I love gossip. And my best friends love it as well. I love watching Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood. I flip through all the gossip magazines at the grocery checkout, I keep up with the Kardashians; I felt excited when Beyoncé gave birth to Lucifer’s Daughter, and had a horse fly named after her all in the first month of this new year. And I was sad to hear about Kobe and Vanessa, and Will and Jada, and Heidi and Seal all biting the dust. As it is so skillful in doing, each of their Wild Storytelling Brains apparently successfully seduced them into believing their own crazy-suffering thinking.
The Meriwether Lewis of the Mind
Speech Just Wants to Be Free
I have friends, of course, who do not love gossip or gossipers. They don’t think there’s any such thing as “Intelligent Gossip,” a phrase coined by Nobel Laureate, Daniel Kahneman. He thinks gossip works to improve our ability to understand errors of judgment and choice, first in others and then eventually in ourselves. But hey, what does Kahneman – considered (with Amos Tversky) one half of the dynamic duo known as “the Lewis and Clark of the Mind” – know?
Those gossip-disdainers would most often be my Christian and Buddhist friends who believe in things like the guidelines of Right Speech. Right Speech admonishes against gossip. Dedicated formal practice only allows for speaking on ten topics: discussions about modesty, contentment, seclusion, non-entanglement, arousing persistence, virtue, concentration, discernment, on release from suffering, and about the knowledge and vision of release from suffering. Truthfully, that feels a little constricting to me. I’d rather be offered ways of skillfully relating to lay people in everyday life who do gossip, who enjoy it and who use it as a tool for learning (or not). Not feeling comfortable with gossipers, it becomes easy for me to begin unconsciously seeing such people as “less than.” People with whom I shouldn’t be spending valuable time. People my mother warned me about: “Those people.”
Gossipers of the World, Unite!
If he was still around, I bet Buddha would have LOVED gossipers. Why? Because Buddha was deeply awake to and loved reality. And one reality in the world is that there are people who gossip. Always have been and always will be. Buddha would have had no choice but to love them. Anything else would have shown up as dualistic separation. And Buddha wasn’t much into that.
As far as Right Speech goes, Buddha offered that up as one of eight practices any of us might want to try on in order to reduce or eliminate suffering in our own lives. He didn’t offer up the practice of Right Speech as a “should” that every gossiper in the world needs to begin practicing so that I can feel comfortable spending time with them. Rather, he offered it up to me as something to consider practicing for my own benefit. Should I so choose.
Forgiving Us Our Trespasses
Buddha also didn’t say that Right Speech means we should never talk about other people when they aren’t present, either. Ben Wong and Jock McKeen drove home the complexity of this lesson quite memorably for me one day in graduate school when they broke me and my classmates into four groups. Each group was then instructed to gossip about someone in another group. Afterwards, a few courageous souls elected to speak their gossip aloud so the person gossiped about could hear it. I stood up and spoke about how William had “confessed” to me about experiencing incestuous feelings towards his daughter. As soon as the words left my mouth, I could feel the embarrassment, shame and pain of betrayal flood my nervous system. William was at little risk for actually incesting his daughter, and in fact, erotic feelings in fathers towards children occur commonly. Healthy fathers like William, undeniably know what line not to cross.
Fortunately, William forgave me for my demonstration of non-intelligent gossip. By that process I did learn how we might use gossip intelligently, as a gauge – discerning how what I say about other people makes me feel in my own body. If we’re speaking about others intelligently, then the chance is pretty high that we will feel perfectly fine in our body. Or at least okay. Parents or teachers talking about children and their development, or therapists talking about a client’s lack of healing progress with a supervisor are some ready examples that come to mind. Angry venting in the presence of a trusted friend about a third person is also an example of Right Speech in my view. Why? Because it can work to lower retained levels of stress chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol. It might also work to catalyze and discharge buried neurological “dissociation capsules.”
But if I’m only talking about others in disparaging or demeaning ways for the sake of idle chatter, talking in ways that might feel shameful were the people actually present, then odds are pretty good that I’ll be feeling pretty poopy in my body. Not to mention that I might very likely be flooding instead of discharging adrenaline and cortisol, and impoverishing important nerve cells in my heart and brain in the process. We actually can trust our body’s response to gossip to guide us, I think. Provided we’re using our brain and body’s inherent intelligence to help us pay undivided attention up close and personal-like.
Dr. Brady,
Is there a significant difference in venting vs. gossiping?
What might they each feel like in your experience, sir? ~ Mark
I felt a loud shout for joy in my body as I read this article. I believe in advancing the complex conversation about how communication (even when the person we are talking about isn’t there) can strengthen and support our growth and when certain kinds of talk gets in the way of connection and empathy. I get so bored by the moralistic confines in many discussions of right speech.
I have recently had an experience of realizing how my past behavior was hurtful to another and I’d been so caught up for so many years in seeing the situation only from my perspective and from wanting to appear a certain way in other people’s eyes I’d totally neglected the truth of another person’s experience. And not just anyone, but someone I loved! Whoa… Made me realize how often when we do cut down another in gossip or directly to their face we are often plain old wrong about the situation and the person.
Thanks Mark for your rich conversation.
So interesting – we just had an assembly (large group meeting) where the subject of avoiding harmful gossip was a specific topic. Time was allotted to defining the practice and a demonstration differentiating the loving sharing of upbuilding information about friends, as a means of drawing us closer, versus “harmful gossip” (or, in your piece, “unintelligent gossip”) which tears down, embarasses, or shames another individual. I also noted gossip is currently a prominent topic in several popular women’s magazine articles. In our assembly, we shared simple questions we could ask ourselves when discussing others, such making sure what we are sharing is true, positive, loving, necessary. The final one was perhaps the most telling: would we say the same thing if the the person being discussed could overhear it.
That last suggestion generally seems to be a pretty good test, Judy. Interestingly though, until I actually spoke what I’d said out loud in front of William, I didn’t realize how uncomfortable it actually made me. Thanks for posting. ~ Mark
I wonder how the theme of gossip as a malicious way to hurt others interfaces with lying. In other words if people “gossiped” by telling ugly truths that might not be kind for the people outed for crappy behavior the good of the group would still probably be served, while if people seek to destroy others by telling lies (perhaps themselves not feeling crappy in their own body owing to lack of empathy, entitlement, sociopathy, etc.) such malicious gossip may advance the gossiper (conferring social power, creating in-group bonds) but is ultimately bad for the group.
As evidence we could look at the lies of Wall Street (greed fueled by insider information, aka gossip, including malicious gossip about hot stocks that the insiders drop before the fools are left holding the bag, the junk, the upside down mortgage) and Washington where we have a “representational democracy” where one dollar represents one vote.
Maybe Jesus, or whoever said it, was right in suggesting that it’s the truth that sets us free (but as a group).
hi mark,
very interesting perspective on gossip, more real somehow, thank you!
would it be ok to copy this article and share it with our sufi community?
it would help clarify what gossip truly means…
thanks for considering,
peggy