GOSSIP

In honor of Halloween and all things spooky, allow me to feature one of the most dangerous ghouls of all: gossip mongers. Webster’s Definition: A gossip is someone who likes talking about other people’s private lives. I will add: a person who lacks discretionary insight and loyalty.

When someone starts to gossip, ask yourself how much of this is genuine venting (or entertainment/information/connection) and how much of this is someone trying to control your purview and perception for their own self-preservation, under the guise of wanting to warn or “protect” you against another, as an act to defend themselves?

I taught my daughter as I taught myself: don’t engage in gossip as a speaker or a listener. If you need to vent, seek a therapist. If you need to understand why someone is doing something, seek a sage. If you need to entertain, seek an audience for your creative expression; and if you want to connect, open your heart, and reflect to those around you that they are truly seen and heard. Don’t drink from the poison well of gossip, for the ink will stain your lips, and not in a pretty way like gloss.

But Everyone Gossips

If everyone jumped off the Empire State Building, would you too? Don’t answer that, if you are a precious, dutiful compliant one. Look, most of us have been guilty of gossiping at one point or another, I certainly have, usually as a desire to form a connection, to be validated, or to entertain. After all, gossip has been identified as evolutionary psychology that aids in social bonding—some might argue that it’s in our DNA to gossip. It’s also in our DNA to rock the Cro-Magnon hairline; but if most of us can evolve beyond that, we can evolve beyond gossip too.

The Dark Side of Gossip

Not to be dramatic, but gossip is like a cancer that can devour your soul. Engaging in gossip can corrode your integrity, infect your spirit, and damage your loyalty and trust in others—for the person who gossips to you may one day gossip about you. No one trusts a gossip. Master manipulators use gossipers to do their bidding. Beware of both.

Robert Evans is quoted as saying, “There are three sides to every story: my side, your side, and the truth.” A sage will search for “the truth,” a therapist will validate “your truth,” and an audience will applaud the way you deliver “a truth.” When you know what you want, you know who to seek, and which role you are being called to play when someone gossips to you.

Malicious gossip, intended to hurt another to protect oneself is often the act of being recruited to be a flying monkey (someone who spreads the gossip of an overt, covert, antagonistic, communal, or malignant narcissist). Don’t allow yourself to be manipulated. They are likely using gossip to release the pressure of unresolved conflict within themselves that dates all the way back to their childhood. Friends can be called on to be archeological excavators. Sometimes the best way to help is to have the name and number of a good therapist to recommend to a good gossiper.

How Not To Gossip

The best way to make our friends feel cared for is to really listen when they speak and ask clarifying questions that both help to understand and make them feel heard. When someone gossips to me in search of venting, I ask them, “If the person you are speaking about were to tell this story, what would they say?” for as the Yiddish proverb teaches, “a half truth is still a whole lie.”

Hang up your cape, my friend, it’s not your job to play the hero in the gossip’s journey. Pull back and survey the whole picture. Even those with the best reputations are still flawed humans—no one is perfect. As stated in, Sage Words, FREEDOM, Book One, “It’s not airing one’s dirty laundry to admit the emperor wears no clothes.” We’re all natural storytellers; that’s how we connect. When the story turns to gossip, tell your narrator to start their story with the one in the mirror. We can find a more loving way to connect whilst remaining in our integrity.

When All Hallows’ Eve brings out the beast of burden, remember the call to action is “Trick or Treat.” You have a choice in how the story is told. Stay safe, my friends; and remember the words of the macabre master himself, Edgar Allan Poe, when he instructed us to believe none of what we hear and only half of what we see.

— © Sage Justice 2022

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Sage Justice, author of “Sage Words FREEDOM Book One.” If you’d like to read more pieces like this, please check out the book on Amazon, monthly articles at SageJustice.Substack.com, videos on YouTube (Sage Words: Almost Everything You Need to Know), inspiration on IG @SageWords2027, website and the podcast: Sage Words (Apple & Spotify). A like and follow on the Sage Justice, author page, on facebook is greatly appreciated. Thank you.