29 - The Chameleon Effect

The God of my Understanding

The transcript will be delayed a couple days, as I migrate everything to a new computer. 

 

But if you're wondering what this episode's about, I'm talking about how the God of my Understanding is NOT the God of my Childhood, and what caused that to be true.

No Reason for Shame

Transcript

Thanks for joining us again on Like Driving in Fog, an emotional healing podcast. I’m Mary Young, and today’s episode is about shame. That’s a hard one for me.

I was thinking the other day about shame, because I was sharing what has been - in my opinion - my deepest secret with a friend of mine whose opinion I really respect. And I was afraid that the secret would change my friend’s opinion of me. The truth of the matter is in the 30 years that I’ve known this woman, I have never seen her be judgmental, but she’s from an older generation and I was afraid that she would judge me. probably because she’s from my parents’ generation, and my mom would have judged me in a heartbeat if I had shared this, and at the same time she would’ve been telling everybody how she wasn’t judging me at all.

The thing is, I needed to face my fear that this woman might judge me. I needed to face my fear of sharing the truth about my past. I mentioned this briefly in my episode about acceptance, and how sometimes you have to accept things you don’t want to accept -- things you wish weren’t true. I wish that I had never been seduced by the woman in my past. I wish that I had not been so vulnerable and so needy, and that she had not been such a predator, but I can’t change my past. I can wish that Jack France had not been so happy to be around little girls, but again, I can’t change that past so I had to learn to accept it. And I also had to learn, in both cases, that the shame I was carrying didn’t belong to me.

That one was hard. It took a long time to get that about Jack France, and it took a long time to get that about Sally. If you have been abused, or molested, or raped, or otherwise traumatized, you may also be struggling with shame. And I just want you to hear this, if you don’t hear anything else in this episode...

You do not need to be ashamed.

You have done nothing to be ashamed of.

The shame belongs on the perpetrator, on the violator. And one of the great tragedies of sexual abuse - especially incest - is that the violators have managed to twist things around so that the person who was violated carries the shame.

That. Is. Wrong.

Very, very wrong.

And it can take you some time to come to grips with that, and to believe that about yourself, and to accept that about yourself.

You can come back and listen to this podcast as many times as you need to while you are working on reinforcing that belief in your own mind.

How did I stop carrying that shame?  Therapy.  

You know by now that therapy is my number one answer to almost every question.

How did you do this, Mary? Therapy.

How did you to come to grips with that, Mary? Therapy.

But it’s not just going to therapy. People go to therapy for years and don’t get better. What it takes to get better is doing the work. Whatever homework the therapist gives you, whatever journaling you need to do... doing the work is how you get better. Doing the work is how you become emotionally healthy.

Yes, I can say therapy as a generic answer, but the reason therapy worked for me is because I had a counselor who said you need to do this, and I was able to talk to the counselor and share with the counselor these experiences that I would have been ashamed to say to anybody.  And my counselor listened, and accepted me. And instead of saying shame on you she said I’m sorry you had to go through that. Both of my counselors stated this -- Tricia in Texas, Tracy here in Georgia -- they listened without judging. They listened with understanding, and they affirmed that there was no shame to me, no reason for shame. And if you hear that enough, then you start to internalize it. But here’s the other part of that. Telling your counselor -- hey, that’s as safe as you can hope to get. If you have a good, ethical, responsible counselor, you’re going to get the same kind of responses I got. No judgment, no shaming, simply acceptance and maybe some sadness about what you’ve gone through. But you can’t spend the rest of your life in your counselor’s office (tempting as that may be sometimes).

You will not get past the shame monster until you have faced it down, and defeated it in your own mind. And for me, the only way to do that was to share what I was ashamed of with other people. And yes, I can picture the look on your face, and I can hear your thoughts going what?! What?! What are you thinking Mary, there is no way. If people really knew me, they would reject me. If people really knew me, they would run screaming the other way.

Folks, don’t sell your friends short. My closest friends are devout Christians, and the secrets I was most ashamed of are things that devout Christians are supposed to go: oh my gosh, no! I can’t know you anymore, because that’s so terrible, and that’s the reaction I was expecting, even though I knew my friends.

