Quit Going in Circles With Emotional Vampires

[00:00:00]If you've ever felt taken advantage of, stuck, crazy, or lost, or you keep repeating the very patterns you despise, one of the most powerful tools I've ever learned for ending many of my self-destructive patterns was vocabulary. In this video, I want to show you why saying "She's toxic, he's manipulative, I'm lazy, or I keep attracting drama" is usually not enough.

[00:00:21]Those words might describe the frustration, but they don't always explain the mechanism. And when you don't understand the mechanism, you keep fighting the same problem with the wrong tools. So, I'm going to break down how the right vocabulary can help you separate the facts from feelings, recognize repeated behavior faster, and make better decisions before the pattern costs you another relationship, another opportunity, or another 5 years of your life. And if you have any doubt in the power of vocabulary, I'm going to break that down, too. If you spent years believing the reason you don't finish what you start is due to a lack of discipline or laziness, stop doing that.

[00:00:57]Research has repeatedly linked procrastination to emotional regulation and short-term mood repair. Now, that means you're not necessarily avoiding the work, you're avoiding the emotional part of your creative process. Hence, your routines and resolutions fall apart. Me and Romani will be hosting a live 90-minute workshop breaking down the emotional blind spots crippling your follow-through and a blueprint for what to do about it. And yes, it's a live 90-minute workshop. If you ain't a millennial or Gen X'er, this ain't for you. I don't need these youngsters trying to check me on my pronouns in the middle of my workshop. But if you are a millennial or Gen X'er who was ready to confront your emotional blocks and activate the go-getter in you, the link is in the description. Let's get back to the program. For years, I was trapped [music] in dysfunctional relationships with some of the most emotionally draining patterns I ever experienced. I could tell you what was wrong, how it made me feel, and why I stopped trusting, but I did not always have the right words for the behavior. So, I kept circling the block like a Vegas trick with no money. Because when all you have is everyday language, you end up describing the behavior the same way everybody else do. She crazy. He fake.

[00:02:10]Toxic, but the chemistry is amazing. And that last one right there is how people lose 5 years of their life and end up co-parenting with a lesson they should have learned in month three. Pause.

[00:02:20]See, everyday language can describe your frustration, but it does not always show you the mechanism, the pattern, or the psychological context. And this is what can set you free. Because once you understand how something works, you can better see your role in it, how you enable it, how you excuse it, how you keep showing up to the same dysfunction like a Maury Povich guest. You stop saying, "I don't know how I keep ending up here." You start seeing the setup.

[00:02:45]You start seeing the part you missed before the emotional damage. Family, [music] the wrong phrases kept me in the wrong fights for way too many years. Let me give you an example. If somebody keeps denying things they clearly did, twisting the story, moving the goal post, fuzzing up the language, making you question your memory, and acting like your reaction is the real problem, you can call that person a liar. And maybe they is lying, but if the pattern keep repeating, you might be dealing with gaslight. Now, gaslighting means somebody is not just disagreeing with you. They are working to make you doubt your own perception. Because a liar gives you something to argue about.

[00:03:24]Gaslighting gives you something to study. Now, you can look up examples, compare what happened, and ask, "Is this a one-time lie, or is it a repeated attempt to make me doubt myself?" That's what I did. And suddenly, the glory hole wall came crumbling down. I could see exactly who was me over and manipulating. I could see how every argument had me defending my memory instead of protecting my peace. That is a nasty little trick right there. You walk in asking for accountability and somehow leave apologizing for your tone.

[00:03:57]That is not communication. That is emotional pickpocketing. Pause.

[00:04:02]Type pause in the comments if you get that. But let's go deeper. What if that same person gaslighting you is mired in shame, self-loathing, fear, and a deep sense of inadequacy due to severe suffering, loss, and guilt? [music] And what if lying comes natural to him like all hell? What if that person then grows to believe they own lies? Now you may be dealing with narcissistic defenses, narcissistic vulnerability, or trauma-related coping.

[00:04:28]>> [music] >> That pattern may involve shame-based defense mechanisms, denial, projection, rationalization, self-deception, pathological lying, and gaslighting.

