Hi, Everybody -

It's time for another archetype. This week, I'm combining two that relate to each other. We're going to start with the storyteller and then go to the gossip, which is like the shadow side of the storyteller.

But I want to begin with a fantastic quote from Eleanor Roosevelt, who said, "Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events and small minds discuss people." And that summarizes the difference between a great storyteller and a gossip and the width of the spectrum between them.

The great power of a storyteller is to take what you've gone through and use it as a launching pad into the theater of life itself. To understand the stories of others is the spiritual purpose of the storyteller.  

For the gossip archetype, human information is social currency; It's their key to getting into social circles, being popular, and having something to say.  

If you tend to gossip, break that pattern. The choice for all of us, no matter the archetype, is whether we are gracing something or withholding grace.

Okay, so the storyteller and the gossip, what a team.

Thank you, everybody.

Love,
Caroline
-- 
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About Caroline Myss: 
Caroline Myss is a five-time New York Times bestselling author and internationally renowned speaker in the fields of human consciousness, spirituality and mysticism, health, energy medicine, and the science of medical intuition. Caroline established her own educational institute in 2003, CMED (Caroline Myss Education), which offers a diverse array of programs devoted to personal development and draws students from all over the world. In addition to her written work, Caroline maintains a rigorous international workshop and lecture schedule and has produced more than eighty audio/visual products on subjects that include healing, spirituality, personal development, and the study of archetypes. 

© Copyright 2023 CMED LLC. All rights reserved.

The way to handle the personal narrative is to not, is to remind ourselves at all, that the last narrative we should ever tell ourselves is that we're the center of the universe.

That somehow we know what's going on in all, in everything that we're looking at, because we never do.

Which brings me to the other extreme, which is the gossip.

Hi everybody, time for another archetype.

This week I'm combining 2 that relate to each other as you'll see.

We're going to start out with the storyteller and then go to the gossip, which is kind of like the shadow side of the storyteller.

But I want to begin with a fantastic quote from Eleanor Roosevelt who said, great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and small minds discuss people.

And that kind of summarizes, really, a little bit about the difference between a great storyteller and a gossip, and the width of the spectrum that they're on.

What I realized in my own career, actually, is that everything is a story, and everybody's life is a story.

And I'll tell you the truth, I have not met 1 person whose life does not fascinate me.

Because for me, every single life is a story and everyone has elements.

And honestly, from the time I was a child and I would see people and I'd think, I'll never know who that person is.

And my mom would be driving down the street and I, you know, it was a passenger as a child and I'd look at people and I'd realize I'm never going to see that person again and that person has had all these celebrations and birthdays and friends and I'll never know them and they'll never know me and I would imagine things about all of these people and imagine where they lived and imagine the kind of houses they lived in, imagine their lives, and I just would tell stories to myself, because I had to fill in the blank, like who were they, and where did they come from, and they'll never know me, and it was like this remarkable truth.

And we are sharing the same city and the same time in history.

And who knows where our lives are connected in some way.

They must be because I'm seeing them for the second and these crazy thoughts that I would have as a child and but they never stopped.

I just kept imagining and wondering what was going on in the lives of all these people.

And then, of course, when I became a teacher and was able to actually have conversations with people, I loved to get them talking about themselves because it was a story.

It was every life is an incredible story and it's filled with stories.

We don't know how to really speak about our lives other than, you know, well, this happened and that happened and we share events and events are stories and how we became who we are and who was a participant in the journey of our lives, who's still in our lives, who has gone out of our lives.

What makes a great storyteller, the archetype in itself, we love stories and even when I teach, I will oftentimes say, I think it's time for a story.

And honestly, the audience leans back and it just delights me, delights me.

Because it brings out the child in people because everybody wants to be told a story.

And I accumulate stories you know just because that's what I do and I love to hear the stories people tell.

The more incredible they are, the more delicious they are and and the more outrageous and the more and even the more and even the simple incredible they just every story has a place.

But I So I guess to some extent I have the storyteller archetype.

