Like Driving in Fog

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 you’ve gone through. But you can’t spend the rest of your life in your counselor’s office (tempting as that may be sometimes). You will not get past the shame monster until you have faced it down, and defeated it in your own mind. And for me, the only way to do that was to share what I was ashamed of with other people. And yes, I can picture the look on your face, and I can hear your thoughts going what?! What?! What are you thinking Mary, there is no way. If people really knew me, they would reject me. If people really knew me, they would run screaming the other way. Folks, don’t sell your friends short. My closest friends are devout Christians, and the secrets I was most ashamed of are things that devout Christians are supposed to go: oh my gosh, no! I can’t know you anymore, because that’s so terrible, and that’s the reaction I was expecting, even though I knew my friends. And I knew my friends well enough to know they wouldn’t be that way, but that is still the reaction I was afraid I would get. So I used to wait until I knew somebody really well, and I would give them just a snippet. And then I would wait until I knew somebody else really well and I would give them just a snippet. And to really know what had gone on in my adult past, you had to be like a best friend. And certainly not family. there were only a couple family members I trusted enough to tell about Sally, and that was back what was going on before even recognized that it she was predatory and abusive. But I’ve never shared with the rest of the family, because my family lives to judge. That’s what it feels like anyway.  But my friends...the friends that I have in my life. They live to love, not to judge. And it reached the point, as I was getting more emotionally healthy, that I didn’t want to hide anymore. If you keep hiding your shame, then you always feel like you have a reason to be ashamed, and we don’t. We really don’t. It’s not our shame to carry. A couple years ago, I finally got brave enough to talk to Tracy - my current counselor -about Sally, and about the whole experience. I’d never talked in detail about it. I had mentioned it in passing, and I had realized at some point that she had been emotionally abusive, but I had never really sat down and looked at it with my counselor the way I’ve looked at so many other things in my life until a couple years ago, because I was ashamed. Tracy and I looked at it. We talked about it. She listened to me, I listened to her, and she helped me see similarities between what happened to me when I was four and what happened to me when I was 24. And after talking to her, I found the courage to email my close Christian friends and tell them about my experience with Sally. And you know what? Not one of those people judged me. Not one of those people said oh my gosh! That is so terrible! I just can’t be your friend anymore! No! They all responded with love, and with caring and concern, and that helps dissipate shame. Shame can’t thrive in a loving environment. Shame can only grow in darkness and judgment. Bring it out into the light. Shower it with love and acceptance, and shame goes away. Does that mean it’s easy to talk about? No. I am still dealing with the fact that I was emotionally abused. I am still dealing with the fact that I was gullible, and taken advantage of, that I was naïve and taken advantage of. But that’s not on me, that’s on the predator. I want you to remember:  it is not your shame. You were not the predator; you were the prey. It’s the person who perpetrates the shameful act; the person who betrays the trust; not the person who was hurt, that should be ashamed. Don’t be ashamed because somebody took advantage of your youth. Don’t be ashamed because somebody stole your innocence. Don’t be ashamed of the fact that you trusted somebody who should’ve been trustworthy. It’s not on you. It’s on the person that betrayed you, the person that hurt you. You have nothing to be judged for, and you don’t need to be judging yourself either. I know you’re not going to absorb all that in one podcast episode. You will probably hear me say this again in future episodes. You’ll probably read it in my book when I get my book done, but I’ll say it one more time before I call it a day: It is not our shame. All we did was trust people who were supposed to be trustworthy. There is nothing shameful in that. Keep telling yourself that, because it’s true. And because part of how you heal Is by giving up that shame, and realizing that you are not the violator. You are the one who was violated. You’re the one that was hurt, but you can heal. Really, you can heal.   Thanks for listening to Like Driving in Fog.   Until next time go make it a great week.

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 tell myself he lived a full happy life (and oh man, did he!), but that doesn’t erase the hole that’s in my life now. That doesn’t erase the changes that I’m going to have to make because he and I traded dog sitting for one, and now have to find a new dog sitter. Interestingly enough, the week before I got the news about John, I had followed a link on Facebook and somebody had written a blog post about something they had heard somebody else say about grief.  I have been sharing this far and wide in the last month, because it is the best description or illustration of grief that I’ve ever heard, and so I’d like to share that with you here today. I will put the link in the transcript but I want to go ahead and just give you the basic gist of it. There is a woman named @LaurenHerschel and she did a series of tweets about grief. Somebody else took her metaphor and turned it into a blog post (with her permission).  It’s been shared on Facebook -- it’s pretty much gone viral. And everybody I’ve shared it with has said: oh my gosh that is exactly how it feels, and it certainly fits my own experience as well.  When I talked to my therapist about it, we were like: this could just as easily be describing trauma. Imagine there is a box. If you need a visual, just draw a square on a piece of paper, and then draw circle inside that square. Have it almost as big as the square - that’s the ball that’s inside the box. On one side of the box is a button, so draw a button on one side, and that button is what we call the pain button. As that ball moves around inside that box, the ball is so big that it can’t help but hit that pain button, over and over and over and over.  And that is your early stages of grief, when it’s fresh, and raw, and feels like it’s going to rip your heart out because that ball in the box keeps hitting the pain button. Over time, the ball gets smaller, and when it’s smaller it doesn’t hit the pain button as much.  So it only occasionally hits the pain button. But every time it does it’s just as fresh, just as raw, just as painful as when it was brand-new. For some people the ball never ever goes away. It just shrinks down to a manageable size, and you’re able to function 90% of the time, until that ball hits the pain button. Sometimes there will be a new incident that is similar, and that hits the pain button again. When my friend Dee passed away in July that was painful, but it had been seven months. We’d gotten through Thanksgiving. We’d gotten through Christmas. We were about to get through her birthday, and it was manageable. The ball was smaller; it didn’t hit the pain button as often. Then her husband passed away, and it was like losing Dee all over again. He’s not my last connection to Dee -- I’m friends with the family. I do Thanksgiving and Christmas with some of the family, but this coming...this coming Thanksgiving will be the first time that people my age will be the oldest people at the dinner table.  We’ve always had somebody from the parents’ generation. John, Dee, Taylor...they’re all gone now, and we are now the older people at the table, and that’s going to be different. Today, that ball in the box is pretty well giant-sized. In the future, I know it will shrink, and then there will be days like the Fourth of July family reunion, Thanksgiving, Christmas, their anniversary -- all of those first special days after loss.   And the ball will grow big again on those days, but it’s okay, because part of being emotionally healthy is feeling your emotions even when they’re painful.   Thanks for listening to Like Driving in Fog. Until next time, go make it a great week.

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 that, it was still hard for me to accept that I had made bad choices romantically. It was hard for me to accept that I had gone against everything that I believed, and chosen something else just because somebody said they loved me. It was hard for me to accept that I had let a woman seduce me and then emotionally abuse me, and it was a pattern that I repeated more than once. And it’s hard to say that out loud to the public, because again, I’m afraid that somebody will listen to this podcast and have a different opinion of me. A negative opinion of me, because of the mistakes that I’ve made in my past - the choices that I’ve made in my past. It was 30 years after the relationship ended, before I was able to share with my therapist all the nuances of that emotionally abusive lesbian relationship that I was in. It was 30 years after that relationship ended, before I was able to tell more than a couple close friends that I had been a victim of date rape, and didn’t even know that I was on a date because I was out with a girl - we were just going out to the bars. It was 30 years before I could admit how ashamed I was because of that interlude in my life. not because it was a same-sex relationship, but because I had been betrayed and deceived, and had been gullible, and fallen for the betrayal and the deceit, and had allowed myself to be emotionally abused and sexually abused. I felt like I should’ve known better, but there’s no way I could’ve. But here’s the amazing thing. Just like when I accepted the reality of what Jack France did to me when I was less than four years old, when I talked openly with my therapist and accepted the reality of my young adult history, it no longer had any power over me. That’s the power of acceptance. As long as you’re fighting it, it’s never going to get better. Accept it, learn from it, and move on. Don’t let it have power over you anymore. Don’t try to hide the dark side. We all have a dark side. We all have things we wish we had not done. We all have things we wish had not happened to us, but it’s in the past.  We are powerless to change it. All we can change is our attitudes toward it, and that’s where the power lies. And we are more powerful than we will ever, ever realize. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, go make it a great day.

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 to do that. I was talking to my grandma one time after my grandpa died. I actually asked her: “how do you get through something like this? You guys were married 50 years.” Her answer was: “you just keep busy. You keep busy, and you don’t give yourself time to think about it”. Well folks, that is a very good description of how to cope, but it is not how you heal. You heal because you deal. You heal because you process. You heal because you don’t just bury it under a rock. Even though it’s easier to bury it under the rug, and hope it never comes back. So check your motivation. Check your motivation for being in a relationship. Check your motivation for leaving that relationship. Check your motivation for taking a job, or for leaving a job. For building a friendship, and leaving a friendship. Why are you reacting to something the way you are? Why do you get angry over something that somebody says? What was it about that comment that made you angry? What is it about this particular person that makes you want to spend all your time with them? What’s going on that makes that pint of ice cream seems so desirable right now? If you take the time to look, you’re gonna find a reason. And the reason may not be what you expected. It’s amazing how powerful our motivation is, and a lot of times we’re not even aware of it. I had a situation last week. I overreacted to something and my therapist said: “Mary, what’s going on? What’s really underneath that?” And I was like “I don’t know.” Well, five days later, while I was soaking in the tub, it finally worked its way up through my subconscious. It had felt like somebody changed the rules in the middle of the game. And that goes right back to growing up in an alcoholic family, where you’re doing what somebody told you to do, and suddenly that’s not the right thing. And I was like oh! And when I could take that out of the picture, that emotional, that trigger, then I could go back and look at the incident and say: you know what? Tracy was right. I totally overreacted to that, and now I know why. It is really amazing how powerful our motivation is, and how so many times we’re not even aware of it.  But part of being self-aware is understanding why you’re doing something. Part of healing is understanding why you’re doing something. Because if you’re doing it for unhealthy reasons, guess what? You are not getting healthier. But if you’re doing it for healthy reasons, then you will get healthier. And as you start understanding your motivation, as you start understanding yourself, then it becomes easier to see the less healthy habits, and it becomes easier to address them. I am not just talking about habits like emotional eating, or drinking. I’m talking about the less healthy habits of being a chameleon, of letting other people be in control of my happiness. You know what? Nobody else should ever be in control of my happiness but me, so why would I let somebody else do that? Another less healthy habit could be isolating. Choosing to stay in your own house, in your own room, in your own apartment, instead of going out into the world, going out with friends, going out and doing something. Those are the kind of things you want think about when you’re checking motivation. It’s challenging at first. It could even be painful at first, but if you do it enough you’re going to do it without even noticing. It’s just going to become part of you. And I don’t think I even have the words to express how important it is, especially if you’re a chameleon who doesn’t want to be one anymore.   Thanks so much for listening. We’ll see you next time on Like Driving in Fog: an emotional healing podcast. Until then, go make it a great week.

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 wrote was poetry, and I remember writing a free-form poem about self-identity or something like that...self-description maybe. But one of the phrases that I used to describe myself was a “nonconformist desperately trying to fit in,” because as a chameleon I needed to fit in and I needed to change my color to match my surroundings. But as a nonconformist, I couldn’t fit in. I didn’t know how to reconcile those two pieces of my personality, and I didn’t know how not to be a chameleon. I recognized at some point that I was being a chameleon; that I was putting on a costume to match whatever group I was with. How did I stop being a chameleon, because I’m not one today? I have to say I’m not really sure. This is one of the things that changed for me as I was healing in other areas. I was in therapy dealing with repressed memories; dealing with family dynamics from those repressed memories; dealing with codependency; dealing with 40 years of not remembering what happened to me when I was four; and along the way as I healed in those other areas, I found that I was no longer a chameleon. If I were to give advice on how to not be a chameleon, or how to move away from the chameleon effect or counteract the chameleon effect, it would probably be things I’ve already said in different episodes. First and foremost is sit down and have a conversation with yourself. Figure out what matters to you. This comes down to why do things matter. I have friends who got college degrees because their parents pushed them to college, and I have friends who got college degrees because they wanted to get a college degree. It was something that mattered to them. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. It basically comes down to listening to yourself trusting yourself examining yourself examining your beliefsWhy do I think this? Why do I feel this? Why do I feel like I have to wear a mask? What would happen if I didn’t wear that mask? And folks, I gotta tell you. If the friendships that you currently have depend on you wearing a mask, that’s not a good friendship. True friends accept us for who we are. We don’t have to wear a mask with our true friends. you may feel like you need to wear a mask with your family, but you’ll find as I did, that the more you focus on determining who you are/what you care about/what matters to you, the harder it will be to wear that mask around your family. Especially if you’re a survivor of childhood trauma, because it’s easier for families to pretend that never happened, and people will always take the easy way out. And you have to ask yourself what matters most to you. I know some survivors who no longer have relationships with their families. They basically divorced their families of origin. When I was seeing my therapist in Texas and first coming to grip with these memories, I knew I did not want to divorce my family. I took a break from them, but I did not want to divorce them. I just needed a break so that I could figure out what I really believed as opposed to what I’d been taught and told my entire life, and so that I could come back to them in a different dynamic. Instead of always feeling like I was the youngest child, I wanted to cut those apron strings and establish that grown-up relationship. And we were able to do that to a degree. Probably not as much as I wanted with my parents, but certainly more than I ever expected we would be able to do. The chameleon effect is real. It comes from not knowing that you are enough just the way you are. It comes from thinking that somebody else has to define you or accept you. It comes from not being comfortable with yourself, with who you really are. It comes from feeling like you have to fit in, and fear of being shut out. You are enough. You are beautiful. You have value just from the fact that you exist. And if somebody doesn’t think the way you do, or they don’t behave the way you do, that doesn’t make you wrong or bad. It makes you unique, and that’s what we need. We need everybody to be the unique person they were created to be. So promise yourself to not be a chameleon for the rest of your life. Promise yourself to start figuring out who you are, what you believe, what you think, what matters to you and why. And start showing the rest of the world the beautiful creation that you are. There’s enough chameleons, there’s enough copycats out there. Let’s all start showing our uniqueness, and valuing that uniqueness. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time. Go make a great week

