Following a Feel: The Remarkable Mark Rashid

If you were to draw a line at the point in this blog that symbolized my most major horsemanship shift, this would be the place to draw it: right at my first clinic with Mark Rashid.

I’ve been reading and loving Mark’s books for years, and last year it suddenly occurred to me: I could study with him.

So I did.            

And wow.

There have been a lot of wow moments in my history with Lupin. In fact, my mind is kinda blown by the amount that I have been privileged to learn and grow with him over the years, and by all the amazing teachers we’ve had. But studying with Mark has been the Wowest of the Wows.

It’s not that Mark is some fancy hotshot who does jaw-dropping things with his horses. In fact he’s quite the opposite: he’s understated and quiet. And it’s not that he says so much that is so radically different from what other horsemen say, though certainly he does say a lot of fascinating things I haven’t heard before.

In fact, in a lot of fundamental ways his approach is very compatible with that of others in terms of its content. But the feel that’s behind it is, well—did I say this already?—wow.

Feel is a challenging thing to convey through words. It’s not designed to be talked about, but to be felt. But since words are what I’ve got, I’ll give it a go, and I’ll start with the feel coming from Mark that I experienced myself.

*   *   *

I actually met Mark for the first time at a demo he gave last year while I was in Florida. I was in the middle of my Horsenality/ Humanality course when I learned that Mark was just down the road. All I could make it to was the demo, but that was enough. That was all it took to make me absolutely determined to study with Mark. Here’s why:

Mark uses his demos to talk about the principles of the martial art of aikido—principles that he incorporates into his horsemanship. He gets auditors up and participating in pairs or groups, and he has us do exercises that are literally hands-on: he asks us, for example, to try to move someone by pushing them, and then to try again by starting, not with the idea of moving the other person, but with the idea that “we” are going to move.

It’s hard to believe without feeling it what a difference this makes. It puts your center of gravity and focus and everything else back in the center of you, and it dismantles the tendency to look at things (like other people and horses) as obstacles and problems. Indeed, it completely rewires our tendency to focus on what’s “wrong” and gets us to envision instead the positive outcome that we’re looking for.

This sounds like semantics, but it isn’t. And it isn’t just psychology either. It’s also physiology. You soften and relax, not only because you’re centered in yourself, but also because you’re no longer in a “me vs. them” mentality; instead, you’re doing things together with others. The brace in you melts, and that feeling travels through your hands into the other person, and even to the person beyond them if there’s a third, starting a chain reaction of irresistible relaxation.

When you’re on the receiving end of this process, the surprise is no longer how easy it suddenly becomes to initiate movement in others; the surprise is the sense of internal ease and happiness that floods through you out of the blue, leaving you smiling and a little stunned at how good it feels just to relax and go with.

And if you’re lucky enough to get to do a few exercises like this with Mark one-on-one, you will know that this is not just profound awesomeness, but game-changing, world-changing awesomeness. And I don’t just mean with horses.

*   *   *

My desire to learn as much as I could about this awesomeness led me back to the same clinic this year, this time with Lupin. I didn’t need the opening demo to get me fired up about being there, but it was fantastic all the same. 

Mark explained that when aikido works, you have a positive impact on the other person, even if they have an aggressive intention toward you. Your internal softness changes their outlook and intention, even as you send them tumbling to the mat (which, however, will feel good to them if you are doing aikido with real softness).

“How do you change the inside of you,” Mark asked, “so that you can affect your partner in a positive way?”

I got the answer during one of my lessons with Mark when he demonstrated feel on a rope to me. Holding the other end of the rope, he showed me how it feels when you lead with hardness (usually unconscious hardness that we might even think feels fairly soft), and then he showed me how it feels when you have the internal softness that comes from relaxation.
 

photo courtesy of Jeane DeVries

One moment I was standing there with my hand braced on a taut rope; the next moment, without any external change on Mark’s part or any movement of the rope, I felt my entire insides relax and I involuntarily let out a deep sigh. How do you change the inside of you so that you can affect your partner in a positive way? You soften inside, and you communicate that softness through feel, thereby creating softness in them. Amazing. And so beyond any concept of a “soft feel” that I’d ever even thought of, let alone experienced.

We’re not talking lightness here. We’re talking about a profound feeling of peace. That is the essence of softness.

