Latest / Unlocking The Paradigm Portal / Be Real, Not Nice: You Were Taught That Existing Was Too Much | The Bad Wound (Generational Wounds Series)

Transcript

Be Real, Not Nice: You Were Taught That Existing Was Too Much | The Bad Wound (Generational Wounds Series) · Unlocking The Paradigm Portal

• 0:00
  Good morning. Welcome back to unlocking the
• 0:03
  Paradigm Portal. My name is Sarah.
• 0:05
  I'm not going to lie, this is the fourth time I've tried to
• 0:07
  record this because I have some words that I, for some reason
• 0:11
  cannot form today and I have fumble over them so many times.
• 0:15
  So this is my last time. If I fumble, we're rolling with
• 0:18
  it. And I know I said that the last
• 0:19
  few episodes, and I am learning to accept that I will fumble
• 0:24
  because that is me being authentic.
• 0:26
  So getting right into this, we've covered a lot of ground
• 0:30
  this week. Monday was the trapped wound,
• 0:32
  that one that keeps the exit mapped.
• 0:35
  Wednesday was the defective wound, the one that says
• 0:37
  something is fundamentally broken and you that you've been
• 0:40
  successfully hiding from everyone who knows you.
• 0:42
  Wasn't that one fun? No, and I want to be honest with
• 0:46
  you, this one took me the longest to name because the
• 0:49
  other two wounds have a kind of logic to them.
• 0:51
  You can trace the trapped wound back to specific experiences,
• 0:55
  and you can locate the defective wound in the messages you
• 0:58
  received. They have identifiable origins.
• 1:02
  The bad wound, that's what we're tackling today.
• 1:05
  The bad wound is different. The bad wound doesn't always
• 1:08
  have a clear origin story. It just kind of is.
• 1:13
  It is the ambient guilt that lives underneath everything, the
• 1:18
  sense that whatever you choose, you are somehow doing something
• 1:22
  wrong, that your needs are an imposition, that your existence
• 1:26
  at full volume cost other people something they didn't sign up to
• 1:30
  pay. Does any of this sound familiar?
• 1:33
  Oh, but wait, there's more. This is the wound that makes you
• 1:35
  apologize for taking up space, for having needs, for being
• 1:39
  human in a way that requires anything from anyone.
• 1:43
  And it is the most utterly exhausting one of all.
• 1:47
  You ready? We're going in.
• 1:49
  You feel guilty for things that are not your fault.
• 1:52
  Does that sound familiar? You feel guilty for things that
• 1:55
  are not even things. You feel guilty for wanting what
• 1:58
  you want, for needing what you need.
• 2:00
  For saying no, for saying yes when you said no before.
• 2:03
  For taking time for yourself. For not taking enough time for
• 2:06
  yourself, For being too much. For not being enough for
• 2:09
  succeeding, for struggling, for asking, for not asking.
• 2:13
  You feel guilty for being in a good mood when someone near you
• 2:16
  is suffering. You feel guilty for struggling
• 2:19
  when someone near you seems fine.
• 2:21
  There is no emotional state available to you that the guilt
• 2:24
  cannot find and colonize. It's an asshole.
• 2:28
  And the most insidious part is that you are not a bad person.
• 2:32
  You are most likely, if anything, one of the most
• 2:35
  conscientious people around. You think about impact.
• 2:39
  Hell, you're listening to a podcast about bad wounds.
• 2:43
  You consider other people. You carry other people's
• 2:46
  experiences with a care and attention that most people don't
• 2:49
  even apply to their own. And it doesn't matter.
• 2:52
  The guilt doesn't respond to evidence of your goodness.
• 2:55
  It predates the evidence. And it was there before the
• 2:58
  situation it's currently attached to, and it will be
• 3:00
  thereafter. Because it's not actually about
• 3:03
  what you did, it's about what you were taught to believe you
• 3:05
  are. You are not guilty because you
• 3:08
  keep doing something wrong. You are guilty because somewhere
• 3:12
  along the way you were taught that existing at full volume is
• 3:14
  something you owe the world an apology for.