TRANSCRIPT Hi and thanks for joining us again on Like Driving in Fog: an Emotional Healing Podcast. I’m Mary Young, and I wanted to talk today about my own emotional healing journey. You know, the tagline on the Facebook page says “the emotional healing journey can feel like you’re driving in fog. But you’re not alone.” and so I wanted to use today to talk about the fact that you’re not alone; that I really do know what this journey is like. To be totally honest, I don’t want to have this conversation at all. This conversation is uncomfortable for me, which is exactly why I’m doing it. Why is it uncomfortable? It’s uncomfortable for a variety of reasons.----more---- One is that I’m a private person, and I do not tend to share this with people anymore. Back when it was brand-new, when I was first going through it, I couldn’t stop talking about it. I would tell anybody and their brother exactly what I was going through. Now? I keep quiet about it for the most part.  But if I keep quiet about it, you won’t know that you’re not alone. I didn’t always know that I needed an emotional healing journey. I didn’t even know that’s what I was on when I was on it. What I did know was that I needed people a lot more than they needed me. I was always looking for somebody to validate me; my existence, my ideas. Somebody to be like. I mentioned being a chameleon in episode 27, and that described me. I still remember the time a friend from college asked me how I was, and I said something like I’m a little sad or I’m a little depressed. Her reply -- very caring, very heartfelt -- was I wish you weren’t depressed or something like that. And my only response to that was I’m sorry how do you want me to be? Because that was the way I lived my life. You tell me how you wanted me to be or who you wanted me to be, and that’s what I would do so that I could be your friend. And I never knew why I was like that. I never knew why I never felt like I fit in. I never knew why I was terrified at the thought of dating. I know that I was quick to anger, and that there was a lot of pent-up anger inside me that I didn’t know where it came from but it wouldn’t take very much for it to kick out. I was passive-aggressive. I lived in fear. I walked in fear. I was always afraid that something was going to happen. I didn’t trust people because they weren’t trustworthy, but I didn’t know why I thought that. I knew how to cope. I knew that I could push stuff away and not think about it, because that’s how I was taught to do. And I learned the hard way that eventually that would come back out and insist that you look at it. But it was years later that I looked at it. Another strong memory from college is we watched a film in a class, and the film showed the life of an alcoholic family from the perspective of the kindergartner. And I sat in this class, and I watched my life on the screen. Memories that I had totally forgotten were being played out in front of the classroom for people to see. When the film was over, I lasted maybe five more minutes in the classroom, clenching my jaw, gritting my teeth, trying to breathe. And then I bolted for the door. Happily, the restroom was right across the hallway. I locked myself in a stall, and I cried uncontrollably. I called my mom that weekend, and said I watched this film in class and it brought back memories. And I told her what the film was about, and her immediate response, in very harsh tones: are you saying we were alcoholic? And being a good little chameleon, I said no, I am saying maybe we might have had some problems with drinking. Because keeping the peace in the family was most important thing. I am here to tell you keeping the peace in the family is not the most important thing. Healing yourself...being healed...being healthy is the most important thing. And if that means that you have to tell the family the truth, then you tell the family the truth. Now, I say that and I sound really passionate when I say that, but there are still things I don’t tell my family because I will get denial as a response. And I’m not always in a place where I can handle that.  I have told my family that when I went to Al-Anon and somebody asked me who my qualifier was, I sat down and made a list, and came up with 13 alcoholics who impacted my life before I graduated from college. That doesn’t count the ones that I worked for or with after that. while I was making that list, I realized that one entire side of my family is alcoholic, even though they never call themselves that, because to my family alcoholic means that you’re a skid row bum. And these were all functioning alcoholics, but alcoholic nonetheless. For most of my life, my earliest coherent memories began with kindergarten. What I didn’t know until I was 38 or 39 was that I had buried a bunch of memories from my very early childhood. When a young child experiences trauma -- actually, when anybody experiences trauma -- one of the reactions to it is to repress the memories because they are too painful to deal with. We had a family friend and alcoholic (that mom and dad were friends with) that lived in our basement. We gave him space in the basement; had a mattress down there that he could sleep on, and he stayed with us cause he didn’t have any place else to be. I was three-ish when he moved in, and four-ish when he moved out. He died when I was too young to understand what death really meant. And...this is still hard to say...some of the memories that I had repressed were about the fact that this man who used to babysit us, who mom said was my buddy, liked little girls a little bit too much. And I was a little girl that he liked. So he wasn’t my buddy; he was grooming me. And we had a secret that we weren’t supposed to ever tell. All of that impacted who I was, and how I behaved, and how I saw the world. And all of that needed to be healed. I could cope with it. I could compartmentalize it. I could turn my brain to something else and not think about it, but I wasn’t healed from it. I hadn’t dealt with it. When it started being too hard functioning every day, I finally went to therapy. That first round of therapy, I was seeing my therapist four days a week because I was only in town one week a month. So I’d see her the four days I was in town, and then email her when I was out of town. It went like that for probably six months before I could take it down to seeing her once a week. I am still healing. I will be healing for the rest of my life, because part of healing for me is just learning to be a better human being; learning to respond differently. To respond, not react. It’s not as foggy as it was back in the day when I was 38/39. There is not nearly as much fog. I have a lot more sunny days now. And I know I’m not alone. I have friends who have similar experiences, and we support each other. If you feel like you’re alone; that nobody else knows what you’re going through or what you’ve been through; you are not alone. It’s epidemic. What you need to remember is that you are not a victim. You are a survivor. And if the healing journey scares you like it scared me. If you think: I can’t talk about this to my therapist! I can’t remember this -- it hurts too much. If you’re having those thoughts, remind yourself of this. You survived the original trauma. If you can survive that, you can survive anything. Emotional healing journey -- it’s hard, but it’s worth it. And you owe it to yourself to let yourself heal. And you are not alone. Thanks for listening. Go make it a great week.

TRANSCRIPT   Thanks for joining us today on Like Driving in Fog: an emotional healing podcast. I’m Mary Young, and today were talking about who are you really. Or as I was thinking this morning, going back to an old, old quiz show from the 50s and early 60s: will the real you please stand up? We are born with a personality. You can ask any parent of babies or small children, and they will tell: you this baby was different from that baby from the get-go. That essence of who we are stays with us for entire life, but life circumstances, family upbringing, other people’s expectations can impact how much of that inner essence we actually share. This feels really complicated the way that I’m saying it, but it’s really not. I’m just not finding the right words so let me try a different way. There’s a Facebook meme going around that has a picture of a coffee cup, and the meme talks about if you’re holding a cup of coffee and somebody bumps into you and you spill it, what do you spill? Well, you spill coffee because that’s what’s in the cup. So turning that into human beings instead of cups of coffee...when something happens to you and you react, you react based on what you have inside you. And the reason I’m thinking about all this today is because yesterday I went to a service described as a Celebration of Life for a 15-year-old young man who lost his life right before Christmas. I talked about that in my Christmas episodes actually: Sometimes There Are No Answers, and There’s Always Hope. At the same time that I was preparing to go to Reed’s Celebration of Life, my Facebook memories popped up a meme from a couple years ago with a quote from Buddha. And the quote said the trouble is we think we have time. We don’t have time. We are not promised anything other than the moment that we are currently living in. we don’t know that we will be here tomorrow, or an hour from now. And yet, we spend a large part of our life trying to be what somebody else wants us to be, or what somebody else has dictated we should be. This works in a lot of different areas...think about people who go to college. Mom and dad are paying for the education, so they get a degree that mom and dad want them to have, even if it’s not what they want to do with their life. We need to stop letting other people define us. We need to define ourselves. It’s not easy, because we have been conditioned to let other people define us. We have been conditioned to believe that that’s who we are. I’m the youngest. I’m scatterbrained. I’m lazy. I suck at math. I don’t have street smarts, I only have book smarts. Most of what I just said to you is stuff that has been said to me over the course of my life, especially over my childhood. Some of this is not a big deal, but some of this is huge. My question for you is who are you really? Will the real you please stand up? What does the real you look like? Who are you? What matters to you? What are your likes and dislikes? What are your strengths and weaknesses? How much of your current description of yourself was given to you by somebody else? Does it actually fit your reality today? Part of the reason that this is on my mind is because at Reed’s service yesterday, his family was sharing memories. And for only being 15 years old, they had a lot of memories to share. But what came through over and over and over again was his absolute zest for life; his joy in living; his bigger than his face smile. And I couldn’t help thinking what a wonderful way to be remembered. When his family thinks about him for the next 30 years, they’re going to remember that he was always smiling, he was always helping, he was always joyful, that he loved life and he loved people, and he loved making a difference in people’s lives. Guys, this is a great way to be remembered, I don’t care how old you are. years ago, I asked myself how do I want to be remembered, and once I had that answer, then the next question was what do I have to do to make sure that that’s how I’m remembered? And it comes back to: who are you really? If you’re holding a cup of coffee and somebody bumps into you, what gets spilled out? I want to be remembered as somebody who lives love. As somebody who cares about other people. As somebody who does not put people down, but instead builds people up. But I can tell you truly: 20 years ago I don’t think that’s how I would’ve been remembered. I am a work in progress. We are all works in progress. So I’m challenging you:  who are you really? And are you letting that shine, or are you burying that under the layers of everything that people have put on you over the years? When I first went to therapy 20 years ago, one of the things that Tricia, my Texas therapist, had me do was make a list of everything that defined me. So that was my homework one week. I went away and I worked on it, and I came back to her with three or four pages of how do I define myself. And it was things like: I’m lazy I read too much I don’t do housework I’m scatterbrained I’m too technical And those were all messages that I had been given when I was growing up. Tricia had me read that list out loud to her, and then we went back and looked at each item one at a time, and I had to decide or identify where did that come from. Was that something I say about myself, or was that something that somebody else said about me? 75%, maybe 85% of that list was things that other people -- specifically my family -- had said about me. Once we had identified that. Then Tricia said okay, now let’s take each one of those and let’s find what’s really true about them. I’m lazy is my favorite one, because I still fight that in my brain, because I am not constantly doing things all day long. I will sit and play on my computer. I will sit and read a book, and to my family of origin that meant that I was lazy because I wasn’t cleaning house, when the house needed cleaned, I was reading a book. Working with Tricia, I changed that phrase from I’m lazy to I choose to do other things with my time. For people who have different priorities, they don’t always know how to describe that and so they say well obviously you’re lazy. Because you’re not doing what I think is important. Well, no! Because I’m not you. I’m doing what’s important to me. last week, I challenged you to spend some time taking an inventory of yourself, to do  an annual am I going where I want to go, am I being who I want to be. This could be part of that. Just sit down and think about how you describe yourself, and decide how much of that is your own description of you, and how much of that was dictated to you by other people. Or how much of that was you becoming a chameleon so that you could fit in, or so that you would be loved. You don’t have to be a chameleon to fit in or to be loved, and it took me 40 years to internalize that. I was a fantastic chameleon. Now I’m just me. And if people like me, that’s wonderful. And if they don’t, that’s not on me. That’s on them. But I am who I am, and I’m not going to change that for anybody. But I started that, by first identifying who I really am. Not who somebody else thinks I am. That’s the first step. Let the real you stand up. Figure out who you really are, and let that person shine. Because I promise you:  the real you is way better than any disguise you’ve been wearing trying to fit in. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week, and until then -- make it a great week.

TRANSCRIPT Happy New Year, and thanks for joining us on the very first-ever episode of Like Driving in Fog. This is an emotional healing podcast, related to all things dealing with emotional healing, and the emotional healing journey that you might be on. my name’s Mary Young and I am so glad you came to listen today, while this is episode number one of Like Driving in Fog, it is actually episode number 26 of my podcast. The podcast has been around since last August, originally called Lessons from Life.----more----  I figured the new year was a great time to have a new name since, I had decided to change the name. And I wanted to take this off cycle episode to talk a little bit about why I was changing the name; what you can expect from this podcast; and why you might be interested in listening to this podcast. It seemed to me that the best way to do that would be to simply bring up what I thought were the pertinent questions that other people might have, and tackle those questions. So we’ll start with the obvious one: why change the name? What was wrong with Lessons from Life? To begin with, the purpose of the podcast has changed since I started it last August. When I started Lessons from Life podcast, it was to be just a hodgepodge of topics; things that I’ve experienced over the years, lessons I’ve learned from that. but as I worked on it, and as I created episodes, I found the episodes that I cared most about -- the episodes where I had the most passion, were the ones where I talked about things I had learned on my emotional healing journey. So roundabout October, I repurposed the podcast to be an emotional healing podcast, and let that be the primary focus rather than just a hodgepodge. Once I had done that, and as I started looking at other podcast names out there, Lessons from Life was too hard for people to find. There are so many other podcasts and blogs and Facebook pages out there that have life and lessons in the name. On top of which, I have said for years that the best description for me, the best allegory of an emotional healing journey, is driving in fog. You can’t see where you’re going, you’re not sure where the road’s going, if you’re even on the road. You don’t even know if anybody else is on the road with you. No choice looks good. I can choose to stop, but I might get hit by somebody else who’s driving in fog. I can choose to continue; it’s not gonna be a very fun trip, but I gotta make some kind of choice. I can just sit there behind the wheel going I don’t know what to do. So to me, the emotional healing journey is a lot Like Driving in Fog. when I was running podcast names by other friends, trying to decide should I change the name, and what should I change the name to, somebody said: why don’t you just call it the emotional healing podcast, since that’s what it’s about. And I thought about it. There’s pros and cons to both names. Logically speaking, the emotional healing podcast makes all kinds of sense, because people will immediately know what I’m talking about when they’re searching. Even if they don’t know exactly what kind of podcast it is, they can find it with no problem. But emotionally speaking, that name does nothing for me. Whereas Like Driving in Fog puts a picture in my brain as soon as I hear it, and reminds me of all the times I’ve driven on foggy roads. You know, sometimes the fog was light just a bare haze. Other times, it was so dense that I wasn’t even sure I was on the road. That then reminded me of the immense relief that I felt when I got out of the fog, or when the fog lifted. On top of that, I love the concept of fog as a metaphor or an allegory. Because when you are on an emotional healing journey, as I’ve been on for over 20 years now, it is so easy to beat yourself up. Oh my gosh! I just did something codependent again. I thought I was done being codependent. Oh my gosh! I just made another bad decision. Oh darn, that bad decision I made five years ago is still having consequences. And we beat ourselves up about that instead of celebrating our victories. But here’s the thing. When you’re out driving, when you’re going somewhere and you run into a foggy patch, you don’t beat yourself up for running into a foggy patch. You don’t go oh my God, it’s foggy! I must’ve done something wrong! You know you can’t control the fog -- it just is. All you can do is figure out the best way to get through the fog, and that precisely... precisely illustrates the process of emotional healing. When you are on that emotional healing journey, the best thing you can do... the only thing you can do, is figure out what is the best way to get through that emotional healing journey. What is the best way to handle this incident, this emotional trigger, this memory, this setback. Don’t beat yourself up about it, just figure out what’s the best way to get through it. Just like when you’re driving and hit a fog bank. So that’s the biggest reason that I changed the name. interestingly enough, I was talking to a friend of mine recently comparing the two names, and she said if she was on an emotional healing journey (which is on her plans for 2019) and she was looking for a podcast to listen to, she would take the one called Like Driving in Fog because with a name like that you know that the podcaster knows what you’re talking about - what you’ve been through. And folks, I am here to tell you: I do know. Which leads right into the next question that I had written down that people would probably wonder about, which is: why am I the person to be doing this podcast? Why should anybody listen to this podcast, or listen to me? And I will start by saying that I am not the same person I was 20 years ago. In fact on December 31, 1998, I went out driving at 10 o’clock at night, 930/10 o’clock at night. New Year’s Eve out on the back roads around San Antonio, thinking and trying to deal with everything that was going on in my life that I didn’t feel like I could deal with. And yelling at God, trying to figure out what the heck was going on. And there was a point, as I was driving around thinking on those back roads, that I started toying with the idea of failing to negotiate a curve. Well, I have a very strong survival instinct, so when I hit that point I turned around and came home. I got home maybe about 1130/12 o’clock at night. I don’t know what time it was, maybe 1130. I was renting a room from friends at the time, but they had gone to bed. And I went into the shower and got into the shower, turned the water on because when you cry in the shower nobody can hear it, because the water, the cascading water keeps people from hearing it. And folks I cried in that shower until the hot water ran cold, until my arms, fingers, feet, legs were cramping. Somebody told me once that has to do with some chemical reaction when you’ve cried that many tears. Somebody said recently: oh, so you cried until you were cried out, and I was like no, I couldn’t stop crying even after I started cramping. And I turned the water off because it was cold, and I gave it time to get warm, for the hot water heater to work, and then I cried in the shower some more. And I promised myself that whatever the heck was going on, I was not going to carry it into the new millennium. And the day after New Year’s I started calling therapists and I found the perfect therapist for me down there in San Antonio. We had a very productive relationship until I moved out of Texas. I moved out of Texas in 2001, and in 2011, after 10 years of absolute peace, I started seeing some of those old behaviors again. And feeling some of those old feelings again like things are going to spiral out of control, so I found a therapist in Georgia, and we continued the work that my Texas therapist and I had started. I am not the same person today that I was 20 years ago. I would not have started a podcast 20 years ago. I would not have thought that I had anything to offer. Back in 2011, when I started seeing Tracy, my Georgia therapist, she asked me why was I there and I said I want to be a better me. I want to be a healthier me. And she said okay, what does that look like? I was like: I don’t know. I’ve never been a healthier me. I don’t know what it looks like. And so I pondered that. I thought about it for a week or so. I made a list, and I took that list with me to my next Tracy appointment, read it to her she’s like: okay, and we talked about it. I came home and threw it on a pile of paper and forgot all about it. I was cleaning out the office in 2014, and stumbled across that list .I had written down 18 things that I thought would describe a healthier me, and I could check 16 of those things off on that list. I was working on the other two. So why am I the person to do this? Because I’ve done it. I know how hard it is. I know how painful it is. And I know how important it is. And I also know how easy it is to feel like you’re the only person in the world going through it, and I want you to know you are not alone. Even when the fog is all around you, and you cannot see another car on the road, you’re not alone. So that’s why am doing a podcast, and that’s why the podcast is called Like Driving in Fog.  That’s what we want to talk about, and you can get a feel for that if you look at the last 20 episodes. Start in like October, or definitely by November, I had converted to focusing on emotional healing. So I do an episode every week. They’ll be released on Monday mornings at 6 AM Eastern. It’s just me talking, and it’s usually 10 minutes or less. Sometimes it may be 12 or 13 but is usually 10 minutes or less, you can find the podcast by going to my Facebook page. Go to Facebook and search for Like Driving in Fog podcast. It will have a link to the podcast. We will be on iTunes. when that happens depends on when iTunes makes it happen, but we’ve done what we need to do on our end to make it happen, so it’s just a matter of waiting on them to approve the submission. I will make an announcement at the beginning of an episode when the iTunes approval has come through, to let you know that you can find us on iTunes. That’s pretty much it. I can promise you truth, candor, vulnerability, authenticity, honesty, caring, compassion... every episode has a transcript.  And I think that’s it. I’ll see you again on Monday the seventh for the next episode of Like Driving in Fog. Until then, thanks for listening.  Go make it a great week.