*   *   *

Mark communicated this same sensation to me on the day of my first lesson in a different way.

I felt more at ease at the prospect of studying with Mark than I have with any other new instructor. I trusted him implicitly and knew with certainty that it would be a hugely positive experience before I ever even showed up with my horse.

Nonetheless, I still had a bit of the “first day of something new” jitters. We started out by chatting a bit about what I wanted to work on, and in doing so we touched on a topic that I have developed something of an emotional charge about: leadership. Decades of going back and forth between trying to do things peacefully and having others tell me that I’m not being assertive enough have wreaked some havoc in my brain around this topic and made me incredibly self-conscious about any apparent lack of “leadership” with my horse.

I could go on and on, which is, in fact, what my brain began doing as I talked to Mark. Though I was doing my best (and succeeding decently well) at keeping it together, I have no doubt that Mark could tell I was in a heightened emotional state. What he did about it was really impressive, and it was this: he did nothing.

Actually, that’s not true. I’ve been in that same scenario with other people who did nothing—people who, like Mark, just continued calmly talking with me until I settled back down and then carried on. But Mark did something more than that. I can’t tell you exactly how he did it, and I didn’t realize until later on that he had done it. It wasn’t just that he stayed calm. It was that he held a center of calmness that he waited for me to find, and when I did, I was at peace again.

It was the feeling of peace that let me know that Mark was doing something different. In that same scenario with other people the external trajectory would look the same, but as I got back to whatever we were working on, I wouldn’t return to it with a sense of peace. I would still be right on the verge of getting emotional again the next time I felt challenged. I might finally earn some hard-won peace by having a breakthrough with my horse or reaching a new understanding, but I would be exhausted by the process.

With Mark I felt just the opposite: I felt lighter and more peaceful with each lesson. There was no feeling of the weight of great learning at the end of the lessons—just a sense that something had shifted. But it wasn’t a shift I needed to analyze or work to keep. It was just a shift I needed to feel and continue to allow to happen. I have never felt less exhausted at the end of a clinic. In fact, I felt good.

photo courtesy of Bo Reich

That’s not to say that I moved into a zen bliss trance where nothing could bother me. Periodically another emotionally charged subject came up—our lack of motivation/impulsion. But again, this was charged for me because of my past experiences and perceptions, not because of Mark.

Indeed, it was Mark’s calm presence that gave me the space and tranquility to realize just how charged I had allowed the issue to become for me. Because my lessons with Mark were predominately peaceful spaces of finding a new kind of feel rather than chaotic spaces of processing information and trying to perform well, I could more easily recognize the baggage that I was carrying around when it showed up. And I could more easily let it go and move back to a peaceful state myself.

I imagine that this is also how horses feel around Mark. They may have histories that have created some emotional baggage for them, but when they get in that emotional space, Mark doesn’t make a big deal of it, or get them busy, or do a bunch of things to “fix” them. He just keeps his own calm, peaceful center and lets them find it.

It’s a remarkable thing to experience. And what is more remarkable is that Mark can teach it. Am I going to find every opportunity I can to learn it from him? You bet!



*Note*: To clarify, Mark is not a Parelli instructor. He does his own thing, and he writes delightful books about it. You can find all of them here. I have yet to read anything by him that wasn't fascinating and enjoyable, but if you're interested in the topic of this blog post, his newest book A Journey to Softness will blow your mind—in a calm, understated, and subtle way, of course! 

Comfort & discomfort

I just attended an amazing clinic on emotional fitness with Linda Parelli and Jenny Susser. Comfort and discomfort were definitely central themes as Jenny taught us to embrace discomfort in ourselves as an opportunity for growth and as Linda talked about how to help our horses find comfort. But that’s not why I’ve titled this entry “Comfort & Discomfort.”

Instead, today I want to muse on a very specific comment that Linda made. She was talking about how the heart of horsemanship lies in figuring out what your horse needs, and about looking for ways to help him be calm, connected, and responsive. At one point she added quite intriguingly that the comfort/discomfort model is, by current standards, “caveman horsemanship.”

