Like Driving in Fog Mary Young

The transcript will be delayed a couple days, as I migrate everything to a new computer. 
 
But if you're wondering what this episode's about, I'm talking about how the God of my Understanding is NOT the God of my Childhood, and what caused that to be true.

Transcript
Thanks for joining us again on Like Driving in Fog, an emotional healing podcast. I’m Mary Young, and today’s episode is about shame. That’s a hard one for me.
I was thinking the other day about shame, because I was sharing what has been - in my opinion - my deepest secret with a friend of mine whose opinion I really respect. And I was afraid that the secret would change my friend’s opinion of me. The truth of the matter is in the 30 years that I’ve known this woman, I have never seen her be judgmental, but she’s from an older generation and I was afraid that she would judge me. probably because she’s from my parents’ generation, and my mom would have judged me in a heartbeat if I had shared this, and at the same time she would’ve been telling everybody how she wasn’t judging me at all.
The thing is, I needed to face my fear that this woman might judge me. I needed to face my fear of sharing the truth about my past. I mentioned this briefly in my episode about acceptance, and how sometimes you have to accept things you don’t want to accept -- things you wish weren’t true. I wish that I had never been seduced by the woman in my past. I wish that I had not been so vulnerable and so needy, and that she had not been such a predator, but I can’t change my past. I can wish that Jack France had not been so happy to be around little girls, but again, I can’t change that past so I had to learn to accept it. And I also had to learn, in both cases, that the shame I was carrying didn’t belong to me.
That one was hard. It took a long time to get that about Jack France, and it took a long time to get that about Sally. If you have been abused, or molested, or raped, or otherwise traumatized, you may also be struggling with shame. And I just want you to hear this, if you don’t hear anything else in this episode...
You do not need to be ashamed.
You have done nothing to be ashamed of.
The shame belongs on the perpetrator, on the violator. And one of the great tragedies of sexual abuse - especially incest - is that the violators have managed to twist things around so that the person who was violated carries the shame.
That. Is. Wrong.
Very, very wrong.
And it can take you some time to come to grips with that, and to believe that about yourself, and to accept that about yourself.
You can come back and listen to this podcast as many times as you need to while you are working on reinforcing that belief in your own mind.
How did I stop carrying that shame?  Therapy.  
You know by now that therapy is my number one answer to almost every question.
How did you do this, Mary? Therapy.
How did you to come to grips with that, Mary? Therapy.
But it’s not just going to therapy. People go to therapy for years and don’t get better. What it takes to get better is doing the work. Whatever homework the therapist gives you, whatever journaling you need to do... doing the work is how you get better. Doing the work is how you become emotionally healthy.
Yes, I can say therapy as a generic answer, but the reason therapy worked for me is because I had a counselor who said you need to do this, and I was able to talk to the counselor and share with the counselor these experiences that I would have been ashamed to say to anybody.  And my counselor listened, and accepted me. And instead of saying shame on you she said I’m sorry you had to go through that. Both of my counselors stated this -- Tricia in Texas, Tracy here in Georgia -- they listened without judging. They listened with understanding, and they affirmed that there was no shame to me, no reason for shame. And if you hear that enough, then you start to internalize it. But here’s the other part of that. Telling your counselor -- hey, that’s as safe as you can hope to get. If you have a good, ethical, responsible counselor, you’re going to get the same kind of responses I got. No judgment, no shaming, simply acceptance and maybe some sadness about what