But the storyteller, what I've learned, and I think it is really true, this is 1 of the few archetypes that I personally relate to very strongly, is that the stories that I have shared with people that matter the most are the ones in which some measure of truth is passed on.

Some greater truth that like you think about your life journey, and in my years during publishing when I was just as an editor in a publishing company, And so many people wanted to tell their story.

And, you know, maybe they had undergone cancer or they had an experience with divorce or some tragedy.

And I read their story and I realized it would never sell and it's not because their story was not valuable but it was because the great gift, the great, the great power of being a storyteller is to take what you've gone through and to use it as a launching pad into the theater of life itself.

You actually use your own life as a kind of a launching pad to relate to the lives of others.

It's, if you're going to talk about sorrow, it's not so much your sorrow, it's that your sorrow taught you about the sorrow of others and what everybody else is going through, and how everybody else shares this journey of what it is to be shattered, and what it is to have to mend, and then keep going.

That it is a universal journey, that your own life brought you to, that the story of your own life brought you to this larger story of everybody else's.

And if you have that archetype in you, that's the great genius of using that force to be able to say, my life is The stories of my life unite me to the stories, with the stories of everybody else's life.

That we're all living a life journey that blends together and which of my stories are so similar or parallel in some way the life journeys excuse me hey you know what I apologize I just cannot accept the fact that I can't eat bread.

And it is my, I apologize to you, I won't do it again, but anyway.

So, and so your life story, how it becomes a vehicle to understand the cosmic stories that are archetypal, that are larger than ourselves.

And that is the genius of the storyteller archetype.

And you look at great storytellers, great storytellers like Charles Dickens, who used his own poverty childhood and then created characters like Pip and David Copperfield and all of his wonderful characters.

He was so in favor of shining a light on the abusive social situations of London in his era because he experienced it, but He wasn't writing about himself.

He used himself in his own experiences in the poorhouse and etc to shine the light on the evil of children in factories and the poorhouse.

And so he became the great Charles Dickens.

It is to use your story to understand the stories of others.

It's like the spiritual purpose of the storyteller.

And another truth that I realized because of my opportunity to tell stories as a teacher on stage is that the passing on of truth and wisdom is a gift to people.

To pass on stories that inspire, that elevate people to see their lives from a larger, wondrous perspective.

For example, 1 of my favorite, very favorite stories is about the guru who was approached by 1 of his students who said, I'm enlightened and so now I can share the enlightenment with you.

I said, okay, well then why don't you come for a walk with me under with the agreement that you say nothing about anything that I do.

And of course, because he thought he was so full of himself and he said of course of course you know.

So they walk along and they get to a village and the village is on a lake, a huge lake like Lake Michigan or Superior and the water is it There's a storm and there's a man trying to make it to the shore in this small boat.

And it's obvious he's not going to make it.

And this enlightened student is looking at this guru, thinking, you can stop the storm.

You have command over all of this why aren't you saving him he's thinking this and the guru is just watching him he does nothing finally the boat capsizes and the man drowns and this that's too much for this guy so he explodes and he says why didn't you save him you have the power you have the power to save him and you could have.

I said, don't question anything that I do.

So now this kid, this young enlightened being is imploding with his own self-serving genius and they continue on with their journey and they come to another place, and they're having being served lunch.

And this abundant lunch, food flowing from all directions, and up walks this starving man, begging for food.

How can you not feed him you have so much and he has nothing and that was enough He had said to him.

This is the second time you're breaking it So he says tell me something could you see the karma of that first man in the boat?

Could you see the whole of who he was and why he was coming to that village?

He was a murderer and his intention was to kill everyone in the village and if I had saved him because of your hysterics, because you couldn't bear to have a story end a certain way.

But you would have been content because of your self-righteousness.

But you would have saved the wrong person.

As for that man starving, he's starving because he's a wastrel and he starved his whole family in order that he could have everything.

And in the foolishness of his own decisions, he's lost everything.

Finally they died and he's got nothing left.

And now he must experience the karma of his decisions.

This is how the wisdom of the universe plays itself out.

So what he points out to this person is that all your decisions come from what you personally can bear to withstand.