TRANSCRIPT   It’s New Year’s Eve here on the Lessons From Life podcast, which means this is the absolute last episode of the Lessons From Life podcast. I’m Mary Young. Thanks for joining us. as we move from the old year to the new year, from the end of one month to a new month, I’m thinking about transitions, and I’m thinking about change, and I’m thinking about how many times I’ve reinvented myself in my life. I’m also thinking about how this podcast has been reinvented. When I started this in late August, I was just going to be talking about whatever came to mind, but as I worked on it I found that the episodes where I had the most passion were the episodes where I talked about emotional healing and my personal healing journey. That is why effective tomorrow, January 1, the name is changing to Like Driving in Fog: an Emotional Healing Podcast. Some people would say “Mary, you should’ve thought of that before you started creating the podcast. Now you’re changing the name four months into it.”  I say that just proves that we can change any time. I started on what I thought was the right road. It was the right road for me at the time. I made the best decision I could at the time, with the information that I had. As I travel down that road in this case, the podcasting road, I realized that I wanted to go a different direction. And that’s okay. I think back to when I started college. I went to college in 1978 to become an English teacher and eventually a guidance counselor, and by my second year in college I realized I did not want to be an English teacher. I still wanted to be involved in counseling somehow, but I did not want to be an English teacher and so I dropped that major. I’ve lost track of how many majors I had while I was in college...there were 4 or 5, and the thing is there’s nothing wrong with that. We do not have to pick one path when we are 18 and stay there for the rest of our life. We just don’t have to do that. We live in a world of possibilities, and we can take advantage of all those possibilities. We do not have to stay in the same town that we grew up in. we do not have to stay in our parents’ house our entire lives. We are not trapped by our present or past. One of the best quotes I ever came across during my healing journey says you may not be able to change your past but you can always change your future. What’s gone behind us is behind us. Some people never look back. I look back periodically just so I can see how far I’ve come. You can reinvent yourself. You can evolve. You can change. You can change your hairstyle, you can change your college major, you can change your career choice, your location... most importantly you can change your attitude. This is big stuff you guys, and we don’t realize sometimes how important that freedom to change really is, and what a difference it can make in our lives. I would encourage everybody to spend time this holiday season just sitting and thinking about who you are, where you are, what you’re doing with your life. Is this really what you want to do? Do you like the person that you are? If you don’t, what would it take for you to become a person that you like? And this is not just a one-time thing you guys. I had this conversation with myself... I tend to do it every year, but I’m trying to think back. Probably the first one for me was when I had just gotten out of the military, so I was 30-ish and had no job. One of my college friends had just been named woman of the year for her community. I looked at her accomplishment and I looked at my not having a job and I had a choice. I could sit there and cry, or I could sit there and figure out what being successful meant to me. And I decided that I didn’t care if I was ever named woman of the year. That was not my personal definition of success. My definition of success is the people around me -- how I interact with the people around me, being able to look myself in the mirror and like who I am, being able to sleep peacefully at night, not tormented by anything. And I have spent my life pursuing that definition of success. It has nothing to do with money, fame, possessions...it has to do with being a better version of me. we all have the opportunity to redefine success so that it’s not tied into money, fame, fortune...stuff that we don’t necessarily have control over. We all have the ability to choose to be better human beings, to compete against ourselves each day to be better than we were the day before. I still do a double take sometimes when somebody will give me a compliment about some aspect of myself that I have changed over the years. The most current one is “you are so organized,” and I’m going “No, I’m scatterbrained. I’ve been scatterbrained for my entire life. Just ask my mother.” And I hadn’t ever realized that I had become organized over the years, because we are able to change. I look at the me when I was 20, 25 even 30, and compare that to the me when I’m 57/58, and I’m like wow. You would think they were two different people. I’m looking specifically at my work habits, at some of my behavior patterns, and it is amazing to me the changes that I have made over the years. Or to put it another way the ways that I have reinvented myself over the years. So I’m thinking about transitions today, and re-inventions and things like that because of changing the podcast name, but it really applies to so much more than just the podcast name. Each one of us has the opportunity at any time to stop and say I don’t like the way this is going, and change it. And I hope, I really hope that you find the time this holiday season to have a conversation with yourself, and make sure that you do like the way things are going, that it is the way you want things to be going. And if it’s not, just like I can change the name of the podcast, you can change the direction that you’re taking. You can change your thoughts, you can change your attitude, you can change your careers, whatever it is that you need to do to be a better version of you.   Thanks for listening and will see you on New Year’s Day for a special New Year’s episode of Like Driving in Fog: an Emotional Healing podcast.

Dedicated to Jeff, JP, Bill & Reed, and to everyone else who's just trying to hang on a little bit longer.   TRANSCRIPT Hi, and welcome to another episode of lessons from life. Remember, on January 1st we are changing our name to Like Driving in Fog: an Emotional Healing Podcast. I’m Mary Young, and I’m so glad you’re listening to us today. Yesterday, 22 December, we talked about how sometimes there are no answers. And I went to bed last night still thinking about that, and thinking I can’t just leave it at that. It’s true that sometimes there are no answers, but even when we don’t have answers, we have hope. There is always hope. You can’t always see it. Sometimes it’s hard to believe in it. But just like no matter how dark the night is the sun comes up again the next morning; just like an eclipse has to end and the sun comes back out from whatever was hiding it; hope is the same way. You can’t always see it, but it’s always there. And if you can wrap your head around that, if you can wrap your heart around that, it helps you hang on. And you guys, I’m not just blowing smoke. I would not stand here in front of this microphone and say stuff just because it sounds good, because that’s not me. I’ve had people say stuff to me just because it sounds good. It didn’t help. What I am sharing is what I have learned from my own emotional healing journey. I said it yesterday; I’ll say it again. I have never been depressed to the point of being actively suicidal, but I have been hopeless. I have been through emotional healing that I didn’t think was ever to happen. I have had nights where I curled up in my bed and cried, or went to the shower and cried until the hot water was gone, and my arms and legs were cramping because I had cried so much. There were times when I didn’t think it would ever get any better, and I would just be trapped, and I would just always be miserable. But I was wrong. It did get better. I’m not trapped, and I’m not miserable. I kept holding on to hope. I kept looking to other people who had been through the same process, who were going through the same process, who were experiencing the same shit. And I went to them for wisdom and advice. I had friends who could help me see the stars when all I could see was a black night. I had friends who could rekindle that spark in me when the world around that had blown it out. I had friends who weren’t afraid to sit with me in the dark instead of trying to tell me where the light switch was. And I had two very good therapists. healing partners are essential. Whether that healing partner is a friend, a talk therapist, a massage therapist...you need somebody. We all need somebody, Not just to listen to us. We all need somebody. We can’t do this alone. if you go back to the concept of driving in fog, and that first foggy trip that I took when I was 21, driving home from the movie theater in northern Indiana. if I had not had a friend making that trip with me, I don’t know what the outcome might’ve been. I might’ve decided to stop and sleep by the side of the road. But I had somebody in the car with me to encourage me, to help me find the road, to help me stay on the road, once we found it. It made a difference. This healing journey that I’ve been on has had a lot of foggy days. There’s been a lot of times when I just didn’t know what I was supposed to do next. Didn’t know what I was seeing. didn’t know if anything was ever going to change, if I would ever stop crying, if I would ever be somebody that I can like, if the flashbacks or whatever stop, if I would ever stop having panic attacks. But I had healing partners, and I had friends, and between them, they helped me remember that hope is always there. I said it yesterday, I’ll say it again. Sometimes the only thing you can do is stubbornly hang on. Hang on to this too shall pass. Hang on to there is always hope. I don’t feel it right now, but it’s there. And when you can’t hang on anymore, I hope you have a friend that you can go to and say hey, I’m having a hard time hanging on to hope. Can you help me? It’s hard. It’s hard to reach out to a friend and say I need help. It’s hard to reach out to a friend and say this is more than I can handle. It was hard to admit that I needed to see a therapist, and then oh my God, it was hard to go. And nobody tells you how hard it is to go to the therapist. Nobody tells you how hard it is to keep going back, and to look at things that are painful. But I will tell you this. If I had not kept going back, if I had not looked at the stuff that hurt and started processing it, I would not be the person I am today. And I really like the person I am today. I like the stability I have. I like the resilience I have. I like the fact that I’m more interested in encouraging other people. I like the fact that I’m brave enough to do a podcast. none of that would have happened if I had not been stubborn 25 years ago, and stubbornly kept insisting: the only way out is through; I can do this; there’s always hope. Personally, I had a three-part mantra for those nights when I was afraid to close my eyes because I didn’t know what kind of nightmare I would have, and I didn’t want to wake up scared so I thought I would just try to stay awake all night. I had three things that I clung to. Yours will be different because we’re not the same people. For me, it was:  God is good. God loves me. Somebody is praying for me. And every time I would do that, I would replace the word somebody with a particular name. Katie is praying for me. Barb is praying for me. Karen is praying for me. Rachel is praying for me. Alice is praying for me. Because I know my friends, and I knew, I knew, that they were praying for me. You can have a different mantra, but one of the best things you can put in that mantra: There is always hope. This too shall pass. You have to get miserable before you can get better. I hate the fact that that’s a reality, but the bottom line is you will not change until being who you are is too uncomfortable. I didn’t change until it reached the point where I was depressed all the time, until it reached the point where I was having nightmares and panic attacks, and it was starting to interfere with my ability to function in my daytime world. And to do what I needed to do for my jobs, I knew something had to change. And that something had to be me. I want to wave a magic wand and make everything all better. I don’t want there to ever be another Reed or another Bill or another Jeff or another JP, but I don’t have that power. All I have is my story, to let you know this is what I went through, and this is how I got through it. I got through it by being stubborn. I got through it by reminding myself over and over and over, it’s not always going to be this way. and you feel like your lyin’ when you say that, because really it’s the only way it’s been for what feels like my entire life, how can it not always be this way. I’ve proven it to myself. I am not the person I was 30 years ago. I don’t have the flashbacks and the panic attacks, the nightmares. I don’t have those depressions. I don’t have those trigger incidents like I used to. My resilience is not something that I occasionally notice. It’s part of who I am, because I was able to hang on. And I’ve gotta be honest with you. As I say this stuff, I feel like I am shortchanging, or judging or criticizing those people who were not able to hang on, and that is not my intent. JP, Jeff, Bill, Reed...they did the absolute best they knew how to do. They held on for as long as they could, and there comes a time when you just can’t. And if there’s nobody around to catch you when you fall, then you fall. I hope we all have somebody to catch us when we fall. I would not still be here if people had not caught me when I fell.   Like I said last night, I don’t have any answers for this, and I’m out of words.  But I care, and I wish I could wave a magic wand to help you hang on, because others care too. About you. Because you are worth caring about. And you are worth healing.  So please hang in there, just a little longer.  Everything changes, and hope is always there, even when we can’t see it.

Dedicated to Jeff, JP, Bill, Reed, and all the others who couldn't find the answers they needed.  And to all those who  are still searching for answers.   TRANSCRIPT   Hi, it’s Mary Young, and currently the Lessons from Life podcast. In another 10 days, the name is changing to Like Driving in Fog: an Emotional Healing Podcast. It’s December 22 as I record this podcast. I just came back from serving at my church’s Christmas services. I had planned that this week’s podcast would be continuing along those lines of having boundaries, or Christmas -- not going home for Christmas, taking care of you for Christmas, and then life intruded. One of the people that came tonight is a friend who lives far enough away that she does not usually attend my church. She has her own home church closer to home, but her family was there tonight. Because her family goes to this church, because they live over this way. And they were there because...tragedy. And the holiday seasons are full of tragedy, and we don’t think about it unless it happens to us. That may not be true for everybody, but it’s true for a lot of people. All holidays are happy happy joy joy, and it doesn’t occur to us that for other people the holidays can be sad. Lonely. Bittersweet. I still remember 15 years ago, having Christmas with my family two weeks after my mother passed away, one week after her funeral. It was not a Merry Christmas that year. And this friend that I saw tonight, this family that came tonight, will be having Christmas less than a week after losing a very young family member. And there is nothing merry about that. I had another friend who told me one time she woke up in the hospital, in the recovery room after her miscarriage, and the room was decorated for Christmas. And she just looked at the decorations on the wall and thought how can I be happy. So I’m asking you: please think about other people this Christmas season. Bear in mind that not everybody sees this as a season of joy. For a lot of people it is bittersweet. You may be that person for whom it is bittersweet, or just flat out sad, or it just flat-out sucks. And I just want you to know: it’s okay to be sad at Christmas time. Don’t feel like you have to put on a mask for the rest of us. Own your feelings. Let yourself feel. If Christmas is a time of grief for you, then let yourself grieve. Grief doesn’t go away if you bury it. It only goes away, or becomes manageable, if you feel it. If you let yourself acknowledge it, and experience it. That’s true of most emotions actually. So this Christmas, if a friend of your says yeah I’m just not really in the Christmas spirit, don’t try to jolly them into it. Respect where they are. Let them be where they are, and just sit with them. One of the best things a friend ever said to me was: sometimes when you’re sitting alone in the dark; you don’t want people to tell you where the light switch is. You know where the light switch is; you just want somebody to sit with you in t9he dark for a while. If you have a friend that just needs somebody to sit with them, not trying to fix them, not trying to jolly them out of anything, not pointing out where the light switch is so you can bring some light into the room, be that person. And sit with them in the dark, so they know they’re not alone. If you are that person wishing somebody could sit there with you in the darkness, don’t give up. I know sometimes things look like they will never get better. Things look like they will never change. Everything changes. It’s the one great law of life. Everything changes. This too shall pass. If you can just hold on, and I know sometimes you can’t hold on... I know that. And I don’t have an answer for that. Everything that’s in my mind wants to come around and tell people just hold a little tighter. Just reach out and call somebody. But if you are in the throes of depression, that’s the hardest thing in the world for you to do. And maybe the answer is to just keep repeating to yourself this too shall pass. I’m not alone. There is a way out. I don’t know. I have never been depressed to the point of being actively suicidal, so I don’t know what that feels like. I do know what it feels like for the people that are left behind. I know the confusion, and the anger, and the sorrow in the decades of loss though. Every year thinking: this year he would’ve been X years old. Every year thinking: this was the day that I lost him. I know that stuff, and I know that for people who are deeply depressed, it’s not even registering on their radar. You know, I usually try in these podcasts to have some kind of uplifting, encouraging something, and tonight all I have is sadness and sorrow because a friend’s family is hurting. Because they lost a loved one way too young, way too soon, and it reminds me of all the other loved ones who’ve been gone too soon. Whether through miscarriage, through childhood leukemia, through crib death, or through suicide, there’s a lot of pain in the world. I don’t want to make light of that. And healing through that pain is hard. It’s possible, but it’s hard. But please remember: you are not alone. I know it feels like you are, but you’re not. And even people that are not in the same room, not in the same state, not in the same country, can still be there for you. Over the Internet. Over the telephone, especially now with Skype and FaceTime, things like that. But even over the Internet. That’s all that kept me going back in the 90s. there were nights where I would spend hours with online chat, talking to somebody because the memories were killing me, and the flashbacks were killing me, and I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t know who I could talk to, and everybody in my time zone was asleep and wouldn’t understand. anyway there are people who understand, and I realize that when you’re in the deep throes of depression reaching out to somebody takes way more energy than you have, and that’s one of those things I don’t have an answer for. I just have a hope, and a prayer, that nobody has to sit in the darkness alone, and that everybody can find the strength to reach out and ask for help.  I don’t have any more words tonight. Thank you for listening.