She was referring primarily to the way that, for instance, in the past Pat would work on trailer loading a horse by making the area outside of the trailer uncomfortable (via movement, noise, pressure, etc.) so that the horse started hunting the inside of trailer as the place where all of that pressure was removed. Now, however, Linda said Pat will instead think about what that individual horse needs in order to be able to get on the trailer.

Most people who practice or teach natural horsemanship are familiar with the idea of making the desirable behavior easy (or comfortable) and the undesirable behavior difficult (or uncomfortable). Just this morning in my news feed I found this quote from Buck Brannaman: “As a rider, you must slowly & methodically show your horse what is appropriate. You also have to discourage what is inappropriate, not by making the inappropriate impossible, but by making it difficult so that the horse himself chooses appropriate behavior. You can't choose it for him; you can only make it difficult for him to make the wrong choices.” 

As Buck implies here, the appealing idea behind the comfort/discomfort model is that you don’t take away the horse’s ability to choose; instead, you guide him toward making “better” choices. Or, in Pat’s terms, you “cause” your horse to want to do something rather than “make” him do it. In an ideal scenario, then, you are empowering your horse while simultaneously getting the result you are looking for.

This is, undeniably, a step above just making your horse do what you want without caring whether he is on board with your plan or not. On reflection, however, it does seem that the horse must feel as if he is simply being channeled between banks of discomfort when he’s with his human.

For example, say that we want our horse to go in a straight line. When he’s on the line, we leave him alone. When he goes off it, we get busy with our aides (rein, leg, stick, what have you). Again, this is a step up from just micro-managing the whole time because there is a reward (being left alone) when he’s doing what we want. But it seems to me that the horse’s main perception would be that, when he’s with his human, there’s a lot of discomfort that he has to find his way to avoiding.

What’s good is that we have provided a way for him to do this—it is no longer a lose-lose situation for the horse as it is when the human continues to pressure the horse even when he's on focus. But nonetheless, it seems like the best deal the human is offering is a cessation of discomfort.

Now, many people agree that this is pretty dang motivating for horses. While other species, like dogs, are motivated by praise, horses really are motivated simply by being left alone. But they have that already when the human isn’t there. So what are we adding, then, that will cause them to really want to be with us? Just a lack of being an asshole means that they’ll like us okay, but as Linda said, we want our horses to be passionate about being with us—to love being with us. What would inspire them to feel that way?

I’m thinking today that the real limitation of the comfort/discomfort model is that, traditionally, our focus has been much more on the discomfort side. Sure, we are careful to offer, in Buck Brannaman’s terms, “the good deal”—which is to say that we start with just our focus and an invitation for the horse to follow it. But most of our effort and attention then goes into creating the appropriate level of discomfort to inspire our horse to accept that good deal. Hence, we focus on a line for the horse to follow, then pick up the rein, stick, etc., then tap with a rope, stick, etc., then tap harder, etc., until the horse finds our focus and we quit. Most of the process has to do with discomfort.

What if, instead, we put more of our effort and intention into the comfort side? What if we made that focus delicious for the horse to follow by being positive and enthusiastic about it ourselves? What if we worked on tuning all of the static out of our focus by having a clear idea and not getting sucked into distractions so that it’s easy for the horse to see it? What if we softened our focus by asking with relaxation and mental lightness rather than determination and direct-line thinking? What if we envisioned the good feeling of harmony with our horse and invited them to join us out of that space? What if we asked our horses, “Can you do this with me?” instead of “Can you do this?” What if, while asking our horse, we also radiated gratitude for all that our horse has already done?

I’m not suggesting that we focus exclusively on comfort, and I don’t espouse the “positive reinforcement only” model of horsemanship; sometimes you need to apply some form of pressure. But I think we’ve let our obsession with how and when and how much to apply pressure and when to stop applying pressure hijack the other side of the equation. I think there’s a space for positivity, not only in our release, reward, and gratitude when the horse does the right thing, but in the way we ask in the first place.

If we put half or more of our attention on envisioning the different kinds of comfort our horses need, then we’ve begun to balance the equation. What does comfort mean to your horse? Is it really just a lack of pressure? Or is it having a companion who speaks his language, understands his needs, seeks to create harmony, and helps him feel better mentally, emotionally, and physically? And how can we help our horses with all of these things?