• 3:18
  So what is the bad wound? The bad wound is the core belief
• 3:22
  that your authentic self, your real needs, your honest
• 3:26
  reactions, your actual wants, is fundamentally problematic.
• 3:31
  That who you are, unedited and unmanaged, causes harm.
• 3:36
  That the truest version of you is something the world would be
• 3:38
  better off with slightly less of.
• 3:41
  And it's different from the defective wound, which says
• 3:44
  something is wrong with me. The bad wound is more
• 3:47
  specifically moral. It says I am wrong, my wanting
• 3:52
  is wrong, my taking up space is wrong, my prioritizing myself is
• 3:57
  wrong. It is the wound of the person
• 4:00
  who has spent their entire life trying to be good and still
• 4:03
  somehow always feeling like they're falling short of it.
• 4:07
  And it lives in the body as chronic guilt.
• 4:10
  Not guilt about specific actions, though that's there
• 4:13
  too. But again, it's that ambient
• 4:16
  guilt. Background guilt.
• 4:18
  Guilt is a default emotional state that doesn't require a
• 4:21
  trigger because it doesn't need one.
• 4:23
  It's just there. It's like the persistent low hum
• 4:27
  of the refrigerator. Does that drive anybody else
• 4:29
  nuts? Nuts.
• 4:30
  It drives me insane. It's that humming in the
• 4:34
  background of I am probably doing something that is wrong
• 4:37
  right now, even if I can't identify what it is.
• 4:41
  And it shows up as the inability to receive without immediately
• 4:44
  reciprocating. Let's say someone does something
• 4:47
  for you, and before you've even fully received it, you're
• 4:50
  probably calculating how to balance the Ledger.
• 4:53
  Because receiving without immediately giving back feels
• 4:55
  like taking, and taking feels wrong, and feeling wrong feels
• 4:59
  like confirmation of the wound. And it shows up as saying yes
• 5:04
  when you mean no, and then resenting the yes and then
• 5:06
  feeling guilty about the resentment.
• 5:07
  Because who are you to resent something you agreed to?
• 5:11
  The guilt generates compliance. The compliance generates the
• 5:15
  resentment. The resentment generates more
• 5:16
  guilt. It is seriously a perfect
• 5:19
  self-sustaining loop. And it shows up as making
• 5:22
  yourself smaller in direct proportion to how big something
• 5:25
  in your life gets. A success arrives, something
• 5:28
  real, something you worked your ass off for, something earned.
• 5:32
  And within days you are finding ways to minimize it, qualify it,
• 5:38
  make sure everyone around you knows you haven't gotten too big
• 5:41
  for yourself. Because the wound tells you that
• 5:43
  expansion is dangerous. The wound says being too much is
• 5:48
  what gets you punished, and it shows up as the specific torture
• 5:52
  of the double bind. Every direction feels wrong.
• 5:56
  You choose yourself. Guilt.
• 5:58
  You choose someone else. Resentment and then guilt about
• 6:01
  the resentment. You speak your truth.
• 6:03
  Guilt about the impact you stay quiet.
• 6:05
  Guilt about the silence. There is no clean exit from the
• 6:09
  double bind because the wound has covered all the exits.
• 6:13
  Whatever you do, the wound will find the angle that makes it
• 6:16
  wrong. The bad wound doesn't just make
• 6:19
  you feel guilty, it makes every direction feel guilty, which
• 6:23
  means you stop moving. You become stuck and then cue in
• 6:27
  the trapped wound. You feel stagnant.
• 6:30
  You might be incredibly indecisive and staying still
• 6:34
  feels safest and safest is just a slower kind of disappearing.
• 6:39
  So we're going to get into the generational map because this
• 6:43
  one goes so much further back than most people track.
