Audio record­ing: You come off as even less like­able on tele­vi­sion than you do through the blog. Amazing that’s even pos­si­ble. You have a real­ly shit­ty pres­ence and your face is so dour. You just have this real­ly hard-looking face, like a bitch­face, and your voice match­es. You’re utter­ly charmless. 

I only read your blog wait­ing for the inevitable crash and burn, that moment when your read­ers final­ly fig­ure out what a vapid waste of time they’re financing. 

I know a lot about nar­cis­sism, and you fit the bill, you self-absorbed whin­er. Do you even have a mater­nal bone in that flat-ass body of yours? 

You’ve got this scary lantern-jawed papier-mâché, giant head look going on. Like you’re dying of can­cer, which I hope you do. Maybe it’s because the only per­son who real­ly cared about your wel­fare was your ex, and look how you screwed that up.

It’s clear from your blog that you’re just a bot­tom­less sponge of need and des­per­a­tion. I hope your kids sue you for every pen­ny you ever made, because they’ll need it for the ther­a­py they’ll have to pay for for hav­ing you as a mother.

Yeah, get over your­self. You’re a blog­ger. Not a nurse, not a teacher, not a ther­a­pist. Not any­one who has devot­ed their life to actu­al­ly help­ing peo­ple. You’re a self-serving idiot who is pour­ing your chil­dren’s lives all over the Internet for the sake of fame and greed. You are a piti­ful piece of nothingness.

Heather Armstrong: And those were just the emails from my mom. She can be a lit­tle critical.

What if I were to tell you that peo­ple who leave that kind of feed­back and that kind of nas­ti­ness are more deserv­ing of our under­stand­ing and com­pas­sion than any­one else who leaves com­men­tary? More deserv­ing of those who real­ly sup­port what we do, and who leave real­ly encour­ag­ing com­ments, and real­ly encour­ag­ing mes­sages on your Facebook wall. Those peo­ple deserve our com­pas­sion more.

For those of you who are unfa­mil­iar with my work, prob­a­bly all of you, I’ve been blog­ging for fif­teen years. And eleven of those years, I have been writ­ing about my chil­dren. Meaning I am respon­si­ble for the blight that is known as mom­my blog­ging. I have been min­ing my chil­dren’s child­hood for con­tent for the last eleven years, twelve years. And accord­ing to some, and I made it my Twitter bio, I have exploit­ed my chil­dren for mil­lions and mil­lions of dol­lars, there­by oblit­er­at­ing their chance of hav­ing a func­tion­ing adulthood.

First there was this one. She made me a lot of mon­ey. She was great for con­tent. And then when I real­ized if I expand­ed my fam­i­ly then I could make more mon­ey, I added this one. Made a lot of mon­ey on that one. It’s very viable busi­ness mod­el, adding children. 

But because mom­my blog­ging is so con­tro­ver­sial, I have expe­ri­enced that kind of crit­i­cism that you heard, day in and day, out for the last fif­teen years. It’s in all of my email. It’s in my Facebook page. It’s on my Twitter account. Everywhere I go, I have to hear that kind of feedback. 

And what if I were to tell you that this feed­back is a gift? It’s a gift to all of us who share online. Now, we think that the peo­ple who leave that kind of com­men­tary look like this: 

That’s my favorite ani­mat­ed GIF on the inter­net. Because…watch that all day long. We think they look like this, and that makes us feel bet­ter. But in fact, they look like this: 

Now, I don’t go around leav­ing that type of com­men­tary. But the peo­ple who leave those nasty com­ments look like me, and they look just like you. 

Now, this gift of these awful com­ments, how on Earth could this pos­si­bly be a gift? And I begin this metaphor by com­par­ing it to the emer­gency room sce­nario. And I’m not sure if you’re famil­iar with the very amaz­ing health­care sys­tem that we have in the States. My friend heard that I was com­ing to Germany, and she’s like, ​“Bring me back some health care.” She has no health­care. She can’t afford it. Which means that she’s going around fac­ing bank­rupt­cy if she hap­pens to get hit by a car. Which I hope that does­n’t happen.

