Latest / The Messy Middle Podcast / 44 | You Don't Owe Your Suffering A Success Story

Transcript

44 | You Don't Owe Your Suffering A Success Story · The Messy Middle Podcast

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Messy Middle, the podcast for women navigating the raw, confusing, lonely aftermath of narcissistic abuse and emotional control.
0:07
SPEAKER_00: I'm Erica Leon, trauma-informed abuse recovery coach, mom of five, and creator of the six keys to unfuckwithable.
0:15
SPEAKER_00: If you're picking up the pieces, questioning everything, and trying to remember who the fuck you were before you were so carefully erased, you're in the right place.
0:27
SPEAKER_00: Hello everyone, welcome back to the messy middle.
0:30
SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Erica Leon, and I'm really excited to get into this one today.
0:36
SPEAKER_00: Really excited.
0:39
SPEAKER_00: Let's crack on.
0:40
SPEAKER_00: This one is You Don't Owe Your Suffering a Success Story.
0:46
SPEAKER_00: Subheading Why You Don't Have to Turn Pain into Purpose.
0:50
SPEAKER_00: Apparently your suffering has homework.
0:54
SPEAKER_00: This is something I want to talk about today because I think it sits underneath a lot of conversations we have about healing.
1:02
SPEAKER_00: And I don't think it's necessarily malicious.
1:05
SPEAKER_00: Probably a lot of it comes wrapped in encouragement, actually, but people are trying to make you feel better.
1:11
SPEAKER_00: They're trying to give you hope.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes they're trying to make sense of something that doesn't make any fucking sense, honestly.
1:19
SPEAKER_00: But somewhere along the way, particularly for women, surviving something awful just seems to have acquired a second job.
1:26
SPEAKER_00: Apparently, we can't just survive it, we have to do something with it.
1:30
SPEAKER_00: You have to grow from it.
1:32
SPEAKER_00: You have to learn from it.
1:34
SPEAKER_00: Become stronger because of it.
1:36
SPEAKER_00: Find the gift in it.
1:38
SPEAKER_00: Discover your purpose.
1:39
SPEAKER_00: Become the best version of yourself.
1:42
SPEAKER_00: Turn your pain into power.
1:43
SPEAKER_00: Does all of this sound familiar?
1:45
SPEAKER_00: And ideally, do all of that whilst raising your children beautifully, keeping your job, paying your legal fees, regulating that nervous system, looking reasonably fuckable, drinking enough water, not being bitter, not talking about what happened too much, certainly not saying anything that might make the person who did it look bad.
2:05
SPEAKER_00: Let's not do that.
2:07
SPEAKER_00: And for fuck's sake, can she have an afternoon off?
2:12
SPEAKER_00: Because there is already so much pressure on women to recover correctly.
2:17
SPEAKER_00: And I say that with facetious quote marks.
2:21
SPEAKER_00: I don't even think we always notice it because a lot of the expectations individually sound perfectly reasonable, don't they?
2:29
SPEAKER_00: Of course you want to be there for your kids, right?
2:32
SPEAKER_00: You want to take care of yourself, naturally you want to heal.
2:35
SPEAKER_00: Of course you don't want to spend the rest of your life consumed by what happened.
2:40
SPEAKER_00: Nothing wrong with any of those things.
2:42
SPEAKER_00: It's when you put the whole fucking job description together that you realize what we're asking of her.
2:48
SPEAKER_00: She's meant to leave an abusive relationship, somehow immediately become the most emotionally evolved person in the room.
2:57
SPEAKER_00: She's trying to figure out where she's gonna live, what she can afford, what happens with the children, whether she needs a lawyer, what the fuck that letter from the lawyer means, whether the money in the account is safe, why her 12-year-old suddenly hates her, whether she's gonna have to sit three rows behind the person at a school concert who wrecked her whole life on Thursday night and pretend that her stomach isn't trying to exit through her asshole.
3:25
SPEAKER_00: And somewhere in there, she's also supposed to be working on herself, right?
3:30
SPEAKER_00: Of course.
3:30
SPEAKER_00: She's listening to podcasts, she's buying books, she's learning about boundaries and attachment theory and nervous systems.
3:38
SPEAKER_00: She's trying to sleep.
3:40
SPEAKER_00: But she's also obviously trying to get up at five in the morning and do a ton of exercises and meditate and write everything and yoga.
3:47
SPEAKER_00: And she's trying to eat something containing an actual nutrient.
3:51
SPEAKER_00: She's Googling things at two in the morning that she'd never have imagined herself googling five years ago.
3:57
SPEAKER_00: And the world around her keeps moving as though nothing particularly extraordinary is happening.
4:03
SPEAKER_00: There's still fucking laundry, dog still throws up on the carpet, somebody at work still wants that fecking spreadsheet, and the school sends an email about crazy hair day.
4:14
SPEAKER_00: And she's thinking, Are you fucking kidding me?
4:17
SPEAKER_00: I'm currently engaged in psychological warfare and now I have to find blue hairspray.
4:24
SPEAKER_00: Life is incredibly rude like that, isn't it?
4:27
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't always clear the diary because your world fell apart.
4:32
SPEAKER_00: Not for anyone.
