Stop Holding A Grudge Against Yourself for Something You Didn’t Do

This is not a podcast about being broken, although you may have been. This is a podcast about strength for women who find themselves in difficult relationships, including that sometimes difficult one with yourself. We'll look at your relationship through a lens of psychology, faith, and a little dash of my own kind of feminism. We're not fixing them. We're fixing you. And that changes everything. Welcome to Stronger in the Difficult Places. Save yourself, heal your relationships. Listen in. Hey there, welcome. I'm your host, Dr. Zoe, and I'm so glad you're here today. Today the topic is stop holding a grudge against yourself for what you didn't do. And really, we're talking about shame. I'm going to talk about shame and how you hurt yourself with it and the most effective way to get over it. But first up, my win and my fail. And for any new listener, my My wins and my fails, I share them every single week, not to boast and not to make you feel sorry for me, but to really honor my wins and my fails, which I think are important for us to do, and also to help you honor yours. Both of them are important. Your fails matter because you're human when we all do it, and you've got to learn to to accept and forgive yourself. And they also matter because there's so much you can learn from them. And your wins matter because you need to. Take a moment every week, every day to honor the things that you've done right. We often have a lot of self-talk that beats us up about the things we do wrong, but hey, take a second, brag on yourself. What did you do right today? What did you do right this week? So my fail first. Unfortunately, I've done this multiple times and I don't wanna think about how many thousands of dollars I've spent on this. I keep closing the garage door on my trunk, on my car. The first time I did it, I think my car was only a couple of months old. And I closed the garage door and it did a lot of damage to the back. I don't know why I do it except that I just get distracted and the car, the way I park it, is close enough to the garage door so that obviously when you close it, it's going to hit it. So my trunk has to be closed in order to close the garage door. And occasionally I get distracted. I leave it open because I've taken groceries out or something. Push the button, close it, and then I've damaged both my garage door and my car. So I did it a couple of days ago, and it did break a small piece on the garage door, and it did very, very, very minor damage to my car back trunk. So it's so tiny, I'm not going to fix it, but obviously I have to fix the garage door. So my fail, I did it again. I'm trying to figure out some kind of stopgap that I can put in. Really, I just need to check, but I get busy. I'm multitasking. We've talked about that before. It doesn't always work. In that case, it doesn't. That's my, my fail. My win is that I signed up for my very first writers conference. I have never been to a writers conference. I'm very excited. It's in November, the HOPE Writers Conference. I've been a member of HOPE Writers for a number of years. I'm a lifetime member, and I'm just excited to connect with and meet with other writers. I have met briefly with some in other capacity. So I know a couple of the women who are going. I'm also, of course, because that's what I do, I'm gonna be applying to speak there. We'll see if I get it. That's a win for me because that's me honoring my writing, which is hard for me to do because I never set out to be a writer. But writing has always been a love of mine, and me calling myself a writer and me pursuing writing is really hard for me. And so I'm very excited that I've signed up for this conference, my first ever writers conference. It's in November. I can't wait to I'll tell you guys about it and I'll keep you updated. And I'm going to be sending in a video to apply to, to just a very small speaking part there, so I'll let you know if I get it. Okay, on to the topic. Stop holding a grudge against yourself for something you didn't do. I hope you're not doing that, but are you doing that? If you are, listen in. So in this episode, I'm going to be talking about shame in a different way. We all have shame for various things that we've done or maybe we didn't do in our lives, and shame can sometimes only very rarely play a positive role in our life. But for the most part, shame is just not a healthy feeling or state to be in, but it is also a natural response of humans. So just a quick rundown on shame. Brené Brown brought the concept of shame and vulnerability to the forefront of our consciousness with her work. I love Brené Brown, and she's done some really great work, but she says that vulnerability is the antidote to shame. I believe that vulnerability is a great first step to obliterating shame, but I don't think it's the antidote to shame. I have much respect for Brené Brown, but I have found with my clients that vulnerability is huge, but despite being able to talk about it, their shame still remains. So I figured out that vulnerability is not the antidote to shame. I'll tell you what is in a minute. Simply put, the difference between shame and guilt is that guilt is an indicator that you violated your moral code. Basically, You've done something wrong. We feel bad. That's guilt. Shame says that you are wrong. You can go back and apologize for something you've done wrong, but you can't so easily undo you. And that's why shame has deeper roots, and it chokes out a lot of our internal health because it says you are wrong. So shame can happen for 2 reasons. Either you've done something wrong or someone tells you you're wrong. And