You can't stand the pain of this and therefore everything has to change.

You can't stand to see that 1 person suffer, but you have no capacity, no capacity to comprehend the fuller picture of what that man's story is, of what his story is, what his history is.

So I make my choices from that story and not from your personal narrative.

And that's the difference between the capacity to understand a cosmic narrative and a personal story.

To reach a place where you can detach from your personal narratives about what you think is going on, what you think should happen, how you think things should work out.

The story, the narratives you tell yourself, and the larger cosmic stories that are actually really always unfolding.

We can only get to a place where we have to trust that something is also unfolding within our personal narrative and that the way to handle the personal narrative is to not, is to remind ourselves at all that the last narrative we should ever tell ourselves is that we're the center of the universe.

That somehow we know what's going on in all, in everything that we're looking at because we never do.

As Eleanor Roosevelt says, small minds discuss people.

And I'm guilty of being a small-minded at times, let's face it, we all are.

But you know, the Gossip is this, let's face it, they're huge businesses that thrive off the gossip archetype, just thrive off the gossip archetype.

And they, magazines, newspapers, and tragically, it's gotten to the place in our collective, globally, the global network of bad information, of false narratives, of fake news, making up things, like a phrase like alternative facts, that it's hard for people to discern what the heck is really going on, What's truth and what isn't?

So it's a hotbed for gossip and that trait is a really negative, it can be a very malicious instinct to want to hear bad news about people or to spread bad news about people or to spread...

I mean 1 time my mother got a phone call.

She said some woman had just called her to express her sympathy because she had heard that I died.

Well, listen, she's right here and I'll tell her.

You know, for people, the bigger, the worse, the better.

What is that dark streak that is in human nature that activates this need to think the worst, believe the worst, want to believe the worst, want to look for the worst.

And I remember, you know, 1 time when I was in England and I did this Jack the Ripper tour.

And of course, there was rumor that the Jack the Ripper was a member of the royal family, right?

And this guy said, you know the only reason, she said, it's so typical, the moment there's a scandal, it's got to be a royal, because that's what people want to believe.

They want to believe, of course it's a royal, it's a horrible royal, because they have to believe the worst about the most.

And it's a way to chip away at a system or a person that seems to have more than you.

And So it had to be a member of the royal family, of course.

I mean, the worst crime ever, well, it must be royal, right?

So that trait, the gossip is a streak in people.

And some people have the gossip as an archetype and they actually go to town with it.

They become people in the news media whose job is to collect data about other people and exploit it for profit.

It's another thing to be a paparazzi or be someone who thrives off of the difficulties or the hardships that other people who may be well-known are going through.

And that to me is like a social moral crime.

And yet, these magazines sell like crazy.

Now there's something in the gossip nature.

If a person has that archetype, that pattern drives them to seek chaotic information about others and to pass it along.

And I have to tell you that if you have a friend and you are aware that that friend tends to be a gossip, then you've got to be crazy to tell them anything or to confide in them.

Because the last thing a gossip is capable of is keeping their mouth shut, keeping a confidant.

It's anathema to the archetype because they are in the business of spreading chaos, of spreading rumors because for the gossip archetype, human information is social currency.

That's their key to getting into social circles, to being popular, to having something to say.

And instead of of ascending to, evolving to the the level of confidant, the level of companion, the moving through the evolutionary stage, the gossip is like the lowest form on the realm that says if I have, I will use every bit of social information that I have to see where it can get me.

So my counsel to you is that that tendency, if it can be directed toward something creative, like Maybe some kind of newspaper work, some kind of information, some kind of blog, where you report on things but not at the expense of others.

Where you seek out information because it's you've got an instinct to find information.

But maybe about in some way that you help people, that you're good at networking, but you collect information for the benefit and not the destructiveness of people.

If you have the tendency to gossip and it's a fault line in you Then see if you can just for the heck of it Break that pattern Break that pattern don't use the hard the difficulties of others as a social currency with other people.

And you have to start recognizing that's what you're doing.

That this is harmful social currency but I'm going to use it.

