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The Healing Power of Belief · RiseUp - Live Joy Your Way

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Today's episode is produced by my friends at Walk West.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: If you're looking to grow your brand and generate leads through podcast or video production, head over to walkwest.com.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, let's start the show.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Rise up, live joy your way.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: From emotional intelligence through cognitive distortions, certified life and wellness coach Comedy Wood is on a mission to help people see the magnificence of their own unique human spirit.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Through these small bites of self-visualization and self-confidence, you can have healthy relationships, success in business and career, and live the life you want to live.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: Rise up, live joy your way.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: Hi there, and welcome to another episode of Rise Up, Live Joy Your Way, whether it's morning, afternoon, or evening.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for spending some time here with me today.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: So today I want to start with something that I came across recently.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's a line from a writer named Zenda Lee Williams that really stopped me because it names something that I work with pretty consistently.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: The gist of it was this you don't have to understand someone's abuse experience to treat them with basic human decency.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes the most powerful thing that you can say to someone is, I believe you.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Now I read that and I thought, yes, absolutely.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I also want to take you underneath it because I think most people nod a sentence like that.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: They have a reaction similar to mine, but they don't still quite grasp why it's so true.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: Why those three words, the I believe you land the way that they do, why I believe you can do something that hours of advice and support and sympathy cannot do.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: So in this episode, it's going to be slightly different because it's not just for the survivor, it's for you, the person standing next to the survivor, you know, the friend, the partner, the sibling, the manager, the one who can see someone who you care about is hurting from a toxic or abusive relationship.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: And you want so desperately to help, but you're scared of saying the wrong thing.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: So this episode is really actually for you.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: So here's the good news the most powerful thing that you can offer is truly also one of the simplest things.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: But to use it well, you have to understand what you're actually repairing.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: So I want to kind of walk us through that into the why.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: So let's just start with the abuse first, right?
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: Especially narcissistic and emotional abuse.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, because, you know, actually we we need to understand what it does to a person, because it's not only the cruelty in the moment of when maybe that verbal abuse is happening, it's something quieter and more coercive that happens over time.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: So when someone lives inside that type of a relationship, their reality systematically gets rewritten.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: And they say, you know, that hurt me, and they're told that that maybe that thing never happened or that you're remembering it wrong, or the survivor is saying, like, I feel dismissed.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: And then they're told, well, you're just too sensitive, or you're overreacting, or you're crazy.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: So when they hear this over and over again, their own perceptions are constantly contradicted by the person that they feel is supposed to be closest to them.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: And their version of events is denied.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: Their feelings are reframed as flaws, their memory is questioned until they stop trusting it.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: And this in and of itself is what we refer to as gaslighting.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: So I really want you to understand what it does on a deeper level.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't just hurt someone's feelings, it actually attacks a person's relationship with themselves.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: It attacks the relationship with their own reality.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: So after enough of it, the survivor genuinely cannot tell any more of what actually happened and what didn't.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they actually start asking, did that really happen or is it the way that I'm remembering it?
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: Am I actually overreacting?
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: Am I being overrately sensitive?
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: Is it me?
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: They've been told so many times that their perception is wrong, that they've actually lost confidence in their own mind and in their own reality and in their own voice.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: And they walk around with this constant low-grade questioning, running underneath everything, which sounds something like, Can I even trust what I think?
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: Can I even trust what I believe happened?
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so I just invite you to sit with how disorienting that can be, right?
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: That the thing, the instrument that we use to navigate our lives, our own perception, the way that we read a situation on what's real versus what's not, is quietly broken down by the person that you feel should be safe.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not just talking in personal relationships, this can happen in the workplace too.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: Like you trust the person in the workplace, you think that they're a safe person, but they're actually cutting you down.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why so many survivors, uh, you know, they carry that out of the relationship.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's not just pain.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: They're actually carrying a shattered self-trust, right?
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: They actually don't know how to trust their own reality.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: So now I want to talk about here's why I believe you is so, so powerful because it speaks directly to that wound, right?
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: If we're lacking self-trust and somebody says to us, I believe you, when you say that to someone whose reality has been systematically denied, you're not just being nice, you're doing repair, right?
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: You're handing back to them the thing that had been taken away.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: You're saying your perception is valid.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: What you experienced is real.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: You're not crazy, you're not too much.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so for a nervous system that spent years being told the opposite, those three words are not just comfort.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: They're a course correction.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: They put reality back the way that it should be.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: And notice uh what they don't require.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: They don't require you to understand the whole story.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: Saying I believe you doesn't require you to understand that whole story.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I just want to say, unless you've experienced that type of abuse yourself, you're not gonna necessarily understand that whole story.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: You're not gonna totally get it.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: And those three words don't require you to have all the details, they don't require you to have been there, they don't require you to fully grasp the nature of what actually happened.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's the part that this quote, right?
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: These three words get so right.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: You don't need to understand somebody's pain to validate it.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: You just need to stop contradicting their reality the way that everybody else did.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: Belief isn't comprehension, belief is choosing not to add your own doubt to the pile that they're already underneath after years of it.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: Here's something else worth understanding, because it explains why survivors are so often they find it so hard or why it's so hard to support survivors and why people give up on them.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: Because when a person has been gaslit for years, you don't walk back into the world trusting people, right?
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: If you've been gaslit for years, you walk back into the world and you actually, it's really difficult to trust people.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: You walk in abrasive, you walk in guarded because you don't know who you can trust.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: So often survivors are gonna test.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: They're gonna test without meaning to.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: They mean no, you know, they're not trying to be rude or obnoxious.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: They're really just trying to protect themselves.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: They're checking, are you gonna do what everybody else does?
