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Stipulation

All existence is constantly in situation;

it must make its choices within the limits of

just these particular contingent facts.

- Marjorie Grene

A teenage boy and his mother are having a searing argument. He is in agony because he knows that every word he is saying is wounding his mother, but she is not giving an inch. She is tormented by the understanding that she is saying everything wrong, that she sounds just like her parents used to sound – her parents who specialized in being unsupportive. The mother and son stop yelling and look at each other, their wide eyes transmitting their mutual pain. Mom takes a shuddering, slow breath and says, “I know you are not trying to hurt me. I understand that all you are trying to do is to get me to see your side of this argument. And you are frustrated because you see me as just spewing clichés. I can see why what I’m saying isn’t in the slightest helpful to you.”

This mother has just given her son a great and empowering gift. It is the stipulation that his view of the circumstances is valid and that what he is doing makes perfect sense given his situation.

Stipulation is empathy taken to a qualitatively new level. It goes beyond the effort to understand the emotional, behavioral or cognitive situation of another. When you stipulate to the truth of another person, you are willingly honoring their sacred, existential right to self-determine. And you are confirming their grasp of their reality.

If it is between peers – stipulation is über confirmation that the stipulatee’s view of life is cool.

If it is between people of differing power – stipulation is recognition of the existential autonomy of the stipulatee.

If it follows an apology – stipulation clarifies that, not only am I wrong, but also, importantly, you are right.

If it occurs in the middle of an argument – stipulation is pure generosity fueled by love.

The mother watches her son tear up as he absorbs her very genuine efforts to reach him. She continues, “I can also understand how agonizing it is to you that you have to seek my permission for this. It is awful when you don’t have the power to direct your own life. It is just awful.”

This is another generous communication that further stipulates to the son that the mother understands the enraging unfairness of his position. Often it sucks to be young.

Do her stipulations mean she is going to let him get a tattoo? Nope. But neither will she hit him with the complete list of awful as a way to condemn him for what he wants or the way he is fighting her. Many parents do use these shaming characterizations to disempower the child by disemboweling their self-esteem. A shaming strategy is one of the worst things a parent can do to a child. It represents atrocious parental cheating (using their greater experience to gaslight the child), it models name-calling as an appropriate behavior and it is a lie.

Our example mother's message, instead, spells out to him her even-handed and open-hearted belief – of course he wants a tattoo and he has the perfect right to fight for it but no way is he going to get one on her watch. Because of her willingness to stipulate, however, he only has to recover from the unfairness of her having the culturally endorsed power to veto the tattoo and not the additional angst of feeling like a mean, unimpressive son for wanting one.

“Of course.” What powerful, beautiful words they are. They are joined by the equally effective, “I see” and “You’re right.” All those phrases represent stipulation – the willingness to acknowledge, without hedge, that someone’s view of their reality is both appropriate and supportable. Stipulation is saying “You are right for you and, even if we differ in our sense of things, your “rightness” is no less valuable than is mine.” What we are endorsing is the genuineness of another person’s search for his or her truth.

So why exactly is it such a gift?

Even the most existentially resistant among us knows in some cobwebbed corner of the mind that we are all guessing about reality. For the most part we can lope along in life without having to pay close attention to the accuracy of our guesses. But at those boundary locations, where our sense of what is real collides with someone else’s sense of reality, we can get rattled.

This rattled state comes in extra small, small, medium, large and extra large. When a fellow with whom I’m talking doesn’t act like he heard what I just said but proceeds to take the conversation off in his preferred direction, I am left puzzled about whether or not I have any significance as an individual. If a driver fails to see you jogging along and cuts you off, you may be startled a bit and wonder if you did indeed have the right of way. When we fight with our spouse for years about how much money to donate to charity, we may start to think we are perhaps stingy. After the third confrontation with our boss over missed deadlines, we may decide to double-check our priorities. And, when nothing we are attempting to do to promote better nutrition in the schools is effective, it is tempting to lose faith in our decision to lead this fight. When the world is giving us no feedback or negative feedback, we feel disconfirmed. At these moments, stipulation from a reliable, special witness is a true boon. Such as: a neighbor says to you “I see you were ‘talking with’ the bloviator”; another driver gives you an oh-man-what-a-jerk-he-was look; your business partner reminds you that you donate many, many hours of your time to others; your boss’s boss meets with you and compliments you on how well you have been juggling your overwhelming workload; or the local newspaper asks to interview you about your efforts to change the school lunch menu. When we are confirmed, we get a brief respite from the bevy of doubts that afflict most thinking people. And that respite comes gift-wrapped in the empathy of the stipulator.