TRANSCRIPT As a reminder: on January 1, we are changing the name of the podcast to Like Driving in Fog -- an Emotional Healing Podcast. I’m Mary Young, and I’m so glad you joined us again today. If you listened to last week’s podcast, we were talking about not going home for the holidays. You know, everybody makes a big deal -- it’s the happiest time of the year! Home is the only place to be! But for a lot of people home is toxic, and they feel guilty about not going home, or not wanting to go home. So I talked last week about it’s okay to not go home for the holidays, and maybe you need to build some new holiday traditions. However I also said if you do go home, wrap yourself in boundaries and so I wanted to touch on that this week. What are boundaries? Are you sure I’m allowed to have them? And how the heck do I have boundaries around my family, and how do I honor those boundaries? I gotta be honest with you -- I was 38, maybe 40, before I ever realized that it was okay for me to have boundaries.  We don’t have boundaries in my family. In fact, one of my mom’s favorite sayings was what’s yours is mine and what’s mine’s my own. If it belonged to anybody in the family, it belonged all of us. That concept of private ownership among family members just didn’t really exist. If you had something and another family member needed it, you were supposed to share. Or maybe even to give. If that’s the kind of family you come, from then going home for the holidays just means going back into that situation.  I used to tell people: you know, it doesn’t matter how old I am; it doesn’t matter how successful I am in my life. When I go home I am 12 years old again. That’s how they all see me and that’s how they’ll treat me. And I just gotta tell you, that is not comfortable. That is not how I want to be seen or treated. I want to be seen or treated as the successful woman that I am; as the age that I am; as the adult that I am. And that’s the kinda stuff that kept me from going home. I would go home once every four or five years. I understand if you have less-than-perfect families. And face it - most people in the world have less-than-perfect families. That’s just how it is. part of growing up, part of becoming emotionally healthy, part of maturity, is learning to let those people be who they are without letting them dictate who you are or how you behave. So if you’re gonna go home -- and sometimes we don’t feel like we have a choice -- you need to wrap yourself in boundaries. You need to protect yourself. How do we do that? The first step to boundaries is very simple:  believe you deserve them. Believe you are allowed to have them. A corollary to that would be believe that you need them. We all need boundaries. We don’t all realize that, but we all need boundaries. And those boundaries go both ways. There is behavior that I will not accept from other people, but there is also behavior that other people should not expect from me.   So part one: believe that you deserve boundaries. Part two: decide what those boundaries are. What is acceptable behavior to you? At what point will you disengage and walk away? For me, I started staying away from the family home. I would not sleep at the family home. It did not mean I didn’t love my parents, it meant that I love myself and I was going to take care of myself. So figure out what your breaking point is, and make sure you have a plan to not reach that breaking point.  That’s what the boundary does. Think of it like a guardrail. That boundary allowed me to say: this is getting close to where I would break. Let me get out of here before I do. Step number three is the hardest part.  You’ve realized or accepted that you deserve boundaries, that you’re allowed to have boundaries. You have established for yourself what those boundaries are, what behavior or words you will not tolerate and what action you will take if something comes up that you won’t tolerate. If they do this, I will do that. If they start a shouting match, I will leave. If they all get drunk, I will leave. It’s not fun to hang around a bunch of drunks. The hard part is enforcing the boundaries. And let me tell you straight up -- they are not going to support you enforcing your boundaries. They don’t want you to have boundaries. You’ve never had boundaries before. They’ve always been able to control you. They’ve always been able to suck you into their drama, or whatever the case may be. It’s no good having boundaries if you’re not going to enforce them. So again, decide that you deserve boundaries. Figure out what those boundaries are and enforce those boundaries. And I make it sound so simple. Just 1 2 3. I know it’s not simple, especially at the holidays.  These are the most challenging times of the year. But I also know that you can do it, because I went from 40 years of not having boundaries, to having and honoring my own boundaries. And if you have a hard time, and I did have a hard time at first.  But if you have a hard time, and start thinking Oh, I could just let that go. They don’t mean to be that way. This is just who they are...what would you do if they were treating your kid that way? Would you ask your child to stay, or would you find a way to get your child out of that situation? You have a responsibility to yourself. I have a responsibility to myself, to nurture me the way that I would nurture a child. It’s part of self-care -- taking care of yourself. And if the only way that you can take care of yourself is to think what would I do if it was a small child, then use that use that, until you have learned how to nurture yourself. There is unacceptable behavior in the world. Some of it comes from family members. You are not required to suffer through unacceptable behavior. Eleanor Roosevelt said nobody can make us feel inferior without our consent.  My therapist says we teach people how to treat us. What we accept, is what they know they can do. They may have spent the last 20, 30, 40, 60 years treating you like you have no value, but that does not have to go on. We teach people how to treat us by what we accept.   Having boundaries helps teach them to treat us with respect. Having boundaries helps teach them to treat us like human beings. You deserve boundaries. You are allowed to have boundaries. You have a right to boundaries. Internalize that. Paste it on your mirror so you see it every day if that’s what you need, but get that inside you, so that it’s inside your brain. Inside your heart. Inside your soul. It’s okay to have boundaries. You are allowed to have boundaries. All healthy people have boundaries. It’s okay to say stop kicking me.  It’s okay to say that is unacceptable behavior.  It’s okay to say I’m going to leave now, and then walk away. It’s okay to say I’m going to hang up now, and then hang up. Boundaries.  They are critical to emotional health.  They are critical to you being emotionally healthy, to me being emotionally healthy. Find your boundaries. Identify them. Identify what behavior is unacceptable. Identify what you will do when faced with unacceptable behavior, and then do it. And if you need somebody to support you, come back to my Facebook page and say hey, I just did that boundary thing and I’m just not sure, because it’s hard. And I will celebrate with you for doing the boundary thing. And I will understand that it’s hard. And I will encourage you to keep setting those boundaries, and keep enforcing those boundaries. And you will find that life gets better with boundaries, especially when you’re around people who don’t have any. Thank you so much for listening. Go make it a great week.

TRANSCRIPT   Hello again, and welcome to the Lessons from Life podcast. I should tell you there’s only about three more weeks that it’s going to be called the Lessons from Life podcast. January 1, we are changing the name of the podcast to Like Driving in Fog: an Emotional Healing podcast. I’m Mary Young, and today we are talking about the holiday season and how absolutely wonderful that can be for people. And yes, if you weren’t sure, that was sarcasm.----more---- We all have grown up watching the holidays be romanticized. All of the movies are about being home for the holidays; all of the songs are about being home for the holidays. Home is the best place you can be during the holidays, with your friends and family. And family is supposedly the absolute best thing in the entire world for you, and you know what? It’s not always true. Some people have toxic families. The truth is, probably every family since Adam and Eve is a dysfunctional family. Just different families have different dysfunctions. If you are from a toxic family, or if you have family trauma in your past, then the thought of going home for the holidays is not a happy thought. And if we keep with the concept of fogginess, driving in fog, being in dense fog banks, that kind of thing, then the holidays could be the densest fog bank of all. Because on the one hand you have societal expectations, familial expectations... hey it’s the holidays! Let’s all get together and show how much we love each other, and on the other hand you have your gut, your emotions, your memories saying no.  NO, I don’t want to. I don’t want to go. I don’t have fun; it’s not a good time. This is your permission: DON’T GO. If your family is toxic, if your holidays bring you more stress than joy, then let this be the year that you make a change. Let this be the year that you stand up and you say no more, and you take care of yourself. It really is okay to do that. I’m not saying it’s easy, I’m saying it’s okay. Some families are toxic. Some family members are fine individually, but you get them in a group and the group becomes toxic. You are under no requirement to keep putting yourself in toxic situations. Or as a friend of mine said, it’s okay to tell people stop kicking me. Sometimes we don’t even realize we’re being kicked. It just is what it is. This is the way our family has always been. This is the way our holidays have always been. I’m just saying take care of you. It’s okay to not go home for the holidays. It’s okay to keep toxic people at arm’s length. It’s okay to have boundaries. If you do go home, then wrap yourself in boundaries. Set some lines that can’t be crossed: if this happens, I will...whatever. If this happens, I will leave. This year instead of staying in the family home, I’m going to stay in a hotel. I’m going to stay with friends. I’ve going to stay with other relatives that are not toxic. That is totally and completely 0K. Holidays are big family times. Yeah I know, you already knew that. But it’s the big family times that can be the most triggering. If you have family trauma, it’s the big family times, where you get together with all the toxic people, not just one or two of them at a time. And if your family trauma is abuse -- physical, sexual, mental, emotional -- maybe that abuse has stopped because you’re an adult, but I will bet you that nobody in your family has ever acknowledged the fact that you were abused. Instead they act like it was no big deal, or they act like it never happened. Incest: they act like it never happened. Violence: that’s a little bit harder, but they may act like it’s no big deal, or just pretend it never happened, gloss over it. Mental abuse, emotional abuse: that’s where they look at you like you’re crazy because of the way that you took it all. I didn’t mean it that way, that’s just the way that you took it. I was just teasing. You just can’t take a joke. People, none of that is true. They were mentally or emotionally abusive, and it affected you, and it makes you not want to go home. So don’t go. Now, let’s bring in some reality. If you don’t go home, you’re going to hear about it. He thinks he’s too good for us. She’s too busy; she just doesn’t prioritize her family. That’s just another way of trying to control, and part of being emotionally healthy is not letting other people control you. It may be hard the first time, but it’s one of the best gifts you can give yourself. To not put yourself in a toxic situation, to not put yourself in the line of fire. Like I said, it’s not easy, especially the first time. There’s a phrase you will hear over and over and over, or read over and over and over. I’ve seen it more times than I can count in the last several years: speak your truth, even if your voice shakes. Let that be your phrase for this holiday season. Speak your truth, even if your voice shakes. My truth is, I don’t have a good time when I go home for Christmas, so I would rather not, and I’m not going to. I don’t have to give a reason. Just no, I can’t make it. No is a complete sentence. As soon as you start giving reasons, they start arguing against those reasons. I can’t afford it: we’ll buy you a ticket. I can’t afford a hotel: you can stay here. If you’re not going, just say no I’m not coming. No explanations are necessary. Even if they ask, just keep repeating: I’m sorry I can’t make it. I hope that you have friends near you that support you and encourage you. Maybe you can start new holiday traditions with them. Another option is to say: you know, Christmas is such a busy time. It’s just too hard to do it Christmas, but I’ll be happy to get together with you in mid-January. Take it at a time when it is not wrapped up in the holidays and the holiday expectations, and it may not be quite as toxic. If you are having a hard time with the holidays and you just wish there was somebody that understood, there are lots of people that understand. If you’re on Facebook, look up the page Talking Trees. It’s a page that’s owned by Dr. Rosenna Bakari. She is a child sexual abuse survivor and a psychologist. Every day there will be a post on Talking Trees that is encouraging, uplifting, insightful. Even if you are not a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, if your childhood trauma was in some other category, you can benefit by what Dr. Bakari puts on her page. And right now she’s talking about toxic families and getting through the holidays, so you could go to the Talking Trees page and find some good insight in the posts. And find people in the comments who are experiencing the same thing you are, and that way you will be reminded that you’re not alone. Holidays are hard. Don’t make them harder on yourself if you don’t have to. Thanks for joining us today. We’ll see you next time. Until then go make it a great week.