These are the kinds of questions that, I think, will bring the comfort/discomfort model from a “caveman” level to a level that is present, immediate, and highly relevant to our larger horsemanship goal, not of getting our horse to do—or even to want to do—what we want, but of getting truly in harmony with our horse.

First, I’d like to give a big thank you to Mark Rashid, who has done a lot of thinking, writing, and teaching about softness and harmony with horses. (See, for example, Mark’s excellent new blog: Considering the Horse).

Second, I am excited that Parelli seems to be evolving in the direction of really emphasizing the comfort side of the equation and all of the things we can do to be positive presences in our horses’ lives. That element has always been in Parelli—in fact, “putting the relationship first” is, as any Parelli student knows, a central tenet of Parelli. But it’s a concept that needs a lot of fleshing out for people to be able to practice it successfully.

The good news is that, based on the things Linda and Jenny talked about this weekend, I believe the methods for doing so are about to come much more into the foreground, and I can’t wait!

Horsenality/Humanality course notes (part 3): Horsenality & Strategy

For the horsenalities, one really instructive thing that Linda did was to show videos of the different horsenalities having, ah, challenging moments. 

The LBE was having a grand time: he was standing up on his back feet practically dancing whenever his human approached, and you could tell it was all a big game to him. The LBI would plant his front feet and buck with his back end and land actually going backwards whenever the rider asked him forwards (you could just here him saying, “Shan’t!”). The RBE was identical to Linda’s drawing of RBE’s on wheels (with the rider at about a 45 degree angle to the ground as she got left behind), and the RBI was, as Linda hardly needed to note, by far the scariest of all: he was all over the place, explosive, and completely unpredictable.

Here’s an overview of what each type tends to do when they’re pushed, upset, or, as Patrick would put it, triggered—and what each one needs in that situation:

LBE go UP needs: play	RBE go  FORWARD needs: focus
LBI WON’T move needs: a reason	RBI CAN’T move needs: gentleness

Linda also explained the idea of spirit—as in, horsenality is determined by innate characteristics, learned behavior, environment, and spirit. While the first three are pretty self-explanatory, I’ve always been unclear on spirit. For instance, it can be a bit confusing to think of what a high-spirited introvert would look like.

But Linda clarified that spirit is, essentially, an amplifier—or a volume control—on a given horsenality’s traits. So whatever the behavior is, the higher the spirit level = the more effort the horse will put into the behavior. A resisting LBI might lie down if he’s got a high spirit level, but depending on what he’s doing, he might also move his feet a lot. However, the movement will be in the service of being a more extreme LBI—which is to say, pursuing his own ideas and resisting yours. (This is why to be successful with LBI’s, you have to make it their idea, because that is when they are motivated to move.)

Ideally, we learn to harmonize with our horses so that they don’t need to exhibit extreme behaviors, just as we try to communicate with other people in a way that doesn’t trigger them into being reactive. In addition to outlining the needs of the individual horsenalities (which I’ll discuss below), Linda gave two general pieces of advice about our own attitude that will help with our ability to harmonize with any horse:

(1) Before a session with your horse, visualize not so much what you want to do with your horse, but more how you want to do it and how you want your horse to look/feel. Primary goals are things like trust, responsiveness, confidence, relaxation, and we should be looking to reward these things as much as, if not more than, the specific movements we want from our horses.

(2) Warm-up is not training—it’s play time. Really don’t be critical here; just let them go and let them express themselves however they need to. The goal of a warm-up is to get them calm, confident, and responsive, and if you correct them, they won’t get there. If you plan to teach something new on the ground, that’s fine, but have a clear idea in your head about when you’re warming up and when you’re teaching. Until they’re connected, you’re still in warm-up, and zero brace is the concept you need here, as well as the belief that the horse can do no wrong.

The other big thing you’re trying to do during warm-up is to match your horse’s energy. The introvert/extrovert axis is more important here than the right brain/left brain, and you identify this by looking at the energy the horse is projecting. Is it inward, or outward? Where is his focus? Up and around, or more internal? That’s the first big question you need to answer so that you can harmonize with your horse.