For me personally, when you recognize that someone has the gossip, and they're a snoop, that's another, and they're snooping, they want information about you, and they're like, why, why aren't you, you know, why, why, Why do you live here and why this and that?" The best thing you can do is become very distant and polite.

Because a gossip will take what you say and they are prone to embellishment and exaggeration and making stories out of nothing because it's really a very dicey archetype unless it's directed towards something creative and positive.

I mean, I think of like, I think we remember that, and you probably won't remember her, but I think she probably put social gossip on the map.

She used to do all these gossip stories about people in Hollywood.

It really did start that whole snooping into the lives of the rich and famous.

She started that trend, I think, more than anybody else.

Remember back in the 50s and the 60s, media was just getting going and here she was always kind of snooping for a story.

The people in the movie stars were still larger than life in the 40s and the 50s.

And so anything that they were getting elevated to these positions of look at all they have, look at their lifestyles, look at the way they live, look at their mansions, look at this and look at us.

So any kind of insight into their stories, into their romances, into anything, and that was Hedy Lamarr, and she provided that.

And people just loved that, but lives were destroyed by this person.

And I guess the bottom line with me, with this archetype, is that the need to use social human currency for anything to get your way to is a high risk thing to do.

And the gossip archetype is 1 that can come very close to doing malicious harm.

If it's creative, you have creative ways of networking, of doing things for people, of expanding from using the skill at being networked into people, to putting that capacity to network to a positive use.

But to use information about others just to get social as a social currency is really a very negative thing to do.

On the other side of it, I want to remind you that storytelling is like that, what a gossip can do is move on into starting to tell stories about people at the worst level of making something up, of saying something that's simply not true.

That's the shadow side of the storyteller.

Making up stories that are simply not true.

And I will just end it on saying the positive side of the storyteller is the capacity to use the stories of others as a way to understand the greater stories we all share.

As a way of saying what 1 person goes through everyone goes through in some way that it's all part of 1 huge cosmic archetypal story that involves all of us so even even at the level of gossip, it's a way of saying, if I pass on something that is really harmful to another, why am I doing that?

When I could pass on something and grace their life instead of not?

So at the end of the day, the choice for all of us, no matter the archetype, is whether we are gracing something or withholding grace.


Speaker 0: The way to handle the personal narrative is to not, is to remind ourselves at all, that the last narrative we should ever tell ourselves is that we're the center of the universe. That somehow we know what's going on in all, in everything that we're looking at, because we never do. We never do. Which brings me to the other extreme, which is the gossip. Hi everybody, time for another archetype.

This week I'm combining 2 that relate to each other as you'll see. We're going to start out with the storyteller and then go to the gossip, which is kind of like the shadow side of the storyteller. But I want to begin with a fantastic quote from Eleanor Roosevelt who said, great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and small minds discuss people. And that kind of summarizes, really, a little bit about the difference between a great storyteller and a gossip, and the width of the spectrum that they're on. What I realized in my own career, actually, is that everything is a story, and everybody's life is a story.

And I'll tell you the truth, I have not met 1 person whose life does not fascinate me. Because for me, every single life is a story and everyone has elements. And honestly, from the time I was a child and I would see people and I'd think, I'll never know who that person is. And my mom would be driving down the street and I, you know, it was a passenger as a child and I'd look at people and I'd realize I'm never going to see that person again and that person has had all these celebrations and birthdays and friends and I'll never know them and they'll never know me and I would imagine things about all of these people and imagine where they lived and imagine the kind of houses they lived in, imagine their lives, and I just would tell stories to myself, because I had to fill in the blank, like who were they, and where did they come from, and they'll never know me, and it was like this remarkable truth. I will never know all these people.

They will never know that I exist. And we are sharing the same city and the same time in history. And we don't know each other. And who knows where our lives are connected in some way. They must be because I'm seeing them for the second and these crazy thoughts that I would have as a child and but they never stopped.

