Like Driving in Fog

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

TRANSCRIPT I still remember a time in college when I told a friend that I was sad or depressed, and her answer was “I’m sorry,” or “I wish you weren’t sad or depressed.” to which I responded “I’m sorry. how do you want me to be?” Her reply was: "I just want you to feel what you’re really feeling, or be who you really are.” And I had absolutely no idea how to do that, because all I knew how to do was be a chameleon.

I’m Mary Young. Thanks for joining us on another episode of the Like Driving in Fog podcast. Today’s episode is talking about what I like to call the Chameleon Effect.

So what is the chameleon effect, and what does that have to do with emotional healing or emotional health?

Well, the  chameleon effect is the tendency that some of us have to be whatever the people around us want us to be; to feel whatever the people around us, or however the people around us want us to feel, instead of acknowledging our own feelings. We paste on a smile, or instead of being happy we pretend to be sad. Whatever we have to do to fit in with the people that we’re with. To be loved by the people that we want to be loved by; to be accepted by the people from whom we need acceptance. It could be feelings or it could be behavior. Either way. But any time that you are not being your own authentic, true self, then you’re being a chameleon.

That explains what a chameleon is, but why are we chameleons? What brought us to this point of wanting to be anything other than who we truly are?

There are probably as many answers as there are people listening to this podcast, because each one of us is unique and therefore each one of us has our own unique reasons for doing things; reasons for behaving certain ways. For me it goes back to childhood. I didn’t know it growing up, but one entire side of my family was alcoholic. And sometimes when I ponder it, I think that I became a chameleon just trying to survive life with that half of the family. Then again, growing up I never felt like I fit in with the neighborhood kids, with the school kids, with my classmates, so maybe I became a chameleon to try to fit in with them.

I remember never feeling like I knew what I was supposed to be doing, or how I was supposed to be behaving, and so I would take my cues from the people around me and act like they did or behave like they did. But along the way, trying so hard to fit in, I lost me.

And then we get to that point in college where I’m 20 years old and my friend says “I just want you to be yourself,” and the only answer I had was “I don’t know who that is. I don’t know how to do that.” it’s not something I had ever done before, and saying that makes me sad.

There are so many different emotions inside me right now as I’m thinking about that conversation with my friend, and that reality about me as a college student, and it’s just sad. I’m sad for the younger me that had never been encouraged to find out who I was, what I thought, what I believed. Instead I had been encouraged to think like the family did, behave like the family did, do what they told me to do. And I had never been encouraged just to take time to figure out who I was, and what did I really want, or how did I really feel, or what really mattered to me. And I lived my life like that for decades.

I don’t want you to do that.

I don’t want anybody to be a chameleon because they think they have to fit in order to be loved. I want people to be free to figure out who they are, and what they think, and what they believe, and how they really feel about something, instead of being told by somebody else how they should behave, or what they should think, or how they should feel. And I gotta tell you... sometimes it’s hard figuring that stuff out, but I will take the real me over the chameleon any day the week.

I remember back in my freshman year in college, I did a lot of writing back then. That was how I processed things. And a lot of what I wrote was poetry, and I remember writing a free-form poem about self-identity or something like that...self-description maybe. But one of the phrases that I used to describe myself was a “nonconformist desperately trying to fit in,” because as a chameleon I needed to fit in and I needed to change my color to match my surroundings. But as a nonconformist, I couldn’t fit in. I didn’t know how to reconcile those two pieces of my personality, and I didn’t know how not to be a chameleon.

I recognized at some point that I was being a chameleon; that I was putting on a costume to match whatever group I was with.

How did I stop being a chameleon, because I’m not one today? I have to say I’m not really sure. This is one of the things that changed for me as I was healing in other areas. I was in therapy dealing with repressed memories; dealing with family dynamics from those repressed memories; dealing with codependency; dealing with 40 years of not remembering what happened to me when I was four; and along the way as I healed in those other areas, I found that I was no longer a chameleon.

If I were to give advice on how to not be a chameleon, or how to move away from the chameleon effect or counteract the chameleon effect, it would probably be things I’ve already said in different episodes. First and foremost is sit down and have a conversation with yourself. Figure out what matters to you. This comes down to why do things matter. I have friends who got college degrees because their parents pushed them to college, and I have friends who got college degrees because they wanted to get a college degree. It was something that mattered to them. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.