[00:04:38]Translation, sometimes the person gaslighting you is not just evil [music] in a cape. Sometimes they're just drowning in shame, guilt, fear, and inadequacy. And the truth feel like a bill collector kicking in the door, so they lie. Then they lie again. Then the lie becomes the furniture in the house.

[00:04:54]Now everybody got to walk around it like it's always been there. That is not just dishonesty. That can be denial, projection, rationalization, self-deception, pathological lying, and gaslighting all having a group meeting inside one emotionally bankrupt adult.

[00:05:11]Pause. But it does not excuse the behavior. And it definitely does not [music] make it your job to hand over your reality like collateral. Type pause in the comments if you're feeling my pain. Suddenly I wasn't standing there trying to win every little argument like a ninja in a small claims court [music] suing somebody over emotional damage and a missing air fryer. I now knew achieving honesty with this person was never going to happen, so I stopped expecting it. I was now looking the pattern dead in the eye. And once I saw the pattern, I stopped getting dragged into every little detail and every little diversion. I was seeing it for what it was instead of what I wanted it to be. And that is where my vocabulary became my protection. Pause.

[00:05:54]Not because the words is magic, but because the words give you a category.

[00:05:59]And once you have a category, you can gather evidence. You can stop asking, "Am I tripping?" You can sit in front of a real therapist, not these internet therapists with GED papers and good but like a real licensed mental health professional. No different from concealing carry. They got to be licensed in your state, you hear me? But you can start asking your therapist, mental health counselor, or psychiatrist, "Does this term match the behavior I'm experiencing?" At this point, the gig is up. I have sat in couples therapy across from a racially biased therapist who could not deny the clinical terms I presented. Suddenly, the vocabulary defining the behavioral patterns with the appropriate terms was incredibly empowering. This white woman with a license was trying to minimize my experience in my relationship and ended up apologizing to me for 20 minutes, talking about, "I am sure if you put your mind to it, you could be a scholar." I was like, "Just because you underestimate black people don't make me a scholar, but it does make you a bigot." A lot of people think they know what happened because they know how it felt. And that is where many of us get stuck. Family, the feeling is real, but the feeling is not always the full explanation. You can feel disrespected and still not understand the tactic. You can feel abandoned and still not understand the attachment pattern. You can feel drained and still not understand the family role you keep playing. That is why vocabulary matters.

[00:07:26]That's why I'm always introducing new terms and connecting them to everyday language in my videos. To be real, that's why most of y'all should be joining my damn Patreon, but that's a different conversation. Here's what I discovered. The right words can separate the pain from the pattern. For instance, if you call avoidance being chill, you might keep waiting on honesty from somebody whose survival strategy is manipulation and gaslighting when things get uncomfortable. If you call parentification, I have to grow up fast, you might never understand why you still feel responsible for everybody's emotions as an adult. If you call limerence [music] love, you might confuse fantasy, obsession, and emotional hunger with real connection.

[00:08:05]The wrong word don't just confuse you.

[00:08:07]It sends you to the wrong solution.

[00:08:10]That's like going to Whole Foods for cut bait. You ain't catching much with that lab-made salmon. You need the right word, the right term, the right classification sometimes. And once you get the right word, now you know where to look. Same thing with your life. Type bars in the comments if you get that. I just realized something. I got to put on my platinum chain cuz that's my trademark. Got that for $59 on Amazon. Anyway, I am not saying every clinical term is automatically a diagnosis. Don't get goofy with it. Some people learn one psychological word and start acting like they got a clipboard and a parking pass at a mental hospital.

[00:08:46]Not everybody at Thanksgiving got a disorder because they passed the macaroni with an attitude. Or when all these women claim to be victims of narcissists and then 2 years later, the same women was accusing each other of being narcissists in their online communities. That is not what I'm talking about. Vocabulary is not there so you can diagnose everybody.

[00:09:06]Vocabulary is there so you can investigate better, consult better. It gives you a starting point. It gives you something to research. It gives you a way to compare what you experience with patterns other people have studied, named, challenged, and documented.