Links referenced in this podcast:
Lauren Herschel's Twitter Feed
Karen Lanser's blog post about Lauren's Twitter Feed----more----
Transcript:
Thanks for joining us, and welcome once again to Like Driving in Fog, an Emotional Healing podcast. I’m Mary Young.
When I was in high school, we had a college student come and speak to our English class. She had published a book of poetry called Clouds of April or something like that (that’s 40 years ago -- I’m lucky to remember this at all).  The premise behind the book - the premise behind the title was that spring is a time of growth, and renewing, and renewed optimism, and that 40 years ago April was the month with the most amount of suicides statistically. And you wonder why am bringing that up. I’m not here to talk about suicide today. I talked about that in my Christmas episodes sometimes there are no words and there’s always hope.
I do want to talk about grief. Grief is one of those things that will hit you really hard right at the get-go, and you think it’s going to crush your soul. And then time passes, and you get accustomed to the new normal, and the grief isn’t as rough. And then someday just out of the blue, it’ll be as painful as if whatever the incident was had just happened. And it drives people crazy- it drives me crazy - when it’s like that. And it’s easy to think that we’re doing it wrong. If we were grieving “properly,” we would be past this. If we were more emotionally healthy, this wouldn’t bother us. Yeah. That’s not true, you guys.
First, let’s go back to my definition of emotional health: feeling your emotions and being able to express them appropriately. Stuffing something down, compartmentalizing, is not feeling your emotions. So when grief rears its head, you need to just go with it. Now, I know that that’s not always an option, okay. Sometimes you have to stuff it down just to be able to function at that particular moment in time.
 Let me give you an example. About a month ago, on a Friday lunchtime... I was about to get on a conference call. In my day job, I do computer training over the Internet. I was about to get into a classroom that would’ve lasted 90 minutes to two hours. I was the instructor. It’d been a busy day, and my cell phone is usually on mute while I’m teaching, and I was teaching several classes that day. So I had not even looked at my cell all morning, and I had five minutes to spare, so I grabbed my phone and started looking at messages. There was a message from an unknown number, asking me to call them.
It wasn’t totally unknown - it was a number I’d dealt with before. It’s actually friends of mine, but I didn’t have every family person’s number recorded in my phone. So I knew which family it was, but I didn’t know which family member it was. I called them, and she told me that a good friend had passed away the night before. And no sooner had I hung up the phone from that conversation than my student showed up in my classroom, and I had to go from being shocked and stunned and sad, to being a professional facilitator and leading this class.  So I took those feelings, and I stuffed them, because I had to bury them for at least the next two hours.
Here’s the problem with stuffing or with burying. It’s really hard to tell your emotions: okay guys, I’m going to bury the sadness and the shock and this grief for two hours, and then it will be okay to feel it.  No, it doesn’t work that way. You bury that grief, that emotion, and it stays buried for a while. My previous experience has always been that it comes back at the most inopportune time.  It’s one of the reasons that I work on feeling the emotions at the time that they’re happening, but sometimes you have to stuff them, like I did last month.
I am still coming to terms with John’s loss.
I can tell myself he’s not in pain anymore.
I can tell myself he’s reunited with his wife (she passed away last July).
I can te

