As a supervisor, I learned the hard way that any old documentation is not good enough.  It has to contain certain key information to stand up to legal challenges.  As such, your HR department won’t allow you to let someone go if your documentation does not make the grade. 

All written communication is a form of documentation.  It is a good suggestion to communicate as much as possible in writing with the person gaslighting you.  Take screenshots of your electronic chats so that they cannot be deleted by the other person.  If this is occurring in a work context, be sure to send screenshots and copies of e-mails to your personal e-mail account, or store on a personal usb device.  Again, seeing the pattern is what will free you to take the next steps you need to and confirm (or not) the extent of what you are experiencing.  If you do have to go to court, then you also have evidence to back you up.

Conclusion

“Educating yourself is one of the most powerful steps you can take to combat gaslighters and their harassment”, so says Sarkis.  I couldn’t agree more.  There is a lot of good and helpful information in her book, Gaslighting, that you can use to educate yourself.  Despite its redeeming qualities, I got bored and annoyed and overwhelmed and had to force myself to read to the end.  At times it feels like all the author’s experience and information was slapped together as quickly as possible.  This may account for the higgledy-piggledy information that you have to wade through all over the place to find what you really need.  There is little acknowledgement of degrees; degrees of gaslighting and degrees of the measures to take. What can happen when you take the recommended steps to put a stop to gaslighting are also hardly dealt with.  She seems to deal in extremes.