[00:09:21]Pause.

[00:09:23]That is one of the reasons vocabulary [music] is so powerful. This literally saved my life. I was deteriorating mentally, emotionally, and physically [music] simply because I was playing teams in a game of prison dodgeball. But when the vague descriptions and emotional rants got replaced with vocabulary and deeper understanding, even the liar, the master manipulator, who believed their own lies and was possibly never aware they own behavior, now have to take ownership because our exchanges now remain grounded in data. Now, I could anticipate the diversion tactics, the DARVO, the externalization, the blame, the victim positioning, the false equivalences, the splitting, and coercive control. I didn't know what none of that meant, but once I did, the conversations I had with her and our therapist became a lot less emotional for me. Not because I was treating the vocabulary as the end-all-tell-all, but because I could ask better question. And when we could nail those terms, we could address the root causes of those behaviors. One thing you learn in prison, you got to get to the bottom of before ninjas get to your bottom.

[00:10:30]Pause.

[00:10:31]Now would be a good time to hit the like button if you like something. And if you motivated as hell, hit that notification bell. But, if you really want to see this channel grow, I'm going to need you to hype this video and share it with your folks. The deeper problem is a lot of us was raised by folks who didn't have the vocabulary, either. They had survival language. They had church language. They had street language. They had shame language. They had mind-your-business language. But, they did not have the emotional language. So, when something was wrong, nobody named the pattern. They named the inconvenience. "Oh, she just difficult."

[00:11:04][music] "He just old school." "That's just your mama." "That's just how men are." "Don't put family business in the street now." "Stop being sensitive."

[00:11:12]"Pray about [music] it." And prayer might help your spirit, but prayer without language can leave your psychology sitting in the driveway with no transmission. Because when a family does not have the words for dysfunction, dysfunction gets protected as tradition.

[00:11:26]Now, everybody walking around defending behaviors that have caused lasting emotional damage. Not because they evil, because they inherited explanations that were too small for what happened. Type balls in the comments if you get that.

[00:11:39]Some families do not pass down wisdom, they pass down survival language. And survival language can keep a family alive while still leaving everybody emotionally illiterate. That's why that's just how your daddy is becomes a cover story for emotional neglect.

[00:11:54]That's how your mama means well becomes a coward's way of saying ignore the abuse. That's how you the man of the house now turns a child into unpaid emotional labor. Parentification is when a child gets forced into adult responsibilities before they are ready.

[00:12:10]And once that gets normalized, the child grow up thinking love means being useful, exhausted, and quietly resentful. That's not maturity. That's childhood debt with grown-up interest.

[00:12:22]And speaking of debt, I ain't sold a t-shirt so long my merch inventory is a write-off at this point. But what I'm trying to say is sometimes family dysfunction goes on for so long people stop recognizing it as dysfunctional.

[00:12:35]Somebody always the strong one. Somebody always the crazy one. Somebody always the successful one. Somebody is the disappointment, the peacekeeper, the caretaker. And once you get assigned that role, the family will punish you for outgrowing it. And to them, your growth is abnormal and inconvenient.

[00:12:53]That's how I got tripped up. I was so accustomed to these dynamics in my relationships because my very impulsive very volatile mama behaved the same way.

[00:13:02]My very alcoholic daddy did it, too. So that behavior seemed normal to me because I ate it for breakfast. I spent my whole childhood managing these dynamics. So as an adult, they seemed manageable.

[00:13:13]>> [music] >> But when I began to develop a vocabulary around what I had been experiencing my whole life and what I was now experiencing in my relationship, I began to understand how these patterns were anything [music] but normal. I began to understand how damaging they had been to my development, my mental health, my sense of self. I began to understand how somebody could end up with two, three, four, five baby mamas or baby daddies and still never connect the dots because if dysfunction is normal to you, repetition don't feel like a warning.

[00:13:45]No, that feel like a heartbeat. You nodding to it and Type bars in the comments if you feeling my pain. And when I started calling this out in my own relationships, making the point that these things were not normal, I was resented for lending clarity. The person asking for accountability become disrespectful. The person naming the pattern becomes dramatic. The person trying to heal becomes acting brand new.