And I knew my friends well enough to know they wouldn’t be that way, but that is still the reaction I was afraid I would get. So I used to wait until I knew somebody really well, and I would give them just a snippet. And then I would wait until I knew somebody else really well and I would give them just a snippet. And to really know what had gone on in my adult past, you had to be like a best friend. And certainly not family. there were only a couple family members I trusted enough to tell about Sally, and that was back what was going on before even recognized that it she was predatory and abusive. But I’ve never shared with the rest of the family, because my family lives to judge. That’s what it feels like anyway.  But my friends...the friends that I have in my life. They live to love, not to judge.

And it reached the point, as I was getting more emotionally healthy, that I didn’t want to hide anymore. If you keep hiding your shame, then you always feel like you have a reason to be ashamed, and we don’t.

We really don’t.

It’s not our shame to carry.

A couple years ago, I finally got brave enough to talk to Tracy - my current counselor -about Sally, and about the whole experience. I’d never talked in detail about it. I had mentioned it in passing, and I had realized at some point that she had been emotionally abusive, but I had never really sat down and looked at it with my counselor the way I’ve looked at so many other things in my life until a couple years ago, because I was ashamed.

Tracy and I looked at it. We talked about it. She listened to me, I listened to her, and she helped me see similarities between what happened to me when I was four and what happened to me when I was 24. And after talking to her, I found the courage to email my close Christian friends and tell them about my experience with Sally. And you know what?

Not one of those people judged me.

Not one of those people said oh my gosh! That is so terrible! I just can’t be your friend anymore!

No! They all responded with love, and with caring and concern, and that helps dissipate shame. Shame can’t thrive in a loving environment. Shame can only grow in darkness and judgment. Bring it out into the light. Shower it with love and acceptance, and shame goes away.

Does that mean it’s easy to talk about? No. I am still dealing with the fact that I was emotionally abused. I am still dealing with the fact that I was gullible, and taken advantage of, that I was naïve and taken advantage of. But that’s not on me, that’s on the predator.

I want you to remember:  it is not your shame. You were not the predator; you were the prey. It’s the person who perpetrates the shameful act; the person who betrays the trust; not the person who was hurt, that should be ashamed.

Don’t be ashamed because somebody took advantage of your youth.

Don’t be ashamed because somebody stole your innocence.

Don’t be ashamed of the fact that you trusted somebody who should’ve been trustworthy.

It’s not on you.

It’s on the person that betrayed you, the person that hurt you.

You have nothing to be judged for, and you don’t need to be judging yourself either.

I know you’re not going to absorb all that in one podcast episode. You will probably hear me say this again in future episodes. You’ll probably read it in my book when I get my book done, but I’ll say it one more time before I call it a day:

It is not our shame.

All we did was trust people who were supposed to be trustworthy. There is nothing shameful in that. Keep telling yourself that, because it’s true. And because part of how you heal Is by giving up that shame, and realizing that you are not the violator. You are the one who was violated. You’re the one that was hurt, but you can heal.

Really, you can heal.

 

Thanks for listening to Like Driving in Fog.   Until next time go make it a great week.

Grief is Like a Ball in a Box

Links referenced in this podcast:

Lauren Herschel's Twitter Feed

Karen Lanser's blog post about Lauren's Twitter Feed----more----

Transcript:

Thanks for joining us, and welcome once again to Like Driving in Fog, an Emotional Healing podcast. I’m Mary Young.

When I was in high school, we had a college student come and speak to our English class. She had published a book of poetry called Clouds of April or something like that (that’s 40 years ago -- I’m lucky to remember this at all).  The premise behind the book - the premise behind the title was that spring is a time of growth, and renewing, and renewed optimism, and that 40 years ago April was the month with the most amount of suicides statistically. And you wonder why am bringing that up. I’m not here to talk about suicide today. I talked about that in my Christmas episodes sometimes there are no words and there’s always hope.