4:32
SPEAKER_00: And then after a while something else starts happening.
4:35
SPEAKER_00: People stop asking quite as much.
4:38
SPEAKER_00: At the beginning, everybody knows you're going through it.
4:41
SPEAKER_00: They give you that look.
4:42
SPEAKER_00: Ah, you might get a little bit of leeway.
4:44
SPEAKER_00: Friends check in, somebody brings food, people say, How are you doing?
4:48
SPEAKER_00: Then six months pass, nine months a year, and the outside world starts quietly, or not so quietly, assuming that you are probably better?
5:00
SPEAKER_00: Or at least better-ish.
5:02
SPEAKER_00: The divorce happened.
5:03
SPEAKER_00: You moved, you got the new place, you're functioning.
5:07
SPEAKER_00: You even laugh sometimes, your hair looks nice.
5:10
SPEAKER_00: Excellent.
5:11
SPEAKER_00: She's healed.
5:12
SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, you personally might be standing in target holding two different brands of washing powder when some completely random memory hits you and you're suddenly back in something that happened four years ago.
5:26
SPEAKER_00: Or a custody email comes in and your entire body changes before you've even finished reading the first sentence.
5:34
SPEAKER_00: You have to run to the bathroom.
5:36
SPEAKER_00: Or you hear that he's taking somebody new to the place he used to take you or taking your kids somewhere with them and you're surprised by the reaction because you don't even give a fuck what he's up to.
5:50
SPEAKER_00: And now you're annoyed with yourself for having the reaction.
5:54
SPEAKER_00: Why do I care?
5:56
SPEAKER_00: I thought I was past this.
5:58
SPEAKER_00: Shouldn't I be further along by now?
6:00
SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh, if I had money for every time I hear a client say that, oof.
6:05
SPEAKER_00: And that's where the pressure doesn't even need to come from other people anymore.
6:09
SPEAKER_00: We pick it up and we internalize it and we carry it ourselves.
6:13
SPEAKER_00: Now we're monitoring the recovery.
6:15
SPEAKER_00: How am I doing?
6:16
SPEAKER_00: Am I still too angry?
6:18
SPEAKER_00: Am I talking about it too much?
6:20
SPEAKER_00: Should I be dating?
6:21
SPEAKER_00: Should I not be?
6:22
SPEAKER_00: Am I avoiding intimacy or protecting my peace?
6:25
SPEAKER_00: What am I doing?
6:26
SPEAKER_00: Is this a boundary or am I just becoming super defensive and rigid?
6:30
SPEAKER_00: Am I triggered?
6:32
SPEAKER_00: Or hang on, am I dysregulated?
6:34
SPEAKER_00: Is this intuition?
6:35
SPEAKER_00: Oh fuck, maybe it's trauma.
6:36
SPEAKER_00: Am I healing?
6:37
SPEAKER_00: Am I healing well enough though?
6:40
SPEAKER_00: You can turn recovery into a performance review without even realizing you've done it.
6:45
SPEAKER_00: And women are already set up for this.
6:47
SPEAKER_00: We're spectacularly well trained for performance reviews.
6:51
SPEAKER_00: How am I doing as a mum?
6:53
SPEAKER_00: How am I doing as a partner?
6:55
SPEAKER_00: Oh, what about a daughter?
6:56
SPEAKER_00: Oh my goodness, an employee, a friend?
6:59
SPEAKER_00: How do I look?
7:00
SPEAKER_00: Am I too much?
7:00
SPEAKER_00: Am I not enough?
7:01
SPEAKER_00: Am I being selfish?
7:02
SPEAKER_00: Have I remembered everyone's birthday this month?
7:05
SPEAKER_00: Oh, did I reply to the group chat?
7:07
SPEAKER_00: Oh, did I book the dentist?
7:09
SPEAKER_00: Is there something in the fridge these children will actually fucking eat?
7:12
SPEAKER_00: And then healing arrives with his own little clipboard.
7:15
SPEAKER_00: More jobs.
7:16
SPEAKER_00: Oh, could he?
7:17
SPEAKER_00: I think that's why I am increasingly resistant to this idea that there's some beautifully evolved version of recovery we're all supposed to be headed towards.
7:28
SPEAKER_00: That's why the word healing is starting to get on my tits.
7:30
SPEAKER_00: I meet women who are doing incredibly well, who don't think they are doing incredibly well.
7:36
SPEAKER_00: I meet them all the time.
7:38
SPEAKER_00: They still cry, they still get furious, they still have days where something knocks them sideways, and they make a decision and then question it, and sometimes they miss somebody who was terrible for them.
7:50
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes they know exactly what their boundary is and then feel guilty as fuck after enforcing it.
7:56
SPEAKER_00: They're incredibly wise at 10, and sometimes by 7.30 they're eating cereal over the sink and thinking, what the fuck is my life?
8:05
SPEAKER_00: And that is what being a person is like.
8:07
SPEAKER_00: Really think we forget that.
8:09
SPEAKER_00: It can be this subtle expectation that after trauma you should somehow become better at being human than people who weren't traumatized in the first place.
8:21
SPEAKER_00: Like, really think about that.
8:22
SPEAKER_00: I love picking this stuff apart because honestly, so much of what society is built upon for us is nonsense that came from somebody's ass.