TRANSCRIPT Hi everybody, and thanks again for joining me on Lessons from Life. I’m Mary Young. If you remember, last week we talked about how the emotional healing journey might be confusing, maybe even nerve-wracking. I compared it to driving in fog, and that’s probably nobody’s favorite travel experience. I don’t want to scare you away from the healing journey by describing it as a foggy drive, but one of the reasons I like that analogy is because even when you’re on a foggy drive it’s not always foggy.----more---- Fog comes in many forms. It can be a light haze. It can be so dense that you can’t see your nose in front of your face, but even if it’s dense fog it’s not permanent. The sun comes out and burns the fog away, or as you’re progressing, you move away from the low ground to the higher ground and the fog lifts accordingly. It’s the same way when you’re healing. You can be in the middle of a craptastic fog bank - and that could be literal or metaphorical - but the sun is going to shine again. one of the reasons I picked the picture for today’s podcast is that even though it’s a foggy picture, you can see the sun rays slanting through if you look at it very closely. And here’s the thing to remember -- not every day is foggy. It’s easy to forget that when you’re in the middle of some hard days or some hard memories, but they won’t last forever. I shared last week about the flashbacks and panic attacks that I had, and there are not enough words to describe how hard they were to experience. But they were not 24/7/365. They were interspersed with days of stability, and as I healed, those days of stability lasted longer. And I had more emotional energy, more coping techniques, more resources for dealing with the flashbacks and the panic attacks when they came. The challenge for me in this podcast is being open and honest, authentic, vulnerable, and at the same time not scaring you away.  I want you to go on that healing journey. The healing journey is the best gift you can give yourself for emotional healing for emotional health, but I want you to go into it with your eyes open. It is a lifetime journey. It is not something that you can waltz through in three months and say: okay we’re good now. If you know people who have done that, then they have chosen to short-circuit themselves. They have chosen to stop the healing process. Let me I’ll tell you how I know this. It was January 1999 when I walked into Tricia’s office. So next month will be 20 years. last night December 1, 2018, almost 20 years after walking into Tricia’s office...twenty years after being on a healing journey and watching the fog lift and having more sunny days than foggy days. And last night at 10 o’clock at night, I was curled up in a fetal position on my bed, holding onto my dogs and crying my eyes out because I was in the middle of a full-blown panic attack, and Ativan wasn’t touching it. I can give you reasons for why that panic attack happened, but that’s not the point. The point is it happened. 20 years on the healing journey, and I still get panic attacks. The difference is they’re not debilitating. I took an Ativan. I let myself cry. I snuggled with my dogs. I tried to relax. I tried to let myself fall asleep. I was not being successful, so I got up and grabbed my laptop, and reached out to an online support group that I have, and was able to share with them that I was having a panic attack. I think I know what caused it, but in the meantime I just had to get it out of my brain, and I needed somebody to hear me. Within 20 minutes somebody had responded on the Facebook page, and once I knew I was heard then I could quiet my brain down. But at 10 o’clock/1030 last night, I was using every coping mechanism that I’ve learned over my healing journey. Grounding myself...I felt like a very tiny little kid, so I spoke out loud and reminded myself that I’m 57 years old almost 58. I reminded myself that I was in my bedroom, in my bed, with my dogs, that the year was 2018, that there was nothing out there that was trying to get me. There was no monster in the house. I let myself cry:  I screamed into my pillow because I didn’t want to scare the dogs. I reached out for help when my own coping techniques or mechanisms weren’t doing the job. I did not reach out to my therapist - it is totally inappropriate to text your therapist at 1030 at night on a Saturday. There was a time earlier in my healing journey where I would not have been aware of that, and if I did know I would not have cared. but I am healed enough that I was able to say you know what, I can tell her about this when I see her on Monday, and I know that I’ll be okay. I just need to get myself to where I can go to sleep. That’s what the healing journey can do for you. Even when the fog comes, you just slow down, use proper driving techniques, and you keep going. That’s why I like the metaphor of driving in fog, because here’s the other thing... if you have been on a healing journey; if you have been trying to change your mindset; tried losing weight; tried changing habits; tried starting an exercise program... I’ll guarantee you that at some point you didn’t succeed. At some point, you fell off the wagon. And if you are like most human beings, when you did that, you started yelling at yourself: I knew I couldn’t do this! I knew sooner or later something would come up. I knew something was going to happen. Last night, I could have sat there curled up in a ball and called myself names. I could have lain there in a fetal position and yelled at myself for having a panic attack, when the fact is that it was my body and my brain telling me that I was currently overwhelmed, and they didn’t know how to handle the overwhelming issue. When you are driving and you come across fog, or when you are out driving in rain and the rain goes from being a little mist to maybe a drizzle to pouring down so hard that you have to put the wipers on super-speed, do you blame yourself for the weather? Oh my God it’s foggy - I am such a terrible person because it’s foggy! Oh shit, it’s raining! What did I do to make it rain so hard? NO. We don’t do that, because we know the weather is outside of us. We don’t control the weather. We can’t control the weather. Your brain, your heart, your emotions, want to heal. Nobody wants to walk around not healed, but we sabotage ourselves during the healing process by blaming ourselves for the fact that we need to heal. It is not my fault that the jerk in the basement liked little girls. That is not my fault. And yes, I want to heal from that. I have healed from that. But first I had to stop blaming myself for his weakness. There are too many examples for that because we all do it. We blame ourselves because something happened, and it’s not our fault. Especially, and let me say this out loud, slowly and clearly... if somebody hurt you when you were a child -- physical abuse, mental abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse --  that was not your fault. If somebody raped you, that was not your fault. If somebody beat you, that was not your fault. It is so important to stop blaming yourself. I had to stop blaming myself. We all do it, and we all need to stop. I don’t blame myself when I drive into a fog bank. I don’t blame myself when the heavens open up and the rain pelts the car so hard that I have to slow down. All I do is slow down, and I make sure that I’m taking proper driving precautions. But I don’t kick myself and go oh my gosh it’s raining. I’m such a terrible person! Oh my gosh it’s foggy. I am such a terrible person! NO!  NO!  NO! What happened to you when you were a child has nothing to do with you. It has to do with the predator that attacked you. And healing from that predation is going to go on the rest of your life, because of things that we learned; things that we were taught, ways that we were taught to behave that are not healthy coping mechanisms. But that doesn’t make you bad. It doesn’t make me bad. It doesn’t make me a failure as a human being, because for a large part of my life I did not know how to deal with authority. That doesn’t make me a failure as a human being. It means I had something I needed to learn. I am not a failure as a human being because for a large part of my life, I did not live up to my potential. The more emotionally healthy I get, the more I find myself living up to my potential. As you travel on this healing journey, pay attention to the victories. Sometimes you may not even notice them because they’re so small. So start a notebook -- call it Proof of Healing, and every time you find yourself behaving differently than you used to, write it down. Proof of Healing: I started a podcast. Proof of Healing: I applied for a promotion at work. Proof of Healing: I did not reach out to my therapist at 1030 on a Saturday night while I was having a panic attack, because I have past experience that tells me I can get through that, and I can reach out to her on Monday when I have an appointment scheduled with her. Proof of Healing: my credit card bills are going down instead of up. Find those victories. Even if they look really tiny to you, find them. Recognize them. Celebrate them, because what happens is you will build on those. I think you’ll be surprised when you start writing them down, how many little victories there are. I used to celebrate if I would have stability for two days. That was a big whoo hoo! for me. Then I had stability for a week --oh my gosh 5 to 7 days where I felt stable instead of crazy! It’s been years, literally years that I have been stable and that’s why the panic last night did not derail me. Because I know, because my experience has shown, that I’ll have panic attacks. Yes I need to recognize what I’m feeling; I need to examine what I’m feeling. What was it that had me so scared and why, what was so overwhelming? And then I can go on. Total honesty...it was not like that 20 years ago. If you remember, 20 years ago panic attacks could have me hiding in the closet.  But that was 20 years ago, at the beginning of the healing journey.  I’ve made progress. You will make progress. Recognize that progress. Celebrate that progress. It builds on itself and you will find that it is not always foggy. The fog will lift, and you will have sunny days. That’s the way it’s been for me, so I know that’s the way it can be for you. Thanks again for listening today. We’ll see you next time. Until then go make it a great week.  

TRANSCRIPT I’ve spent this entire week thinking about how to follow up last week’s podcast. If you remember, last week we talked about the difference that can be made when you go through an emotional healing journey. And the next thought that came to mind was what does that journey look like. I’ve said in the past that emotional healing is how we get to emotional health, and that that journey or that process is unique to each individual. What I mean by that is we each do things differently. My emotional healing journey is different from your emotional healing journey. There are similarities. There are things that are universal, but we are each unique individuals and therefore our actual journey, our actual process, is unique to ourselves. You can learn from what I’ve gone through. I can learn from what you’ve gone through, but the specific steps that I took may not be the right steps for you, because we are different people. With that in mind, I was trying really hard to figure out how to describe the journey...what metaphor, what analogy, could I find for the journey. And I have one that I think is perfect.----more---- Thanks for joining us today on the Lessons from Life podcast. I’m Mary Young, and we are talking about what it looks like while you are actually going through your healing journey or your emotional healing process. And what does it really look like? Confusion...Uncertainty...Apprehension...Nervousness...all that. And when I look for a simple metaphor or a simple allegory, fog is the word that comes to mind. Have you ever driven in fog, or been out on the lake or the ocean and been enveloped by a fog bank, or maybe gone walking on a foggy day? It changes how everything looks. In fact it may hide everything so you can’t even see anything. Sometimes you can see a little bit of the way.  Sometimes you can see a lot, because it’s just a light fog which makes everything hazy, and makes it look not quite the same as you’re used to seeing it. But sometimes, it’s like this morning when I was out. Fog hid everything that was more than a 10th of a mile in front of me.  If I tried to look ahead, I couldn’t see anything except the road ending in a bank of fog. That’s what it feels like sometimes when you’re on that healing journey. As I was thinking about that, I remembered a time when I was 21 – I was a senior in college. My friend and I had gone to another town to watch the movie on Golden Pond because it wasn’t showing in our small Indiana town. This was in northwestern Indiana, maybe 10 miles south of Lake Michigan, and it was winter time.  You get foggy roads in the wintertime when you’re close to Lake Michigan. We went to the 730 showing of the movie, so it got out about nine, and we headed back to our college town. It’s normally a 45 minute - maybe an hour - drive. We got home at midnight, because the fog had settled in and it was dense. And when I say dense, I mean cut it with a knife dense. We’re on this back road - it’s a state road but it’s a back road - to go back to our town. We are maybe 10 miles south of the lake so we have all that lake fog, and I couldn’t see the road I was driving on. In fact Colleen and I both had our windows rolled down, and while I was focusing on keeping the car going straight, she was looking out her window to make sure that I was in the right lane. She was looking for the stripe on the side of the road, and I still remember when she stopped and said “Mary I am seeing double yellow stripes on my side of the car,” which meant I was totally in the wrong lane. So I eased back over to her side of the road until she told me that she could see a white stripe. And no sooner was I fully in the correct lane, then we came up to an intersection and I saw headlights coming towards us. So if we had not made that lane correction, we could very possibly have been in an accident. There’s a lot of parallels there to emotional healing: not being able to see where you are not sure where you’re going not sure where the road is suddenly realizing you’re not in the right position on the road making a lane change narrowly avoiding a collision. All of this is a really, really good metaphor or allegory for emotional healing. So let’s look at that a little bit deeper. When I first saw my therapist back in 1998, I had never been through therapy before. I had a degree in counseling; I had done some internships when I was in college, but it had been 20 years at least since I had graduated college. Maybe 25, and I had never actually worked in the counseling field, so my experience with therapy was very limited. I had done a couple counseling sessions in college, but again it had been 25 years ago probably. And I remember telling a friend of mine “I can’t go to therapy that means I’m crazy.” And she’s like: “you know better than that.” So I started seeing Tricia. I had no idea how to talk about this stuff, because I had never talked about it. I had no idea what I needed to work on, because I didn’t know what I didn’t know. It was all foggy, and I had a choice.  I could stop and go home; say I’m not coming back, or I could keep going. We always have a choice. In going back to the driving in fog allegory, or the traveling through fog bank allegory, you have a lot of different choices. Choice number one is I could just stop. When Colleen and I were driving home from that movie, I could’ve just stopped and said: “hey I can’t see where I’m going we’re just gonna stop.” There’s a couple different problems with that, not the least of which is I’ll never get anywhere if I’m not moving.  If you’re just standing still, you are not making any progress. You are just standing there.  And sometimes that’s the right move - don’t get me wrong. But not when you’re on a foggy road, because there may be other cars on the road, and if you’re just sitting there, there could be a collision. Standing still was not an option for me on my healing journey. I had to keep moving, even if I was moving at the speed of a snail. Even if I felt like I was crawling on hands and knees over broken glass, I had to keep going forward. The only way to get out of a fog bank is to go through it. So choice one: you could stop. You could stop your car in the middle of the road in the fog because you can’t see.  And that’s a dangerous choice because you’re not gonna make any progress, and you might wind up in a collision. Choice number two: I can change my direction. I could turn around and go back where it wasn’t foggy. I have a hard time choosing to retrace my steps in a healing journey.  I don’t want to go back. I want to go forward. I want to heal. So I did not choose to go back. I chose to go forward. You can go really slowly, and put your flashers on to make it easier for other cars to see you. That’s what I felt like I did. There were days in that 45 minute therapy session where we spent 30 to 40 minutes talking about all kinds of other stuff, and I would bring up the hard stuff in the last five minutes. You don’t make a lot of progress that way, but you do make progress. Go as slowly as you need to go, but don’t stop. Stopping is not progressing. Stopping is not moving forward. Here’s the thing -- fog will lift eventually. It always does. And when it does, you’ll be amazed at how far you’ve come when you look back, as long as you don’t stop. So yes, the healing journey can be a very foggy, very disorienting journey. But it’s worth the trip. It’s worth the time and the effort that you put into it, and you just have to keep moving. Even if you move slowly. Even if it takes you forever be able to share with your therapist about the stuff that really, really matters, you’ll get there. And that fog will lift, and you’ll be able to see the road ahead of you again, instead of it just being some giant cloud bank. That’s how it’s been for me. I’m confident it will be that way for you as well. Thanks so much for listening. Go make it a great week

TRANSCRIPT I was working on a time-sensitive project at work, and in the room on the other side of the wall, the company owner and general manager were having a shouting match.  It was all I could do to concentrate on my project.  Their angry voices kept interrupting my concentration, and my “fight or flight” response was kicking in as I waited for the shouting match to escalate to violence.  It never did, but it was all I could do to not run and hide as I listened to them.  I didn’t feel like I was 32 years old. I felt like a little kid listening to her parents fight. I huddled in the back corner of the closet, all lights off, hoping the clothes hanging above me and the laundry basket in front of me would keep me from being seen.  It was the closest thing to a “safe room” that existed in my house.  I pulled a blanket over my head hoping it would make me a shapeless lump, and not as easily recognizable as a human being.  My stomach did flip flops, and in my mind I repeated endlessly “Don’t let them find me. Don’t let them find me.”  I was 38 years old, but I felt like I was only 3 or 4, and that a monster was looking for me. ----more---- Thanks for joining us on Lessons from Life. I’m Mary Young. Last week, we talked about definitions of emotional health and emotional healing.  This week, I want to show you the difference emotional healing can make by sharing a little from my own life.  When I was very young, my folks let a family friend live in our basement.  He was an alcoholic, but so was everyone they knew, so that wasn’t a problem for them.  His name was Jack France, and he was my buddy.  I still have a toy poodle he gave me for my 3rd birthday. It’s the only childhood toy I still have.  I treasured it, because he gave it to me. Everything I knew about Jack France when I was growing up, I learned from Mom.  She told me he was my special friend. That he always had time for me.  I liked having a special friend -- as the youngest, it always felt like no one had time for me, but he always did. In all the times Mom would tell me about Jack France, she never once told me what he did to me. I don’t even know if she knew. I didn’t know, because I had repressed all the memories as a coping mechanism. But here’s the thing about repressed memories - they don’t stay buried forever.  They will eventually surface, and the average age for that is around 38.  I was 37 when my memories started surfacing as nightmares and flashbacks. And I reacted to them the same way I reacted when I was a child. As we grow up, we learn the skills we will use as adults.  Not just reading, writing, and arithmetic, but how to handle emotions and how to respond to what happens around us.  My family didn’t process emotions - we buried them.  Keep busy, don’t think about them was the message I learned from several adult family members.  If something was unpleasant, just deny it. It didn’t really happen.  The only emotion I remember seeing in childhood was anger. I’m sure there was also love, but what I remember most are the times the adults were angry. Those are the skills I carried into adulthood - bury your emotions, but it’s ok to express anger. I walked in anger, convinced that I was a victim and the world was stacked against me, although I wouldn’t have said it that clearly back then.  So I grew up, went to college, joined the military, moved away from home, and never understood why I was so hesitant to return home.  Until I was in my early 30s, which brings us back to the opening lines of today’s podcast. Growing up, my bedroom was on the other side of the wall from Mom & Dad’s. There was one time when I was very young - probably no more than 5 - and they were having an argument.  I remember hearing thuds.  When I was 32 and the company owner was arguing with the manager, they were on the other side of the wall from me, and it took me back to that time my parents were fighting.  That’s what PTSD does, if you don’t deal with the trauma. That other incident I shared at the beginning, about hiding in the closet...yes, I really did that during a flashback.  I also crawled under the desk in my home-office, trying to hide but still be able to talk on the phone with a friend who was virtually holding my hand while I was having a different flashback. The thing about flashbacks -- no matter where you are or how old you are, you FEEL like you are the age and location where the trauma occurred, and experiencing the trauma again.  That’s why one of the coping techniques for flashbacks is to “ground” yourself in the present. But that’s just a coping technique.  It gets you through the flashback, which is really, really important.  To truly heal, you have to deal with the underlying trauma. My childhood experiences -- being molested by Jack France, having emotionally absent parents, having a narcissistic parent, having a family tree full of active alcoholics -- taught me how to behave as an adult. But the behaviors I learned weren’t healthy, functional behaviors.  Bury your emotions. Be a victim. Be passive-aggressive. Be a chameleon - do whatever it takes to be liked. Wait for people to figure out what you want/need instead of asking for it.  Never take responsibility - it’s always someone else’s fault. Or take too much responsibility - it’s all my fault. This is how I lived my life until I was in my late 30s.  I was co-dependent when I didn’t even know what that was. I wasn’t happy. I didn’t like myself. I kept trying to be like other people who seemed happy, but it never worked for me.  A friend said “Just be you!” and I had no idea how to do that. But I never knew anything was wrong. This was my normal. As crazy as it sounds to say this: Thank goodness for the nightmares and the flashbacks. The nightmares were part of what drove me to find a therapist. The flashbacks started after I began therapy, because I finally had a safe place to talk about them and deal with them. And a large part of my healing was processing the emotions. Somebody told me one time:  “you have to feel to heal.”  Take it from me - that’s not always easy. It was actually one of the most challenging parts of my healing journey.  But burying the painful emotions also buries the happy ones. You can’t numb just part of your emotions - you wind up numbing all of them. It’s been 20 years since I first walked into a therapist’s office (and no, I have not spent all of the last 20 years in therapy), and my life is radically different than it was then. It may not look any different on the outside, other than I moved from Texas to Georgia.  But the inside is where it matters.  And the inside is what’s changed. I’m not co-dependent. I’m not a victim. I’m not defined by what happened to me - it’s just part of my history. I know how to nurture myself instead of needing others to do so. I very rarely feel like I’m 3 or 4 years old - even when something happens that used to make me feel that way. I recognize and admit my emotions when I feel them, and give myself permission to feel them, and time to process them. I take responsibility for my own happiness, and my own needs. I even ask for help without feeling like it’s an admission of weakness. I don’t blame myself for someone else’s bad behavior -- it’s not my fault that Jack France liked little girls.  I don’t eat or drink my emotions away, or do “retail therapy.” There is always more work to do on the healing journey. As I said last week, emotional health is not an either/or situation, where you’re either healthy or you’re not. It’s a continuum, and no matter how emotionally healthy I am, I can always improve. And I’m OK with that, because I know I *will* improve, because I *have* improved.  And I want this podcast to give you hope that you can, too. I remember thinking nothing would ever change; no one would ever understand; everything was hopeless; and I was just doomed to be the way I was. But I was WRONG.  Emotional health isn’t just for other people, for the lucky ones. It’s for everyone. If I can heal, so can you.  If my podcasts don’t do anything but give you hope, they’ve done enough.  You are not alone. You are not hopeless. You can heal.  But you have to choose to deal with whatever it is. You have to choose to feel. You have to choose to heal.  Not just once, but every day, maybe even every minute. Choose to heal, and watch your life change.   Until next time, thanks for listening, and go make it a great week.