I do want to talk about grief. Grief is one of those things that will hit you really hard right at the get-go, and you think it’s going to crush your soul. And then time passes, and you get accustomed to the new normal, and the grief isn’t as rough. And then someday just out of the blue, it’ll be as painful as if whatever the incident was had just happened. And it drives people crazy- it drives me crazy - when it’s like that. And it’s easy to think that we’re doing it wrong. If we were grieving “properly,” we would be past this. If we were more emotionally healthy, this wouldn’t bother us. Yeah. That’s not true, you guys.

First, let’s go back to my definition of emotional health: feeling your emotions and being able to express them appropriately. Stuffing something down, compartmentalizing, is not feeling your emotions. So when grief rears its head, you need to just go with it. Now, I know that that’s not always an option, okay. Sometimes you have to stuff it down just to be able to function at that particular moment in time.

 Let me give you an example. About a month ago, on a Friday lunchtime... I was about to get on a conference call. In my day job, I do computer training over the Internet. I was about to get into a classroom that would’ve lasted 90 minutes to two hours. I was the instructor. It’d been a busy day, and my cell phone is usually on mute while I’m teaching, and I was teaching several classes that day. So I had not even looked at my cell all morning, and I had five minutes to spare, so I grabbed my phone and started looking at messages. There was a message from an unknown number, asking me to call them.

It wasn’t totally unknown - it was a number I’d dealt with before. It’s actually friends of mine, but I didn’t have every family person’s number recorded in my phone. So I knew which family it was, but I didn’t know which family member it was. I called them, and she told me that a good friend had passed away the night before. And no sooner had I hung up the phone from that conversation than my student showed up in my classroom, and I had to go from being shocked and stunned and sad, to being a professional facilitator and leading this class.  So I took those feelings, and I stuffed them, because I had to bury them for at least the next two hours.

Here’s the problem with stuffing or with burying. It’s really hard to tell your emotions: okay guys, I’m going to bury the sadness and the shock and this grief for two hours, and then it will be okay to feel it.  No, it doesn’t work that way. You bury that grief, that emotion, and it stays buried for a while. My previous experience has always been that it comes back at the most inopportune time.  It’s one of the reasons that I work on feeling the emotions at the time that they’re happening, but sometimes you have to stuff them, like I did last month.

I am still coming to terms with John’s loss.

I can tell myself he’s not in pain anymore.

I can tell myself he’s reunited with his wife (she passed away last July).

I can tell myself he lived a full happy life (and oh man, did he!), but that doesn’t erase the hole that’s in my life now.

That doesn’t erase the changes that I’m going to have to make because he and I traded dog sitting for one, and now have to find a new dog sitter.

Interestingly enough, the week before I got the news about John, I had followed a link on Facebook and somebody had written a blog post about something they had heard somebody else say about grief.  I have been sharing this far and wide in the last month, because it is the best description or illustration of grief that I’ve ever heard, and so I’d like to share that with you here today. I will put the link in the transcript but I want to go ahead and just give you the basic gist of it.

There is a woman named @LaurenHerschel and she did a series of tweets about grief. Somebody else took her metaphor and turned it into a blog post (with her permission).  It’s been shared on Facebook -- it’s pretty much gone viral. And everybody I’ve shared it with has said: oh my gosh that is exactly how it feels, and it certainly fits my own experience as well.  When I talked to my therapist about it, we were like: this could just as easily be describing trauma.

Imagine there is a box. If you need a visual, just draw a square on a piece of paper, and then draw circle inside that square. Have it almost as big as the square - that’s the ball that’s inside the box. On one side of the box is a button, so draw a button on one side, and that button is what we call the pain button.

As that ball moves around inside that box, the ball is so big that it can’t help but hit that pain button, over and over and over and over.  And that is your early stages of grief, when it’s fresh, and raw, and feels like it’s going to rip your heart out because that ball in the box keeps hitting the pain button.

Over time, the ball gets smaller, and when it’s smaller it doesn’t hit the pain button as much.  So it only occasionally hits the pain button. But every time it does it’s just as fresh, just as raw, just as painful as when it was brand-new.

