Chapter 3

Pit Language and Professional Pit People

When we’re being a Pit person with our Pit posture, we also have Pit prattle! Pit prattle is that little voice inside our heads that mutters away to us. If you’ve just asked yourself, “What voice?” — that’s it! Go ahead and introduce yourself! When we’re in the Pit, this little voice will grumble in a negative and defeatist way:

“I hate my life.”

“How could anyone love me?”

“I’ll never be any good.”

“I’m so hopeless.”

“Why doesn’t anyone understand me?”

“I’ll never get over this hang-up.”

“I’ll be lonely all my life.”

“I hate my job.”

“Why did they do this to me?”

“No one understands me.”

“How will I ever cope?”

“Nothing seems to go right for me!”

“I’ll never get any better.”

“I need more money.”

“I can’t stand this anymore.”

“I’m sick and tired of everything.”

“I’ll never get out of this hellhole.”

“I can’t change; I’ve been this way all my life.”

“I’m stuck in this job/relationship/town … blah, blah, blah.”

Pit prattle is incredibly pessimistic, and when we are allowing our Pitman to rule, we can tend to criticize others and ourselves harshly. Pit dwellers often vocalize their Pit prattle. They constantly complain about their partners, their jobs, their lives, their kids, the traffic, the weather, TV commercials, the price of food, today’s youth, today’s elderly, last night’s dinner, and tomorrow’s dessert!

It’s as if they can’t control themselves, and of course, it’s never their fault; the fault always lies elsewhere. And if you even attempt to offer a more positive outlook, they’ll give you countless reasons why you’re wrong. They’ll argue on behalf of their limitations and shortfalls, trying to convince you that things are out of their control.

Now, think about your habitual responses. How do you react when it rains? When the kids leave their bags at the front door? When the dog poops inside? (My Pitman comes out when our dogs do that!) When the traffic is heavy? When the train is late? When your new lover doesn’t call? When your old lover does?

For most of us, Pitman is just an occasional visitor, but some people are quite comfortable having Pitman around constantly, and he soon becomes a habit, as we discussed earlier. If he sticks around too long, we are in danger of becoming a PPP — a Professional Pit Person! We become so good at telling our Pit story that we start to make it more dramatic, more intense, to the point that we become addicted to our tale and want to hang on to it at all costs.

When we get this serious about being in our Pit, we start renovating. After all, if we’re planning on being down there for a while, we might as well make it comfortable, right? You see, PPPs like to have a pretty Pit! Professional Pit People put a lot of time into setting up their Pit. They may even put some furniture in there — a table, maybe some chairs — and a TV and DVD player (they need the technology to play all of those sad movies and sad songs). Heck, if you’re going to be really negative, why not build a basement? Why go up when you can go down deep — really, really deep?

Pit Party with Pit Pals

We can also get lonely in our Pit, and as we know, misery loves company, so we end up having a Pit Party with our Pit Pals! Pit Pals are people who get a buzz from feeding off of each other’s bad luck stories. Serious Pit dwellers can actually feel disappointed when they meet someone who has had a worse life than theirs!

So how do we dig ourselves out of this Pit? By being aware of the different phrases we use when we’re communicating, we can educate ourselves and avoid fueling our situation. Or if we find ourselves giving in to the habit, we can take it as a prompt to turn ourselves around. Here are some examples of Pit talk to be aware of and avoid:

“Nothing ever goes right for me!”

“Can you believe how disgustingly hot it is?”

“Rain always depresses me.”

“I’m nothing without him/her.”

“I’ve never been any good at...”

“My kids are so annoying.”

“I never have time for myself.”

“I find it impossible to make friends.”

“I wish she/he would grow up.”

“I’ll never get out of this debt.”

“It’s OK for you; you don’t know how hard it is for me!”

“Why are they doing this to me?”

“Why is this happening to me?”

“What did I do to deserve this?”

“Gosh, you’re so annoying.”