[00:14:07]No, sometimes you are not acting brand new. Sometimes you are the first person in the family to stop calling damage discipline because a lot of what we call culture is sometimes just pain that's been around so long we forget it's there like genital warts. Type bars in the comments if you get that. Ironically, I was the first and only person in couples therapy presenting the behaviors and the vocabulary in clear terms. That eventually led to my ex getting a psychiatric assessment that came back as a full-blown mental health diagnosis. To this very day she resents me for that fact. Whenever we cross paths, she pretend not to see me while acting like she living the high life. Can't be that high. Her two oldest kids still borrowing money from me. She don't know that though. If you haven't figured it out by now, the real reason you keep stalling on your goals has nothing to do with how disciplined, motivated, or focused you is. Men hate it when I say this, but your failure to follow through on the things you know would improve your life is not a discipline issue.

[00:15:07]It's an emotional issue. Don't take my word for it. Research has been confirming this for over two decades.

[00:15:13]Look up the Tyson Witkowski study, the Seroyce and Picol studies. You're not avoiding the work. What you are avoiding is the emotional part of your creative process. Yes, women, too. That's the real reason your follow-through is garbage. You don't need another planner, you need emotional accountability.

[00:15:31]Romani Malco and I is hosting a live 90-minute workshop where we expose the emotional blind spot sabotaging most people's progress, and we hand you the exact playbook to get you active on your So, ready to take notes. This is for millennials and Gen Xers. I know what your upbringing was like, and I know the emotional toll it on you. The workshop is live for any millennial or Gen Xer who is tired of sleeping on your own ambition and need some real ones to wake your ass up. The link is in the description. Now, let's get back to the program. The point of learning these words, these terms, is not to sound smart. It's not to win arguments. It's not to sit around diagnosing everybody like you got a stethoscope from Teemu.

[00:16:12]The point is to stop living at the mercy of language that was too small for your pain and too small for your gains.

[00:16:18]Pause.

[00:16:20]Because if all you can say is, "They crazy," you will keep dealing with crazy like it's random. If all you can say is, "That's just family," you will keep protecting dysfunction like it's culture. If all you can say is, "I'm just bad at relationships," you might never realize you are reenacting patterns that started before you ever had a choice. That is why vocabulary matters. It gives shape to the invisible. [music] It gives structure to the confusion. It gives your therapist something better to work with than, "I don't know, doc. The vibes was demonic like the Palm Beach PD class." And once you can name it, you can study it. Once you can study it, you can question it. Once you can question it, you can stop obeying it. The words alone ain't healing. The words is the doorway. You still got to walk through it. You still got to tell the truth. You still got to stop romanticizing emotional damage. You still got to stop protecting people who need your confusion in order to keep their version of the story alive. And sometimes, the hardest part of clarity is accepting that somebody may never admit what you can now clearly explain. That is where you grow up. Not by getting the confession, not by winning a debate, not by finally making them understand.

[00:17:26]Sometimes you grow up by saying, "I understand enough to stop participating [music] because vague language will keep you emotionally incarcerated, but accurate language can hand you the key." Some of y'all been holding that key for years like you gatekeeping [music] toxicity.

[00:17:41]Type bars in the comments if you get that. This might seem irrelevant to the illiterate class, but it's more valid than Khalid Tossin [music] Drake Salad.

[00:17:49]Bars.

[00:17:50]Many years ago I was going through this book Metu Neter Volume One, The Great Oracle of the Hoodoo and the Egyptian System of Spiritual Cultivation. And one thing that stayed with me all these years, it was that even in spiritual systems like Metu Neter, [music] words was never decoration. Words carried power. The right word could reveal a spiritual condition, expose the hidden pattern, and point you towards [music] the force believed to correct it. That is why vocabulary matters because sometimes [music] the word is not just a description.

[00:18:18]Sometimes the word can become the prescription. Bars.

[00:18:22]And for all you strong and independent, reliable [clears throat] folks who show up for everybody else but yourself, I got a word for you in this video right here.