For some people the ball never ever goes away. It just shrinks down to a manageable size, and you’re able to function 90% of the time, until that ball hits the pain button.

Sometimes there will be a new incident that is similar, and that hits the pain button again. When my friend Dee passed away in July that was painful, but it had been seven months. We’d gotten through Thanksgiving. We’d gotten through Christmas. We were about to get through her birthday, and it was manageable. The ball was smaller; it didn’t hit the pain button as often.

Then her husband passed away, and it was like losing Dee all over again. He’s not my last connection to Dee -- I’m friends with the family. I do Thanksgiving and Christmas with some of the family, but this coming...this coming Thanksgiving will be the first time that people my age will be the oldest people at the dinner table.  We’ve always had somebody from the parents’ generation. John, Dee, Taylor...they’re all gone now, and we are now the older people at the table, and that’s going to be different.

Today, that ball in the box is pretty well giant-sized. In the future, I know it will shrink, and then there will be days like the Fourth of July family reunion, Thanksgiving, Christmas, their anniversary -- all of those first special days after loss.  

And the ball will grow big again on those days, but it’s okay, because part of being emotionally healthy is feeling your emotions even when they’re painful.

 

Thanks for listening to Like Driving in Fog. Until next time, go make it a great week.

31 - Acceptance is Key

Transcript Have you ever been facing something that you just wish wasn’t true? If there is a way you could change history, that’s the history that you would change? That actually is an important milestone in the emotional healing journey.

Hi, I’m Mary Young. Thanks for joining us on like driving in fog, an emotional healing podcast. In today’s episode, we are talking about acceptance.

For me, accepting my past was one of the hardest things to deal with on my emotional healing journey. And this comes in a couple different directions, just to make life more interesting (that was sarcasm).

First off, when I started having flashbacks and body memories about what it happened to me before kindergarten, I didn’t want to believe it was true. I did not want to accept that reality.

• it was too shameful
• it was too ugly
• it was too bad
• it made me a bad person (no, it didn’t)
• It was my fault (no, it wasn’t).

But no matter how much I didn’t want it to be true, it was true.

Now honestly, between me and you, I can’t prove that anything happened. The perpetrator is dead. My parents are dead. My siblings wouldn’t remember because we were all very young, and I’m certain that the family would’ve covered it up. but my first therapist, Tricia in Texas...when we were talking about whether or not these memories were real, gave me the best wisdom for my entire healing journey I think.

She told me I could spend every dime I had to hire a private investigator who could go explore, and again because we were looking at something 40 years previously, that private investigator may never be able to get an answer. Or we could look at the reality that I exhibited classic textbook signs of a person who had been molested as a child, and I could focus on healing. I chose the second option, and it has worked out really well for me.

But part of that process included accepting the reality that I did not want to admit. The reality that yes, I had been molested as a child by the alcoholic babysitter in the basement that I thought was my best friend and my buddy. That was hard to accept. I don’t have words to describe how hard that was.

I had to accept that my parents did not protect me, even though it’s a parent’s job to protect their children. I had to accept along the way that my parents were emotionally absent when I was growing up. They took care of our physical needs, but emotionally -- not so much. Which makes perfect sense for who they were and when they grew up, and I totally understand that. But it does not negate the reality that emotionally they did not give me what I needed.

So part of the emotional healing journey is you have to accept what happened to you, whether you want to or not. You don’t have to stay rooted in the past. You don’t have to cling to it and be a victim for the rest of your life. I don’t call myself a victim of childhood abuse. I call myself a survivor. So are you. You survived whatever the trauma was. You are still here. They tried to victimize you, but you are not a victim. You are a survivor.

So I came to terms with the reality of my early childhood.

 Another part of my emotional healing journey was I had to accept the fact that I had made very bad decisions in the romance department. In retrospect, accepting the reality of what happened to me in my very early childhood was easy compared to the other accepting I had to do. It was easier to accept that I had been molested by the alcoholic babysitter in the basement, because that wasn’t my fault. There was no decision I made, that made that jerk want to go after a little girl. I had no complicity in that at all.