• 6:47
  Excuse me as I grab a drink. And I'm finding it really
• 6:49
  interesting that I timed this wound for today because I just
• 6:53
  had an amazing conversation with my silent generation mom today.
• 6:58
  And we were literally tracking the bad wound back to the
• 7:01
  greatest generation to show. And I was explaining to her
• 7:04
  generational patterns and let's break them down and see what did
• 7:08
  her parents have and what passed to her and what continued down
• 7:10
  the line to realize you're not bad.
• 7:14
  You're you don't like you feel guilty, but have you actually
• 7:17
  done anything? It was really cool and
• 7:20
  insightful. And as I'm recording this, I'm
• 7:22
  going to send it to her because it's so darn on point with the
• 7:27
  conversation today. So anyways, getting back and
• 7:30
  focusing the Greatest Generation, they were shaped by
• 7:32
  genuine scarcity. Not metaphorical scarcity, but
• 7:35
  the kind where people genuinely did not have enough.
• 7:39
  And in that context, need was dangerous.
• 7:41
  Your need competed with someone else's survival.
• 7:44
  Wanting more than your share, wanting anything beyond the bare
• 7:47
  minimum was not just impractical, it was morally
• 7:50
  suspect. The culture of that generation
• 7:53
  built guilt into the architecture of desire itself.
• 7:56
  You don't want too much. You don't ask for more than you
• 7:59
  need. You be grateful, damn grateful,
• 8:02
  for what you have, and you don't make it about you.
• 8:06
  That is not a lesson that stayed in the Depression.
• 8:07
  It traveled forward into the Silent Generation.
• 8:11
  So the Silent Generation received it as a near religious
• 8:15
  framework. Self sacrifice was virtue.
• 8:18
  Selflessness was the highest expression of goodness, and the
• 8:21
  flip side of that, the obvious implication was that
• 8:24
  self-interest was its opposite. Wanting things for yourself,
• 8:29
  prioritizing your own needs, saying no to someone who needed
• 8:32
  something from you. These were moral failures, and
• 8:36
  the children of the silent generation grew up in houses
• 8:38
  where putting yourself first was not just impractical, it was
• 8:41
  wrong. And then the boomers inherited
• 8:45
  that template, but lived in a cultural moment that was in
• 8:48
  theory rejecting it. Self actualization.
• 8:53
  Do your own thing. The pursuit of individual
• 8:55
  happiness as a legitimate goal. But here's the catch.
• 8:59
  Many boomers carried the guilt framework in their bodies even
• 9:03
  while their minds were adopting the new language.
• 9:06
  Think of the cognitive dissonance involved in that.
• 9:09
  And that produced a very specific kind of parenting, the
• 9:12
  parent who said you should do what makes you happy, while
• 9:15
  modeling through their own behavior that their happiness
• 9:19
  was always the last consideration.
• 9:22
  Children don't learn from what they're told, they learn from
• 9:25
  what they watch. And what a lot of Boomer
• 9:28
  children watched was a parent who gave and gave until it hurt,
• 9:32
  and then they gave more and they called it love.
• 9:37
  So Gen. X received the wound through
• 9:39
  self-sufficiency. You didn't burden people.
• 9:41
  You didn't ask for help. You handled your own stuff
• 9:44
  because handling your own stuff was what functional people did.
• 9:47
  And the guilt in Gen. X is often specifically located
• 9:51
  around need, around the moments when you couldn't handle it
• 9:54
  alone, when you had to ask. I mean, how many Gen.
• 9:56
  Xers ask for help? Not a whole lot when you were
• 10:00
  visibly struggling and therefore visibly costing someone
• 10:04
  something. The Gen.
• 10:06
  X bad wound whispers. Your need is an inconvenience.
• 10:09
  Your struggle is someone else's problem.
• 10:12
  Get your shit together. And then millennials.
• 10:15
  They got it in the form of hyper awareness of impact.
