Breaking the Habit: Strategies to Overcome the Tendency to Gossip

Monday, 26 February 2024 Written by Matt Kahn

Are you sitting down? Don’t worry, you’re the first to know. But you cannot tell anyone.

You’re never going to believe what they did next! How many times have you heard the breaking news alarm blaring within your social circles as you hope you are near the front of the line to get the latest salacious update on who did what? In a world where many define trust by how ‘in the know’ they remain with the juiciest details of someone’s life, the tendency to gossip continues to pull on the fabric of a society that often prefers talking about one another over talking to each other.

Fundamentally, the need for gossip has a few levels of motivation. At its core, gossiping is intended to be a way for people to process their feelings or gain the support of loved ones during times of difficulty. The oversight that turns sharing into gossip is discovered in where our focus is placed. While it is natural to share details about our experiences, when the focus is too consumed on ‘who did what’ along with deciding ‘what do we think of them as a result,’ the healing power of processing halts in the face of personal judgment.

As a way of seeing through and eliminating the tendency to gossip and judge, it is important to remember emotional processing is most effective when the focus of your sharing is centered more on how you feel than on the vilifying of another. Of course, if someone has violated your personal space, it is important to let people that you trust know to help advocate for your well-being. While confiding in someone you trust about the abuses you are ready to be freed from requires talking about another person, there is a palpable level of intention that makes a cry for help a much different experience than talking behind someone’s back.

Even when the energy just needs to speak disparaging words toward the character or people associated with your wounds, it is of equal importance for those holding space for your process to witness your sharing without feeding anyone’s ego through reflections of judgment. When operating from states of unconsciousness, it is common to believe you are offering companionship to others in pain by adopting their enemies as your own. While you don’t have to degrade the value of a person who hurt someone you love, it is equally unhelpful to correct someone in pain, who may need to accuse, criticize, and condemn a character, in order to move the layers of emotional energy that guide them further through their own healing process.

Since it is common to overlook the value of emotional companionship needed when holding space is invited, it can be nearly instinctive to partner up with others, in an attempt to become spiritual detectives intent on figuring out the motivations of another. Instead of focusing on ‘who did what’ or determining who was right or wrong, space holding is more so a willingness to be present for the versions of truth each person perceives, as it relates to the feelings that have surfaced to be healed. Even though people’s perceptions of reality can vary, shaped by their life experiences and internalized pain, it’s crucial to recognize that everyone has the inherent right to experience and navigate their emotions in their own manner, provided it doesn’t inflict harm on others, without being judged for the validity of their feelings.

Rather than fueling the fire of someone’s judgments or even trying to correct them, of fundamental importance when holding space is to honor how someone feels, no matter the narratives attached to each feeling or memory. In order to do so, it is important to resist the temptation to dig for information, even when the other person wants to give you updates, show you text threads, or troll someone’s social media pages in your presence. Instead, it is important to distinguish yourself as an ally of their soul and not an enabling haven for their ego to hide in. This occurs by maintaining a focus on someone’s emotional journey no matter how steeped in envy, jealousy, wrath, judgment, or rage they may need to be.

For example, let’s say a friend in pain says, “How could they have done this to me?” In all honesty, you can say, ‘I don’t know’ because the truth is, you don’t. You may have strong suspicions in one direction or another, but because you haven’t lived a lifetime in someone else’s shoes, you couldn’t assume to know anyone’s true motives without living out their history of pleasure and pain. Even when your intuition says, ‘I know exactly why,’ it is important to distinguish the ego’s belief in being intuitive from the true beauty of intuitive knowing.

When co-opted by the ego, you are likely to confuse the impulse of snap judgments with a sense of higher knowing—as if knowing why anything happened the way it did offers some degree of relief. Contrary to the ego’s ‘intuitive’ need to know, the soul’s version of intuition is knowing the right question to ask and the right things to say to help someone face themselves with supportive connection and compassion. In truth, relief is not a matter of knowing why, since there are always endless versions of why waiting to be answered. Instead, true relief is found in facing how we feel whether in time spent alone or through the support of loved ones.

To help you deepen your ability to hold space by eliminating the tendency to gossip, please consider the following tips:

• Gossip is an unconscious way of feeling special. When we know details that others don’t, we are momentarily freed from beliefs in inferiority and fears of rejection by being ‘in the know.’ Because gossip creates an energetic phenomenon known as ‘triangulation,’ there is no redeeming healing benefit for any person involved when the sharing of feelings becomes the ridiculing or accusatory nature of talking behind someone’s back.
• To the best of your ability, choose to replace ‘what do I think about this’ with ‘how do I feel about it.’ What you think about things is mainly an extrapolation of judgment that gives you no greater ability to feel or uncover the next most empowered steps you may need to take. It’s simply how the ego derives a false sense of power from the circumstances it has felt disempowered by. Since the ego doesn’t know how to make courageous decisions without making someone else an enemy to reject or avoid, you are better off focusing on your feelings, along with the changes in environment, relationship, or lifestyle that only have to be right for you and the journey you’re on.
• While you may be present when gossip ensues, trying to correct anyone’s behavior helps no one heal. In order to move from victimhood into empowerment, one must be permitted space to give words to their feelings. Gossip is a judgmental free-for-all where everyone engages in this expression with no one holding space for another person’s feelings. As this occurs, you can sit quietly and hold space for the emotionally-fueled sharing of others. Although, it is only helpful if it’s a space you willfully desire holding. Sometimes gossip can become so toxic that you may choose to remove yourself from the spiral of projection. When this occurs, you can politely excuse yourself without any need to correct the behavior of others, allowing it to naturally correct on its own as their healing deepens. This may help remind your inner healer that while you may be capable of space holding, it can only be a powerful gift to offer when holding space is a choice instead of an insistence or obligation.

When connecting takes precedence over correcting, we are able to hold space for the healing occurring in ourselves and others without adopting anyone’s narrative or creating energetic patterns of triangulation. Since the aim of personal integrity is to treat ourselves and others the way we wish to be treated, one of the best ways to heal lingering wounds of rejection, abandonment, and betrayal is to refuse playing that same hurtful role in someone else’s life. From this space of mindful compassion, the elimination of gossip becomes instinctive versus effortful and can occur for everyone’s mutual benefit.

All for love,

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