But decisions I’ve made as an adult? I want so much to bring up a list of excuses for why those decisions were not my fault. I can tell you that every relationship decision I made as a young adult was directly impacted by the unknown memories of what happened to me as a child, the unknown trauma that I had gone through. And even knowing that, it was still hard for me to accept that I had made bad choices romantically. It was hard for me to accept that I had gone against everything that I believed, and chosen something else just because somebody said they loved me.

It was hard for me to accept that I had let a woman seduce me and then emotionally abuse me, and it was a pattern that I repeated more than once.

And it’s hard to say that out loud to the public, because again, I’m afraid that somebody will listen to this podcast and have a different opinion of me. A negative opinion of me, because of the mistakes that I’ve made in my past - the choices that I’ve made in my past.

It was 30 years after the relationship ended, before I was able to share with my therapist all the nuances of that emotionally abusive lesbian relationship that I was in.

It was 30 years after that relationship ended, before I was able to tell more than a couple close friends that I had been a victim of date rape, and didn’t even know that I was on a date because I was out with a girl - we were just going out to the bars.

It was 30 years before I could admit how ashamed I was because of that interlude in my life. not because it was a same-sex relationship, but because I had been betrayed and deceived, and had been gullible, and fallen for the betrayal and the deceit, and had allowed myself to be emotionally abused and sexually abused. I felt like I should’ve known better, but there’s no way I could’ve.

But here’s the amazing thing. Just like when I accepted the reality of what Jack France did to me when I was less than four years old, when I talked openly with my therapist and accepted the reality of my young adult history, it no longer had any power over me.

That’s the power of acceptance.

As long as you’re fighting it, it’s never going to get better. Accept it, learn from it, and move on. Don’t let it have power over you anymore. Don’t try to hide the dark side. We all have a dark side. We all have things we wish we had not done. We all have things we wish had not happened to us, but it’s in the past.  We are powerless to change it. All we can change is our attitudes toward it, and that’s where the power lies. And we are more powerful than we will ever, ever realize.

Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, go make it a great day.

30 - Check Your Motivation

TRANSCRIPT

 

Thanks for joining us again on Like Driving in Fog: an emotional healing podcast I’m Mary Young, and the topic for this episode is “check your motivation.” You know, we all have reasons for everything we do, but we don’t always know what those reasons are. And sometimes, even though we don’t know it, reasons are buried in our past. So we need to check our motivation. We need to ask ourselves why. Why could be the second most important question you ask yourself. I said in an earlier episode that the most important question is “what does a healthier me look like?” the second most important question is why?

• Why am I doing this?
• Why am I feeling this?
• Why am I acting this way?----more----

Check your motivation. This has been my mantra for my entire healing journey. Why am I behaving the way I am? Why am I reacting the way I am? This ties in perfectly with the last episode when we talked about the chameleon effect.

If you remember, the chameleon effect is when you bury yourself and try to be what somebody else wants you to be, so that you can be liked or loved or fit in or whatever. I was talking to somebody this past week and they said that chameleon thing is so confusing, because sometimes you just go along with people because you’re being polite. That’s true. I personally am not a big fan of the TV show Survivor, but I used to watch it with a friend of mine because she liked it and I was being friendly. But the motivation is the important part.

 Why was I watching Survivor? To be friendly. On the other hand, why did I say Nicholas Sparks and Pat Conroy were my favorite authors when they really weren’t?  That was the chameleon effect. I wanted to fit in. I wanted to be liked by this other person.

If you are staying true to yourself, then you can’t possibly be a chameleon. But if you are surrendering your own identity, then something is wrong. So check your motivation. Now, I’m not saying go be an asshole. I will still go to somebody else’s choice for a dinner restaurant. You know, I’ll offer my suggestions, but if they want someplace else and it’s a place where I like the food, I’ll go. That’s not being a chameleon. That’s being polite.

On the other hand, if I started saying “oh no, I hate this restaurant because this other person hated the restaurant, or if I started treating my friends differently because the other person didn’t like my friends, that could be being a chameleon. That’s what you want to watch out for, and that’s why it’s so important to check your motivation.