8:31
SPEAKER_00: Everybody else gets to be inconsistent and petty occasionally and tired and confused and have questionable taste in men and send the text they probably shouldn't have sent.
8:41
SPEAKER_00: But the woman who has been through hell Oh, not her.
8:45
SPEAKER_00: She needs to demonstrate growth.
8:47
SPEAKER_00: She has learned her lesson.
8:49
SPEAKER_00: She has boundaries now.
8:50
SPEAKER_00: She can't ever make a bad dating choice before everybody throws her back into that category and gives her that look again.
8:58
SPEAKER_00: She knows her worth, right?
9:00
SPEAKER_00: She doesn't react, she rises above it, preferably while looking completely fabulous.
9:05
SPEAKER_00: And if she loses her shit one day, there's almost this feeling of oh no.
9:10
SPEAKER_00: Has she gone backwards?
9:11
SPEAKER_00: What's going on?
9:13
SPEAKER_00: Is she in menopause?
9:14
SPEAKER_00: Is she having a midlife crisis?
9:16
SPEAKER_00: Maybe she hasn't gone anywhere.
9:18
SPEAKER_00: Maybe somebody was being a dick, and she had a bad Tuesday.
9:22
SPEAKER_00: This is something I see all the time with women who've been through abusive or high control relationships or betrayal, horrific divorces, prolonged legal battles, family estrangement.
9:33
SPEAKER_00: Any experience that has basically picked their life up by the ankles and shaken everything out of the pockets.
9:39
SPEAKER_00: They already have been given so many instructions about what recovery is supposed to look like.
9:45
SPEAKER_00: Don't be angry for too long.
9:46
SPEAKER_00: Don't become bitter.
9:48
SPEAKER_00: Again with the be the bigger person.
9:50
SPEAKER_00: Think of the kids, move forward, forgive.
9:53
SPEAKER_00: Don't let what happened define you.
9:55
SPEAKER_00: Don't talk about him too much, because then he's still controlling your life.
9:59
SPEAKER_00: Don't say too much publicly because again, what about the children?
10:03
SPEAKER_00: Don't tell people what actually happened.
10:05
SPEAKER_00: Because that's airing dirty laundry.
10:08
SPEAKER_00: That's so tacky.
10:09
SPEAKER_00: Don't swear.
10:10
SPEAKER_00: Obviously I listened to that one.
10:12
SPEAKER_00: Don't be vindictive.
10:13
SPEAKER_00: Don't make mistakes.
10:14
SPEAKER_00: Don't speak with someone too soon.
10:16
SPEAKER_00: Don't stay single too long though, because perhaps you've closed your heart then and that's a whole nother thing that people are going to tell you.
10:22
SPEAKER_00: You definitely do want a partner, don't you?
10:25
SPEAKER_00: You want to get remarried, don't you?
10:28
SPEAKER_00: And for fuck's sake, don't look like you're having too much fun after the divorce, because then obviously you never cared about the marriage.
10:35
SPEAKER_00: My god, it's exhausting just saying it all, and it is laughable and comical and ridiculous.
10:42
SPEAKER_00: If you really think about it.
10:45
SPEAKER_00: And here's the bit that fascinates me too.
10:48
SPEAKER_00: After we've given her all of these assignments, we hand her one more and it's a doozy.
10:52
SPEAKER_00: And that is make it mean something.
10:55
SPEAKER_00: Do something with what happened to you.
10:58
SPEAKER_00: And I have a fucking problem with that.
11:00
SPEAKER_00: Not because I think meaning is bad, because in fact, I am actually speaking of somebody that did do that.
11:07
SPEAKER_00: I'm not dissing it.
11:09
SPEAKER_00: I just human beings make meaning out of things.
11:12
SPEAKER_00: We tell stories, we create, we take experiences and we weave them into who we become.
11:19
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes something that happened to us genuinely does change the direction of our life.
11:23
SPEAKER_00: I've done it myself.
11:25
SPEAKER_00: My work exists solely because of things I've lived through, things I've learned, things I've had to understand, and things I don't want anyone else to go through alone when there's information out there.
11:37
SPEAKER_00: The six keys didn't fall out of the fucking sky at all.
11:41
SPEAKER_00: A lot of what I teach was built through years of trying to understand human beings, abuse, survival, self-trust, the nervous system, boundaries, all of it.
11:51
SPEAKER_00: And I love what I do.
11:52
SPEAKER_00: Oh my god, I love it.
11:54
SPEAKER_00: I love the women I work with, I love the men I work with.
11:57
SPEAKER_00: I can look at parts of my life now and see something incredibly meaningful that grew in ground I wouldn't have chosen.
12:05
SPEAKER_00: But that's really different from saying, thank God those things happen to me.
12:10
SPEAKER_00: Because apparently I needed them in order to become this person.
12:14
SPEAKER_00: Nope.
12:15
SPEAKER_00: I don't believe I have to do that.
12:18
SPEAKER_00: And I don't think you do either.
12:21
SPEAKER_00: You're allowed to love who you became without loving what happened to you.
12:27
SPEAKER_00: Shall I say it again?
12:29
SPEAKER_00: Actually, let me say it again.