• 10:18
  They were a generation raised on the language of harm, of
• 10:21
  privilege and responsibility, and the ways in which your
• 10:24
  choices ripple outward and affect people you'll never meet.
• 10:28
  Which is genuinely important awareness, let's make that very
• 10:31
  clear. But when it lands in a nervous
• 10:34
  system that already carries the bad wound, it doesn't produce
• 10:38
  careful ethical consideration. It produces paralysis.
• 10:42
  It produces a person who cannot make a move without running it
• 10:45
  through an elaborate guilt audit.
• 10:48
  Who has extended the question, Am I causing harm so far beyond
• 10:53
  its useful range that it now covers things like, is it OK for
• 10:57
  me to want this? Is it OK for me to have this?
• 11:00
  Is it OK for me to be this? And then Gen.
• 11:04
  Z? Poor Gen.
• 11:05
  Z. God I feel so bad for Gen.
• 11:06
  Z. They're living with the bad
• 11:08
  wound in a world that has externalized the guilt audit
• 11:11
  entirely. There are now public systems for
• 11:15
  adjudicating whether someone's existence is taking up too much
• 11:18
  space and using too many resources and moving through the
• 11:21
  world in a way that is net positive or net negative.
• 11:25
  The bad wound for Gen. Z is not a private internal
• 11:28
  experience, it is a social one. And the verdict is crowd
• 11:32
  sourced, real time, and absolutely freaking ruthless.
• 11:38
  Different generations, different expressions, same wound
• 11:41
  underneath. I am the thing that is wrong.
• 11:45
  My wanting is the problem, and the truest version of me owes
• 11:48
  the world an apology. So every generation passed down
• 11:53
  a version of the same instruction.
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  Make yourself smaller, be less, need less, want less, cost less,
• 12:00
  and call it virtue. You inherited that instruction,
• 12:03
  and you are allowed to return it to sender.
• 12:07
  So how does the bad wound show up on a Friday morning in your
• 12:12
  actual, real life? Well, it looks like the apology
• 12:16
  that lives permanently at the front of your mouth, not the
• 12:20
  occasional genuine apology for something you actually did that
• 12:23
  is healthy. If you struggle with apologies,
• 12:26
  that's a problem with taking accountability.
• 12:28
  Look into that. Find a great therapist.
• 12:31
  The automatic, reflexive apology that comes out before you've
• 12:34
  done anything, before you've asked for anything, before
• 12:38
  you've taken up any space at all.
• 12:40
  Sorry to bother you. Sorry, I just have a quick
• 12:42
  question. Sorry, I know you're busy.
• 12:44
  You apologize for your own existence as a preamble to every
• 12:47
  interaction. And it looks like the way you
• 12:50
  phrase your needs, not as needs, as possibilities, as
• 12:53
  suggestions, as things. That would be nice if it wasn't
• 12:56
  too much trouble. And please don't worry about if
• 12:58
  it is. It would probably be great if
• 13:01
  maybe when you have the chance, if it's not a big deal, we could
• 13:04
  possibly talk about XYZ. You've learned to make your
• 13:08
  needs so small and so tentative that they're easy to miss.
• 13:11
  And then when they're missed, you feel guilty for having them
• 13:14
  in the first place. And it looks like the guilt
• 13:17
  hangover after you enforce A boundary.
• 13:19
  You said no, you held the line, you chose yourself, clearly,
• 13:23
  cleanly, without cruelty. And then the guilt moved in, the
• 13:29
  second guessing, the review of whether you were too harsh, too
• 13:32
  rigid, too selfish, the quiet wondering whether the other
• 13:36
  person is OK, and whether their degree of okayness in the other
• 13:40
  person is somehow your responsibility, even when you
• 13:44
  were the one whose boundary was crossed.
• 13:47
  That one has got to resonate with some people, and it looks
• 13:50
  like making yourself the last priority as a default setting,
• 13:54
  not as a conscious choice, just as the automatic baseline.