After that, you can move on more to particulars. Here’s what Linda said about each horsenality type:


LEFT BRAIN EXTROVERTS (i.e., Highland)

Quite often, LBE’s aren’t the most dominant: they’re more interested in playing than in dominating. But often they go into fight mode with us because they are allergic to suppression. We tend to brace against them because we’re trying to control them, and when we do this, they can fight for hours. But it’s over in minutes if you don’t give them anything to fight/brace against. You have to take a leap of faith and really believe that zero brace is the key.

You also want to mentally engage/challenge LBE’s from the start. You’re not trying to calm them down or control them: let them play! However, this doesn’t have to be change, change, change; it’s more that when you ask them to go, have them GO! Don’t be afraid of the bigness. You can use this same attitude to embrace their ideas (“Yeah! That’s a great idea! You should GO!”)

Also, praise them a lot. LBE’s love to hear an enthusiastic “Good boy!”


RIGHT BRAIN INTROVERTS (i.e., Hot Jazz)

In an RBI, willingness is a measure of trust/confidence, and hesitancy is the opposite (they may be going forward but they’re thinking backwards because they’re not really confident enough to be going forward yet).

RBI’s want to do the right thing and get stressed when they don’t know how to. They don’t tend to play much, and they may not look at you much either. Linda: “if he can’t look at me, that’s the worst time for me to send him off.” RBI's are often most comfortable with you in Zone 3, 4, or 5, and sometimes that’s a better place for you to rest with them than Z1.

But RBI’s generally want to be in physical proximity to you, and doing things further away from you is hard for them.

With RBI’s you want to take it slowly, and the attitude of “they can do no wrong” is crucial. Don’t be afraid to ask RBI’s to do things, but do give them lots of time to process and build gradually. For example, circles further away and at liberty are hardest for Jazz, so when Linda started, she would let him come in whenever he wanted. As their training progressed, she asked more and more for him to find relaxation (blowing out, more rhythm, lower head, etc.) out on the circle and in movement. (During the demo my class watched, she asked him to keep trotting on the circle until he blew out, which was a progression from letting him come down to the walk to blow out.)

The biggest thing with an RBI is to wait until they’re able to do what you’re asking to do rather than going up your phases. Trust takes time, and particularly if you’ve got damaged goods, it’s a long road. Think about how to make what you want a more comfortable thing for your RBI (for example, if your RBI doesn’t want to go over poles, make the pole the comfort place by doing more away from it and letting her rest by it).

When you’ve asked your RBI to do something hard and stressful, follow it up with something easy and relaxing, like Stick-to-me.

On a side note, Linda has followed Luis Lucio’s lead and started using a heart monitor on her horses, particularly with Jazz. This gives her an indication of what the horse’s stress level really is, since RBI’s will try quite hard for humans even when they’re stressed. Linda rode Jazz around further away from and then closer to his herd mates while calling out his heart rate, and though he looked practically the same, the heart rate varied wildly just at the walk. Luis waits for the heart rate to go below 70 before he does anything, even walking.


LEFT BRAIN INTROVERTS (i.e., Na’avi)

LBI’s are slow on the outside but very busy inside. We tend to think it’s about getting the trot, canter, etc., but what it’s really about is getting the mind: the higher gaits and the responsiveness will come when you have the mind. In fact, as Linda put it, “LBI’s only look LBI’s when we’re doing it wrong.”

With LBI’s, we tend to get sucked into nagging; we often start above phase 1 and stay around phase 2/3 for a long time, both of which really annoy them (which means they go forward even less). Our goal with LBI’s is to be soft and clear, and you always have to start soft yourself if you want your horse to be soft. That’s true with all horses, but it’s particularly important to remember with LBI’s, who often cause us to get forget it.

The worst thing you can do is to try to prevent them from getting slow or micromanage them. (Linda’s definition of micromanaging is, in fact, preventing mistakes, because then you are also preventing them from learning.) The next worse thing you can do is push them when they slow down, or get out ahead of them. Don’t get into a fight: think in terms of allowing them to zig, and then zagging them back—don’t resist the zig.

Break the cycle of nagging by staying true to the progression of your aids. When riding, try not to use your leg. Start with your seat, tap on the shoulder, and then do whatever motivates them (maybe this is tickling them in the ear) and then release quickly. Then start again if you need to. Don’t hang in there, nag, or try to control.

If you ask for a trot and they trot, stop them and make a big fuss praising them (but don’t mess their mane all up rubbing them—you do that with extroverts). Then repeat. Pretty soon they want to trot because they get to stop. 