It basically comes down to

• listening to yourself
• trusting yourself
• examining yourself
• examining your beliefs
  • Why do I think this?
  • Why do I feel this?
  • Why do I feel like I have to wear a mask?
  • What would happen if I didn’t wear that mask?

And folks, I gotta tell you. If the friendships that you currently have depend on you wearing a mask, that’s not a good friendship. True friends accept us for who we are. We don’t have to wear a mask with our true friends. you may feel like you need to wear a mask with your family, but you’ll find as I did, that the more you focus on determining who you are/what you care about/what matters to you, the harder it will be to wear that mask around your family. Especially if you’re a survivor of childhood trauma, because it’s easier for families to pretend that never happened, and people will always take the easy way out. And you have to ask yourself what matters most to you. I know some survivors who no longer have relationships with their families. They basically divorced their families of origin.

When I was seeing my therapist in Texas and first coming to grip with these memories, I knew I did not want to divorce my family. I took a break from them, but I did not want to divorce them. I just needed a break so that I could figure out what I really believed as opposed to what I’d been taught and told my entire life, and so that I could come back to them in a different dynamic. Instead of always feeling like I was the youngest child, I wanted to cut those apron strings and establish that grown-up relationship. And we were able to do that to a degree. Probably not as much as I wanted with my parents, but certainly more than I ever expected we would be able to do.

The chameleon effect is real.

• It comes from not knowing that you are enough just the way you are.
• It comes from thinking that somebody else has to define you or accept you.
• It comes from not being comfortable with yourself, with who you really are.
• It comes from feeling like you have to fit in, and fear of being shut out.

You are enough.

You are beautiful.

You have value just from the fact that you exist.

And if somebody doesn’t think the way you do, or they don’t behave the way you do, that doesn’t make you wrong or bad. It makes you unique, and that’s what we need. We need everybody to be the unique person they were created to be.

So promise yourself to not be a chameleon for the rest of your life.

Promise yourself to start figuring out who you are, what you believe, what you think, what matters to you and why. And start showing the rest of the world the beautiful creation that you are. There’s enough chameleons, there’s enough copycats out there. Let’s all start showing our uniqueness, and valuing that uniqueness.

Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.

Go make a great week

TRANSCRIPT

Hi and thanks for joining us again on Like Driving in Fog: an Emotional Healing Podcast. I’m Mary Young, and I wanted to talk today about my own emotional healing journey. You know, the tagline on the Facebook page says “the emotional healing journey can feel like you’re driving in fog. But you’re not alone.” and so I wanted to use today to talk about the fact that you’re not alone; that I really do know what this journey is like. To be totally honest, I don’t want to have this conversation at all. This conversation is uncomfortable for me, which is exactly why I’m doing it. Why is it uncomfortable? It’s uncomfortable for a variety of reasons.----more----

One is that I’m a private person, and I do not tend to share this with people anymore. Back when it was brand-new, when I was first going through it, I couldn’t stop talking about it. I would tell anybody and their brother exactly what I was going through. Now? I keep quiet about it for the most part.  But if I keep quiet about it, you won’t know that you’re not alone.

I didn’t always know that I needed an emotional healing journey. I didn’t even know that’s what I was on when I was on it. What I did know was that I needed people a lot more than they needed me. I was always looking for somebody to validate me; my existence, my ideas. Somebody to be like. I mentioned being a chameleon in episode 27, and that described me. I still remember the time a friend from college asked me how I was, and I said something like I’m a little sad or I’m a little depressed. Her reply -- very caring, very heartfelt -- was I wish you weren’t depressed or something like that. And my only response to that was I’m sorry how do you want me to be? Because that was the way I lived my life. You tell me how you wanted me to be or who you wanted me to be, and that’s what I would do so that I could be your friend.

And I never knew why I was like that.

• I never knew why I never felt like I fit in.
• I never knew why I was terrified at the thought of dating.
• I know that I was quick to anger, and that there was a lot of pent-up anger inside me that I didn’t know where it came from but it wouldn’t take very much for it to kick out.
• I was passive-aggressive.
• I lived in fear.
• I walked in fear.
• I was always afraid that something was going to happen.

I didn’t trust people because they weren’t trustworthy, but I didn’t know why I thought that.