Checking your motivation is so much more than just “are you being a chameleon,” or “are you being polite.” My therapist and I have this particular conversation on a regular basis.

She’ll say: “Mary, why are you reacting so strongly to that? Because honestly, it doesn’t warrant the reaction you’re giving it.”

And I’m all “but...yeah...yeah, it does!”

And she’s like “no, really, it doesn’t.”

We have that conversation because there are still times when I will react strongly to something happening right now, that’s actually triggering feelings from my childhood. And so my therapist has taught me to check my motivation. To ask myself why.

 When I am reacting really strongly to something, and Tracy doesn’t think it even deserves a reaction, that will be her question. What’s really going on with this? What is it linked to in your childhood or your past? And usually if I take the time to sit down and ponder, I will find a linkage.

• it hit my hot button of feeling ignored
• it hit my hot button of you can’t do that because you’re a woman
• it hit my hot button of we changed the rules midstream
• it hit my hot button of I never fit in,
• Or nobody ever listened to anything I had to say.

But the only way you will ever be able to find out any of that kind of stuff is if you take the time to know yourself.

And I’ve got to tell you...as survivors, it is so much easier not to do that. I was talking to my grandma one time after my grandpa died. I actually asked her: “how do you get through something like this? You guys were married 50 years.” Her answer was: “you just keep busy. You keep busy, and you don’t give yourself time to think about it”. Well folks, that is a very good description of how to cope, but it is not how you heal.

You heal because you deal.

You heal because you process.

You heal because you don’t just bury it under a rock.

Even though it’s easier to bury it under the rug, and hope it never comes back. So check your motivation.

• Check your motivation for being in a relationship.
• Check your motivation for leaving that relationship.
• Check your motivation for taking a job, or for leaving a job.
• For building a friendship, and leaving a friendship.
• Why are you reacting to something the way you are?
• Why do you get angry over something that somebody says?
• What was it about that comment that made you angry?
• What is it about this particular person that makes you want to spend all your time with them?
• What’s going on that makes that pint of ice cream seems so desirable right now?

If you take the time to look, you’re gonna find a reason. And the reason may not be what you expected.

It’s amazing how powerful our motivation is, and a lot of times we’re not even aware of it.

I had a situation last week. I overreacted to something and my therapist said: “Mary, what’s going on? What’s really underneath that?” And I was like “I don’t know.”

Well, five days later, while I was soaking in the tub, it finally worked its way up through my subconscious. It had felt like somebody changed the rules in the middle of the game. And that goes right back to growing up in an alcoholic family, where you’re doing what somebody told you to do, and suddenly that’s not the right thing. And I was like oh! And when I could take that out of the picture, that emotional, that trigger, then I could go back and look at the incident and say: you know what? Tracy was right. I totally overreacted to that, and now I know why.

It is really amazing how powerful our motivation is, and how so many times we’re not even aware of it.  But part of being self-aware is understanding why you’re doing something. Part of healing is understanding why you’re doing something. Because if you’re doing it for unhealthy reasons, guess what? You are not getting healthier. But if you’re doing it for healthy reasons, then you will get healthier. And as you start understanding your motivation, as you start understanding yourself, then it becomes easier to see the less healthy habits, and it becomes easier to address them.

I am not just talking about habits like emotional eating, or drinking. I’m talking about the less healthy habits of being a chameleon, of letting other people be in control of my happiness. You know what? Nobody else should ever be in control of my happiness but me, so why would I let somebody else do that? Another less healthy habit could be isolating. Choosing to stay in your own house, in your own room, in your own apartment, instead of going out into the world, going out with friends, going out and doing something.

Those are the kind of things you want think about when you’re checking motivation. It’s challenging at first. It could even be painful at first, but if you do it enough you’re going to do it without even noticing. It’s just going to become part of you.

And I don’t think I even have the words to express how important it is, especially if you’re a chameleon who doesn’t want to be one anymore.

 

Thanks so much for listening. We’ll see you next time on Like Driving in Fog: an emotional healing podcast. Until then, go make it a great week.