12:31
SPEAKER_00: Because I really think we sometimes mash those two things together.
12:36
SPEAKER_00: You can be profoundly grateful for your life now and still wish you hadn't had to survive what you survived to get here.
12:45
SPEAKER_00: There is no contradiction in that.
12:48
SPEAKER_00: And I think sometimes when people say, But look how strong it made you, they're giving the experience credit for something that actually belongs to you.
12:57
SPEAKER_00: But did the abuse make you strong?
12:59
SPEAKER_00: Or did you have to use an extraordinary amount of strength to survive the abuse?
13:05
SPEAKER_00: Stuff you may not have even knew you were capable of, but it was you.
13:10
SPEAKER_00: You had the reserves, you did it.
13:13
SPEAKER_00: Did the divorce make you resourceful?
13:15
SPEAKER_00: Sure it fucking did because you had no money.
13:18
SPEAKER_00: Or were you resourceful because suddenly you were staring at 3,000 problems you'd never asked for and somebody had to fucking solve them, right?
13:27
SPEAKER_00: Or your kids would not have eaten.
13:28
SPEAKER_00: Did betrayal give you courage?
13:31
SPEAKER_00: Or did you find courage because your life required you to do terrifying things while your knees were literally shaking?
13:38
SPEAKER_00: Because I don't particularly want to give the fire credit for the house you built afterwards.
13:44
SPEAKER_00: The fire was a fire.
13:46
SPEAKER_00: You didn't start it most likely either.
13:49
SPEAKER_00: You built the fucking house.
13:50
SPEAKER_00: And I think that distinction matters.
13:53
SPEAKER_00: Even inside your own head, it matters.
13:55
SPEAKER_00: Matters how we talk to ourselves, matters how we think about ourselves, it matters when we internalize these stupid Disney-esque movie versions of what life should be like.
14:07
SPEAKER_00: It's nonsense.
14:08
SPEAKER_00: Because otherwise adversity gets elevated into this wise old teacher that apparently arrived with a little lesson plan tucked under its arm.
14:17
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes adversity is not a teacher.
14:20
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes something terrible happened because somebody behaved terribly.
14:25
SPEAKER_00: Somebody lied.
14:26
SPEAKER_00: Somebody abused power.
14:28
SPEAKER_00: Somebody chose themselves at enormous cost to their family and everyone around them.
14:33
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes the systems that are set up, the institutions that are set up, failed you and caused these situations.
14:41
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes life was brutally unfair.
14:44
SPEAKER_00: And there isn't always a lovely ribbon to put around that.
14:46
SPEAKER_00: And I don't think healing should require us to find one.
14:51
SPEAKER_00: I think one of the reasons that we're so uncomfortable leaving suffering meaningless is that human beings don't particularly like randomness.
15:00
SPEAKER_00: We like cause and effect.
15:02
SPEAKER_00: We like stories where things make sense.
15:05
SPEAKER_00: The good people get good things, and the bad people eventually get what's coming to them.
15:09
SPEAKER_00: Work hard and you'll succeed.
15:11
SPEAKER_00: Do the right things and you'll be protected.
15:15
SPEAKER_00: I mean, look at that bullshit.
15:16
SPEAKER_00: We have a trillionaire that exists hoarding wealth that could help millions or billions of people.
15:23
SPEAKER_00: Okay, fucked.
15:25
SPEAKER_00: Heal enough and you'll attract better people.
15:28
SPEAKER_00: Oh my god, I'm making myself annoyed.
15:30
SPEAKER_00: Just repeating this stuff, I'm getting annoyed again.
15:34
SPEAKER_00: Or raise your vibration, and the universe will send you the parking space right outside Trader Joe's entrance.
15:41
SPEAKER_00: And listen.
15:42
SPEAKER_00: If you believe in manifestation, energy, God prayer, synchronicity, I'm not here to take any of that away from you.
15:47
SPEAKER_00: I get it.
15:48
SPEAKER_00: I love it all myself.
15:49
SPEAKER_00: I work with energetics, I use visualization, meditation, neurolinguistics, hypnosis, intention, mindfulness, all of that.
15:58
SPEAKER_00: I think there's plenty about being human that we don't fully understand, and I'm quite comfortable leaving some mystery in the room here.
16:05
SPEAKER_00: What I am deeply uncomfortable with is any belief system that turns somebody's suffering into evidence against them.
16:13
SPEAKER_00: Because follow the logic.
16:15
SPEAKER_00: If something wonderful happens to me and I say, oh, God was or universe was looking out for me, okay?
16:22
SPEAKER_00: What am I saying about the person beside me who wasn't spared?
16:26
SPEAKER_00: If I survived the accident and someone else didn't, am I more loved?
16:31
SPEAKER_00: More worthy?
16:32
SPEAKER_00: Did I pray better?
16:33
SPEAKER_00: Did God like my application?
16:35
SPEAKER_00: If I manifest a beautiful relationship because I've finally done the work, what exactly are we implying about the woman who's been abused by her husband tonight that she hasn't healed enough?
16:44
SPEAKER_00: That she attracted him, that she needed the lesson?
16:47
SPEAKER_00: As some unhealed part of her called this experience into her life?
