Question #2: Is sarcasm your way of deflecting or avoiding vulnerable feelings?
Solution: Practice speaking sincerely.
A joke to keep things light can be a great tool. If I really do not want to get into a dicey office-politics discussion, a sarcastic joke that it would be easier to solve the national debt might be a lighthearted way to deflect.
But what about when we rely on frequent sarcasm as a mask to deflect attention from our difficulties, or keep others from seeing how we feel? According to a study in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, that is an all-too-common coping strategy – especially if we suffer from anxiety and/or depression. Ironically, this pattern can make things worse, not better, because eventually people stop fully trusting us. They see our mask and put on their own, shying away from emotional closeness. After all, emotional closeness requires two things:
- Vulnerability from us.
- Vulnerability from others. And by now, others are pretty sure their own vulnerabilities – if they share them – could become the next sarcastic joke.
In our research for The Kindness Challenge, one wife realized that she and her husband both used sarcasm to cope with the hard realities of having a special-needs son – and it had become a barrier to closeness between them. So they did the 30-Day Kindness Challenge and committed to drop all sarcasm for 30 days. They realized that the opposite of sarcasm is sincerity. If someone told them they were holding up great under the pressure, instead of quipping, “Well, you didn’t see us this morning,” they would say, “Thanks. That means a lot to us.”
Very quickly, they felt more satisfied emotionally. They also leaned more honestly into gratitude for their wins because they were emotionally honest about the hard things they endured.
We can do the same.
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