I mean they never stopped. I just kept imagining and wondering what was going on in the lives of all these people. And then, of course, when I became a teacher and was able to actually have conversations with people, I loved to get them talking about themselves because it was a story. It was every life is an incredible story and it's filled with stories. We don't know how to really speak about our lives other than, you know, well, this happened and that happened and we share events and events are stories and how we became who we are and who was a participant in the journey of our lives, who's still in our lives, who has gone out of our lives.

What makes a great storyteller, the archetype in itself, we love stories and even when I teach, I will oftentimes say, I think it's time for a story. And honestly, the audience leans back and it just delights me, delights me. Because it brings out the child in people because everybody wants to be told a story. And I accumulate stories you know just because that's what I do and I love to hear the stories people tell. The more incredible they are, the more delicious they are and and the more outrageous and the more and even the more and even the simple incredible they just every story has a place.

But I So I guess to some extent I have the storyteller archetype. But the storyteller, what I've learned, and I think it is really true, this is 1 of the few archetypes that I personally relate to very strongly, is that the stories that I have shared with people that matter the most are the ones in which some measure of truth is passed on. Some greater truth that like you think about your life journey, and in my years during publishing when I was just as an editor in a publishing company, And so many people wanted to tell their story. And, you know, maybe they had undergone cancer or they had an experience with divorce or some tragedy. And I read their story and I realized it would never sell and it's not because their story was not valuable but it was because the great gift, the great, the great power of being a storyteller is to take what you've gone through and to use it as a launching pad into the theater of life itself.

You actually use your own life as a kind of a launching pad to relate to the lives of others. It's, if you're going to talk about sorrow, it's not so much your sorrow, it's that your sorrow taught you about the sorrow of others and what everybody else is going through, and how everybody else shares this journey of what it is to be shattered, and what it is to have to mend, and then keep going. That it is a universal journey, that your own life brought you to, that the story of your own life brought you to this larger story of everybody else's. That's the genius of great storytelling. And if you have that archetype in you, that's the great genius of using that force to be able to say, my life is The stories of my life unite me to the stories, with the stories of everybody else's life.

That we're all living a life journey that blends together and which of my stories are so similar or parallel in some way the life journeys excuse me hey you know what I apologize I just cannot accept the fact that I can't eat bread. And it is my, I apologize to you, I won't do it again, but anyway. So, and so your life story, how it becomes a vehicle to understand the cosmic stories that are archetypal, that are larger than ourselves. And that is the genius of the storyteller archetype. And you look at great storytellers, great storytellers like Charles Dickens, who used his own poverty childhood and then created characters like Pip and David Copperfield and all of his wonderful characters.

He was so in favor of shining a light on the abusive social situations of London in his era because he experienced it, but He wasn't writing about himself. He used himself in his own experiences in the poorhouse and etc to shine the light on the evil of children in factories and the poorhouse. And so he became the great Charles Dickens. It is to use your story to understand the stories of others. It's like the spiritual purpose of the storyteller.

It's brilliant when you understand that. And another truth that I realized because of my opportunity to tell stories as a teacher on stage is that the passing on of truth and wisdom is a gift to people. To pass on stories that inspire, that elevate people to see their lives from a larger, wondrous perspective. For example, 1 of my favorite, very favorite stories is about the guru who was approached by 1 of his students who said, I'm enlightened and so now I can share the enlightenment with you. And he says, really?

I said, okay, well then why don't you come for a walk with me under with the agreement that you say nothing about anything that I do. You may not comment on anything. And of course, because he thought he was so full of himself and he said of course of course you know. So they walk along and they get to a village and the village is on a lake, a huge lake like Lake Michigan or Superior and the water is it There's a storm and there's a man trying to make it to the shore in this small boat. And it's obvious he's not going to make it.

The boat is capsizing. And this enlightened student is looking at this guru, thinking, you can stop the storm. You can save him. You have command over all of this why aren't you saving him he's thinking this and the guru is just watching him he does nothing finally the boat capsizes and the man drowns and this that's too much for this guy so he explodes and he says why didn't you save him you have the power you have the power to save him and you could have. And the guru said, what did I tell you?