TRANSCRIPT   Last week, I was telling a friend of mine about the fact that I’m doing a podcast and that the podcast is about emotional healing. When I said that, my friend asked me a question that I don’t remember anybody ever asking me before. She said “what do you mean when you say emotional healing?” I didn’t have an answer, because every time I have said to somebody “I’m on an emotional healing journey,” or “I’m doing a podcast on emotional healing,” or “my next book is about emotional healing,” people just smile and nod, like they automatically know what I’m talking about. Nobody has ever asked me before what do I mean when I say emotional healing, so I didn’t have an answer. And it’s actually kind of embarrassing. So I pondered it, and didn’t have an answer. I reached out to some friends of mine who have been on the same type of emotional healing journey that I’ve been on, recovering from childhood trauma, and I asked them “what does emotional healing mean to you?” They gave me some answers, and they gave me permission to share their answers, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about today.  Thanks ever so much for joining us on the Lessons from Life podcast. I’m Mary Young, and today were talking about what is emotional healing; what is emotional health; what does it mean; what does it look like. When I asked my friends what do they think of when they think of emotional healing or what does it mean to them, all of the answers I got were in writing, so I’m just going to read you what they said. one friend said: “I think emotional healing happens when we come to terms with what has happened to us and then we allow ourselves to grow emotionally. . ie: I feel as though I have accepted what has happened to me and it no longer controls my thoughts and my life and I have become stronger when I am faced with situations that bring back my experiences. This is emotional healing. I may never be completely healed emotionally but it's a constant work in progress as I am a work in progress.”   Another friend said: I haven’t really processed that question fully but I can say that part of it is:  My night terrors disappeared years ago. There is less emotional knee-jerk reactions to things said or seen. I process a little differently now. But I still have times when I'll relive something. Whether it’s a 37yr old bad choice or reliving a horrible moment again. To me, emotional healing is a process that I'm constantly refining (in or for) my brain. It isn't so easy to trigger me anymore, but it’s not impossible. and then my third friend that shared said:  This is hard. I’ve started to type a response and stopped three times. I keep wanting to compare it to a loss of someone or something and the stages that a person goes through. The death of a loved one or pet, surviving an accident, a war, losing your home or community. Some ppl get “stuck” in a phase, denial, anger, etc. Emotional healing is when you have allowed yourself to go through all of the emotional phases and come through on the other side intact. Not the same but healing. Things still trigger but not as often or are as painful hopefully. So those are three answers from three survivors of childhood trauma, and they say basically the same thing that I was thinking. So I put all of that into my brain and let it percolate around, and came up with the following when I talk about emotional health or emotional healing, this is what I’m talking about. Emotional health is being able to feel your emotions without being controlled by or ashamed of them, and being able to express those emotions appropriately. Emotional healing is the process of getting there, and that process is unique to each individual. I took that definition back to my friends and all three of them agreed that it sounded like what they meant. Being able to feel your emotions -- allowing yourself to feel your emotions -- without being controlled by or ashamed of them, and being able to express those emotions appropriately, and healing is the process of getting there. Again, that process is unique to everyone. The healing journey that I was, on the steps that I took -- yours will be different. There may be similarities, but we are not the same people, so there will be differences, and each one of us is unique, so our healing journey will be unique.  So that’s my definition of emotional health and the emotional healing journey. We’re going to be talking about that in more detail over the next few weeks, because how can you go on a healing journey if you don’t know what it looks like, or what you’re trying to accomplish? I will tell you this much, and I said it to my friend when she said “I still have healing to do, I will probably always be healing.” I told her that we think of healing the way we think of a broken bone or a cut. The cut scabs over; the scab falls off; you might have a scar depending, you might’ve had to get stitches depending, but you’re healed. The cut is no longer there. The bone mends, it knits back together, and you no longer have a broken bone. You are healthy again.  Emotional healing is not either/or.  Either I’m emotionally healthy or I’m not. Emotional healing/emotional health is a continuum, and all along that continuum you need more healing. I needed more healing when I was 21. I needed more healing when I was 38 and went to therapy. I needed more healing when I was 40 and out of therapy. I needed more healing when I was 51 and went back to therapy. I needed more healing when I was 55 and thought I had crossed that bridge from the unhealthy to the healthy, before I realized it was a continuum. There will always be areas where I need to heal emotionally, and that’s just part of becoming a better version of me.  The difference is in 1998 and in 2011, the areas where I needed to heal were debilitating. They were keeping me from being able to function to my full capacity. Now, the areas where I need to heal are... I want to say normal and I know that’s not right, and I’m not trying to minimize, it but it’s more of an understanding myself. Why did I overreact to that statement, that kind of thing. I like the person that I have worked hard to become. I am a better version of me than I was before I started this healing journey. You can be a better version of you. You can find the you that you were meant to be, and that’s all I want.  I want me to be the best me that I can be. I want you to be the best you that you can be. And if understanding emotional healing and emotional health helps you get there, then please keep listening. Please keep reading the transcripts, because I’m gonna share what has worked for me, what my journey has looked like. And maybe you’ll find some value in that. If nothing else, you’ll know that you’re not alone. And that may be the most important thing to know. Because we always feel like we are the only person going through it.  You are not alone. I am not alone.  Thanks for listening. I hope to see you again, and don’t forget to go make it a great week.

TRANSCRIPT I’ve got a question for you. When you’re going someplace, especially someplace you’ve never been before, how do you find it? Did somebody give you directions? Maybe somebody texted or emailed you directions turn by turn. Back in the day, did you pull out a map or map book and plot your directions? I remember back in 1969, our family took a vacation from Ohio to St. Louis. My mom contacted AAA and got two or three -- I think they’re called trip books -- and she used those to plan the trip. They had information about every state that we were going be going through. Things that we could stop and see along the way, campsites, all kinds of stuff. We knew that we wanted to visit family in Illinois. Everything after that was up for grabs. She used those trip books, and she planned our trip to get from Ohio to Illinois to St. Louis, and all the way back home. And it worked, because she researched, and because she planned. Today I’m sure you can still contact AAA and get trip books, but I don’t know anybody who would, because we have the Internet. And we have cell phones and smart phones, and every smart phone has a GPS app so we’re good to go. All you have to do is program in the address you want to go to, or the location you want to go to, and it gives you turn by turn directions. You can’t get lost. And that’s great, if all you’re worried about is going from point A to point B in some geographic location. What if you’re talking about your career? “What do you want to be when you grow up” is a question that we’re always asked.----more---- Looking at it a different way -- what is it that you want to do with your life? What kind of job do you want? How do you get that job? What do I need to know to be able to get that job? What do I need to be qualified to get that job? And again, you can do some research, and you can do some planning, and you can just follow that plan and know exactly what you need to do. When people talk about having five-year plans, it’s the same kind of thing. They are planning out where I want to be in five years, what I want to be doing. All of that stuff is wonderful for things like careers, or family trips. But what about life? And I draw your attention again to the graphic at the top of the page. That start line and that finish line, and how it’s not a nice straight progression from start to finish, but full of twists and turns, and double backs and loop arounds, because that’s what life does. Life has twists and turns, ups and downs, plateaus, mountains, valleys, cliffs, caves, lakes, oceans, ponds, gravel roads, paved roads, dirt roads, and very, very few road signs. There’s not a lot out there saying hey, go this way and you’ll be happy. Go this way and you’ll be healthy. No, it’s hey, welcome to life! Have fun! Figure it out as you go along. Good luck with that. So now what do we do? We try, and we figure it out as we go along. So, road trips and careers, you can plan and research and have a chart laid out, and kind of follow a path. Life? Yeah, you can have ideas, and sometimes you get there and sometimes it throws you a whopper. Here’s the whopper that I dealt with. It wasn’t really life per se, although it’s part of life. It was my emotional healing journey. Thanks for joining us today on the lessons from life podcast. I’m Mary Young, and we’re going to be talking about what in hindsight is probably the most important question -- I could even call it a life-changing question  --  that I’ve ever been asked. So in an emotional healing journey, how do you know when you’re healed? When I broke my leg last year, it was easy to know when it was healed, because they took x-rays. They took x-rays at the beginning, and said oh look! Those bones aren’t together, and they took x-rays at the end and said oh look! You’re good now. If you have a cut or a scratch on your arm or your leg or your hand, you know it’s healed because it’s no longer there. Sometimes there will be a scar - sometimes not, but the cut or the scratch is no longer there, so you know you’re healed. When you have the flu, you know you’re over the flu because you no longer have flu symptoms.  But emotional healing - that’s all inside. There are not physical symptoms like it is with the flu or a broken bone, or a cut or scratch, or poison ivy. So how do you know when you are emotionally healthy? How do you know how to get there? Where’s the road signs? Where’s the trip books that I can use that will say follow these steps and you’ll be good? Oh my gosh, I would love to give you a one-size-fits-all answer. The longer I live life, the more convinced I am that there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all answer. Yes, we may have commonalities, but we are also unique, and we each deal with our issues individually, uniquely. And what works for me may not work for you, and vice versa. I will say this though. Counseling helps. It’s worth every penny that I’ve spent, and every hour that I’ve spent in a counselor’s office. What makes me say that? My personal experience. But here’s where I’m going with this. When I first started seeing Tracy, the counselor that I see now, in the very first or second session that I had with her, we were talking about why I was in therapy, what I wanted to get out of the therapy. And I said I want my past to stop kicking my butt. I want to be stable. I want to be able to function. I want to be healthier than I am now. I just want to be a healthier me.  And that’s when Tracy asked me the question that honestly has changed my life. And it’s actually a two-part question: what does a healthy you look like? That’s part one. I said I want to be a healthier me, and she said great! What does that look like? So I walked out of her office, and I pondered. I pondered, and I pondered some more, and I continued pondering. And as I pondered I would write, because that’s how I process things is by writing.  So I did some therapeutic writing and some journaling, whatever you want to call it, and by the time all was said and done, I sat down one day and just started a piece of paper. Up at the top I wrote what does a healthier me look like, and I started writing down bullet points. And I took that list into my next Tracy appointment, and shared it with Tracy, and when I got home I threw it on stack of paper in the office and forgot all about it. Yes, really, I did. But I said it’s a two-part question. Part one - what does a healthier me look like? That was my list. This is what I want to be. This this is what I think a healthy me would look like. Part two is the kicker. What does it take to get there, and are you willing to do that work? For me, getting there meant spending a lot of time in Tracy’s office. And these were not just casual sit down and talk about the weather conversations, these were if I could’ve hidden behind the couch while I talked to her I would’ve because the stuff that I was sharing was so terrifying to me. So I spent a lot of time in my counselor’s office. I spent a lot of time journaling and doing therapeutic writing. I did a lot of retraining my brain, facing things that were hard to face, looking at memories that I had repressed, facing things about myself that I didn’t like or that were hard to face about myself. Turns out I’m not the nicest person in the world, even though I always thought I was growing up. But here’s the thing... I said a minute ago that when I came back from that Tracy appointment where I had read her that list, I took that piece of paper and I threw it in a stack of paper in the office and forgot about it. That is literally true. I did not go into Tracy’s office each week going okay! Today let’s talk about number six on that list. I’m not that kind person. There are people who are meticulous like that, but that’s not me. I go into to Tracy’s office and say here’s what’s driving me crazy today, and that’s what we talk about. And three or four years after I first started seeing Tracy, I was deep cleaning my office so I could paint it. And so I’m going through the stacks of paper, and I ran across this list. By then I had totally forgotten I had ever made that list of what does a healthier me look like. And I stopped what I was doing, and I read that sheet of paper, and I started to cry. Not ugly tears. Happy tears. And I’m kind of blinking back tears right now as I share this, because it was so powerful. There were 18 items on that list, and as I worked my way down through that list, I went check...check...check. All but two of those 18 items, I could check off and say hey, I’ve got that. And the two that I could not check off, I was actively working on. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather. I had forgotten that I ever made that list, and I’d certainly forgotten what was on it. And I didn’t realize it, but all those times that I went to Tracy’s office and dealt with whatever was driving me crazy, it was actually working its way through the items on the list, bringing me to the point where I could say oh my gosh, I’m emotionally healthy! And because I had succeeded in the first 16 items, the fact that I was still working on the last two items didn’t bother me, because I knew that I would get there, because I had already gotten there with the other items. And there’s power in that. There is power in knowing what you want to achieve There’s power in writing it down. There is power in having an accountability partner. In my case, the accountability partner was my counselor. For you, it could be somebody else. But the somebody, whoever it is, has to be somebody that will encourage you to be a better version of you. Somebody who will celebrate with you all these little victories that you’ll have along the way. And I’m telling you...when I say little victories; they could be TINY, almost too small to see. And it is so critically important that you notice those, and you recognize those, and you celebrate those. And you honor those, because that is how we change. Incrementally. By baby steps. And you need that accountability partner, that celebration partner. Maybe you don’t have anybody like that in your life, and I’m really really sorry if that’s the case. I hope you have an accountability partner, a celebration partner. But you know what? If you don’t have that in your life right now, I have a Facebook page.  Go to Facebook, and look up the lessons from life podcast. Find that Facebook page, and you leave me a comment, and I will celebrate your victories with you. Because your victories deserve to be celebrated. Because you are becoming a better you, and that is one of the best things that you can do for yourself. So remember the question: what would a healthier you look like? And the corollary: what will it take to make that happen, and are you willing to do the work? Ponder that, and remember: You are worth healing. You are worth being emotionally healthy. You deserve to be healthy. You deserve so much more than what you’re letting yourself have right now.   So please. Be good to yourself, and be gentle with yourself. Thank you so much for listening today.  Go out and make it a great week