But in the States, if you can’t make it to the clin­ic where your insur­ance pays for your doc­tor, and you have a bro­ken toe, you have to go to the emer­gency room and you have to fill out a ton of paper­work. And you have to pay a lot of mon­ey. You have to wait. Depending on who’s work­ing in the hos­pi­tal that day, and depend­ing on how how big your injury is, you may wait there all day long. But then they rush some­one in who has a gun­shot wound to the chest. And he does­n’t have to fill out the paper­work. He gets right to the doc­tor because his wound is greater than your bro­ken toe. Those peo­ple who leave those com­ments are the ones with with the gun­shot wound to the chest. 

And any­body who’s ever fol­lowed me online knows that I have not always been this gen­er­ous to these people…ever. I’ve had some very major pub­lic melt­downs. But I know that a lot of us expe­ri­ence this. Again, we expe­ri­ence it in our Facebook feed. We expe­ri­ence it on Twitter. We may have that ran­dom email from an aunt to tell us that we are a dis­ap­point­ment to our mother. 

How do we deal with this? How do we deal with this con­flict that is in this space? Because it’s nev­er going away. You can’t cure it. You can’t put it in a cor­ner. How is this a gift? How do we make it so that those com­ments don’t form a nox­ious cloud in our head and par­a­lyze us? How do we move for­ward? People will tell you to shake it off. Because the haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate…

Now, I have giv­en this response in many inter­views because mom­my blog­ging is very impor­tant. It’s a very impor­tant job. And peo­ple will ask me, ​“How do you deal with this feed­back? Does it hurt you?” And my response is yes, it does. Because if it did­n’t hurt me, then I think I would lose the capac­i­ty that I have to write sto­ries that con­nect with peo­ple. If I become immune to the hurt and to the pain, then I can’t write some­thing that moves some­one. There’s an American author and researcher named Brené Brown. You may be famil­iar with her. She wrote a book called The Gifts of Imperfection. And in it she wrote the best quote that I can think about this whole metaphor.

The prob­lem is that when we don’t care at all what peo­ple think and we’re immune to hurt, we’re also inef­fec­tive at con­nect­ing. Courage is telling our sto­ry, not being immune to crit­i­cism. Staying vul­ner­a­ble is a risk that we have to take if we want to expe­ri­ence connection.
Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

How is this a gift? This all began when my now twelve year-old daugh­ter, who was ten, came to me and she said, ​“Mom, I want to start an Instagram account and a YouTube chan­nel.” At ten. Now, my web­site is called Dooce. And again, mom­my blog­ging is a very polar­iz­ing and con­tro­ver­sial sit­u­a­tion. People have very strong opin­ions about me. And I did­n’t take her seri­ous­ly, and I said, ​“Well, what are you going to call his Instagram account?”

And she says, ​“I’m going to call it Dooce Junior.”

Now, when I’m in the States and I tell this sto­ry, I like to say okay, it’s basi­cal­ly like OJ Simpson’s son, who has no idea what peo­ple think of his father, is going to start an Instagram account called ​“OJ junior.” Yeah, not a good idea. But since I’m in Berlin, let’s use the metaphor Donald Trump. Let’s say Donald Trump had ten year-old son who had no idea what the world thought about his father and start­ed an Instagram account called Donald Trump Junior. Imagine the hell that would happen.

So when she told me that, my instant thought was to sit her down and say, ​“Humans are awful. Okay. People suck. Everyone is a sociopath. Okay? Okay, good. Go for­ward. You’re prepared.” 

Except that that’s not going to pre­pare her for what she’s about to encounter when she goes online. And our chil­dren are going to expe­ri­ence this in a way that we can­not pos­si­bly com­pre­hend. They already are. Our chil­dren will face this kind of crit­i­cism and bul­ly­ing and awful­ness on a scale that is just unimag­in­able. And so what I’m going to tell you is what I’m gonna tell her, is all the ways that I have done it wrong over the last fif­teen years. All of the ways that I got defensive.

Defensiveness steals your ener­gy and demands that you explain your­self to those who will delib­er­ate­ly and mali­cious­ly mis­in­ter­pret you. It’s a waste of time, like scream­ing words into a vac­u­um. This all start­ed back in the year 2000, when I first start­ed blog­ging, before com­put­ers exist­ed. And there were no com­ment sec­tions. There was no Facebook. Basically, peo­ple just emailed. And all of a sud­den, I’m get­ting email from peo­ple telling me that I suck. ​“No, you suck.” And then I would respond, and it would go back and forth, and it was just use­less scream­ing at each oth­er. It was like a Trump ral­ly. I’m going to drop his name as much as I can. So sor­ry. Sorry for Donald Trump, you guys. So sorry.