Same concepts apply if they’re veering off course. Don’t pull on the rein; instead, reset them quickly with the rein, then reward. Repeat as necessary. So rather than, “Gooooooooo theeeeeeeere,” it’s, “GO THERE! Good girl. GO THERE! Good girl.”

Your mantra with an LBI is, “Don’t get mad; get even-tempered.”


RIGHT BRAIN EXTROVERTS

We didn’t actually get to see Linda work with one of these. As with LBE’s, however, you want to avoid saying ‘no’ to them and correcting them a lot or trying to suppress them; instead, give them a direction in which to expend their energy.

If they’re on adrenaline, ideally you want to be able to encourage them to move around and burn it off: “you’d better go!” If you’re not in an environment where that’s possible, use constant and snappy disengages and changes of direction until the adrenaline’s gone.


At the end of the day, what’s true about each horsenality is this: “Horsemanship has to be about the horse’s needs. The perfect horse is there, right in front of you, and you’re either bringing out the best in them or the worst in them.”

I’ll close with a few audio clips of Linda and Patrick reprising their delightful Savvy Summit roles as horses and humans of different –analities paired together. The last video is of Linda speaking the part of a fellow student’s LBI horse. When Urszula asked a question about her horse, Linda asked if she’d like to come up and have a conversation with her horse (i.e., Linda). What ensued was hilarious in the way that only Linda impersonating an LBI horse can be. Enjoy!

(Video images once again courtesy of Becky Shewchuk.)

Horsenality/Humanality course notes (part 2): Triggers and reactions

I spent most of the last post talking about the different humanality types, and I think it's easy to see from the descriptions how each type has the potential to be both attractive and frustrating to others. In this post, I'm going to linger a bit on the frustrating part, because that's where we usually get all tripped up in our interactions with people and horses. 

One problem most of us have is that we allow ourselves to be triggered by others—often by others who are in different quadrants than our own. We don't understand or empathize with their priorities or modes of communication, and we take their behavior personally.

As Patrick defines it, a trigger is something that sends you into an emotionally reactive place. You don't even process the trigger: you just immediately get defensive or upset, judge, blame, attack, retreat, shut down, etc. In this state, it's very hard to have meaningful communication or make good choices. But it's very easy to alienate and hurt others, and to make things worse for yourself.

Some common triggers among humans:
—rolling eyes (read as lack of respect)
—walking away (read as rejection)
—staring/intense eye contact (read as creepy/predatory, or a power play)
—no eye contact/looking away (read as not caring)
—yelling or raising the voice (read as a sign of anger or emotional upset)
—finger-pointing (read as blaming)
—silence (read as coldness)
—smirking (read as mocking/laughing at the other person)
—blaming or saying "you're wrong" (read as a personal attack)
—putting words in your mouth (read as presumption or condescension)
—being left out (read as being intentionally excluded)
—not being acknowledged (read as dismissal) 

The problem, as this list shows, is not so much with the action itself as with the meaning we place on it . . . and the assumption that the other person did it on purpose. 

Yet while many of these actions could be rudely intended, many of them would be easy for certain humanality types to fall into without meaning anything negative by it. An LBE might tell someone they're wrong in the process of trying to fix a problem without any thought that the person might feel hurt. An RBI might look away, not because they don't care, but because they can't handle the intensity of the connection. An LBI might be silent because they are thinking about what to say. And an RBE might roll their eyes out of sheer over-expressiveness.

Understanding the behaviors of the different humanalities is a good starting place to help us avoid taking things personally in the first place. 

We can go a step further by becoming aware of the specific kinds of things that trigger us, so that we can begin to respond more consciously. If we also know the triggers of others, we can become more effective in communicating with them and working with them rather than against them. 

The following charts lay out some triggers and reactions that are typical for the different quadrants.

Triggers for each quadrant
LBE Being out of control. Feeling minimized or disrespected.	RBE Feeling ignored, unheard, or left out.
LBI Having their system or schedule messed up.	RBI Not having their needs understood or cared about. Being pushed.