I knew how to cope. I knew that I could push stuff away and not think about it, because that’s how I was taught to do. And I learned the hard way that eventually that would come back out and insist that you look at it. But it was years later that I looked at it. Another strong memory from college is we watched a film in a class, and the film showed the life of an alcoholic family from the perspective of the kindergartner. And I sat in this class, and I watched my life on the screen. Memories that I had totally forgotten were being played out in front of the classroom for people to see. When the film was over, I lasted maybe five more minutes in the classroom, clenching my jaw, gritting my teeth, trying to breathe. And then I bolted for the door. Happily, the restroom was right across the hallway. I locked myself in a stall, and I cried uncontrollably. I called my mom that weekend, and said I watched this film in class and it brought back memories. And I told her what the film was about, and her immediate response, in very harsh tones: are you saying we were alcoholic?

And being a good little chameleon, I said no, I am saying maybe we might have had some problems with drinking. Because keeping the peace in the family was most important thing. I am here to tell you keeping the peace in the family is not the most important thing. Healing yourself...being healed...being healthy is the most important thing. And if that means that you have to tell the family the truth, then you tell the family the truth.

Now, I say that and I sound really passionate when I say that, but there are still things I don’t tell my family because I will get denial as a response. And I’m not always in a place where I can handle that.  I have told my family that when I went to Al-Anon and somebody asked me who my qualifier was, I sat down and made a list, and came up with 13 alcoholics who impacted my life before I graduated from college. That doesn’t count the ones that I worked for or with after that. while I was making that list, I realized that one entire side of my family is alcoholic, even though they never call themselves that, because to my family alcoholic means that you’re a skid row bum. And these were all functioning alcoholics, but alcoholic nonetheless.

For most of my life, my earliest coherent memories began with kindergarten. What I didn’t know until I was 38 or 39 was that I had buried a bunch of memories from my very early childhood. When a young child experiences trauma -- actually, when anybody experiences trauma -- one of the reactions to it is to repress the memories because they are too painful to deal with. We had a family friend and alcoholic (that mom and dad were friends with) that lived in our basement. We gave him space in the basement; had a mattress down there that he could sleep on, and he stayed with us cause he didn’t have any place else to be. I was three-ish when he moved in, and four-ish when he moved out. He died when I was too young to understand what death really meant.

And...this is still hard to say...some of the memories that I had repressed were about the fact that this man who used to babysit us, who mom said was my buddy, liked little girls a little bit too much. And I was a little girl that he liked. So he wasn’t my buddy; he was grooming me. And we had a secret that we weren’t supposed to ever tell.

All of that impacted who I was, and how I behaved, and how I saw the world. And all of that needed to be healed. I could cope with it. I could compartmentalize it. I could turn my brain to something else and not think about it, but I wasn’t healed from it. I hadn’t dealt with it.

When it started being too hard functioning every day, I finally went to therapy. That first round of therapy, I was seeing my therapist four days a week because I was only in town one week a month. So I’d see her the four days I was in town, and then email her when I was out of town. It went like that for probably six months before I could take it down to seeing her once a week.

I am still healing.

I will be healing for the rest of my life, because part of healing for me is just learning to be a better human being; learning to respond differently. To respond, not react. It’s not as foggy as it was back in the day when I was 38/39. There is not nearly as much fog. I have a lot more sunny days now. And I know I’m not alone. I have friends who have similar experiences, and we support each other. If you feel like you’re alone; that nobody else knows what you’re going through or what you’ve been through; you are not alone. It’s epidemic.

What you need to remember is that you are not a victim. You are a survivor. And if the healing journey scares you like it scared me. If you think: I can’t talk about this to my therapist! I can’t remember this -- it hurts too much. If you’re having those thoughts, remind yourself of this.

You survived the original trauma. If you can survive that, you can survive anything. Emotional healing journey -- it’s hard, but it’s worth it. And you owe it to yourself to let yourself heal. And you are not alone.

Thanks for listening. Go make it a great week.

TRANSCRIPT

Thanks for joining us today on Like Driving in Fog: an emotional healing podcast. I’m Mary Young, and today were talking about who are you really. Or as I was thinking this morning, going back to an old, old quiz show from the 50s and early 60s: will the real you please stand up?

We are born with a personality. You can ask any parent of babies or small children, and they will tell: you this baby was different from that baby from the get-go. That essence of who we are stays with us for entire life, but life circumstances, family upbringing, other people’s expectations can impact how much of that inner essence we actually share. This feels really complicated the way that I’m saying it, but it’s really not. I’m just not finding the right words so let me try a different way.