What did I tell you? I said, don't question anything that I do. So now this kid, this young enlightened being is imploding with his own self-serving genius and they continue on with their journey and they come to another place, and they're having being served lunch. And this abundant lunch, food flowing from all directions, and up walks this starving man, begging for food. And the guru turns him down.

And that's just too much now. He says how can you not feed this man? How can you not feed him you have so much and he has nothing and that was enough He had said to him. I told you what our agreement was. This is the second time you're breaking it So he says tell me something could you see the karma of that first man in the boat?

Could you see what his intention was? Could you see the whole of who he was and why he was coming to that village? And He says, no, no. He says, well I could. He was a murderer and his intention was to kill everyone in the village and if I had saved him because of your hysterics, because you couldn't bear to have a story end a certain way.

Everybody would have died. But you would have been content because of your self-righteousness. But you would have saved the wrong person. As for that man starving, he's starving because he's a wastrel and he starved his whole family in order that he could have everything. And in the foolishness of his own decisions, he's lost everything.

But he didn't feed his own family. Finally they died and he's got nothing left. And now he must experience the karma of his decisions. And you're questioning me. And you're questioning me.

This is how the wisdom of the universe plays itself out. So what he points out to this person is that all your decisions come from what you personally can bear to withstand. You can't stand the pain of this and therefore everything has to change. You can't stand to see that 1 person suffer, but you have no capacity, no capacity to comprehend the fuller picture of what that man's story is, of what his story is, what his history is. But I do.

So I make my choices from that story and not from your personal narrative. And that's the difference between the capacity to understand a cosmic narrative and a personal story. And that is the journey of the soul. To reach a place where you can detach from your personal narratives about what you think is going on, what you think should happen, how you think things should work out. The story, the narratives you tell yourself, and the larger cosmic stories that are actually really always unfolding.

They're too much for us to comprehend. We can only get to a place where we have to trust that something is also unfolding within our personal narrative and that the way to handle the personal narrative is to not, is to remind ourselves at all that the last narrative we should ever tell ourselves is that we're the center of the universe. That somehow we know what's going on in all, in everything that we're looking at because we never do. We never do. Which brings me to the other extreme, which is the gossip.

As Eleanor Roosevelt says, small minds discuss people. And I'm guilty of being a small-minded at times, let's face it, we all are. But you know, the Gossip is this, let's face it, they're huge businesses that thrive off the gossip archetype, just thrive off the gossip archetype. And they, magazines, newspapers, and tragically, it's gotten to the place in our collective, globally, the global network of bad information, of false narratives, of fake news, making up things, like a phrase like alternative facts, that it's hard for people to discern what the heck is really going on, What's truth and what isn't? So it's a hotbed for gossip and that trait is a really negative, it can be a very malicious instinct to want to hear bad news about people or to spread bad news about people or to spread...

I mean 1 time my mother got a phone call. And I heard her say, uh-huh, really? And when did this happen? Oh, well, you know what? She's right here and I'll tell her.

And she then hung up the phone. She said some woman had just called her to express her sympathy because she had heard that I died. My mother said, really? When did that happen? Well, listen, she's right here and I'll tell her.

You know, for people, the bigger, the worse, the better. What is that? What is that dark streak that is in human nature that activates this need to think the worst, believe the worst, want to believe the worst, want to look for the worst. And I remember, you know, 1 time when I was in England and I did this Jack the Ripper tour. And of course, there was rumor that the Jack the Ripper was a member of the royal family, right?

And this guy said, you know the only reason, she said, it's so typical, the moment there's a scandal, it's got to be a royal, because that's what people want to believe. They want to believe, of course it's a royal, it's a horrible royal, because they have to believe the worst about the most. And it's a way to chip away at a system or a person that seems to have more than you. So then they have to chip away at that. They have to create a maliciousness.

And So it had to be a member of the royal family, of course. I mean, the worst crime ever, well, it must be royal, right? So that trait, the gossip is a streak in people. And some people have the gossip as an archetype and they actually go to town with it. They become columnists.

