Giving Up Gossip

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Not familiar with the Inner Mean Girl Reform School?  Check out this post!

Week 1 in the Inner Mean Girl Cleanse is about giving up gossip.  The discussion questions were:

1. What’s the cost of gossip?
2. What’s the benefit?
3. What’s the truth?

I don’t often participate in gossip and most of the people I know don’t either.  I’m not perfect and occasionally I do have moments where I feel slighted and my first reaction is to resort to hurtful words – but when I really look at it, it’s more about my feeling of inferiority that makes me want to pull someone else down with me and then I feel guilty for having that kind of spiteful reaction.  And that, in a nutshell, is the perfect explanation of my particular inner mean girl. She is all about the fear of not being good enough, of being inferior in some way or another.

So. I know that gossip isn’t good for me, or anyone else and I’m pretty good about dealing with it.  (again, not perfect, but pretty good).  I know I’ll keep working on that and continue to realize what and why I’m saying.  However, there was something very interesting about this week’s lesson and that was the realization that I’ve become more involved with celebrity gossip than I ever admitted to myself!  We all love a good snark, right?  Some clever repartee, maybe? Well, there are a couple of celebrity gossip sites that I read and I realized that participating in, reading about, or passing along information that’s not nice isn’t just bad if you know the person, it’s bad period.  And it’s not about the celebrity, it’s about me.  It’s more of the same feeling of inferiority, or superiority over said celebrity.  We don’t look to feel superior to someone if we’re already feeling good about ourselves, right?  It’s all tied together.

I realized that I was clicking through on links that were stories about who was getting divorced, who cheated on whom, what the wronged spouse got in the divorce settlement and because my focus is on improving my outlook in that area, I was able to see that I lot of what I was following on Twitter and Facebook were just gossip sites.  Interesting.  If you had asked me if I was “into” celebrity gossip, I would have emphatically told you that I had better things to do with my time. And then I might even have gone into a diatribe about what a waste of paper People, The Star, the Enquirer and the NY Post, really are.   Hmm…  Is that gossip about gossipers? So I hid those particular sites from my Facebook newsfeed and I’m not clicking through on gossipy news items on Twitter and apparently I was spending an awful lot of time on that. Yikes.

Christine Arylo talked about a different form of sneaky gossip in her post: You May Be A Gossip and Not Even Know It.

As an aside, part of the discussion was about “Being Impeccable With Your Word” and I realized it had been far too long since I picked up and re-read my copy of the Four Agreements.  Seemed like a good thing to do.  Have you read it?  Are you reading it now?

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So why don’t you join me (affiliate link)? C’mon – it’ll be fun. Maybe we’ll learn a little bit about how to stop being so mean to ourselves.

I am participating in the Inner Mean Girl 40-day Cleanse as a Self-Love Ambassador. To thank me for my participation, I will receive a self-love gift from the founders of the Inner Mean Girl Reform School

It is OK to use my photos or content provided a link back and proper crediting is given