There’s a Facebook meme going around that has a picture of a coffee cup, and the meme talks about if you’re holding a cup of coffee and somebody bumps into you and you spill it, what do you spill? Well, you spill coffee because that’s what’s in the cup. So turning that into human beings instead of cups of coffee...when something happens to you and you react, you react based on what you have inside you.

And the reason I’m thinking about all this today is because yesterday I went to a service described as a Celebration of Life for a 15-year-old young man who lost his life right before Christmas. I talked about that in my Christmas episodes actually: Sometimes There Are No Answers, and There’s Always Hope. At the same time that I was preparing to go to Reed’s Celebration of Life, my Facebook memories popped up a meme from a couple years ago with a quote from Buddha. And the quote said the trouble is we think we have time.

We don’t have time.

We are not promised anything other than the moment that we are currently living in. we don’t know that we will be here tomorrow, or an hour from now. And yet, we spend a large part of our life trying to be what somebody else wants us to be, or what somebody else has dictated we should be. This works in a lot of different areas...think about people who go to college. Mom and dad are paying for the education, so they get a degree that mom and dad want them to have, even if it’s not what they want to do with their life.

We need to stop letting other people define us.

We need to define ourselves.

It’s not easy, because we have been conditioned to let other people define us. We have been conditioned to believe that that’s who we are.

• I’m the youngest.
• I’m scatterbrained.
• I’m lazy.
• I suck at math.
• I don’t have street smarts, I only have book smarts.

Most of what I just said to you is stuff that has been said to me over the course of my life, especially over my childhood. Some of this is not a big deal, but some of this is huge.

My question for you is who are you really?

• Will the real you please stand up?
• What does the real you look like?
• Who are you?
• What matters to you?
• What are your likes and dislikes?
• What are your strengths and weaknesses?
• How much of your current description of yourself was given to you by somebody else?
• Does it actually fit your reality today?

Part of the reason that this is on my mind is because at Reed’s service yesterday, his family was sharing memories. And for only being 15 years old, they had a lot of memories to share. But what came through over and over and over again was his absolute zest for life; his joy in living; his bigger than his face smile. And I couldn’t help thinking what a wonderful way to be remembered. When his family thinks about him for the next 30 years, they’re going to remember that he was always smiling, he was always helping, he was always joyful, that he loved life and he loved people, and he loved making a difference in people’s lives.

Guys, this is a great way to be remembered, I don’t care how old you are. years ago, I asked myself how do I want to be remembered, and once I had that answer, then the next question was what do I have to do to make sure that that’s how I’m remembered? And it comes back to: who are you really?

If you’re holding a cup of coffee and somebody bumps into you, what gets spilled out? I want to be remembered as somebody who lives love. As somebody who cares about other people. As somebody who does not put people down, but instead builds people up. But I can tell you truly: 20 years ago I don’t think that’s how I would’ve been remembered. I am a work in progress.

We are all works in progress.

So I’m challenging you:  who are you really? And are you letting that shine, or are you burying that under the layers of everything that people have put on you over the years? When I first went to therapy 20 years ago, one of the things that Tricia, my Texas therapist, had me do was make a list of everything that defined me. So that was my homework one week. I went away and I worked on it, and I came back to her with three or four pages of how do I define myself. And it was things like:

• I’m lazy
• I read too much
• I don’t do housework
• I’m scatterbrained
• I’m too technical

And those were all messages that I had been given when I was growing up.

Tricia had me read that list out loud to her, and then we went back and looked at each item one at a time, and I had to decide or identify where did that come from. Was that something I say about myself, or was that something that somebody else said about me? 75%, maybe 85% of that list was things that other people -- specifically my family -- had said about me. Once we had identified that. Then Tricia said okay, now let’s take each one of those and let’s find what’s really true about them.

I’m lazy is my favorite one, because I still fight that in my brain, because I am not constantly doing things all day long. I will sit and play on my computer. I will sit and read a book, and to my family of origin that meant that I was lazy because I wasn’t cleaning house, when the house needed cleaned, I was reading a book.

Working with Tricia, I changed that phrase from I’m lazy to I choose to do other things with my time. For people who have different priorities, they don’t always know how to describe that and so they say well obviously you’re lazy. Because you’re not doing what I think is important. Well, no! Because I’m not you. I’m doing what’s important to me.

last week, I challenged you to spend some time taking an inventory of yourself, to do  an annual am I going where I want to go, am I being who I want to be. This could be part of that. Just sit down and think about how you describe yourself, and decide how much of that is your own description of you, and how much of that was dictated to you by other people. Or how much of that was you becoming a chameleon so that you could fit in, or so that you would be loved.