“Why would you do something that stupid?”

“I wish I had more money.”

“I wish I had less stress.”

“I wish I didn’t have so much work to do.”

“I wish I had a new job.”

“What is wrong with you?”

“I wish these people would leave me alone.”

“I wish I wasn’t alone.”

“I hate this town, job, relationship, life...”

Pulled into the Pit

We have to be very careful when hanging out with people who’ve made their Pit too cozy, because helping someone who spends a lot of time in the Pit can be very seductive. We all love the warm glow of offering counsel to someone, but are we really helping? When we go down into the Pit with them and start believing that we’re the only one who can help them, we’re in danger of becoming a rescuer.

We might think at first that we’re that special someone who can turn this person’s life around. We might even think that it will be our wisdom, our advice, and our guidance that will change him or her. Many of us desperately want to help those we love who have become comfortable in their Pits. We want so much to help that we are in danger of joining them.

A rescuer needs a victim, and a victim needs a rescuer. They are both Pit states; it’s just that the rescuer has a better marketing team! Quite often, the rescuer role can feel positive and optimistic, but the positivity is usually for self-gain and not for the long-term success or development of the other person — the more helpless the person, the bigger the rush for the rescuer. The old adage “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day; teach him how to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime” is a brilliant description of the difference between rescuing and truly helping someone. One creates a dependency; the other teaches us to take personal responsibility for our life. There are many powerful books on the damaging effects of codependency, and most of us have experienced this to some degree in our relationships.

I played the rescuer role for many years. The way that I first began to realize I was rescuing was the telltale rush I would feel when someone came to me with a problem. In those moments, I felt much more significant if I could help the person with his or her issues. It wasn’t so much about their problem but more about how wonderful I was for helping them. When I started to see that “saving” them wasn’t empowering them, I learned how to effectively coach people through their problems rather than be the rescuer. The outcome was much more powerful and positive, and the people were able to take total responsibility for their life rather than always depending on someone else to solve their issues. It can be difficult to truly own the answer that someone else gives you.

No one can help a Pit Person who doesn’t want to be helped. Sure, we can encourage, guide, and support, but people in a Pit state need to find their own way to climb out. We can’t drag them to the surface!

In other words, the only person who can save you is YOU!

I recall sitting beside a gentleman at a conference dinner where I had spoken earlier in the day. He said to me that he had been really offended when I first started speaking about the Pit. He thought I was making fun of people who had genuine issues and real struggles in their life, and as he sat there in the audience he felt I was trivializing their problems. He then said that the more he listened, the more he realized that I was actually speaking about his wife! He realized that he had climbed into the Pit with her. He felt incredibly sorry for her yet admitted that he had started finding excuses to stay late at work because he felt so drained when he was around her. He acknowledged that by sympathizing with her, he was helping her to stay in the Pit, and that was why he had reacted so strongly to me on stage. His truth was coming up, and he didn’t like it.

Wow! What a realization! He was referring to a form of response in his marriage known as enabling. He had made the same mistake a lot of us make when we’re trying to help someone in the Pit: he had gone down into the Pit with his wife and was enabling her. When we offer pity to Pit people, we are not helping them. We’re simply reinforcing their reasons to remain in the Pit. As we continue to offer great amounts of pity and sympathy to people in their Pit, we give them even more reason to remain in there. We reward them with attention for being a Pit Person!

After first being offended by my presentation, my dinner companion went on to explain that he had confused empathy with sympathy in his dealings with his wife. He felt incredibly guilty about withdrawing from her, and he realized that he was avoiding the situation rather than dealing with it. He was grateful for his new perspective and was inspired to create some changes in his relationship.

Many of us can fall into the trap of being an enabler under the guise of love. I remember a very loving father telling me of the grief he had felt after he had to evict his son from his home. The father had put up with years of his son’s drug abuse, unemployment, and apathy. His son contributed nothing to the upkeep of the home, and his lack of gratitude was often displayed in abusive tirades against other members of the family. The father told his son that he loved him with every inch of his being, but he could no longer support him in the destruction of his life and the negative impact he was having on the remainder of the family. He explained that he would be there for his son with love and time, but he needed to end the living arrangement.

