C.J. Scarlet's Blog, page 3
May 2, 2020
Parenting in the 21st Century
April 16, 2020
The World is Safer Today than When You Were a Kid—Yes, Really!
April 2, 2020
The Awful, Horrible, Maybe Not Quite as Terrifying as You Thought Facts
November 14, 2018
Surviving Turkey Day: How to Rise Above the Family Drama & Enjoy a Peaceful Thanksgiving
People are making themselves literally sick over politics and current events, with folks from all sides spewing toxic emotional content and blaming each other.
This is hard enough to deal with on an average day, but at Thanksgiving, a time to feel grateful for all the bounty in our lives, it can be especially distressing and triggering.
It’s easy to get sucked in to family drama because we are so tied to these people—genetically and emotionally. We react so strongly toward them when old grievances get triggered because we feel like we have to defend our position. But do we?
It doesn’t have to be this way! Back away from the turkey baster and give everyone—including yourself—a break.
So, how can you react differently this year? I’m going to you 5 ways to rise above family drama and enjoy a peaceful Thanksgiving for a change:
1 – Check Your Own Attitude at the Door
Check in with yourself to see if YOU are part of the problem. Are you on Defcon 4 before you even ring the doorbell? Are you anticipating a confrontation? If you go in with this kind of attitude, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
First, take a deep breath. Take another one. Then acknowledge that everyone is fighting a hard battle. People often behave the way they do because they feel afraid—of change, of people who aren’t like them, of being judged or disrespected.
Release your own negativity and judgment and embrace a peaceful state of mind.
NOW, ring the doorbell.
2 – Love the haters: How to deal with obnoxious political rants
The first things you need here are patience and tolerance. Remember that everyone has the right to their opinion—even wild Aunt Lulu!
Just because someone says something that triggers you doesn’t mean you have to take the bait! It’s the same as if someone offered you a gift and you choose not to accept it. Decline the “gift” with grace and love and feel the happiness that comes with rejecting negativity.
If you feel yourself getting triggered, try doing a silent lovingkindness mediation. Say to yourself, “May Aunt Lulu be well. May she be happy. May she be free from suffering.” Repeat this in your mind until you feel peaceful again.
3 – How to Repel Energy Vampires
Energy vampires are people who try to dump their problem on you and suck the life right out of you with their dramas. They feel and act like victims and they want you to feel sorry for them. If you offer advice, they’ll immediately reject it as impossible. You can literally feel them stealing your mojo as they speak!
I have a simple cure for the energy vampires in your life. Say this simple phrase over and over as they drone on about the problems in their life: “Wow. What are you going to do about that?”
Keep saying this like a holy mantra and one of two things will happen: They’ll either stop and think, “Wow. What AM I going to do about that?” OR, if they’re invested in clinging to their problems, they’ll get frustrated with you and walk away. Either way, you’ve stopped them from stealing your life force.
4 – How to Respond to Your Personal MeToo Moment: What to do/say when Mom tries to sit you next to your abuser at Thanksgiving dinner .
You deserve to be validated and protected from abusers in your family, and you don’t need people trying to force you to “make nice” to anyone who makes you feel unsafe. This is the time to summon your inner badass and set clear boundaries.
Calmly but firmly take Mom into the kitchen and tell her you’ll be switching seats. Don’t’ ask. Tell. Then do it.
If you’re not supported and protected by your family, you may need to find others to spend the holiday with. Do what you need to in order to feel protected and supported.
5 – Be an Up-Stander
Don’t bite your tongue when Aunt Lulu goes on a racist rant. Here’s what to say…
“Aunt Lulu, that’s offensive. Please stop saying things like that.”
If she argues with you and tries to justify her rant, say: “I know you believe that, but today is about enjoying family time, so let’s keep it friendly.”
Keep repeating that sentence until she runs out of steam or you are able to get away from her.
Play the “Ism Game”
Here is my favorite tip, one that I used successfully with an opinionated relative last Thanksgiving. It’s called the “ism game.” Here’s what you do:
Get a notepad and pen and keep them handy.
Get a few people in on the game.
Now, every time Aunt Lulu says something mean, inappropriate, or racist, yell “Luluism!” and write it down.
At first, Aunt Lulu may look confused, but as it dawns on her that her inappropriate words are being captured for prosperity, she’ll tone it down. She may go through the five stages of grief first: anger, denial, bargaining, depression and, eventually, acceptance. It’s at this final stage that she’ll finally get quiet.
It’s REALLY important to make this a light, fun, loving exercise. Don’t do it with vindictiveness or you lose the battle. Do it instead with love.
When All Else Fails
When all else fails, just send your relatives love. Bathe them in love. Drown them in it. You will end the day feeling genuinely grateful that you kept an open heart and mind, and that you didn’t let the turkeys bring you down!
March 12, 2018
Moving Beyond #MeToo
The MeToo movement is a powerful tipping point that’s giving voice to victims of sexual harassment and assault. It’s shifting the power dynamic between victims and perpetrators and leading to real changes in and out of the workplace.