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: Are you gonna minimize the story?
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: Are you gonna minimize what I'm sharing?
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: Are you gonna question it?
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: Are you gonna tell me it wasn't that bad?
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: Are you gonna ask me all of these, you know, questions, detailed questions about it in order for me to um validate what I actually went through?
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: And here's where well-meaning people accidentally cause harm.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: You do, you ask clarifying questions.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, maybe you use a little bit of a tone.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: And what happens is if somebody's a survivor and their nervous system is on edge, they will hear that as interrogation.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: They'll hear that as they've done something wrong.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so when you say something like, Are you sure it was that bad?
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: meaning to understand, right?
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I really mean this.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: You may ask that because you are trying to understand what happened.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: What they hear is what they've always heard.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so you offer actually the other person's perspective.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: You're trying to be fair, you're trying to, it almost sounds to them that this is one more person taking the abuser's side.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: This is one more person that's denying the reality.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: This is one more person telling me that I was crazy.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: And you aren't out there trying to wound them, but because their system is so primed for doubt that your natural curiosity actually lands as a bit of like a betrayal, right?
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: This is why I believe you said early and said simply and plainly, matters so much.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: It answers the question that they're afraid to ask.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: It tells their nervous system, this person that I'm talking to is actually a safe person.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: You can stop bracing.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: And once they're not bracing, everything else that you want to offer can actually find its way in.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: So just to get practical for a second, um, because I really do believe that those of us who are supporting people who've come out of this really want to help.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: They just sometimes don't know how.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: So here's here's some things to just think about.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, very first thing, lead with belief, not with questions.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: When someone first opens up to you, your instinct might be to understand, to gather facts, to ask those questions.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: What happened?
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: Why did it happen?
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: When did you know?
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: Please, please try to resist that from the very beginning, right?
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like just from the start.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying don't ever get there, but the first thing out of your mouth really needs to be something that indicates to them that, hey, I'm on your side, I'm with you.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so saying something like I believe you, or that sounds really, really hard, or I'm so glad that you told me.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: Truly, you can get to the details later, but we want to open that up and provide that safety.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: The second thing is really try not to play devil's advocate.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: I know it can feel like you're being fair-minded to offer the other perspective and to say, well, maybe they didn't mean it, or have you considered this instead?
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: When somebody is talking about being abused, the survivor, it's just important to remember that they have spent potentially years, maybe not, but they've spent time on the other end of the abuser's perspective, forced as their own.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: They don't need you to represent it to.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: So being a good friend here is not being a neutral judge, it's just being unmistakably in their corner.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: There's time for that nuance of like maybe seeing what else could be possible here, but in that first moment, it's really important for you to just be with them.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: And then the third thing is to validate the experience even when we can't understand the choices, right?
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: Like if somebody's been in a relationship for years and years, you can't understand why they stayed, validate the experience first.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: You don't have to understand the choice of why they stayed right away, right?
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: This is the thing that I think people struggle with the most because we naturally want to understand and you want to get the why, but the why they're grieving someone who treated them that way, like, you know, why they why did they go back?
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: Why did they leave and then go back again?
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: All these questions, I'm not saying eventually and can talk about those things, but you don't have to understand it right away.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it's important again that you are staying connected to the person who's coming to you.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: And we're not here to um decide what their choices were and what they weren't, right?
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's about I'm here with you.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: And then the fourth thing that I would say, um, which I think matters a lot, and maybe more than people realize, is survivors heal in the presence of steadiness.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: They heal in repeated safety, not just one conversation.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: So being the person who consistently shows up, who consistently reminds them that you believe in them, uh, recognizes that healing is not a linear process, um, doesn't get tired of them maybe doubting or repeating a story, you know, that's really powerful when you're just not offering it one time, but you're consistently there.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and the other thing I want to say is, you know, those of us who are supporting people, um, it's hard.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's not easy.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: And you have limits too.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: So believing someone does not mean that you become their only support system.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: It does not mean that you become their their coach or their therapist.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: It means that you are fully in their corner and you can also recognize when maybe what they're carrying is larger than what you have capacity for.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: So it's okay to actually be with them and to remind them that I am here for you and I love you and I support you.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: And with that, I suggest that you also do get some support, whether it be from, you know, a trauma-informed coach or a therapist or uh even a domestic violence resource center.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: Just it's okay for you to say, I believe you, and I also think you you deserve more support than I might be able to offer you.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't mean I'm going anywhere, I'm still here.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: I think we just need to add to it.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: So if you've been watching someone struggle with this, someone that you love struggle with this in that in kind of the aftermath, or maybe they're even in the middle of it, um, and you're afraid of getting something wrong.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: Again, I just want to repeat, you know, you don't have to understand it.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: You don't have to have the perfect words, you don't have to fix it.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: You just have to not do what they've been subjected to over and over again.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: And really it comes down to believing them.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and so, you know, that's the thing that I want to just offer.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: If you are in that situation, just and or maybe you have somebody that you're thinking of right now, just notice.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: Just notice if there is somebody who maybe has been coming to you and you think that you're supporting them, asking a lot of questions, just maybe try to keep it brief and simple and just remember to offer them the simple words of I believe you.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: And that must be really hard.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's actually quite powerful.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: And until next time, stay well.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to Rise Up, Live Joy Your Way.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: For more information, book a chat with comedy at www.chatwithcomedy.com.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: Or visit her website at www.comedywood.com.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: You can also find comedy on Facebook or Instagram.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: Username it's authentic me.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.