They become reporters. They become people in the news media whose job is to collect data about other people and exploit it for profit. And it's 1 thing to be a journalist. It's another thing to be a paparazzi or be someone who thrives off of the difficulties or the hardships that other people who may be well-known are going through. And that to me is like a social moral crime.

And yet, these magazines sell like crazy. They sell like crazy. Now there's something in the gossip nature. If a person has that archetype, that pattern drives them to seek chaotic information about others and to pass it along. And I have to tell you that if you have a friend and you are aware that that friend tends to be a gossip, then you've got to be crazy to tell them anything or to confide in them.

Because the last thing a gossip is capable of is keeping their mouth shut, keeping a confidant. They can't do it. It's anathema to the archetype because they are in the business of spreading chaos, of spreading rumors because for the gossip archetype, human information is social currency. That's their key to getting into social circles, to being popular, to having something to say. And instead of of ascending to, evolving to the the level of confidant, the level of companion, the moving through the evolutionary stage, the gossip is like the lowest form on the realm that says if I have, I will use every bit of social information that I have to see where it can get me.

So my counsel to you is that that tendency, if it can be directed toward something creative, like Maybe some kind of newspaper work, some kind of information, some kind of blog, where you report on things but not at the expense of others. Where you seek out information because it's you've got an instinct to find information. But maybe about in some way that you help people, that you're good at networking, but you collect information for the benefit and not the destructiveness of people. If you have the tendency to gossip and it's a fault line in you Then see if you can just for the heck of it Break that pattern Break that pattern don't use the hard the difficulties of others as a social currency with other people. Don't use their lives in that way.

And you have to start recognizing that's what you're doing. That this is harmful social currency but I'm going to use it. That's a very negative choice. But What can I say? For me personally, when you recognize that someone has the gossip, and they're a snoop, that's another, and they're snooping, they want information about you, and they're like, why, why aren't you, you know, why, why, Why do you live here and why this and that?" The best thing you can do is become very distant and polite.

Just offer them no information at all. Do not feed the beast. Because a gossip will take what you say and they are prone to embellishment and exaggeration and making stories out of nothing because it's really a very dicey archetype unless it's directed towards something creative and positive. I mean, I think of like, I think we remember that, and you probably won't remember her, but I think she probably put social gossip on the map. Her name was Hedy Lamarr.

She used to do all these gossip stories about people in Hollywood. It really did start that whole snooping into the lives of the rich and famous. She started that trend, I think, more than anybody else. Remember back in the 50s and the 60s, media was just getting going and here she was always kind of snooping for a story. The people in the movie stars were still larger than life in the 40s and the 50s.

And so anything that they were getting elevated to these positions of look at all they have, look at their lifestyles, look at the way they live, look at their mansions, look at this and look at us. So any kind of insight into their stories, into their romances, into anything, and that was Hedy Lamarr, and she provided that. And people just loved that, but lives were destroyed by this person. And I guess the bottom line with me, with this archetype, is that the need to use social human currency for anything to get your way to is a high risk thing to do. It's unkind and it can be malicious.

And the gossip archetype is 1 that can come very close to doing malicious harm. If it's creative, you have creative ways of networking, of doing things for people, of expanding from using the skill at being networked into people, to putting that capacity to network to a positive use. But to use information about others just to get social as a social currency is really a very negative thing to do. On the other side of it, I want to remind you that storytelling is like that, what a gossip can do is move on into starting to tell stories about people at the worst level of making something up, of saying something that's simply not true. That's the shadow side of the storyteller.

It's called lying. Making up stories that are simply not true. The harm that is caused by others. And I will just end it on saying the positive side of the storyteller is the capacity to use the stories of others as a way to understand the greater stories we all share. And therein lies the power.

As a way of saying what 1 person goes through everyone goes through in some way that it's all part of 1 huge cosmic archetypal story that involves all of us so even even at the level of gossip, it's a way of saying, if I pass on something that is really harmful to another, why am I doing that? When I could pass on something and grace their life instead of not? So at the end of the day, the choice for all of us, no matter the archetype, is whether we are gracing something or withholding grace.

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Caroline Myss - The Storyteller and the Gossip (The Power of Archetypes)