But while the MeToo movement is an important step in the right direction, it doesn’t address ways people can avoid becoming victims in the first place. THAT is my mission—to teach women and girls how to claim their power to protect and defend themselves.
Nearly 100 percent of the women I’ve met as I’ve spoken around the country told me they experienced some form of behavior by men that made them uncomfortable or afraid, or that left them traumatized. They got creepy phone calls late in the night with heavy breathing on the other end of the line. They were harassed by rangy herds of young men who followed them halfway home while they tried not to cry. They were felt up on the bus by strangers. Their uncles drunkenly French kissed them when they were just getting used to their training bras. They were drugged and raped at frat parties. They were kidnapped and repeatedly assaulted.
And most of these women blamed themselves, some so harshly that they played judge and jury—sentencing themselves to life in emotional prison for something that wasn’t even their fault!
If you’re sick of living like this… If you’re tired of feeling afraid every time you walk by yourself through a deserted parking lot… Tired of scurrying with your keys clenched in your fist until you can breathlessly throw yourself into the driver’s seat and slam down the door lock… Tired of not feeling safe to move around the world in peace and security, you are not alone.
Making ‘Nice’ is Killing Us
In my new book, The Badass Girl’s Guide: Uncommon Strategies to Outwit Predators, I help women and girls own their power and live safer, more confident lives. The guide covers everything from how predators select and groom their victims, to how to out-think, out-talk and out-fight them using your body’s natural weapons.
I don’t know about you, but I was raised to be nice to everyone. I was taught to avoid being rude at all cost. To smile through awkward situations. To giggle when I felt uncomfortable rather than risk embarrassing someone who was just “playing” with me. To subsume my needs in favor of others’. To expect men to be my rescuers if I was in danger. Basically, to be a good girl and not make trouble for anyone.
How many times in your life have you ignored the blaring sirens from your intuition and sat silently as someone violated your boundaries? I sure did; more times than I can count and all in the name of being polite.
It’s a strange paradox—we spend so much of our lives being hypervigilant about potential danger but become utterly helpless when we’re confronted with uncomfortable or dangerous situations. We smile when someone pays us an inappropriate compliment at work. We roll our eyes when a man makes a crude joke or gesture. We stiffen but don’t necessarily move when someone brushes up against us.
Why? Why do we “make nice” when we’re treated with disrespect? After all, these people clearly don’t respect us! Our instincts are correct, but we override them because our early training was so strong.
Part of the reason is fear—that the situation will escalate if we object, that we’ll embarrass the other person or ourselves, or that the person we confront won’t like/love/employ us anymore. We’re also often clueless about how to respond. Then there’s the pervasive, personally-held belief that we can’t take care of ourselves, so we demure rather than react.
We feel helpless, which leads to a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness. Denial is also a huge factor; we deny what’s happening to us in favor of making excuses for the perpetrator: “He was just kidding.” “I’m just being overly sensitive.” “He didn’t mean it.” Or, my (least) favorite, “Boys will be boys.” This twisted perspective lets predators off the hook when they behave badly.
An alarming number of women and girls, even those who’ve never been victimized, state that they feel a general sense of self-loathing and shame. And for those who have been victimized, add self-blame to that toxic mix.
As a result, we give away our power to others and allow them to dictate our lives. Yes, we do. Every time we let someone lead us into a decision we’re not comfortable with, or allow them to violate our boundaries, we’re relinquishing our power.
These feelings are at the heart of why we remain so vulnerable to predators. I’m bringing them to light so you can understand how this mentality sets us up for victimization. And, more than that, how this self-defeating mindset denies us the joy of self-love and self-esteem that are essential to living a happy, healthy life.
It’s time to reject the negative messages bombarding us in the media and society in general, to be gentle with ourselves, to embrace our perfectly imperfect selves and claim our power! We must take ownership of and responsibility for our own lives, every single second of them, understanding that we are the only ones who have our best interest in mind at all times.
Summoning Your Super Powers
I want to briefly share with you, dear reader, the three super powers each of you can summon to protect yourselves from emotional and physical harm. They are:
Your boundaries
Your intuition
Your moxy, meaning your willingness to honor that intuition and defend those boundaries
Your Boundaries
The first super power consists of your boundaries, which represent the line you allow people to cross (or not) in your physical and emotional space.
Predators will test your boundaries to determine whether you’ll make a good victim. They often first attempt to cross your emotional boundaries by making suggestive or inappropriate comments or jokes to see how you react. If you make it clear they’ve crossed a line, they’ll usually back off. If you giggle nervously or “make nice,” they’ll push further in an attempt to manipulate you into a bad situation.
If someone crosses a boundary with you, you must let them know right away—whether it’s a stranger or someone you know well. A simple, “I’m not comfortable with that,” may be all it takes. Sure, you may both feel uncomfortable for a few moments after you set a firm boundary, but isn’t your body, your very life worth that small and passing discomfort? Of course it is!
Your Intuition
Your second super power appears when you trust your intuition, or gut. Your body is a finely tuned instrument of wisdom and knowing. It’s constantly giving you cues about your environment and the people in it.