16:51
SPEAKER_00: Because if so, I want absolutely nothing to do with that.
16:55
SPEAKER_00: And this is particularly important when we're talking about survivors of abuse, because a lot of those rules that make sense everywhere else don't make for a survivor-centric space.
17:06
SPEAKER_00: For fuck's sake, she already thinks it's her fault.
17:09
SPEAKER_00: You don't have to teach her that.
17:10
SPEAKER_00: She's got it.
17:11
SPEAKER_00: She's already asked herself, how did I let this happen?
17:14
SPEAKER_00: She's already said, Why did I stay?
17:16
SPEAKER_00: Why didn't I see it?
17:17
SPEAKER_00: What was wrong with me?
17:18
SPEAKER_00: Why did I choose him?
17:20
SPEAKER_00: How did I not leave right away?
17:22
SPEAKER_00: How could somebody like me have ended up here?
17:25
SPEAKER_00: And depending on what she's been consuming online, somebody may have helpfully added, What wound in you attracted this?
17:33
SPEAKER_00: Oh excellent.
17:34
SPEAKER_00: Fucking thank you.
17:35
SPEAKER_00: She was just beginning to suspect that perhaps another adult human being might be responsible for his own behavior.
17:42
SPEAKER_00: But apparently, Mercury's in lemonade, and her sacral chakra chose a narcissist.
17:48
SPEAKER_00: Fucking fantastic.
17:50
SPEAKER_00: I am being slightly facetious, obviously, but I care about this because spiritual language can become another extremely sophisticated form of self-blame and victim blame.
18:01
SPEAKER_00: And survivors do not need more ways to blame themselves.
18:04
SPEAKER_00: I don't need you to abandon your faith.
18:06
SPEAKER_00: I don't need you to abandon manifestation or the secret if it's meaningful to you.
18:11
SPEAKER_00: I don't want to tell you what the universe means, but I will tell you one of my own standards.
18:16
SPEAKER_00: A belief stops being useful to me when it turns someone's suffering into evidence against them.
18:23
SPEAKER_00: That's where I get the fuck off that ride.
18:25
SPEAKER_00: Because you can have faith without believing everybody gets what they deserve.
18:29
SPEAKER_00: You can work with intention without believing you caused everything that happened to you.
18:35
SPEAKER_00: You can find meaning in an experience without deciding that the experience was sent to teach you something, quote unquote.
18:43
SPEAKER_00: Those are all really different things.
18:46
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes meaning isn't sitting inside the terrible thing waiting for you to discover it.
18:51
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you create meaning later.
18:53
SPEAKER_00: You take knowledge you never wanted and use it to help someone.
18:57
SPEAKER_00: You discover something about yourself, maybe.
19:00
SPEAKER_00: You make art, you raise your children differently.
19:02
SPEAKER_00: I know I have.
19:04
SPEAKER_00: You build a business, you become the person who knows what to say when another woman calls you from the bathroom whispering because her husband is in the next room angry.
19:14
SPEAKER_00: That can be incredibly meaningful, but the meaning belongs to you.
19:18
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't retroactively justify what happened.
19:22
SPEAKER_00: If someone breaks into my house and smashes every fucking window, and ten years later I become the finest glazier in North America, nobody gets to say, see, Erica, everything happens for a reason.
19:35
SPEAKER_00: No Barry, I'm still quite like my fucking windows.
19:38
SPEAKER_00: And this is where I think we do need to make room for something that gets rushed past constantly.
19:43
SPEAKER_00: And that's the waste.
19:45
SPEAKER_00: Because sometimes there is waste, there was waste, years were lost, money disappeared, career opportunities went, friendships didn't survive, kids were lives were destroyed, but there might have been experiences with your children that you can never redo, but moments that that you can never have a second chance at, memories you can never recreate.
20:13
SPEAKER_00: Because you spent your 30s maybe trying to keep a marriage alive that one person was quietly destroying.
20:20
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you spent your forties fighting over custody.
20:23
SPEAKER_00: You don't have a slant on it like the other people do when they were coming into their own.
20:28
SPEAKER_00: You were in trauma.
20:30
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you spent years managing someone else's moods instead of finding out what you want to do with your own life.
20:36
SPEAKER_00: And then you finally get out, finally get some space, and everyone wants to race you towards, but look at you now.
20:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah?
20:44
SPEAKER_00: Look at me now.
20:45
SPEAKER_00: And also, I'm fucking sad about what it cost.
20:49
SPEAKER_00: I think we have to be able to hold both.
20:52
SPEAKER_00: Because grief doesn't mean you failed to heal, but grief's it's just sometimes simply an accurate response to the fact that something mattered and you lost it and a lot of people lost.
21:04
SPEAKER_00: And some losses don't come back.
21:06
SPEAKER_00: I can't give a woman a whole decade back.
21:10
SPEAKER_00: I can't give her motherhood she imagined she'd have.
21:13
SPEAKER_00: I can't give her that back.
21:15
SPEAKER_00: When this was happening to me when my kids were really little, one, two, four, they were tiny.
21:24
SPEAKER_00: And a lot of those really signpost moments were lost because I was literally just in survival the entire time.
21:36
SPEAKER_00: I missed a lot of things.