So, I did­n’t know how to respond to it. And it’s use­less going back and forth over email. And so then as my web­site got more pop­u­lar, what I would do is I would col­lect the best hate mail. I would col­lect them and do a post called the ​“Exclamation Point” edi­tion. Because peo­ple who send this feed­back can’t resist the excla­ma­tion point on the key­board. They have to use sev­en, and some­times that eighth excla­ma­tion point is going to send the point home. And so what I would do is I would col­lect the best ones and fea­ture para­graphs, and then fea­ture what I would have respond­ed to them. Like some­one said, ​“Stop blog­ging about your stu­pid bor­ing life in your house all day, and eat some­thing already. You look anorex­ic like you’re dying. Eat a cheese­burg­er, for Christ’s sake.”

And then I would respond, ​“Does mak­ing fun of skin­ny peo­ple make you feel bet­ter about being an ass­hole? Because appar­ent­ly I can cure my metab­o­lism with a cheese­burg­er. How are you going to cure your per­son­al­i­ty disorder?”

And it made me feel tem­porar­i­ly bet­ter. And I audi­ence laughed about it. But it did­n’t pre­pare me for the next onslaught of crit­i­cism. And then in 2009, dur­ing a par­tic­u­lar­ly bad peri­od of my life… I had just had my sec­ond child (mean­ing I had just expand­ed my busi­ness), I had a real­ly bad case of shin­gles, and I had tak­en to my Twitter account where I have 1.5 mil­lion fol­low­ers, and called out a multi-billion dol­lar cor­po­ra­tion for not fix­ing my wash­ing machine.

And my crit­ics came out and said that I had bul­lied that multi-billion dol­lar cor­po­ra­tion, Maytag. And the the hate mail that ensued was unre­al. And I was in a bad place as it was, and I did not know what to do. So, I did what a friend told me to do and I col­lect­ed prob­a­bly a good a hun­dred and fifty pages of com­ments left on Facebook, com­ments left on web sites, com­ments on my own web­site, emails. And I put it in a WordPress tem­plate, and I sur­round­ed it with ads. A hun­dred and fifty pages, and called it Monetizing the Hate. That made $8,000 in the span of sev­en days. Paid for a lot of therapy. 

But still, I was host­ing the hate is what I was doing. I was host­ing it. I was­n’t get­ting over it. I was­n’t work­ing through the emo­tion of what was going on. And it still came in every day. I’d add anoth­er page, I’d add anoth­er page, because the hate did­n’t stop. I still was­n’t pro­cess­ing it.

Recently, Psychology Today, an American pub­li­ca­tion, did a study about this troll-like behav­ior and found that the major­i­ty of these peo­ple are nar­cis­sists, psy­chopaths, and sadists. When I read this study, I was like, ​“Well, duh. Did you have to spend any mon­ey on this study? Couldn’t you have used that mon­ey to buy a cheese­burg­er? Of course they’re this.”

But then I also thought I am will­ing to bet that the major­i­ty of these peo­ple are hurt­ing. That they’re in pain. Something is wrong. And you might have heard from a friend or a fam­i­ly mem­ber that when some­one says some­thing to you or does some­thing awful to you, it has noth­ing to do with you. It has every­thing to do with them, and that’s com­plete­ly cor­rect. It’s very very good advice. 

But I would take that a step fur­ther. Because if [there] is some­thing going on in their life, they’re in a lot of pain, and they don’t know how to process it in a healthy way except to take it out on you, and on me, through a screen. That’s how they’re pro­cess­ing their pain, and how sad is that? How sad is it that they do not see us as human? How sad is it that their ​“opin­ion” and their ​“right to free speech” is more impor­tant than our humanity?

I once read a tweet by a come­di­an on Twitter who said ​“TMZ. Because they’re celebri­ties, not humans.” TMZ is a tabloid in the States. The thing is, though, that it’s not just celebri­ties any­more. It’s any­body who has a Facebook page, and any­body who has a Twitter feed, and any­body who has an email account, is now get­ting this type of feed­back and expe­ri­enc­ing this type of bullying.

So how is this a gift? How do we process this? And so going for­ward from the day that I decid­ed okay, one day my daugh­ter is going to get on Instagram. She’s not going to call it ​“Dooce Junior” for sure. What am I going to tell her? How is she going to process this? 