You don’t have to be a chameleon to fit in or to be loved, and it took me 40 years to internalize that. I was a fantastic chameleon. Now I’m just me. And if people like me, that’s wonderful. And if they don’t, that’s not on me. That’s on them. But I am who I am, and I’m not going to change that for anybody. But I started that, by first identifying who I really am. Not who somebody else thinks I am. That’s the first step.

Let the real you stand up. Figure out who you really are, and let that person shine. Because I promise you:  the real you is way better than any disguise you’ve been wearing trying to fit in.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week, and until then -- make it a great week.

TRANSCRIPT

Happy New Year, and thanks for joining us on the very first-ever episode of Like Driving in Fog. This is an emotional healing podcast, related to all things dealing with emotional healing, and the emotional healing journey that you might be on. my name’s Mary Young and I am so glad you came to listen today, while this is episode number one of Like Driving in Fog, it is actually episode number 26 of my podcast. The podcast has been around since last August, originally called Lessons from Life.----more----

 I figured the new year was a great time to have a new name since, I had decided to change the name. And I wanted to take this off cycle episode to talk a little bit about why I was changing the name; what you can expect from this podcast; and why you might be interested in listening to this podcast. It seemed to me that the best way to do that would be to simply bring up what I thought were the pertinent questions that other people might have, and tackle those questions.

So we’ll start with the obvious one: why change the name? What was wrong with Lessons from Life? To begin with, the purpose of the podcast has changed since I started it last August. When I started Lessons from Life podcast, it was to be just a hodgepodge of topics; things that I’ve experienced over the years, lessons I’ve learned from that. but as I worked on it, and as I created episodes, I found the episodes that I cared most about -- the episodes where I had the most passion, were the ones where I talked about things I had learned on my emotional healing journey. So roundabout October, I repurposed the podcast to be an emotional healing podcast, and let that be the primary focus rather than just a hodgepodge. Once I had done that, and as I started looking at other podcast names out there, Lessons from Life was too hard for people to find. There are so many other podcasts and blogs and Facebook pages out there that have life and lessons in the name.

On top of which, I have said for years that the best description for me, the best allegory of an emotional healing journey, is driving in fog. You can’t see where you’re going, you’re not sure where the road’s going, if you’re even on the road. You don’t even know if anybody else is on the road with you. No choice looks good. I can choose to stop, but I might get hit by somebody else who’s driving in fog. I can choose to continue; it’s not gonna be a very fun trip, but I gotta make some kind of choice. I can just sit there behind the wheel going I don’t know what to do. So to me, the emotional healing journey is a lot Like Driving in Fog.

when I was running podcast names by other friends, trying to decide should I change the name, and what should I change the name to, somebody said: why don’t you just call it the emotional healing podcast, since that’s what it’s about. And I thought about it. There’s pros and cons to both names. Logically speaking, the emotional healing podcast makes all kinds of sense, because people will immediately know what I’m talking about when they’re searching. Even if they don’t know exactly what kind of podcast it is, they can find it with no problem. But emotionally speaking, that name does nothing for me.

Whereas Like Driving in Fog puts a picture in my brain as soon as I hear it, and reminds me of all the times I’ve driven on foggy roads. You know, sometimes the fog was light just a bare haze. Other times, it was so dense that I wasn’t even sure I was on the road. That then reminded me of the immense relief that I felt when I got out of the fog, or when the fog lifted. On top of that, I love the concept of fog as a metaphor or an allegory. Because when you are on an emotional healing journey, as I’ve been on for over 20 years now, it is so easy to beat yourself up.

• Oh my gosh! I just did something codependent again. I thought I was done being codependent.
• Oh my gosh! I just made another bad decision.
• Oh darn, that bad decision I made five years ago is still having consequences.

And we beat ourselves up about that instead of celebrating our victories. But here’s the thing. When you’re out driving, when you’re going somewhere and you run into a foggy patch, you don’t beat yourself up for running into a foggy patch. You don’t go oh my God, it’s foggy! I must’ve done something wrong! You know you can’t control the fog -- it just is. All you can do is figure out the best way to get through the fog, and that precisely... precisely illustrates the process of emotional healing. When you are on that emotional healing journey, the best thing you can do... the only thing you can do, is figure out what is the best way to get through that emotional healing journey. What is the best way to handle this incident, this emotional trigger, this memory, this setback. Don’t beat yourself up about it, just figure out what’s the best way to get through it. Just like when you’re driving and hit a fog bank.