Go-to techniques for each quadrant: what they will try first  when under stress or dealing with adversity
LBE Lead/Take charge	RBE Connect and express themselves
LBI Make a system	RBI Be diplomatic

What they do when that doesn’t work
LBE Fight! (and then fight harder— get even louder and bigger)	RBE Flight! (for humans, it’s a flight  into out-of-control emotion)
LBI Resist/Refuse (become even more  attached to doing it their way)	RBI Freeze or Leave    (hide, disengage, give up, back off, avoid conflict)

Under stress, we tend to over-use our strengths. When the pressure continues to build as a result of the fact that we're being ineffective with our go-to technique, then we often flip to the other side of the chart. As Billy Joel would put it, sometimes we go to extremes:

What they do when THAT doesn’t work
LBE Shut down/Walk away “Fine. Screw it.”	RBE Go cold “You don’t love me,  I don’t love you.”
LBI Have a tantrum “I’m tearing up the system!”	RBI Explode “AAAAAAAAAAAA!!!”

If we go on long enough with our unconscious reactiveness, at some point we kind of calcify into a not-so-fun-house mirror version of what used to be our personal strengths:

When it heads toward being pathological
LBE Narcissistic self-important & self-admiring condescending & bullying no empathy with or gratitude for others fantasize about unlimited power, success, and love	RBE Histrionic rapidly shifting & extreme emotions Drama Queen, Princess, or Victim must be center of attention believe that they are critical to you & you are critical to them
LBI Obsessive Compulsive obsessed with rules, lists, order, schedules, & cleanliness perfectionistic & judgmental reluctant to delegate inflexible & overly conscientious emotionally stiff & unadaptable	RBI Withdrawn        avoid intimacy & social situations  because of a fear of being shamed,  ridiculed, criticized, rejected, or embarrassed vigilant, anxious, & isolated feel inferior, inept, & unappealing

It is useful to be aware of the fact that people who are in extreme or moderately extreme emotional states will often try to induce us to join them. As Patrick noted, people who are angry or upset don’t have fun being that way by themselves, so they try (usually unconsciously) to hook us into an emotional state as well. 

Here are some common strategies they might use on us (or we may find ourselves using on others):

—blame (so that we defend)

—exaggerate/tell it wrong (so that we feel the need to set the record straight)

—guilt-trip: "You don't care!"

—name call: "You're just like ________!" [your mother, my ex-wife, your no-good Uncle Doug] or more general things like princess, slob, coward, etc.

—threaten (to leave, stop doing something, etc.): "If you don't do X, I'm going to do Y"

—order

—ask a question (so that we'll explain, which will give them an in to arguing)

—use the silent treatment/mope

—complain/go negative

However, rather than getting sucked into escalating the drama, we can opt to put our energy into helping others stay calmer instead. Here are some strategies my classmates came up with to put each quadrant at ease:

Advice on how to treat each quadrant
LBE Have fun. Be playful, competitive, and speak up. Say what you think and don't sugarcoat it.	RBE Accept us, include us,  and direct us. Smile and be friendly.
LBI Get to the point, be logical,  and keep emotions in check.  Keep voice low.  Respect my bubble  and my privacy.	RBI See us, invite us in with  eye contact, wait.        Don't interrupt.       Be gentle and sincere.       Keep energy low.       Ask permission.

While it's not our job to manage or prevent other people's reactiveness, learning how to flex and meet them halfway (or sometimes more than halfway) is a gift that we can give to those we love. It's also a practical skill to have, for, as Patrick pointed out, "A lot of times your spouse will not sign up for the personal development program."

Indeed, family members are the most challenging for us. They know all of our buttons, and family dynamics are generally deeply rooted. Patrick, once again: "They throw us off more than the angry and upset people because they make us angry and upset, and we want to shake them and become normal." 

But, of course, it's ourselves that we need to shake into a less reactive state in order to feel normal again, even when it seems more satisfying to shake others. We can always attempt to change others, but we have a radically greater ability to change ourselves. And once we manage that apparently daunting task and let go of a little of our judgment/blame/resentment, we often see that there's a ripple effect in those around us.  

By then, however, we will care less about others being reactive, because we will have learned how to manage our own reactiveness better. And the world will seem, at that point, a much less stressful place.

I hope some of this information contributes to the understanding and awareness that will help on that journey. In the next post, I'll move into the horsenality side of things.