TranscriptHave you ever been facing something that you just wish wasn’t true? If there is a way you could change history, that’s the history that you would change? That actually is an important milestone in the emotional healing journey.
Hi, I’m Mary Young. Thanks for joining us on like driving in fog, an emotional healing podcast. In today’s episode, we are talking about acceptance.
For me, accepting my past was one of the hardest things to deal with on my emotional healing journey. And this comes in a couple different directions, just to make life more interesting (that was sarcasm).
First off, when I started having flashbacks and body memories about what it happened to me before kindergarten, I didn’t want to believe it was true. I did not want to accept that reality.
it was too shameful
it was too ugly
it was too bad
it made me a bad person (no, it didn’t)
It was my fault (no, it wasn’t).
But no matter how much I didn’t want it to be true, it was true.
Now honestly, between me and you, I can’t prove that anything happened. The perpetrator is dead. My parents are dead. My siblings wouldn’t remember because we were all very young, and I’m certain that the family would’ve covered it up. but my first therapist, Tricia in Texas...when we were talking about whether or not these memories were real, gave me the best wisdom for my entire healing journey I think.
She told me I could spend every dime I had to hire a private investigator who could go explore, and again because we were looking at something 40 years previously, that private investigator may never be able to get an answer. Or we could look at the reality that I exhibited classic textbook signs of a person who had been molested as a child, and I could focus on healing. I chose the second option, and it has worked out really well for me.
But part of that process included accepting the reality that I did not want to admit. The reality that yes, I had been molested as a child by the alcoholic babysitter in the basement that I thought was my best friend and my buddy. That was hard to accept. I don’t have words to describe how hard that was.
I had to accept that my parents did not protect me, even though it’s a parent’s job to protect their children. I had to accept along the way that my parents were emotionally absent when I was growing up. They took care of our physical needs, but emotionally -- not so much. Which makes perfect sense for who they were and when they grew up, and I totally understand that. But it does not negate the reality that emotionally they did not give me what I needed.
So part of the emotional healing journey is you have to accept what happened to you, whether you want to or not. You don’t have to stay rooted in the past. You don’t have to cling to it and be a victim for the rest of your life. I don’t call myself a victim of childhood abuse. I call myself a survivor. So are you. You survived whatever the trauma was. You are still here. They tried to victimize you, but you are not a victim. You are a survivor.
So I came to terms with the reality of my early childhood.
 Another part of my emotional healing journey was I had to accept the fact that I had made very bad decisions in the romance department. In retrospect, accepting the reality of what happened to me in my very early childhood was easy compared to the other accepting I had to do. It was easier to accept that I had been molested by the alcoholic babysitter in the basement, because that wasn’t my fault. There was no decision I made, that made that jerk want to go after a little girl. I had no complicity in that at all.
But decisions I’ve made as an adult? I want so much to bring up a list of excuses for why those decisions were not my fault. I can tell you that every relationship decision I made as a young adult was directly impacted by the unknown memories of what happened to me as a child, the unknown trauma that I had gone through. And even knowing

TRANSCRIPT
 
Thanks for joining us again on Like Driving in Fog: an emotional healing podcast I’m Mary Young, and the topic for this episode is “check your motivation.” You know, we all have reasons for everything we do, but we don’t always know what those reasons are. And sometimes, even though we don’t know it, reasons are buried in our past. So we need to check our motivation. We need to ask ourselves why. Why could be the second most important question you ask yourself. I said in an earlier episode that the most important question is “what does a healthier me look like?” the second most important question is why?
Why am I doing this?
Why am I feeling this?
Why am I acting this way?----more----
Check your motivation. This has been my mantra for my entire healing journey. Why am I behaving the way I am? Why am I reacting the way I am? This ties in perfectly with the last episode when we talked about the chameleon effect.
If you remember, the chameleon effect is when you bury yourself and try to be what somebody else wants you to be, so that you can be liked or loved or fit in or whatever. I was talking to somebody this past week and they said that chameleon thing is so confusing, because sometimes you just go along with people because you’re being polite. That’s true. I personally am not a big fan of the TV show Survivor, but I used to watch it with a friend of mine because she liked it and I was being friendly. But the motivation is the important part.
 Why was I watching Survivor? To be friendly. On the other hand, why did I say Nicholas Sparks and Pat Conroy were my favorite authors when they really weren’t?  That was the chameleon effect. I wanted to fit in. I wanted to be liked by this other person.
If you are staying true to yourself, then you can’t possibly be a chameleon. But if you are surrendering your own identity, then something is wrong. So check your motivation. Now, I’m not saying go be an asshole. I will still go to somebody else’s choice for a dinner restaurant. You know, I’ll offer my suggestions, but if they want someplace else and it’s a place where I like the food, I’ll go. That’s not being a chameleon. That’s being polite.
On the other hand, if I started saying “oh no, I hate this restaurant because this other person hated the restaurant, or if I started treating my friends differently because the other person didn’t like my friends, that could be being a chameleon. That’s what you want to watch out for, and that’s why it’s so important to check your motivation.
Checking your motivation is so much more than just “are you being a chameleon,” or “are you being polite.” My therapist and I have this particular conversation on a regular basis.
She’ll say: “Mary, why are you reacting so strongly to that? Because honestly, it doesn’t warrant the reaction you’re giving it.”
And I’m all “but...yeah...yeah, it does!”
And she’s like “no, really, it doesn’t.”
We have that conversation because there are still times when I will react strongly to something happening right now, that’s actually triggering feelings from my childhood. And so my therapist has taught me to check my motivation. To ask myself why.
 When I am reacting really strongly to something, and Tracy doesn’t think it even deserves a reaction, that will be her question. What’s really going on with this? What is it linked to in your childhood or your past? And usually if I take the time to sit down and ponder, I will find a linkage.
it hit my hot button of feeling ignored
it hit my hot button of you can’t do that because you’re a woman
it hit my hot button of we changed the rules midstream
it hit my hot button of I never fit in,
Or nobody ever listened to anything I had to say.
But the only way you will ever be able to find out any of that kind of stuff is if you take the time to know yourself.
And I’ve got to tell you...as survivors, it is so much easier not