So that’s the biggest reason that I changed the name. interestingly enough, I was talking to a friend of mine recently comparing the two names, and she said if she was on an emotional healing journey (which is on her plans for 2019) and she was looking for a podcast to listen to, she would take the one called Like Driving in Fog because with a name like that you know that the podcaster knows what you’re talking about - what you’ve been through. And folks, I am here to tell you: I do know.

Which leads right into the next question that I had written down that people would probably wonder about, which is: why am I the person to be doing this podcast? Why should anybody listen to this podcast, or listen to me? And I will start by saying that I am not the same person I was 20 years ago. In fact on December 31, 1998, I went out driving at 10 o’clock at night, 930/10 o’clock at night. New Year’s Eve out on the back roads around San Antonio, thinking and trying to deal with everything that was going on in my life that I didn’t feel like I could deal with. And yelling at God, trying to figure out what the heck was going on. And there was a point, as I was driving around thinking on those back roads, that I started toying with the idea of failing to negotiate a curve. Well, I have a very strong survival instinct, so when I hit that point I turned around and came home. I got home maybe about 1130/12 o’clock at night. I don’t know what time it was, maybe 1130. I was renting a room from friends at the time, but they had gone to bed. And I went into the shower and got into the shower, turned the water on because when you cry in the shower nobody can hear it, because the water, the cascading water keeps people from hearing it. And folks I cried in that shower until the hot water ran cold, until my arms, fingers, feet, legs were cramping. Somebody told me once that has to do with some chemical reaction when you’ve cried that many tears. Somebody said recently: oh, so you cried until you were cried out, and I was like no, I couldn’t stop crying even after I started cramping. And I turned the water off because it was cold, and I gave it time to get warm, for the hot water heater to work, and then I cried in the shower some more.

And I promised myself that whatever the heck was going on, I was not going to carry it into the new millennium. And the day after New Year’s I started calling therapists and I found the perfect therapist for me down there in San Antonio. We had a very productive relationship until I moved out of Texas.

I moved out of Texas in 2001, and in 2011, after 10 years of absolute peace, I started seeing some of those old behaviors again. And feeling some of those old feelings again like things are going to spiral out of control, so I found a therapist in Georgia, and we continued the work that my Texas therapist and I had started.

I am not the same person today that I was 20 years ago. I would not have started a podcast 20 years ago. I would not have thought that I had anything to offer. Back in 2011, when I started seeing Tracy, my Georgia therapist, she asked me why was I there and I said I want to be a better me. I want to be a healthier me. And she said okay, what does that look like? I was like: I don’t know. I’ve never been a healthier me. I don’t know what it looks like. And so I pondered that. I thought about it for a week or so. I made a list, and I took that list with me to my next Tracy appointment, read it to her she’s like: okay, and we talked about it.

I came home and threw it on a pile of paper and forgot all about it. I was cleaning out the office in 2014, and stumbled across that list .I had written down 18 things that I thought would describe a healthier me, and I could check 16 of those things off on that list. I was working on the other two.

So why am I the person to do this? Because I’ve done it. I know how hard it is. I know how painful it is. And I know how important it is. And I also know how easy it is to feel like you’re the only person in the world going through it, and I want you to know you are not alone. Even when the fog is all around you, and you cannot see another car on the road, you’re not alone. So that’s why am doing a podcast, and that’s why the podcast is called Like Driving in Fog.

 That’s what we want to talk about, and you can get a feel for that if you look at the last 20 episodes. Start in like October, or definitely by November, I had converted to focusing on emotional healing.

So I do an episode every week. They’ll be released on Monday mornings at 6 AM Eastern. It’s just me talking, and it’s usually 10 minutes or less. Sometimes it may be 12 or 13 but is usually 10 minutes or less, you can find the podcast by going to my Facebook page. Go to Facebook and search for Like Driving in Fog podcast. It will have a link to the podcast. We will be on iTunes. when that happens depends on whe

TRANSCRIPT

It’s New Year’s Eve here on the Lessons From Life podcast, which means this is the absolute last episode of the Lessons From Life podcast. I’m Mary Young. Thanks for joining us. as we move from the old year to the new year, from the end of one month to a new month, I’m thinking about transitions, and I’m thinking about change, and I’m thinking about how many times I’ve reinvented myself in my life. I’m also thinking about how this podcast has been reinvented. When I started this in late August, I was just going to be talking about whatever came to mind, but as I worked on it I found that the episodes where I had the most passion were the episodes where I talked about emotional healing and my personal healing journey. That is why effective tomorrow, January 1, the name is changing to Like Driving in Fog: an Emotional Healing Podcast.