• 13:58
  Everyone else's needs, preferences, comfort, and
• 14:01
  emotional states get processed before yours.
• 14:04
  Not because you've assessed the situation and decided this is
• 14:07
  appropriate. Just because that is the order
• 14:10
  of operations that was installed and you've never questioned
• 14:14
  whether to update it. And it looks like diminishing
• 14:17
  what you've built, talking yourself down in a room full of
• 14:21
  people who deserve to know what and who you actually are,
• 14:26
  preemptively making yourself more palatable, more accessible,
• 14:30
  less threateningly competent. And I said it that way
• 14:34
  intentionally, to let that land. And you do that so that the
• 14:38
  people around you don't feel shown up by your full presence.
• 14:41
  You dim your light. And it looks like exhaustion,
• 14:46
  that specific bone level exhaustion of spending your
• 14:50
  entire life managing other people's comfort with your
• 14:53
  existence, Of filtering yourself constantly, Of running every
• 14:58
  thought, every need, every want through the guilt audit before
• 15:01
  it's allowed to see daylight. Of being in some fundamental way
• 15:06
  at war with your own ability to be alive.
• 15:11
  And you're tired because you've been making yourself smaller for
• 15:13
  a very long time. And small takes more energy than
• 15:17
  big, because big is what you actually are.
• 15:22
  So we're going to flip the lights on and see what changes
• 15:24
  when you're able to see it. Here's the thing that the bad
• 15:28
  wound has never told you. Guilt is not a moral compass.
• 15:31
  It feels like one. It presents itself as one.
• 15:34
  But real guilt, useful guilt, is a signal that arises in response
• 15:38
  to something you actually did that caused actual harm.
• 15:42
  It's specific, it's proportionate, and it resolves
• 15:45
  when you make it right. The guilt you're carrying
• 15:48
  doesn't do any of those things. It is not specific.
• 15:52
  It attaches to everything. It is not proportionate.
• 15:55
  It fires at the same intensity whether you cancel the coffee
• 15:58
  date or ended a relationship, and it does not resolve.
• 16:03
  You cannot make it right because it is not actually about
• 16:05
  anything you did. It is about what you were taught
• 16:09
  to believe you are. That is not a moral compass.
• 16:12
  That is a wound wearing a moral compass's clothing if a compass
• 16:16
  wore clothes. So when you turn the light on
• 16:19
  and when you name it, the first shift is the ability to
• 16:22
  distinguish between the two. Real guilt versus wound guilt.
• 16:27
  Did I actually cause harm here? Or does this just feel wrong
• 16:31
  because my system has been trained to flag self priority as
• 16:35
  dangerous? That question creates space.
• 16:38
  Not a lot of space. The wound is old and it moves
• 16:41
  fast, but enough, just enough to interpret the automatic
• 16:45
  response. So the second shift is the
• 16:49
  recognition that your needs are not in imposition.
• 16:53
  They are information. They are the bodies, honest
• 16:55
  accounting of what is required for you to function, to be well,
• 16:59
  to show up for the people and work you actually care about.
• 17:03
  A person who never acknowledges their needs does not become
• 17:07
  needless. They become a pressure cooker.
• 17:10
  And pressure cookers eventually are not calm and are not safe.
• 17:15
  And when you become a pressure cooker, you struggle
• 17:17
  tremendously with deeply rudent rooted, excuse me anxiety.
• 17:23
  So the third shift that happens, and this is the one that takes
• 17:26
  the longest, is the experience of choosing yourself without it
• 17:29
  ending the world. I know it sounds crazy, but the
• 17:33
  world doesn't end because you say no and you hold a limit.
• 17:38
  You put your name first on something that matters to you,
• 17:42
  and the catastrophe the wound predicted doesn't arrive.
• 17:45
  You're waiting for it, you're brace for it, but it doesn't
• 17:47
  show up. The people who actually belong
• 17:51
  in your life, they don't leave. I will say the people who don't
• 17:55
  belong in your life, they do leave.