Don’t, I repeat—do NOT give someone the benefit of the doubt if you feel uncomfortable around them. Whether you firmly tell them “NO” or walk away, you decide what’s necessary.
Don’t be afraid of being wrong or looking silly. When you tell someone to back off and give you space, if he’s a good guy he’ll do it and likely apologize. If he’s a predator, he’ll get angry with you and try to make you feel badly it. This is your clue that he’s not to be trusted. And while nothing may come of it, you might actually have thwarted an attack against you.
Your Moxy
Your third super power is your moxy, also called “brass” or “chutzpah.” It’s your willingness to stand in your power to honor your intuition and defend your boundaries. It means summoning your inner badass and walking your talk. It means being as rude or aggressive as necessary to someone who’s setting off alarm bells in your body and pushing your boundaries past the breaking point.
A Quick Huddle
For those of you who are right now thinking, “I couldn’t possibly call someone out like that—I’m too nice/polite/timid/afraid/whatever.”
Ladies, we have GOT to get over this outdated and outright dangerous kind of thinking if we’re going to make it through this life with any sense of security and sanity. Tell that voice in your head to shut the hell up.
It’s harming you; it’s harming us all by perpetuating the false belief that we, as women, don’t have the ability or right to protect the integrity of our bodies, minds, and spirits.
So, before you agree to let that person carry your groceries into your apartment or go to that location that makes your gut clench, THINK about what you’re doing. Check in with your intuition and your body to get their opinions first. You don’t owe it to anyone to do what they want, even if they’re persistent (and bad guys will be persistent).
If you want to do whatever it is you’re considering, and it aligns with your intuition and integrity, do it. If it doesn’t resonate with you and you have doubts, don’t do it. It’s that simple.
Trust your gut and defend those boundaries, and then use your moxy to ACT!
About CJ Scarlet
CJ Scarlet is an author and motivational speaker on the topics of self-empowerment and common-sense self-defense for women and girls. A survivor of sexual assault, CJ is an expert in criminal justice and victim advocacy, has given speeches and workshops at national and international events; and has appeared on numerous radio and television programs, including MSNBC and NPR.
CJ holds an interdisciplinary M.A. in Humanities with an emphasis on Human Violence and a graduate certificate in Women’s Studies from Old Dominion University. She is the author of The Badass Girl’s Guide: Uncommon Strategies to Outwit Predators and Neptune’s Gift: Discovering Your Inner Ocean. Named one of the “Happy 100” people on the planet, CJ’s personal story of triumph over adversity is featured in several books, including bestsellers Happy for No Reason and Be Invincible.
August 15, 2016
How to Create World Peace
World peace begins with inner peace. Your greatest impact on others and the world will only come when you have looked deeply inside and made peace with what you find there. But what if what you find makes you squirm? What if you hate what you find?
The answer is love; it is always love.
The person you need to love most–who most needs your love–is YOU. Loving and caring for yourself first isn’t selfish, it’s self-full. This means caring for your Self with gentleness and compassion. If you need to forgive yourself or others, do it and the energy of the anger and resentment you once carried will be available to fuel your dreams. When you offer and accept love of and for yourself, then your heart will overflow with love for others. You will find yourself being more kind, more patient, more accepting and more generous with yourself and others.
The path to a peaceful, authentic life begins with this love for oneself. You can’t be authentic with yourself or others if you don’t like what you see in the mirror. To cultivate self-love, you must embrace your shadow self—those tender parts that you feel ashamed of and fear to share with others—and quench them with love. Those tragic and terrible mistakes you made, the ego that lashed out at others, that wounded and abused child who shivers in your heart—work to make peace with them for they are also aspects of your Self. It is heartbreaking work, accepting the shadow self, but in fact, your heart must break if it is to open at all.
But how to achieve this inner peace, this self-love? Two ways—through generosity and through gratitude. Being generous with yourself and others is the surest and fastest way to open your heart. A Tibetan Buddhist lama once commanded me to stop feeling sorry for myself and start thinking about the happiness of others. When I followed his advice by performing daily acts of intentional kindness, I learned that everyone suffers and is engaged in a heroic battle to survive and thrive. As a result, I gained perspective around my own illness and troubles and was able to release them all.
Acts of kindness can be as simple as letting the mom with the crying child go ahead of you in line or sending a thoughtful handwritten note to someone in need of comfort. Every time you perform an act of kindness, your body produces pain-killing endorphins and mood-boosting serotonin that can heal your body and, more importantly, heal your heart.
As your heart begins to open and heal, feelings of gratitude will naturally arise. You will find you appreciate people and things more. It will begin to seem that every experience that enters your life is a blessing—from your most caring friends to your most bitter enemies (who, you suddenly realize, are your greatest teachers).
As generosity and gratitude permeate your life, your inner peace will shine through you like a beacon that attracts love and abundance to you. It is a virtuous circle that generates greater and greater peace within; a peace so compelling and complete, it infuses everything you touch. THAT is when world peace becomes possible and when you are positioned to make a genuine impact on the world.