TRANSCRIPT   In January 1999, I started seeing my first therapist. I worked with her for a couple years. My friends told me there was a night and day difference between who I was before I started therapy - how I seemed - and after I started therapy.  And I felt different. Stuff wasn't driving me crazy anymore. I wasn't having flashbacks any more from my childhood trauma, so I figured I was healed. I went on my happy way. I was stable. I was more successful than I had ever been. More confident than I had ever been.  I was like “wow, this therapy stuff really works. This is good!”    And about 10 years went by, and then suddenly – well gradually -- I started to change. And it started to feel more like it had before I first started going to therapy, and I was so frustrated by that, because I was healed. What was this doing cropping up again? What was going on?  ----more----  Now, it wasn't coming back with the same intensity that it had when I first started seeing a therapist, but it was definitely... it was back. And it was affecting me, and affecting my perception of things, and I knew whether I wanted to or not, I was going to have to find a therapist again. I had moved by then to a different state, so I couldn't go back to the original therapist, but I knew based on prior experience, therapy was the only thing that was going to help me through it.    and I was talking to my friend Barb, who I've known since she was a freshman in college and I was a sophomore (so it's been a couple years now), and I was like “Barb, why?  what am I doing wrong that this is coming back?  I thought I was healed - what did I miss?”    It’s been eight years since Barb and I had that conversation, and I still remember her answer to me.    I had recently moved into a house with a yard, and I was planting stuff in the yard, and had been doing that for a couple years I guess. And she said “you know Mary, you like to garden. What do you do when the weeds come back? Do you look at the weeds and go why are these weeds here? I just pulled these weeds last year! Why are they back again? What did I do wrong? What’s wrong with me, that the garden keeps getting weeds? Or do you just look at them and say oh look,  I've got some weeds. Let me go get the weed killer. Let me go start pulling these out and deal with them?”    Thanks for joining us today on Lessons from Life. I'm Mary Young, and we’re gonna be talking about the weeds, and how they pop up and what to do with them when they do.    We all have weeds in our life. We all have areas that we work on, that we think we've dealt with, that will come back around and need to be dealt with again. And most of us will look at that and think it means there's something wrong with us.   I gained back that 10 pounds I lost -- I must be a failure. I'm unemployed again -- I must be a failure. My kid is having trouble in school – I must be a failure. My siblings and I don't get along – I must be a failure. My New Year's resolutions petered out after six weeks -- I must be a failure.     You are not a failure.   My childhood trauma came back to be looked at again, I must be a failure. I must be broken. I must be defective. I must not have looked at it the right way the first time.    None of that is true. What’s true is that we all have weeds in our life, and we will spend our life pulling up weeds, and they will come back because that's what weeds do.    The birds fly by and plant weed seeds for us. The squirrels plant weed seeds. The wind blows the dandelion seeds around, and so then your perfect lawn has dandelions in the middle of it.  Because weeds happen.    They are part of life, and we have a choice. We can sit there and go “oh my gosh! I'm a failure because I have weeds!”   Or we can get busy pulling them up, dealing with them.    I don't care what you're talking about. In my case, it was childhood trauma and my healing journey that came back and needed to be looked at again. In your case, it could be something else entirely – finances, weight, employment, children, siblings, parents...what ever. Having to deal with issues does not mean that you are a failure. Having issues come back to be looked at again does not mean that you are a failure.    It means that you get to look at it again. Whoo hoo!  Yeah, I was so excited, believe me (you know I wasn't - that was sarcasm). But the thing is -- each time that it comes back, it's less powerful than it was the time before. As long as I keep the flower bed weeded. As long as I get after those weeds when they come back, and I don't let them sit there for three or four years before I try to pull them out, eventually that flower bed will not have weeds in it.   But even when that happens, I still have to be vigilant because the wind is still gonna blow the dandelion seeds, and the birds and the squirrels and the chipmunks are still going to plant weed seeds in that flower bed.    It’s part of life.    But it does not make me a failure because I have weeds growing among the flowers. It does not make you a failure because you fell off the wagon; because you stepped away from the diet; because you did some emotional spending when you were trying to keep to a budget. All it does is identify here's another area where I need to work, or here's an area that I need to work on some more.    You are not a failure. You are not broken. You’re a flower bed that happens to have weeds in it.  So am I.  And I can take my time, and I can let those weeds grow while I try to ignore them, or I can choose to deal with them.  There will always be weeds. I will always have the choice. Do I want to deal with the weeds, or do I want to ignore them and hope they go away on their own?    Speaking as a person who loves to play in my yard -- they don't go away on their own. I am looking out my living room window right now at a weed that is 5 feet tall, because I did not go out and weed that bed because it was 85° out this summer, and I can't work in the heat. And I could look at that 5 foot tall weed and I could say oh my gosh, Mary, you are such a failure as a yardener, and as a person who wants to grow flowers, because look how tall that weed is! Think about what the neighbors must think when they drive by and see that. Everybody must hate you and your yard, because look at the weeds!   Yeah. Go back to episode one of the podcast if that's the way that you think.  If that's the way that you talk to yourself when you see areas that need work, go back to episode one of this podcast and listen to it again.    Good self talk does not beat yourself up.    So I look at that weed outside my window, and I go “wow, I dropped the ball this summer. I'll do better next year.”    I look at the weeds that crop up in my life and go “Oh, I get to look at that again. Let’s schedule an appointment with Tracy.”    Don’t beat yourself up because you have weeds, deal with them.  Promise yourself to deal with them. Preferably when they're small so that they don't get uncontrollable, but if you're caught up with other stuff and you don't have time to deal with the weed until it's 5 feet tall, that's okay.    As long as you deal with the weeds.    Because I promise you. If you just put your head in the sand and try to pretend they're not there, they won't go away. They just get bigger. Dealing with stuff is not always easy, but it's always necessary, and it's always beneficial. So please... remind yourself you are not a weed.  You are not a failure.  You’re just a flower bed that has some weeds that need to be dealt with.  Just like I am.    If you're not sure how to deal with the weeds, then get some help. In my case, I found a therapist. I will always recommend therapy as a good option. Support groups would be another good option. A trusted friend could help. Don’t beat yourself up because you have weeds. All it means is that you’re human, and you’re alive.    So remind yourself -- the weeds do not define you.  They simply challenge you.    Thanks for listening. Go make it a great week.

TRANSCRIPT   I'm watching the movie the King's speech. I remember liking it the first time I saw it a few years ago, but I am seeing so much more in it now than I did then. And at this one point, I had to stop the movie. And I ran for the microphone because what's in my brain, in my feelings, in my heart, I just wanted to share.  The elocutionist- the elocution trainer that the King visits, who's not a doctor although he does have an office on Harley Street, is always after the King to talk about his personal life. What it was like as a child. When did he start stammering. Why did he start stammering. And it all started when he was about five, which is apparently common for stammer errors. And as the king starts sharing some of what his early family life was like - no wonder he stammers.  David has abdicated, and Albert is now King George the sixth. They’re getting ready for the coronation, and the King has found out that this person who’s been helping him is not a doctor. Now, Loke never claimed to be a doctor, he did not do anything fraudulent. Everybody just assumed he was a doctor. So when the Archbishop started investigating and found out Loke was not a doctor, the king felt betrayed, because he thought he was going to see a doctor this whole time.  And so Loke was explaining to him how he got started with this, cause he's just a failed actor. He wasn't anybody. But after the Great War (that would be the first world war, for those of us who don't know it by the other name) a lot of the Australians, when they came home, they were shell-shocked. Today we call it PTSD. And they had lost their voice. They had lost their ability to share, to speak, because they had screamed for help for so long and nobody had heard.  And what this man said was: “my job is to give you back your voice. To let you know that somebody is listening.” And the king takes exception with this because he's feeling betrayed. So they get into an argument. The King's like: “you know, I didn't even want to be king but you made me think I could blah blah. But you're not even a doctor blah blah.”  And he turns around and Loke is sitting in the chair that George will sit in when he's crowned king, or after he's crowned King, and he's like get out of that chair.  Loke:  Why? King:  I'm telling you to. Loke: Who are you to tell me what to do? King: I'm your King. Loke:  You said you don’t even want to be king.   And this goes on and on until finally George is shouting “I have a voice and I will be listened to!”  And I paused Netflix and ran for the microphone.   Thanks for joining us on this episode of Lessons from Life. I’m Mary Young, and we are talking about having a voice.   I ran for the microphone because of that scene in the movie, that conversation in the movie. It brought back a memory of a conversation that my current counselor Tracy and I had probably three years ago now, maybe four years ago. We had been talking about my childhood, because we did a lot of talking about my childhood in therapy. and at some point I looked at her and with a tremble in my voice like I have now, and with tears in my eyes like I have now, I shared the realization that I had been stifled as a child. Children should be seen and not heard, okay? Some of us grew up with that. That’s kind of stifling, but there was all kinds of other stuff because I was the youngest, and I just wasn't important. Nobody needed to listen to me. I didn't have anything of value to share.   And I looked at Tracy, and I said “oh my God they stifled me” and she's like “yeah.” and I said “I'm not stifled anymore. I'm allowed to talk about this stuff.” and she's like “yeah.” I was driving home from that session, and I just remember I kept pondering and pondering. You know, I just kept running in my brain “they had stifled me.” “I'm not stifled anymore.” and I found myself suddenly just gripping the steering wheel with both hands, and screaming at the top of my lungs “I'm not stifled! I'm not stifled anymore!” which is what the king was saying in the movie. I have a voice and its worth listening to. It deserves to be listened to.   My question for you today is “who is stifling you? What is stifling you? What is keeping your voice silent, and what will it take to break that silence? What is keeping you stomped down from achieving your potential, and what will it take for you to stand up and say: I am no longer stifled. I deserve to be listened to. I have a voice, I have a dream, and by God I am going to make that dream come true.   Find what's holding you back. Find what is stifling you. If you have to go to therapy to do it, go to therapy. Therapy can work wonders. If you can figure it out on your own with a trusted friend, if you have a life coach, whatever. But figure out where your stifling is coming from. Figure out where your self-doubts are coming from, and deal with them. Because I gotta tell you, the Mary that I was when I was stifled, and the Mary that I am today are not the same person.   Yeah, we’re in the same body. We have the same brain and the same voice, but I am not the person that I was when I was stifled. I am doing things that I honestly never thought I would. A podcast for crying out loud! I would never thought that I could do a podcast, and anybody would want to listen to me. I am no longer stifled. I have a voice, and it's worth listening to. You have a voice, and it's worth listening to.   Don’t let people stifle you.   Just don't.   Figure out what is holding you down, what is keeping you down, what is holding you back. Figure out where you are being stifled, and stand up for yourself.  The first time you speak your truth, your voice may shake, and your knees may knock, and you may feel like you're gonna be sick to your stomach.   And that's okay. That’s normal.   It’s not fun, but it's normal.   But you know what? The next time you do it, it gets a little bit easier, and the time after that it gets a little bit easier. And if you have a good support system, if you have healing partners and friends who love you and support you, and you get the toxic people out of your life... Katie bar the door!     You will be amazed, utterly and completely amazed at how things can change. And I know that, and I know it's possible, because I've seen it with myself. Because I can look back four years and say “WOW!” The stuff I'm doing today, I would never have dreamed of doing four years ago.   I have friends who are working through emotional healing, and they are seeing the same thing that I saw. When they stop letting themselves be stifled, when they start believing in themselves, and believing in their voice, and sharing their voice, the world changes.   Your life changes.   Their life changed.   My life changed.   Everything this podcast is about, is about having a better life. About liking yourself. About loving yourself. More accurately, everything I’m sharing here is stuff that I've learned along the way.   This one this is a biggie.  Not being stifled, expressing your voice.   That is right up there with loving yourself, in terms of what is life-changing. And I want your life to change. I want you to see how your life can be when you're no longer being pushed down. When you're no longer being stifled. When you're expressing your voice, both to yourself with self talk and self-love, and to the world around you.   Don’t stifle yourself.   And don't let anybody else stifle you.   You have a voice.   You deserve to be heard.   Thank you for listening today.   Go out and make it a great week.

TRANSCRIPT When I first started seeing my therapist back in January 1999, we talked about what I needed to deal with. Which was repressed memories coming back to the surface and insisting that I look at them, and not ignore them and not push them under again. She gave me a piece of wisdom that has become one of my rules for life. “as we work through this you're going to be outputting a lot of negative, so you need to make sure that you input a lot of positives to counteract that.” it's almost 20 years since I first saw Tricia, and I still live by that particular statement. Thanks for joining us on the lessons from life podcast. I'm Mary Young, and we will be talking today about positivity.----more---- So what is positivity? You can hear it from all kinds of people -- power of positive thinking, just be positive, be a Pollyanna! Wear those rose-colored glasses. Everything works for the best. Just stay positive. Now that's not really the way that I interpret that. Inputting positivity means I need to find things that make me feel positive. It could be posters on Facebook...there are lots of positive pages on Facebook that will post memes on a regular basis. It could be heartwarming stories. It could be good news stories. It could be me just making a journal every day, writing down things like what a beautiful sunrise I saw this morning and how that just made my heart sing, or the day that a friend asked me out to dinner instead of me always being the one to initiate. Things that are positive in nature. It does not mean go be a Pollyanna -- and by the way Pollyanna got a bum rap because everybody thinks that being a Pollyanna means that you're just not admitting that there's anything bad in the world, and that's not what those books were about. I've read them all, and it was about looking for the good no matter what the situation was. She never tried to sugarcoat the bad situation; she just always tried to find something good in it. And that to me is what having a positive attitude is about.  It’s not denying the bad things happen. It’s not refusing to feel the pain, but it's holding onto the belief that something better will come out of this. Studies have shown that positive mental attitudes are good for health. Optimistic people live longer than pessimistic people. Is that optimism always warranted? No. sometimes it gets shot down. I've been known to use what I call cautious optimism instead of full-blown optimism, because while I want something to work out, I'm not 100% sure that it will. But I would much rather look for positive, and pour positive into my heart and my mind than negative. And again, I'm not saying that a person can't say “I'm really sad right now.” Or “I am depressed.” That’s not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that if you have to choose between glass-half-empty and glass-half-full, try to look at it like the glass is half-full, because that’s gonna be better for you in the long run. Here’s the thing. If you have spent your entire life thinking the glass is half-empty, it's hard to change your thinking. Negative mental energy will drain you, but positive mental energy will fill you up. So input positive to counteract the fact that you’re outputting negative. It makes all the sense in the world to me, and I have actually experienced it in my own life. How do I do that? Well for me, it's with what I read, because I read more than I listen. I don't watch videos on YouTube, I read transcripts. You might be a person that watches videos on YouTube. That’s OK.  If you're on Facebook, you know that every third post is a cute animal video. Take the time to watch the cute animal videos; the ones that are heartwarming; the ones that just make you go awwwww. That’s part of the positivity. Pay attention to the posts or the memes or the shares that are about people helping each other. Mr. Rogers talked about after tragedies or catastrophes, when he was a little boy; he asked his mom “how do you go through something like this?"  His mom said “look for the helpers.” After every catastrophe, after every tragedy, people will come out of the woodwork to help. Look for them. Focus on them. That’s the kind of thing I'm talking about. There are lots of different places you can find that. Facebook has a lot of pages about positivity and positive attitudes. Marc and Angel Hack Life is a good one. There’s the power of positivity. There’s one called heroic stories -- that's actually a website and an e-zine -- an emailed magazine. It sends out one or two stories a week about simple acts that people have experienced that somebody did for them, or maybe they did for somebody else, that had a lasting impact. Heroic Stories. You can just Google that, or the website is heroicstories.com.  Some people like to read Chicken Soup For The Soul for the same kind of reason. Upworthy. There’s lots of good stuff out there. Surround yourself with positive friends, not friends who are always seeing the negative. Find out what works for you. We are all different people. There are all lots of different ways, but if you just Google positivity, or if you just go the Internet and search positivity, you’ll find all kinds of things. Somebody did a study -- his guy did a study at the cellular level with super microscopic cameras, and he compared the difference between positive comments and negative comments and what that did on the cellular level. I will look up the link and include it in the transcript, because it is so powerful and it illustrates so clearly the power that positive attitudes, positive thoughts, positive mental energy, positive words have on us, and the destructive power of negativity. So I would invite you to check out the link in the transcript, and go watch that study. https://fractalenlightenment.com/765/spirituality/how-our-thoughts-affect-water-and-us Watch that video. It’s incredible. And let that show you, let that get through to you about the importance of positivity and how good it is for us as human beings. How good it is for our bodies and our minds and our hearts and our health to be positive instead of negative. And to not just input positivity but to be a positive person and to output positivity to the world around us. If you're so inclined, you could make yourself a promise. This is a promise that I've made to myself, and I'm just sharing it with you here. Because I care about my mental and emotional health, and because I understand the effects of positivity on my body; I promise myself that I will look for the positive in the world around me, in the people around me, and in the events in my life. I also promise myself that I will be positive as often as I can, to the people around me, to the world around me, and to the events around me. I’m not wearing rose-colored glasses, not pretending that things aren't bad when they are, but recognizing that even in the darkness you can find a spark of light, and a light or candle shines brighter when everything is dark around it. You wouldn't see the stars if you didn't have darkness for them to shine in, so promise yourself to look for positivity, and promise yourself to be that positivity that other people are looking for. Thanks for listening. Go make it a great week.