• 17:57
  And that's tough and that's grief stricken, but it
• 17:59
  ultimately is a good thing. The relationships worth having
• 18:03
  do not dissolve because you started having needs inside of
• 18:07
  them, and slowly, imperfectly, the nervous system starts to
• 18:11
  update its prediction. You are not bad for wanting, and
• 18:16
  you are not bad for needing, and you are not bad for taking up
• 18:21
  the full amount of space that a full human life requires.
• 18:25
  You are someone who was handed a story that said otherwise, and
• 18:28
  you've been living inside that story long enough.
• 18:31
  Today it ends. The wound says your full
• 18:34
  presence is too much. But the truth is your full
• 18:37
  presence is the only thing you actually have to offer.
• 18:41
  A diminished version of you serves no one, least of all you.
• 18:47
  So now we're going to head into our stone challenge in it again,
• 18:50
  two parter. So first, this week, I want you
• 18:54
  to catch the automatic apology. Not all of them.
• 18:57
  You'll be catching them every 30 seconds.
• 18:59
  And that's not the assignment. Just one, one moment where you
• 19:02
  hear yourself begin to apologize for existing, for needing, for
• 19:05
  asking, and you stop. You don't have to replace it
• 19:08
  with something bold. You don't have to make a speech
• 19:11
  about your worthiness. You just don't apologize.
• 19:14
  You're going to have to sit in the discomfort, leave the space
• 19:18
  where the apology would have been, and notice what that feels
• 19:20
  like in your body. And 2nd, I want you to let
• 19:24
  yourself want something this week without auditing the want
• 19:27
  first. Doesn't have to be a huge thing,
• 19:30
  not something that requires like a major life decision.
• 19:33
  Don't do that one this week. Something small, something
• 19:36
  you've been automatically talking yourself out of because
• 19:39
  the guilt audit flagged it is too much or too indulgent or not
• 19:43
  sufficiently justified. Let yourself want it, just for a
• 19:48
  moment, just to feel what that's like before the wound moves in
• 19:51
  to manage it. You are not too much.
• 19:54
  You've never been too much, you were just surrounded by people
• 19:58
  who hadn't done enough of their own work to be able to hold all
• 20:01
  of what you are. That is not a verdict on your
• 20:04
  worth, it is information about their capacity.
• 20:09
  So this is the week 3 different wounds this week.
• 20:12
  We did three last week. We'll tackle 3 more next week.
• 20:15
  We did the trap, the defective, the bad.
• 20:17
  And if you've been here for all of it, and if you've been
• 20:19
  sitting with this week, letting it land, catching the patterns
• 20:22
  in your life, I want to say something to you directly.
• 20:26
  This is not easy work. Most people never do it.
• 20:30
  And the fact that you're here and you're looking at it and
• 20:33
  you're willing to name what's been running in the background
• 20:35
  of your life without your consent, that is not small.
• 20:39
  That is everything. It is huge.
• 20:42
  And I am so mind bogglingly proud of you.
• 20:46
  And I'm thinking now, I may have apologized for fumbling at the
• 20:49
  very beginning of this recording.
• 20:51
  So see, there's the remnants of my bad one popping up.
• 20:55
  All right, as always. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday at
• 20:59
  9:00 PM, light in the dark, Monday, Wednesday, Friday at
• 21:01
  6:00 AM. Be real, not nice.
• 21:04
  And Sunday I will be back for the deep dive.
• 21:06
  I have no idea what it's going to be.
• 21:09
  Who knows? If you have suggestions, leave a
• 21:11
  comment like share, subscribe, hype, blah, blah, blah.
• 21:14
  All the things just keep coming back for more.
• 21:16
  I love, love, love being in this expansion with you and I.
• 21:21
  I grow from the comments that you leave as much as hopefully
• 21:24
  you feel supported when you leave them.
• 21:27
  All right, I'll be back Sunday.