Crafting effective stipulation messages

Crafting effective stipulations involves a little über-empathic waltz – one, two, three.

One, the better able we are to respect the rights of another to self-determine, the more easily we can perceive the rationality of their position. So, odd as it may sound, the first thing we need to practice in order to be skillful stipulators is a deep commitment to the prerogative of a person to make un-coerced decisions about what is true for him or her. In other words, to be adept at stipulation, we need to be rabid fans of free agency. I would guess that most people, when pressed, would absolutely agree that the design of each person's life is up to them. Therefore, what we need to practice is to remember that we believe this. It also helps to recommit frequently to maintaining our focus on our own life design. That teeny, tiny task can easily keep our thoughts occupied with our own areas of growth, and our noses out of other people's business.

Two, we need to clear a little space in our thinking (like we do when engaging in empathy) to explore the view from the other side. Can we imagine being them and seeing what they are seeing? From inside their life, is what they are saying or doing or thinking coherent for them? Referring back to the Marjorie Grene epigraph, if we cannot perceive someone’s “particular contingent facts,” we will be unable to see what is affecting the freedom of that person. Next, we can zoom out a bit to get a zeitgeist overview of their embedded situation providing us with even greater perspective. No one is making choices in a vacuum and no one isn’t trying to do their best. These twin beliefs are crucial in a stipulator.

And three, after we have carefully witnessed the situation, we give the gift of confirmation with a clear and generous statement. The message we want to get across is this: I, This Person Over Here, grant that you, That Person Over There, have adequately assessed the situation you are in and I stipulate that what you are saying/doing/feeling is logical, credible and impressive. Using opening phrases like “I can see that”, “That makes sense” or simply “Oh!” we present the stipulatee with an explicit endorsement of their latest existential project. As is always the case with communication, the more concrete and descriptive the statement, the more efficacious the transmission. To wit: “I can see why you prefer to look through a menu quickly and order the first thing that appeals to you rather than experience the tension of too many good choices. Your job requires you to make tough choices all day!” is an effective stipulation. Whereas “Boy. That was quick.” is considerably less so.

Extra examples:

I can see that you have thought about this issue a lot. It makes sense to me that you would be upset, then, when people dismiss your contributions during the meeting just because you are fairly new at the job.

Oh. I get it. When I interrupt you, you feel like my words and thoughts are more important to me than your words and thoughts are to me.

You have made sure that every guest here has had personal contact with you this evening. I’m impressed with your willingness to make that happen when I know how tired you are today.

I like the fact that you work so hard to be relaxed! You don’t just give de-stressing lip service. You actually try to achieve it! No. I’m not being sarcastic. I mean it. I see you really working to make better choices.

I wish I could be as brave as you’re being right now. I think our idea is bold. I’m just not willing to risk losing my job if this concept turns out poorly. I’ll certainly support you pitching it.

I don’t blame you for losing it with your mother-in-law. Her behavior toward you continues to be rude and condescending. I would have been furious, too, in your situation. I wish you had a mother-in-law like I have. She is very empathic and supportive.

Of course you want new furniture to go in the new house. We may have to wait to get it, but I can understand why you want it. The old furniture looks pretty pathetic in here!

No wonder you struggled with that first Spanish class. Everyone else in the room had had at least a year of high school Spanish. I would have felt lost, too, if I hadn’t spent two summers in Mexico.

The danger in stipulation

There are a few ways a stipulation can careen off the rails.

Stipulations are fragile. As wonderful as it is to receive, a confirmation is like a soap bubble and will blink out the instant the stipulator hedges. In order to be a sound source of stipulation, then, we must resist the temptation to parse our confirmation in any way. The mother in the scenario above could allow that, of course, the son wanted a tattoo. She didn’t suggest by word or tone or sneer that only silly boys crave tattoos. So, try not to be half-hearted because when you stipulate you are at the pinnacle of existential gift giving and a glass-half-full endorsement is a poor gift. A full and resplendent gift says: You are doing it your way and your way is okay. Kudos to you.