21:38
SPEAKER_00: I was there physically and I was doing all of the logistics, but I could not be emotionally where I needed to be drinking in all the precious moments.
21:50
SPEAKER_00: I just couldn't.
21:51
SPEAKER_00: I can't give that back to myself.
21:54
SPEAKER_00: I can't restore every opportunity she missed while her entire nervous system was.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: Was occupied with just surviving the day.
22:02
SPEAKER_00: I also can't promise her that eventually the universe will reimburse her for every shitty thing that happened.
22:08
SPEAKER_00: I actually, being with my clients for as long as I have and seeing this play out, it actually does tend to come back around.
22:17
SPEAKER_00: But I don't want to promise anyone that unequivocally.
22:21
SPEAKER_00: And I wouldn't insult her by pretending that I could.
22:24
SPEAKER_00: What I can do is I can sit beside her without immediately trying to turn the loss into a lesson.
22:30
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes she needs somebody who can tolerate hearing.
22:34
SPEAKER_00: That cost me so much.
22:36
SPEAKER_00: It cost me too much.
22:38
SPEAKER_00: Without rushing in to say, and I don't mean financially, often that's a part of it, but I'm talking about years of believing someone was one way and putting all of your eggs in their basket with them and forging a future that they pretended they wanted all the while screwing around behind your back in one way or another.
22:59
SPEAKER_00: Without me rushing in to say yes, but or no but that costs you too much.
23:05
SPEAKER_00: I believe you, and we can definitely stay there for a minute.
23:09
SPEAKER_00: You don't owe us the inspirational ending.
23:13
SPEAKER_00: There's another version, I think, of this that can sneak in much later too.
23:19
SPEAKER_00: So you've survived something extraordinary, right?
23:21
SPEAKER_00: So now somewhere inside you, there can be this pressure to build this extraordinary life.
23:27
SPEAKER_00: And I understand why.
23:29
SPEAKER_00: If I lost all that, if I endured all that, if I had to rebuild from fucking rubble, this had better have been for something.
23:37
SPEAKER_00: So now the second act has to be magnificent.
23:41
SPEAKER_00: You've got to start that company, write that book, your revenge body.
23:46
SPEAKER_00: Get it to be amazing, find the love of your life, travel everywhere, take amazing Instagram reels, become enlightened, have fantastic fucking tantric sex with that guy from the gym that keeps coming up in these boss.
24:03
SPEAKER_00: What's his name?
24:04
SPEAKER_00: Luca.
24:05
SPEAKER_00: Buy the house, create the foundation that changes the world.
24:09
SPEAKER_00: And if you genuinely want those things, brilliant! I love that for you.
24:13
SPEAKER_00: Go have them.
24:14
SPEAKER_00: You know me.
24:15
SPEAKER_00: Once we're through the meat grind and we're at the stage of coaching where nothing is actively on fire anymore, I fucking love that part.
24:21
SPEAKER_00: This is where we get wild, and I love to ask, what do you want?
24:26
SPEAKER_00: Now that we're not just fixing not what crisis are we managing?
24:30
SPEAKER_00: What would you like to create?
24:32
SPEAKER_00: That's some of my favourite work.
24:34
SPEAKER_00: But there is this enormous difference between creating because you want to and creating because you feel you owe the past some kind of massive return on investment.
24:45
SPEAKER_00: One is desire and the other is debt.
24:48
SPEAKER_00: It almost feels forced.
24:50
SPEAKER_00: Like a duty that you have.
24:53
SPEAKER_00: And your trauma is not a fucking venture capitalist.
24:57
SPEAKER_00: You don't owe it exponential growth.
25:00
SPEAKER_00: Maybe after everything you've been through, what you actually want is a fairly ordinary life.
25:04
SPEAKER_00: Have we ever considered that?
25:06
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you want a little house, work you don't hate, an existence lacking in huge highs and lows, people you trust, children who know they can tell you the truth and feel safe with you to hold their emotions.
25:23
SPEAKER_00: A dog or twenty-nine, a garden for my twenty-nine pitfalls, somebody nice to have sex with occasionally, maybe, or nobody to have sex with because frankly you've got a weighted blanket and nobody steals your space or snores in your ear.
25:38
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you want to grow tomatoes and watch the bacon show on TV.
25:43
SPEAKER_00: Sounds awesome to me.
25:45
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you want to sleep diagonally across your bed and spend an unreasonable amount of money on a perfume collection.
25:52
SPEAKER_00: Oh, is that me?
25:53
SPEAKER_00: Maybe.
25:54
SPEAKER_00: Who says that isn't enough?
25:57
SPEAKER_00: I think we get exposed to the survivor stories that become stories because they're extraordinary.
26:02
SPEAKER_00: They're really inspirational when you're really in the shit.
26:06
SPEAKER_00: The woman who left and started the foundation, she turned out to be a billionaire, and the woman who changed the law, and she wrote that best selling book, and she built a multi-million dollar business, and those women are fucking amazing.
26:18
SPEAKER_00: But there are millions of quieter endings.
26:20
SPEAKER_00: There is a woman somewhere tonight who used to sit in her driveway for twenty minutes because she didn't want to go inside her own house because she was too scared.