here is the thing when it comes to your brain and how it works. It doesn't matter when it comes to shame whether you did it or someone else did it. So the woman that was molested feels just as much shame, sometimes more so, than a recovering molester. Why? Because of something I call shame cosigning. Shame cosigning is when someone tells you that you're wrong, either by their actions or their words, And you co-sign it. You say, yep, I'll take that torch and I'll run with it. I am that. That's who I am. So once you co-sign with shame, it begins to take that root, those dangerous, insidious roots that I talked about. And shame can show up in various forms. So shame can show up as religious shame. So I'm not good enough for God. I'm despicable. I must hate myself and only seek God's forgiveness for restitution. Social shame. We're— we as people, we are intensely social beings, and so anything that makes us feel outcasted or shunned creates an enormous amount of shame. Also, a part of that is family shame, intergenerational shame, and then there's gender shame. So either my gender is not as worthy or valuable as the other, or I am not acting in ways according to my gender stereotype. Both of those can create shame. And then there's racial shame. The color of my skin or my phenotype says that I'm wrong. I'm not good enough. So if you've done something wrong, confession is a start, but the healing starts when you truly have compassion for yourself and you forgive yourself. It's trickier when someone did something to you, but guess what? You still have to forgive yourself. And this might sound controversial, But honestly, it's the missing piece that I have found in my work. Helpers and loved ones want to say, it wasn't your fault. That's not yours to take on. There was nothing you can do. They did this to you. And I, as a therapist, have said these words myself probably more times than I even want to admit. And they are true words, but honestly, they don't matter because your brain doesn't believe it. Why? Because there's a small voice inside of every victim that says, I could have, I should have, this is my fault. If you are a victim, you know that there were multiple times in the course of your victimization, whether it lasted a moment or it lasted decades, that you could have made a different choice. Sometimes you even convince yourself that you could have made a different choice before it even happened to prevent it, and therefore it's your fault. I shouldn't have gone to that party. I shouldn't have had that drink. I shouldn't have made that friend. I shouldn't have let him in. If I had never said that to my father, then this. And of course, it's not your fault. But for some people, not all, but for some people, your brain will never believe it until you go ahead and you forgive yourself for not making a different choice. Now, some people are going to get angry at me for saying this. Some people will say, you're victim blaming. No, I'm not victim blaming. I'm saying that victims are blaming themselves, and this is how you can heal that. This is total acceptance and love. Why? Because it gets even more complicated than that. Because as a result of being victimized, you sometimes go on to make future choices that could be self-harming, that are sabotaging, that are neglectful, and then you reap the consequences of those choices. So now you have additional anger and shame at yourself for those choices, and then those shame roots just grow deeper and more intertwined, and you can't separate what was done to you and what you did to yourself. So you can't just confess. You can't just tell yourself it was not your fault. You have to look at yourself in the mirror and say, I forgive you for all the choices you made. I forgive you for what you didn't do and for all the things that you did afterwards to run from what happened to you. I forgive you. True forgiveness releases you from shame. Now, I wish that just looking at yourself in the mirror and reciting those words would be the instant obliteration of your shame, but of course it's not. You know that. You need to walk in self-forgiveness, and that means daily reminders that you forgive yourself. It means changing your patterns of behavior so that you're acting in such a way That sends a statement to you that you forgive yourself. It means paying attention to your self-talk that's no longer self-blaming because you're reminding yourself, I forgive myself. Forgiveness is actually an easier pill for your brain to swallow than to tell yourself that you lack responsibility. You know, on a logical level, it wasn't your fault. You know that. But emotionally, you're not aligned with it. And so walking in forgiveness allows those 2 parts of your brain to align. You can release it and recognize that it wasn't your fault because you've forgiven yourself. And then you've got to do this often because it's easy to slip back into the shame cycle. You're going to get triggered and you're going to be angry at yourself, and you've got to work on treating yourself better, on walking in self-forgiveness. This is a short episode today, but this was on my heart as I'm working with clients, as I'm seeing Shame and the way that it shows up in the world. I just want to remind you that you did the best you could do. And on top of that, you're not even that person anymore. You are who you are today, which is made up of her and that little girl that you once were. But go ahead and forgive her and let you, the one who I'm talking to today, let you live free. You got this. Thank you for listening to Stronger in the Difficult Places. New episodes go up on Tuesday. 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