Stipulation allows for no interpersonal hierarchy. We may believe that, in a situation where I have more power due to age, income, gender, education, etc., I am granting you legitimacy because of my status. In addition, I may believe that I hold a dead-man’s switch that would allow me to undo the stipulation at any time. The message in that case being: "Your way is okay only for as long as I say it’s okay." But that’s not how the universe works. In the trenches of life where we face the dreadful givens of existence, no one has the power to dictate reality to another. In other words, a sincere stipulation trumps institutional or cultural power with existential power – which assumes that neither prince nor pauper has the inside track on the ways of the universe. We're all just guessing here.

Here’s an example of the existential equalizer: An older male supervisor is rattled when the younger female supervisee he is reviewing gives him pushback on the salary differential between the male and female employees of the company for which they both work. She has made an extremely cogent and moving argument, and he is momentarily at a loss. He doesn’t have the power to give her a sufficient raise to equalize her wage with her male co-workers, but he sincerely appreciates her situation. He has two choices at this juncture. He can dismiss her argument without stipulation by refusing to discuss the matter and simply resume his review. Or he can stipulate that her points are valid, her argument well formed and acknowledge that this reality is really rotten. If he chooses Plan B, he has joined with her as a colleague in the human-rights aspect of being an employee of this particular company while remaining her supervisor in the specific department that he manages. Even if he refuses to take on her concerns and join her in the battle, he has granted that she, in this situation, is correct.

Finally, stipulations are easy, unfortunately, to counterfeit. Some people use faux stipulations as a relationship get-out-of-jail-free card, as in “Yes, dear, you’re right. I should have come home at midnight like I promised.” Sometimes a fake stipulation is meant as a sympathetic gesture, as in “Of course you wanted another drink. You had a bad day.” And, sadly, often people will simulate stipulation to simply pacify, as in “I really liked your manuscript. There were lots of places that made me laugh.” If you believe that stipulation is precious, you will be less likely to willingly defraud another person with a poor imitation.

Too much of a good thing

Is it possible to be over-stipulated?

Like so many things in life, the effectiveness of stipulation has a curvilinear reality relative to quantity. Too much can definitely be as counterproductive as can too little. We’ve discussed above the damage created by too little stipulation, so we need to stop here to investigate what happens with too much of this good thing.

When people are over-stipulated, their personal growth will actually be stymied by the relentless positive feedback. Why?

We humans grow psychologically when our circumstances offer us boundary situations – those life locations that require us to stretch our sense of self into a new and bigger shape. An environment with only stipulation means that there is no one capable of or willing to challenge us with a set boundary. When we exist in a world thus ostensibly populated with only yes-men, we will struggle to raise ourselves up developmentally.

An obvious example is, of course, an over-praising parent. Too often adults put heroic levels of effort into sparing their offspring barked emotional shins. These adults take the easy way out by stipulating prophylactically because they lack the psychological toughness to allow youngsters any discomfort when trying new things. The adults single out a child (the first step of stipulation) but then send an exceedingly poor message – you can’t be expected to be more than what you are right now. And because the message exists in the subtext under too frequent stipulation, it can be difficult for a child to rebut the dismissal of their potential potency. However unintended this message, it is an awful thing to tell a child, especially repeatedly.

As adults, if we choose to associate only with people who give us positive feedback, we are likely surrounding ourselves with people whose existential successes don’t exceed ours. The equanimity that results from an unchallenging community may not be all it’s cracked up to be, for we will be trapped at the developmental stature of the tallest of these flatterers.

An unhelpfully over-stipulating reality, then, is an interpersonal environment where the only challenges to our way of being come from within us. This bootstrapping state of affairs can do one of two things. It can create a private image of ourself as nearly perfect. Not good. Or it can fill us with a sense that we aren’t worth much since our environment can’t be bothered to test us. Also not good.

The most bothersome aspect of over-stipulating to my way of thinking is this: there is something demeaning when our every little move is observed and praised. Acknowledgement of everyone who tackles a big challenge kind of makes sense. Trophies for every little effort send the message that no one thinks we have any internal motivation, ambition or grit to keep up any level of effort in our life. Ick. A cloying litany of stipulation will also take on a sing-song banality that reveals the stipulator as someone who is phoning it in a bit. It is much better to treat stipulation like we treat truth, as information that needs to be presented from a well-though-through, high integrity position.

