Held Hostage

Self-blame keeps you a hostage of the past. This episode shares a personal story about breaking the blame that keeps you stuck. 

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Transcript

0:32

Hey my friends. Today I want to share with you something I found really useful from therapy this week. Right now I'm doing EMDR therapy, and I find it incredibly helpful. If you've never tried EMDR, I highly recommend trying it out. It's really good for like processing trauma. So in EMDR, you find a core belief that is harming you and you kind of try to isolate the first time it ever came up for you. And then the most recent time and then the most distressing time. And right now I'm working the first time that I ever felt like a doormat. It was actually such a core formative memory for me. I was probably around eight years old. I couldn't have been older than that because my youngest sister wasn't around yet. And she was born when I was nine so I had to have been younger than nine. And we would have the Mormon missionaries over for dinner sometimes. But there was one pair of missionaries that came over more often; they would just like drop by sometimes, even though technically they weren't supposed to do that. That pair of missionaries were my favorite missionaries. I would play with them the same way that we did with our older siblings when they were around. And they played with my sister and I like that as well and it was just a lot of fun. So they were over one time and I repeated something that I had heard my mom say. I didn't say that she had said it. I said it like it was my own thought, but really, it was just something I was parroting like young kids do. And then she proceeded to make fun of me for it in front of them. That was the moment that I learned about betrayal and how people can turn on you and you won't always know when or why. And so I just got really quiet. this memory in EMDR, I came to realize that there's a little But as I'm digging through and processing I think that is important because I think a lot of people bit of blame attached to it. Not like consciously. But as an eight year old, I thought it was my fault that I got made fun of. coming out of abusive or toxic relationships blame themselves That I must have done or said something wrong in order to on some level. deserve that. And I didn't realize that eight year old me had internalized that until I was working on it in therapy. But as I looked back at that memory with adult eyes, and I saw how my mom never liked how the missionaries liked to play with us. She didn't want us to have the attention. She wanted to have the attention. She always has to be the center of attention-- always. And so that was just her way of getting the attention back on her. And I realized that everything I had done was normal kid stuff. Parroting what adults say--that's typical child behavior. Playing with older sibling figures --totally normal. But my mom's behavior wasn't normal. Making fun of me and wanting these 19 year old boys attention like all of that was kind of weird. It's kind of weird, inappropriate and pathetic. And it wasn't until I realized that, that I hadn't done anything wrong, it was just her being pathetic that the memory lost all of the emotional charge that it had had. It was like until that moment, I hadn't truly realized deep in my bones that it wasn't my fault. sometimes in such a low key way that it might not even be like But as long as there's any self blame involved, the past keeps a little bit of a hold on you. There's a heaviness there. You can't fully move on while you're still blaming yourself. At some point, you have to realize that other people's actions aren't about you. They're always about them. And when you start to look at your behavior versus your abusers behavior, like whose behavior was more normal, whose was more okay. Honestly, a lot overtly noticeable. of these abusers behave like toddlers, right? They don't get their way and It's really pathetic when you really sit and think about it. They're like oversized toddlers, mentally or emotionally they're still two years old throwing a tantrum because they want the whole world to cater to them. It's really pathetic. And their patheticness has nothing to do with you. It is my hope for you that you can come to know that in your bones that any and all heaviness of self blame that you might have been carrying will dissipate as you come to that knowing. Alright my friends that's what I got for you to think about this week. Until next time, be well