I thought how brave this father was; it would have taken an enormous amount of courage to take this action. Then he made a comment that rocked me to my core because of its absolute truth: “Terry, I now realize, after meeting Pitman, that I had to starve my son from the oxygen in that Pit! I was allowing him to continue with his behavior, but at the same time I was constantly complaining about it. I was like his Pit dealer!”

Wow! That comment made it clear to me. How often do we enable people who are permanently living in their Pit because we can’t deal with the consequences?

From painful firsthand experience, I know that we can wait our entire lives for some loved ones to get out of their Pit. We can pour everything into “helping” them climb out, only to realize years later that little has changed except for the complete depletion of our own energy levels. There’s a wonderful line in the Janet Jackson song “Interlude-Full” — “How empty of me to be so full of you” — a brilliant description of how it feels trying to save a Permanent Pit Person.

The man went on to explain that his son started living in his car. The man felt deep guilt as a result, but he also felt completely lost as to what else to do. He stayed committed to his word, and as a result, the son cut off contact for almost a year. This, the man said, was the longest year of his life. That was definitely tough love. But as difficult as it was for him, he didn’t wait until it was too late; he chose to act now.

How easy it is to wait in the seductive hope of the Pit, thinking that the situation will get better, that the person will change, that life will magically transform. But if nothing changes, nothing changes.

One day there was a knock at the door, and there stood his son: clean-shaven, employed, and with his life back on track.

As the father shared this story with me, he had tears in his eyes, especially when he told me how his son said that he knew his father loved him, and it was this love that had motivated him to get his life in order. He had wanted to make his father proud of him again.

Contrast this with another story I recall: a very gruff, aggressive man approaching me after one of my presentations. He said, “I wish my pathetic son could hear you speak. He’s totally hopeless! He’s eighteen, unemployed, smokes dope, lies on the couch all day, and is just throwing his life away. He’s a complete waste of space.”

Here we have the same situation, yet this father was stuck in criticism instead of resolution. I’m sure he thought he was trying to help, but attacking people personally is never helpful. I’m not condoning the son’s behavior, but constant criticism is often a contributing factor to keeping an individual in this state. I would never call my children naughty or bratty. When we use terms like this, we are judging the whole child instead of isolating the specific behavior. I think my son Harison explained this to me perfectly when he was three years old. A gecko was sitting in the middle of the garden step, and I said, “Look at that silly gecko!” Harison replied wisely, “Mumma, he isn’t a silly gecko; he just does silly things sometimes.” It is empowering to know that we are not our behaviors and that we’re valuable as human beings regardless of what we do.

Let’s all pay attention to the language that’s used to keep people in the Pit. We usually get the behavior that we keep reinforcing. I remember being overly critical of Harison as a young teenager, and he once again wisely said, “Mum, do you really think calling me that is going to make me want to change?” I ate humble pie and apologized. None of us are our behaviors, and that’s why we can change the way we do our life if it isn’t serving us. I can give you countless stories of people (including myself) who have lived part or all of their lives in the Pit, either in a rescuing role, as a victim, or both. When we have the courage to stop rescuing or playing the victim, the Pit dance stops. When one of you decides to stop the negative routine, the other person is faced with a choice: either learn a new, more positive dance or stay in the Pit and find a new Pit partner.

However, for some of us, owning our happiness can create an internal conflict. Do we risk what we have, even if it isn’t serving us? I hear it all the time from unhappy lovers, discouraged employers, and disgruntled employees. I hear it from lots of people who are unhappy with their relationships but are not willing to do anything about it.

Even when we are willing to do something, we have to remember the importance of how we do it. That’s why learning the difference between sympathy and empathy is critical.