I hope you can see that there is little empowerment to be had in an over-stipulated environment.

Anti-stipulation

And then there is, of course, anti-stipulation also known as bullying. To anti-stipulate someone is to rip them out of their context and label them arbitrarily with negative terms. The ground-ripped person is stuck in the miserable place of trying to both re-establish their context and to defend themselves against the slander. It turns out that both efforts are futile. A bully is simply unreachable because they lack the ability to be empathic, and empathy is the only route to correcting a glitch in a relationship.

To revisit parental anti-stipulation, I’m sure you can picture how effective gas lighting through anti-stipulation can be when the bullying comes from adults in a youngster’s world – adults that the kids are designed to trust. As I’ve been hammering home on this website, the majority of mental distress in people is caused by the lies kids are told. Prime among these lies are anti-stipulations.

All you can do to protect yourself from bullies is to pay a lot of attention to how all the people in your life are treating you, question the reliability of the negative feedback, seek corroboration of criticism from people whom you trust, make changes as necessary and ignore the data from people who seem to be gleefully slandering you. Trying to change a bully is as ill-advised as is feeding the bears in Yosemite.

Ivy league stipulation

Stipulation, like all psychological behaviors, can be more or less robust depending on how thoroughly we understand the construct. If you would like to provide someone important to you with elite level stipulation you will need to approach it with all five components of existential intelligence. To the extent you can, you will need to seriously take the person’s past into account as you extend a thoughtful gaze toward them. (In our example of the son who wants a tattoo, the mother contextualizes the son as having a history of being reasonable.) Yet, you will need to hold them accountable for the way that they are managing their present. (The mother expects the son to “fight cleanly” during their argument.) Your stipulation must provide them with the sense that you agree that the future they are reaching for is likely to be delightful for them. (Mom acknowledges his belief that some parts of his life will be more wonderful after he turns 18 and can “sketch” on his body to his heart’s content.) In order for your stipulation to be trustworthy, you must understand to some degree the role Fate has been playing in that person’s life to date. (The mother did this when she granted the fact that being powerless is horrid.) And, finally, the stipulator has to have a healthy enough social life to ensure that the feedback he or she is giving isn’t seen as a con. In other words, the receiver of the stipulation has to believe that there is no loneliness-driven desperation on the part of the speaker that casts doubt on the validity of the stipulation. The stipulator is seen as having plenty of social energy, ensuring that the kind words are meant as a gift not a bribe. (Mom isn’t trying to win her son’s love by stipulating his reality. She “proves” this by not allowing him to get the tattoo.)

We are at our best as beings when our internal will to power is met with external cooperation, and elite level stipulation is one such match-up. Since will to power creates simply the optimal version of a human, who wouldn’t want to contribute to that status in another person with a robust stipulation? The mother in our example has boosted her son’s evolving will to power with her brave and honest stipulation, making her an übermench mom.

Stipulation and gender

Within a patriarchy, stipulation is going to cluster around those who exemplify the dominant (read: male) ideology. Currently, the more one embodies male characteristics, the more likely one is to be stipulated. And, of course, when the sex matches the gender characteristics, stipulation peaks. You look right, you’re doing right, applause!

Thus, two hugely unfortunate things are happening in today’s imbalanced zeitgeist.

First, men tend to be unaware that they are marinated in stipulation. Because their egos are often sated with respect to this construct from preverbal days onward, they are unlikely to have empathy for those who are experiencing stipulation starvation. They actually don’t even recognize that stipulation is a thing. As the saying goes, the last to understand water would be the fish.

It’s worth mentioning that the stimulus value alone of being a male precipitates stipulation. Tons of research demonstrates this truth. Change the name on a document from female to male and respect is automatically heightened. Strangers and salespeople continue to make assumptions about power when they meet a male/female couple. Their default setting appears immediately as they stipulate the leadership role to the male. These small but painful experiences litter the days of the average female, further draining her of her precious energy.

Second, because stipulation remains a foreign concept to most men, they fail to provide it. They also frequently resent it when someone requests it. They respond with a version of: “I don’t need stipulation so I don’t understand why you do.” Of course they need it. They are just getting so much of it pre-emptively they don’t experience any hunger for it. To drive this painful nail in, men also often have the same unwitting relationship with empathy, positive feedback, apology and forgiveness.