26:29
SPEAKER_00: And now she walks through her front door into a little pink front door without thinking about that.
26:36
SPEAKER_00: Nobody's making a documentary about her, are they?
26:39
SPEAKER_00: There's another woman who used to check the expression on someone else's face before she decided what mood she was allowed to be in that night.
26:46
SPEAKER_00: She'd already planned how to stay out of the way and be small.
26:50
SPEAKER_00: Tonight she's on her sofa watching something ridiculous, eating something she loves, and nobody is monitoring her.
26:58
SPEAKER_00: There's a mum who spent years terrified of what the next email would say.
27:03
SPEAKER_00: Now her kids have aged out.
27:05
SPEAKER_00: She occasionally forgets to check her phone.
27:08
SPEAKER_00: That's it.
27:10
SPEAKER_00: That's it.
27:11
SPEAKER_00: That's the transformation.
27:12
SPEAKER_00: It's not a TED talk.
27:13
SPEAKER_00: It's not a book deal.
27:14
SPEAKER_00: It's not a six-figure launch.
27:17
SPEAKER_00: It's just a regular T.
27:19
SPEAKER_00: Her life becomes hers on a regular random weekday.
27:23
SPEAKER_00: And I want that woman included in our definition of a successful ending, please.
27:29
SPEAKER_00: Actually, I don't even know that I want to call it successful.
27:33
SPEAKER_00: It's hers, it's what she created, and that's enough.
27:37
SPEAKER_00: Because maybe the beautiful thing isn't what she managed to make from the suffering.
27:42
SPEAKER_00: Maybe the beautiful thing, and hear me because I feel like I'm dropping bars here, is that eventually the suffering stopped.
27:51
SPEAKER_00: That's the beautiful thing.
27:53
SPEAKER_00: It's not what she managed to make from the suffering.
27:57
SPEAKER_00: It's that the suffering stopped and she got to live.
28:01
SPEAKER_00: I also think sometimes other people need the inspirational ending more than the survivor does.
28:07
SPEAKER_00: Because suffering is difficult to witness.
28:10
SPEAKER_00: And especially suffering we can't fix.
28:13
SPEAKER_00: If it's uncomfortable to accept that someone can lose years of their life, and there isn't necessarily a cosmic accounting department making sure she gets exactly the same number of wonderful years deposited back to her at the other end.
28:29
SPEAKER_00: We want symmetry, we want justice, we crave that.
28:32
SPEAKER_00: We want the movie ending where suddenly everything that happened makes sense.
28:37
SPEAKER_00: So we say, but look how strong you are.
28:39
SPEAKER_00: Look what you've created.
28:41
SPEAKER_00: You wouldn't be who you are without it.
28:43
SPEAKER_00: And again, people often mean this really lovingly, but sometimes the most loving thing we can do is tolerate the fact that she doesn't have to redeem the story for us.
28:54
SPEAKER_00: She doesn't have to make what happened easier for us to hear.
29:00
SPEAKER_00: She doesn't owe us gratitude.
29:02
SPEAKER_00: She doesn't have to tell us that she wouldn't change a thing.
29:06
SPEAKER_00: She's allowed to say, I would change quite a fucking lot actually, and still love her life now.
29:12
SPEAKER_00: That is perhaps the piece I care about the most because accepting your present doesn't require endorsing your past.
29:20
SPEAKER_00: You don't have to go back through every awful thing that happened and stamp approved.
29:25
SPEAKER_00: That was necessary for character development.
29:28
SPEAKER_00: Really crazy that we have all been taught that kind of nonsense, isn't it?
29:33
SPEAKER_00: Maybe it was because the advent of social media.
29:36
SPEAKER_00: Now we get to see all of it at our fingertips all the time.
29:40
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
29:41
SPEAKER_00: Some of it can remain unacceptable.
29:44
SPEAKER_00: Some of it can remain unfair.
29:46
SPEAKER_00: Some of it might always make you angry when you dip in and think about it.
29:50
SPEAKER_00: And none of that prevents you from building something amazing now.
29:54
SPEAKER_00: You just don't have to pretend the wonderful thing makes the awful thing.
29:59
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
30:00
SPEAKER_00: Can we stop doing that?
30:02
SPEAKER_00: Please.
30:04
SPEAKER_00: I'm proud of you.
30:05
SPEAKER_00: Whatever you do and whatever you've made of it, I'm just really proud of you.
30:10
SPEAKER_00: Even if it's just the absence of all the yuck and the shit, and your life is more of a calm and predictable, peaceful place.
30:19
SPEAKER_00: Fucking good for you.
30:21
SPEAKER_00: And before you go, I want to give you something very small to try with this one.
30:26
SPEAKER_00: Think of something about yourself now that you're proud of, something you built or you learned or reclaimed or became after a difficult period of your life.
30:36
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you're more boundried or you trust yourself now or you created financial independence.
30:43
SPEAKER_00: You might have become an incredible mother through circumstances that asked far too much of you.
30:49
SPEAKER_00: Perhaps you just simply have peace.
30:52
SPEAKER_00: And notice how you tell yourself the story of that quality.
30:56
SPEAKER_00: If the story is what happened to me made me this way, just experiment with moving the credit.