TRANSCRIPTI still remember a time in college when I told a friend that I was sad or depressed, and her answer was “I’m sorry,” or “I wish you weren’t sad or depressed.” to which I responded “I’m sorry. how do you want me to be?”Her reply was: "I just want you to feel what you’re really feeling, or be who you really are.” And I had absolutely no idea how to do that, because all I knew how to do was be a chameleon.
I’m Mary Young. Thanks for joining us on another episode of the Like Driving in Fog podcast. Today’s episode is talking about what I like to call the Chameleon Effect.
So what is the chameleon effect, and what does that have to do with emotional healing or emotional health?
Well, the  chameleon effect is the tendency that some of us have to be whatever the people around us want us to be; to feel whatever the people around us, or however the people around us want us to feel, instead of acknowledging our own feelings. We paste on a smile, or instead of being happy we pretend to be sad. Whatever we have to do to fit in with the people that we’re with. To be loved by the people that we want to be loved by; to be accepted by the people from whom we need acceptance. It could be feelings or it could be behavior. Either way. But any time that you are not being your own authentic, true self, then you’re being a chameleon.
That explains what a chameleon is, but why are we chameleons? What brought us to this point of wanting to be anything other than who we truly are?
There are probably as many answers as there are people listening to this podcast, because each one of us is unique and therefore each one of us has our own unique reasons for doing things; reasons for behaving certain ways. For me it goes back to childhood. I didn’t know it growing up, but one entire side of my family was alcoholic. And sometimes when I ponder it, I think that I became a chameleon just trying to survive life with that half of the family. Then again, growing up I never felt like I fit in with the neighborhood kids, with the school kids, with my classmates, so maybe I became a chameleon to try to fit in with them.
I remember never feeling like I knew what I was supposed to be doing, or how I was supposed to be behaving, and so I would take my cues from the people around me and act like they did or behave like they did. But along the way, trying so hard to fit in, I lost me.
And then we get to that point in college where I’m 20 years old and my friend says “I just want you to be yourself,” and the only answer I had was “I don’t know who that is. I don’t know how to do that.” it’s not something I had ever done before, and saying that makes me sad.
There are so many different emotions inside me right now as I’m thinking about that conversation with my friend, and that reality about me as a college student, and it’s just sad. I’m sad for the younger me that had never been encouraged to find out who I was, what I thought, what I believed. Instead I had been encouraged to think like the family did, behave like the family did, do what they told me to do. And I had never been encouraged just to take time to figure out who I was, and what did I really want, or how did I really feel, or what really mattered to me. And I lived my life like that for decades.
I don’t want you to do that.
I don’t want anybody to be a chameleon because they think they have to fit in order to be loved. I want people to be free to figure out who they are, and what they think, and what they believe, and how they really feel about something, instead of being told by somebody else how they should behave, or what they should think, or how they should feel. And I gotta tell you... sometimes it’s hard figuring that stuff out, but I will take the real me over the chameleon any day the week.
I remember back in my freshman year in college, I did a lot of writing back then. That was how I processed things. And a lot of what I wr