All of that is to say, women repeatedly find themselves both not valued by the culture AND under-stipulated by the people in their lives. If you weren’t raised on the phrase “The personal is political.” please Google it now.

Until the filter representing how women look at life is deemed as valid as that of the male perspective, stipulation is going to land much, much, much more consistently on the heads of men. To blame women for being strident because of their constant state of stipulation starvation is the height of cruel victim blaming.

Stipulation starvation

Before we leave the interaction of stipulation and gender, I want to punch up the following feminist truth: many, many, many, many women are seriously under stipulated. And often the least stipulated women are the most impressive in terms of productivity, creativity, effort, innovation, leadership, etc. It appears that the further a female moves away from conventional interpersonal roles of support and provisioning, the leaner the supply of stipulation. If you have any doubt about what I am saying here, Google: Dr. Nettie Stevens, mathematician Katherine Johnson, Esther Lederberg, Lise Meitner, or Rosalind Franklin for historical proof, or think about the current sexist situation in the country music world.

This unacceptable situation can lead to a level of stipulation starvation in a woman’s soul that is wretched and eviscerating. When left unnourished by the culture, a potent woman can find it extraordinarily difficult to maintain healthy relationships. Too often she will slip into bitterness, resignation, anger, stinginess, competition, martyrdom, etc. as she tries to protect herself from further depletion.

And über-ironically, what this means is that often the very women who could best stipulate other women are frequently too undernourished to be able to do so.

So before you jump to a conclusion about a particular woman’s behavior, start the stipulation process in your head by studying how much stipulation her successes should precipitate, how much you imagine she is actually getting, why that may be and what effect that might have on her spirit. Your first and most blessed gift to her might then well be stipulation for her unjustly stipulation-starved state.

Stipulation and differentiation

Life runs more smoothly when we can regulate our moods because a calm attitude serves to optimize our chances of living a motivated and productive life. This regulation, called differentiation by psychologists, is created in part by highly developed emotional intelligence. As the article about differentiation clarifies, when we wisely see emotions as data, we learn to use those data to inform us about how we are doing in the interpersonal world rather than to evoke an emotional whirlwind.

Being under-stipulated puts the onus of differentiation completely on the person who is already suffering from a deficit of social endorsement.

As you can imagine, it is extremely difficult to stabilize our mood when we are swamped by loneliness, stipulation envy or a sense of alienation. When individuals in this bleak interpersonal vacuum fail to regulate their emotions – and they probably will with some regularity – they further alienate the people in their immediate environment who are their only source of positive reflection. This vicious circle of isolation leading to increasing emotional deregulation leading to less stipulation is one that an unrewarded person can find nearly impossible to stop.

I hope you can see how a lack of stipulation cuts us off from a large part of that crucial data flow that allows us to proceed with our differentiation process.

Réchauffé

Can you ask for stipulation when you need it?

Asserting for confirmation is an appropriate human endeavor – if perhaps rarely successful. Fishing for compliments often stems from an internalized just-world hypothesis in that we believe we should get credit for what we do well. Understandable. It is also appropriate to solicit stipulations. Yes, they are nicer as spontaneous gifts, but you can enjoy them when they have been requested. When you are genuinely reflecting with another person on your life choices and their consequences, you are working to sidestep both self-referencing and self-deluding. As scary as it might be vis-à-vis your work-in-progress status, it is a wise move on your part to seek corroboration of your existential exploration from another, trustworthy individual.

The ultimate decision on who you want to become is yours to make, certainly, but another perspective from across the interpersonal boundary is always beneficial. And if you are truly brave, seek out input from folks you know who hold views wildly different from your own!

One last point – stipulations, like compliments, don’t wear out. Please feel free to distribute them repeatedly (keeping in mind respect for frequency).

One last plea – get the good stuff out of your head and bestow it on a world that can use all the good stuff it can get. If you are watching someone working through their life challenges and you recognize a behavior on their part that is stipulation-worthy – please, please, please bestir yourself enough to present them with that gift. Too many of us are walking around with our heads full of nicely wrapped presents of positive feedback but, for whatever reason, we fail to give them away. I can, without reservation, guarantee that when you have spent your day attending to the distribution of stipulations, you have left empowered and joyful people in your wake. Being a diligent stipulator is as close to being divine as humans can get.