31:04
SPEAKER_00: Try I did this with what I had left.
31:08
SPEAKER_00: See what happens in your body when you say that.
31:10
SPEAKER_00: Because the person who hurt you doesn't get the credit for your wisdom.
31:14
SPEAKER_00: No.
31:15
SPEAKER_00: The relationship doesn't get the credit for your courage, and that betrayal doesn't own your discernment.
31:23
SPEAKER_00: You built all those things.
31:25
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you built them in conditions you never would have chosen.
31:30
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you had to use materials that you should never have been handed, but they are yours.
31:37
SPEAKER_00: And if you've created something beautiful from what happened, beautiful.
31:42
SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the absolute fuck out of it.
31:45
SPEAKER_00: Just don't feel obligated to call the fire a gift because you became good at rebuilding your house.
31:54
SPEAKER_00: There are experiences in my own life that I've made something from.
31:57
SPEAKER_00: I can see the threads, I can see how what I've lived through informs how I work, how I'm arm, how I teach, what I notice in people, what I care about.
32:08
SPEAKER_00: And I can be grateful for what I created without being grateful that somebody handed me the raw materials in the first place.
32:17
SPEAKER_00: And the raw materials were a shit sandwich, by the way.
32:21
SPEAKER_00: That's an important distinction for me.
32:24
SPEAKER_00: Alchemy is not gratitude for the fire.
32:27
SPEAKER_00: Let's really keep that in mind.
32:29
SPEAKER_00: Etch it into your brain.
32:31
SPEAKER_00: Alchemy is what you decided to do afterwards.
32:34
SPEAKER_00: It's the action you took.
32:35
SPEAKER_00: It's the choices you made.
32:37
SPEAKER_00: It's your refusal to give up, your tenacity, your care, your love.
32:42
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes you won't want to alchemise a fucking thing.
32:45
SPEAKER_00: You might just want to put it all down, and I want that to be allowed too.
32:50
SPEAKER_00: Because there is already enough pressure on women to turn themselves into something acceptable after they've been hurt.
32:56
SPEAKER_00: Heal beautifully, age beautifully.
33:00
SPEAKER_00: All of this stuff that you have to do.
33:03
SPEAKER_00: Parent beautifully.
33:04
SPEAKER_00: You have to be all calm and lovely.
33:08
SPEAKER_00: Not messy.
33:09
SPEAKER_00: Forgive beautifully.
33:10
SPEAKER_00: Tell the story beautifully.
33:12
SPEAKER_00: Apparently, even our suffering has to become fucking content.
33:15
SPEAKER_00: No.
33:16
SPEAKER_00: You don't owe your suffering a success story, please.
33:19
SPEAKER_00: You don't owe anyone an inspirational ending.
33:23
SPEAKER_00: You don't have to become extraordinary enough to justify what happened to you.
33:27
SPEAKER_00: You are allowed to have lost something and call it the loss that it was.
33:32
SPEAKER_00: You're allowed to wish that didn't happen.
33:34
SPEAKER_00: And you're allowed to be wildly, ridiculously happy now without turning around and thanking the thing that nearly destroyed you for getting you here.
33:42
SPEAKER_00: Because it didn't get you here.
33:44
SPEAKER_00: You did.
33:45
SPEAKER_00: You did that.
33:47
SPEAKER_00: And if the life you build from here is enormous and ambitious and loud, I'll be cheering you on so fucking hard.
33:53
SPEAKER_00: You know I will.
33:55
SPEAKER_00: If it's quiet and ordinary and nobody outside your little circle ever knows what it took to create it, I will be cheering just as loudly.
34:05
SPEAKER_00: You bet your ass.
34:06
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you don't need to turn what happened into something beautiful.
34:10
SPEAKER_00: You just get to leave what happened exactly where it belongs, and go make something beautiful that has absolutely fucking nothing to do with it.
34:20
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to me, you guys.
34:22
SPEAKER_00: I don't know what it does, but I hope it helps at least someone.
34:27
SPEAKER_00: If this episode has landed because you're at that strange point where the emergency is mostly over, but you're still trying to work out who the fuck you are and what you actually want now, that's some of the work.
34:38
SPEAKER_00: My favourite work I do with my peeps.
34:41
SPEAKER_00: Not because I have a grand plan for what your second act is supposed to be like, quite the opposite.
34:46
SPEAKER_00: I don't want to give you another assignment, actually.
34:49
SPEAKER_00: I want to help you separate what you genuinely want from everything you've been told you're supposed to want.
34:55
SPEAKER_00: And then see what happens when your life starts being organized around you rather than around what happened to you.
35:01
SPEAKER_00: That's the kind of work I do with my one-to-one or laser coaching.
35:05
SPEAKER_00: You'll find both in the show notes if you want me.
35:08
SPEAKER_00: And until the next time, Barry can keep his life lesson.
35:13
SPEAKER_00: I want my fucking windows back.
35:15
SPEAKER_00: Please take care of yourselves.
35:16
SPEAKER_00: And if you want me to answer any questions for you in a future episode, please comment and leave them in the email provided.
35:25
SPEAKER_00: Sending you so much love.
35:27
SPEAKER_00: I'll see you next time.