It’s a three-pronged approach. And the first is don’t seek it out. Don’t Google your name. Don’t Google ​“who hates me?” If you’re read­ing a com­ment and you see it going bad­ly, delete it. Delete with impuni­ty. Block. Walk away. There’s no need to read or inter­act with that kind of feed­back. None.

The sec­ond is hon­or your ​“pis­stiv­i­ty,” which is…you’re gonna get pissed. And that’s okay. You’re going to be angry, and that’s okay. You’re going to be hurt, and that’s okay. It’s because we’re online to con­nect. And that abil­i­ty to con­nects means that we’re vul­ner­a­ble. It’s okay to feel that way if you find that infor­ma­tion online. I have very very well-meaning friends who are like, ​“Did you hear what they said?” It’s like, thanks. Thanks for send­ing that my way.

But the third approach to this, and the most impor­tant, is extend your hand across the table, at least metaphor­i­cal­ly. and imag­ine that you are sit­ting there across the table from the per­son who has left that awful com­ment telling you that they wish you were dead. Extend your hand across the table, imag­ine that you can see their eyes. Imagine that you can see the out­line of their face. Imagine that you can see what they’re wear­ing. Imagine that you can smell the sham­poo in their hair. See them as a human being, and say, ​“Where is your pain? Why are you hurt­ing, and how can I help? If leav­ing that com­ment makes you feel bet­ter, even tem­porar­i­ly, let me give that to you. If I am that pint of ice cream at the end of the day that you want to eat because you need to eat away your feel­ings, let me give that to you.”

And what that does for us as those who are online to share and con­nect, that expands our abil­i­ty to reach out to oth­ers. It gives us an inside pic­ture as to how much hurt there is that still needs to be worked through, even in our own pain. It allows us to con­nect as human beings. And then it’s not a mat­ter of shak­ing it off. It’s not a mat­ter of being defen­sive. It’s a mat­ter find­ing the human­i­ty and offer­ing that per­son their human­i­ty. Because if we want to be seen as human, we have to offer the same to them.

Danke.

Audience 1: Hi, there. Thanks for the great talk. I run a music blog, so I face these types of com­ments all the time. And regard­ing your first call to action, your first point, how do you sep­a­rate some­one who is a pro­fes­sion­al troll, like a sadist like you said, and some­one who is maybe momen­tar­i­ly con­flict­ed, momen­tar­i­ly aggres­sive, but there’s some­thing there. Do you not feel that you lose a chance for dis­cus­sion if you just delete them out­right or block them?

Heather Armstrong: Usually what I do is…I say block. You can tell pret­ty much in the first sen­tence whether this per­son is a sadist. You can tell pret­ty much in the first three or four words. Those who are being momen­tar­i­ly, I will engage them. And I’ll say, ​“I’m so sor­ry that you feel this way. I don’t know what’s going on in your life, but what­ev­er it is I wish you the best.” And I can tell you 100% of the time they have com­ment­ed back and said, ​“You’re com­plete­ly cor­rect. I am so sor­ry I left this com­ment.” That’s what I usu­al­ly do, even on Instagram, on Facebook, on all my platforms.

Audience 2: Do you see any changes in your behav­ior or how peo­ple inter­act with you since you’ve found the new focus?

Armstrong: Yes. I do now block like, imme­di­ate­ly. I used to think if I’m block­ing them then they know that they affect­ed me. I don’t care any­more. I don’t need to see that, at all. I don’t need to see the bad and let it infect me. But also again, I have engaged a lot of peo­ple who have left ​“con­struc­tive” crit­i­cism a lot more than I used to, and I’ve grown up. I feel like a grown-up now. Because I’m not scream­ing at them.

Audience 3: Hi. Thanks for your talk. I have a guy with one hun­dred excla­ma­tion marks. And my ques­tion is what do you do with the men­tal­ly ill? 

Armstrong: With the men­tal­ly ill, I refer them to sev­er­al orga­ni­za­tions in the States, includ­ing a sui­cide pre­ven­tion line. There’s sev­er­al orga­ni­za­tions where I will be, ​“Something is clear­ly wrong. Check out this web site, this web site, and here’s a hot­line that you can call.” Generally those peo­ple will delete their own comment.