Some people would say “Mary, you should’ve thought of that before you started creating the podcast. Now you’re changing the name four months into it.”  I say that just proves that we can change any time. I started on what I thought was the right road. It was the right road for me at the time. I made the best decision I could at the time, with the information that I had. As I travel down that road in this case, the podcasting road, I realized that I wanted to go a different direction.

And that’s okay.

I think back to when I started college. I went to college in 1978 to become an English teacher and eventually a guidance counselor, and by my second year in college I realized I did not want to be an English teacher. I still wanted to be involved in counseling somehow, but I did not want to be an English teacher and so I dropped that major. I’ve lost track of how many majors I had while I was in college...there were 4 or 5, and the thing is there’s nothing wrong with that. We do not have to pick one path when we are 18 and stay there for the rest of our life. We just don’t have to do that.

We live in a world of possibilities, and we can take advantage of all those possibilities. We do not have to stay in the same town that we grew up in. we do not have to stay in our parents’ house our entire lives. We are not trapped by our present or past. One of the best quotes I ever came across during my healing journey says you may not be able to change your past but you can always change your future.

What’s gone behind us is behind us. Some people never look back. I look back periodically just so I can see how far I’ve come.

You can reinvent yourself.

You can evolve.

You can change.

You can change your hairstyle, you can change your college major, you can change your career choice, your location... most importantly you can change your attitude. This is big stuff you guys, and we don’t realize sometimes how important that freedom to change really is, and what a difference it can make in our lives.

I would encourage everybody to spend time this holiday season just sitting and thinking about who you are, where you are, what you’re doing with your life. Is this really what you want to do? Do you like the person that you are? If you don’t, what would it take for you to become a person that you like?

And this is not just a one-time thing you guys. I had this conversation with myself... I tend to do it every year, but I’m trying to think back. Probably the first one for me was when I had just gotten out of the military, so I was 30-ish and had no job. One of my college friends had just been named woman of the year for her community. I looked at her accomplishment and I looked at my not having a job and I had a choice.

I could sit there and cry, or I could sit there and figure out what being successful meant to me. And I decided that I didn’t care if I was ever named woman of the year. That was not my personal definition of success. My definition of success is the people around me -- how I interact with the people around me, being able to look myself in the mirror and like who I am, being able to sleep peacefully at night, not tormented by anything. And I have spent my life pursuing that definition of success.

It has nothing to do with money, fame, possessions...it has to do with being a better version of me. we all have the opportunity to redefine success so that it’s not tied into money, fame, fortune...stuff that we don’t necessarily have control over. We all have the ability to choose to be better human beings, to compete against ourselves each day to be better than we were the day before.

I still do a double take sometimes when somebody will give me a compliment about some aspect of myself that I have changed over the years. The most current one is “you are so organized,” and I’m going “No, I’m scatterbrained. I’ve been scatterbrained for my entire life. Just ask my mother.” And I hadn’t ever realized that I had become organized over the years, because we are able to change. I look at the me when I was 20, 25 even 30, and compare that to the me when I’m 57/58, and I’m like wow.

You would think they were two different people. I’m looking specifically at my work habits, at some of my behavior patterns, and it is amazing to me the changes that I have made over the years. Or to put it another way the ways that I have reinvented myself over the years.

So I’m thinking about transitions today, and re-inventions and things like that because of changing the podcast name, but it really applies to so much more than just the podcast name. Each one of us has the opportunity at any time to stop and say I don’t like the way this is going, and change it. And I hope, I really hope that you find the time this holiday season to have a conversation with yourself, and make sure that you do like the way things are going, that it is the way you want things to be going. And if it’s not, just like I can change the name of the podcast, you can change the direction that you’re taking.

You can change your thoughts, you can change your attitude, you can change your careers, whatever it is that you need to do to be a better version of you.

Thanks for listening and will see you on New Year’s Day for a special New Year’s episode of Like Driving in Fog: an Emotional Healing podcast.