TRANSCRIPT   One of my favorite books has a passage where the characters are having a conversation about a decision that had been made 20-30 years previously. At the time, it seemed like a good decision. but here they were 30 years later, and it was coming up to... well, not quite bite them, but coming back and needing to be faced again.    And as they have a conversation about it, one of the characters says something that resonates with me every time I read it. “We all did it,” she said. “And for us - for me at least - it came from taking the quiet way, the easy way. Forget, I thought.  Forget what’s behind. Look to the future. As if the future were not built grain by grain out of the past.”    There is so much truth in that one sentence.  ----more----  And yet...  stop me if you've heard this before: Really, you just need to forget that that's in the past you should move on forgive and forget just let it go that's old history   Have you ever heard anybody say that to you when you're trying to deal with something out of your past?  I don't know why people say that kind of thing.   I don't know if it's because they don't want to be part of the conversation because it's uncomfortable for them.   I don't know if it's because they truly believe it.   But I'm here to tell you... our present is built from our past. Our future is built from our past. Grain by grain out of the past. What happened to you in the past determined how you acted. It determined choices you made, behaviors you did. And until you understand that, and deal with that, the future is not gonna change. We touched on that in the episode about the monster in the basement.   Hi, I'm Mary Young. Thanks for joining us on this episode of lessons from life. Today we’re talking about “FUHGEDDABOUDIT.” Do we really need to forget the past, or can we study it, deal with it, learn from it, and just let it be part of our past?   Some people tell us to move on. Some people tell us you can't change the past so why bother looking at it. You know, I had a monster in the basement. It got loose and I was trying to protect it from the scientists. I tried to protect the monster. That was in the last episode. That’s what it feels like to me when people say don't think about the past. Let the past bury the past. They’re saying put the monster back in the basement.   NO.   Look at it.   It might be scary.      It might be painful.   Get a healing partner, but look at it. Don’t get stuck in it, don’t wallow in it.  Don’t sit there and reread old journals and let it spiral you down. That’s not healthy. But it is healthy to look and see why did you behave a certain way, or where are the parallels between what happened to me when I was four and the decisions that I made when I was 28.    And believe me there are parallels that I did not see until I was 56. If I had studied my past earlier, I might not have made those decisions when I was 28.    If you don't look at it, you can't heal from it. If you just throw a Band-Aid on a gaping wound, all you're doing is hiding it.  We’ve hidden enough in our emotional healing journeys.  It doesn't matter what you’re healing from. You could be healing from abuse. You could be healing from some other trauma. At some point, something happened that requires you to be on an emotional healing journey, and you will not successfully manage that journey if you don't come to grips with your past.    People tell us “just move on.”  How can you move on when you're standing in quicksand?    Looking at the past with a trusted healing partner helps firm up the ground beneath your feet.   Here’s an example. From the time I was a freshman in college until I was in my 40s --so a 20 year time span --October was always a bad month for me. The closer we got to Halloween, the worse it was. I didn't know why. I just knew that I would go into a blue funk. I would get melancholy. In college I would take to my bed for two days over Halloween. I had no idea why, and I never looked at my past because I was afraid to.   And because the one time I said something to my mom, because I had seen a movie that triggered me. And I said to her “hey, I just watched this movie in this class, and it was about an alcoholic family as seen through the eyes of the four-year-old, the kindergartner or five-year-old little girl, and it was really hard to watch.”    And mom's response was: are you saying were alcoholics? And like a good little girl, I backtracked. “No, mom. I’m saying that maybe we had a drinking problem somewhere.”   When I was in my 40s, I sat down and looked at that alcoholic thing again, and found all of one side of my family was alcoholic. Or had a drinking problem -  phrase it how you will. Only one of them ever admitted to being an alcoholic, but I never saw any of them without a drink in their hand.   All.  Day.  Long.   I started coming to grips with the fact that I come from an alcoholic background, and when I knew that, then a lot of other stuff made sense and I could deal with it. I went to Al-Anon and got some coping techniques there.   But let's go back to October. I never said anything to the family about October being a bad month because as the above incident shows, I would not have gotten much help from them. But in therapy, I started trying to remember. Late October. Halloween timeframe. I mean, seriously, all we ever did was go trick-or-treating, so what else could there be? And I remembered an incident, and when I remembered that incident it all made sense.   Here is the amazing thing to me. I don't have a problem with Octobers anymore. I don't even notice it.  I remember the first time, it was November and I was like wait what happened to Halloween?  Where did the end of October go? I did not get melancholy. I was not in a blue funk, because I had dealt with the issue.    You have to deal with stuff, and you can't deal with stuff by forgetting it. You can't move on when you're stuck in quicksand.   Don’t get mired down.   Work with your therapist to come up with a definition of when you're wallowing as opposed to studying. And try not to wallow, because that's just not healthy. But studying, looking for clues, looking for patterns and parallels -- that’s part of getting healthy. And that's what we want.   We want to be healthy. We want our past to not control us anymore, and every time you sweep it under the rug, you're just letting it control you for a little bit longer.   I know it can be scary. I was terrified.   But you can do it with a good healing partner, with a good support system.   You can do this.   So don't forget about it.   Study it.   Learn from it, and let it go where it belongs, just as a piece of your history not as something that is still controlling you   Thanks so much for listening.   Go make it a great week.  

Transcript   I've been reading a book called Girl, Wash Your Face by Rachel Hollis. Rachel Hollis is a Christian, and I know that not everybody listening to the podcast really want to read things written by Christians. But I’m here to tell you that in what I’ve read so far, she is not one of those people who beat the reader over the head with Christianity. She is just sharing common-sense, practical wisdom, things that she has experienced. I’m only about 4 chapters in - it could change, but that’s what it seems like so far.  ----more---- So here’s what Rachel has to say in her chapter where she talks about fear, and how fear can hold us back.   She says: “...let’s take the fear away.  The best way I know to do that is to talk about it. The Bible says, let that which is in the darkness be brought into the light. when things are allowed to sit in the darkness, when we’re afraid to speak them aloud, we give them power. the darkness lets those fears fester and grow until they become stronger over time. if you never allow your fears out then how in the world can you disseminate them?”   I think she meant dissipate right there, not disseminate, and that’s the way I’m going to be looking at this. So how do I dissipate those fears?  And the answer is, by looking at them, and talking about them.    Hi, I'm Mary Young. Thanks for joining us on Lessons From Life. Today, we are talking about the monster in the basement, also known as “sometimes you gotta look at the stuff that you'd really rather hide.”   When I was growing up, I used to have recurring nightmares. Now, I did not know they were recurring nightmares, because I didn't know the concept, and some of them were the standard stress nightmares that we've all heard about. Like you're walking down the hallway of the school buck naked during finals week, for classes that you haven't studied for, and haven't even attended since the first or second day of class. That’s one thing. Those are just stress nightmares.   But I had three nightmares that followed me all the way through college, and came back again as a young adult. I'm not going to go into huge detail about them here, because I don't want to spend two hours on this podcast, but in all three nightmares there were some similarities. There was a monster. It was chasing me. I was the target, and I could not hide. Every time I got to someplace that I thought was safe, the safe person would tell the monster where I was.   And I have to stop and take a couple deep breaths just after saying that, because even though it's been 20 years since I've had one of those nightmares, I can still feel the terror of that little girl trying to hide.   When I watched Schindler's list - and if you've seen it, you know it’s a black-and-white movie. But there’s one scene where a little girl’s wearing a pink coat, and she's trying to hide from the Nazis. And when I watched that, I was right back in my nightmare land, with my monster.   Interestingly, when I went to therapy, it wasn't two or three visits in, and I had another monster nightmare. But this one was different. Usually in my monster nightmares, I was being chased. The monster wanted me for something. This one wasn't like that.   In this nightmare, the monster, which I always kept locked in the basement hidden away from everybody, had gotten loose. And scientists knew that I had a monster, and they wanted to study it. And I've seen enough science fiction movies to know that when a scientist starts to study the alien, the alien dies. And I had to protect that monster.   I was doing the best I could to get that monster back into the house. I got it back into the house, and I'm trying to get it back into the basement, and it doesn't want to go there, and it's running from me, hiding in different rooms in the house. I finally got it locked in the bathroom just as the scientists were knocking on my door, and so I could pretend that I was home alone.    “That noise?”   “No, I don't know what that noise is, there's nothing here.”   And then BOOM!   The monster breaks out of the bathroom by kicking the door down, and all I could think was I have to protect the monster.   And I’m going to make myself cry just saying that out loud.   Because if you are a survivor... if you were a sexual abuse victim when you were a child, or an emotional abuse or physical abuse victim... if your abuser taught you that this was our secret and we can't let anybody know ,then you are also protecting your monster.   Because that's what we were taught to do.   Don’t protect the monster.   Let it out of the basement.   Study it.   HEAL.   Everything that I did as an adult, every behavior I took, every reaction I had, was a direct result of the fear that lived in me from the time that I was a very small child because of that monster, and because I was afraid people would find out about that monster. And I say this, knowing that I didn't even know there was a monster.   I repressed all my memories because they were too hard to look at, and too hard to remember. Even so, subconsciously, I knew that there was a monster that I needed to protect. And that dream?  When I shared it with my therapist, we were both going yeah, you know, you can't get much plainer. We don't need to do any analyzing on that one. It was so obvious.   And the hardest thing I've ever done in my life is spend time with my therapist looking at the monster.   Looking at what happened to me.   Looking at how what it happened to me affected me 40 years later. Even 50 years later.     I still find things and I've been emotionally healthier for years. Okay, I can't put a time on how long I’ve been healthier, because it's not a black and white thing, it's a continuum. It’s not two sides of the bridge, where this side is healthy and that side’s unhealthy. It’s a continuum. But I have been on the healthier side of the continuum since 2001, and then I moved even farther along the healthier side of the continuum in 2012 or 2013, while I was in my second round of therapy.   I do consider myself healed. Although there will always be healing that needs to take place, I feel like it's more now just normal dealing with life stuff. My therapist and I do still find some things that carry back to those early childhood experiences.   But here's my point.   You can't hide the monster and expect to heal and grow.   You can hide the monster, OR you can heal and grow.   You can't do both.   If you choose healing, then at some point, and it doesn't have to be right now, but at some point you are going to have to let the monster out of the basement.   In a safe, trusted environment, preferably with a good healing partner like a therapist.   But you have to look.   You have to look, and you have to let yourself feel, and you have to let yourself heal, because if you don't, that monster that's hiding in your basement is going to control your life from now to the day that you die.   And you deserve so very much better than that.   You are worth more than that.   You are worth healing.   Find the courage to take that first step, and don't forget to be gentle with yourself.   Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.   Go out and make it a great week.

TRANSCRIPT   This is a lessons from life "short take."  I'm Mary Young; thanks for joining us.  The news has been full of the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.  Today on Facebook, I received a request to show solidarity as a woman by blacking out my profile pic. The idea is to show how empty the world would be without us, or something. It's also a protest against how rape survivors are treated. I'm not doing it. NOT because I don't feel sympathy for survivors (I am one), and not because of any political reason (both major political parties have sexual offenders in them). THIS is my reason. ----more---- Rape is an equal-opportunity offender. Sexual abuse is an equal-opportunity offender. Women and girls are not the only people who have been shamed into silence. A male friend of mine told me one time about the time he went to a local organization that was offering a workshop for people who had been sexually abused. He walked in, asked someone at the front desk where he should go for the workshop, and BECAUSE HE WAS MALE, she directed him to the workshop for sexual offenders. IT NEVER OCCURRED TO HER THAT HE COULD BE A RAPE VICTIM, BECAUSE HE WAS MALE. That still hurts my heart. So no, I will not "black out" my profile picture. If you want to, go right ahead. But while you're standing in solidarity with all women everywhere, please remember that men and boys get raped, too. Sometimes by men, sometimes by women. And sometimes girls get raped by women. And a large portion of the time (you can look up the stats), for both boys & girls, men & women, it's by a family member or someone they know. Instead of using this past week for an emotion-fueled outburst, use it as motivation to educate yourself on what to say to a friend if they confide in you, and how to recognize sexual abuse in your own family unit, and maybe even to think about why it's SO important to the family unit that the abused person keep silent to protect the perpetrator. What is up with that?  WHY is it so important that grandpa not be embarrassed, when they victimized their own family member? If we were better at helping people when they disclose their "shameful secrets" (and it's NOT their shame, NOR their secret - both of those belong to the perpetrator), then we might find more people speaking up sooner. But as long as we victimize the victims, or refuse to see the reality of their experience, this will all continue, regardless of gender, political party, ethnicity, belief system, etc. But if we were better at helping people when they disclose, then we might find more people speaking up sooner.  But as long as we victimize the victims, or refuse to see the reality of their experience, or flat out deny the reality of their experience, saying to  them:  you just made that up to get attention, this will never stop.  It will continue regardless of gender, regardless of political party, regardless of ethnicity, regardless of belief system, regardless of anything you can come up with that helps you demonize one side or the other. It's not about blacking out your profile picture. It's not about women not being heard. Women are not the only victims. It's about victims not being heard. It's about there not being a safe way to disclose, and that is what we need to change.   Thanks for listening, and go make it a great week

TRANSCRIPT Yesterday on Facebook, one of my friends posted that there are only 100 days left to this year.  They posted that as a “if there was something you’re going to do this year, you’re running out of time” kind of reminder, and here’s where my brain went. My brain jumped ahead to New Year’s resolutions, because of what I’ve been thinking about for this week’s podcast. Whether you do resolutions or not, you’ve heard people talk about them. You might’ve done them earlier in your life, I don’t know. But think back think about all the times you’ve heard somebody talk about “this year I’m going to… what”?  It’s always I’m going to do something different. This something different is usually something that I don’t like about myself that I’m going to try to fix.----more---- This year I’m going to lose weight. I’m going to quit smoking. I’m going to eat better. I’m going to exercise more. Have you ever, ever, and seriously -think hard. Think of all the resolutions you’ve ever heard anybody say, including yourself. In all of that, have you ever heard somebody say “this year I’m going to get more massages.” This year I’m going to make sure I get a mani-pedi at least once a month. This year I’m going to pamper myself. Think about it. Have you ever heard or made a resolution like that?  I couldn’t remember ever hearing anything like that, so just out of curiosity I went out to the Internet. My search for common New Year’s resolutions came up with a couple different charts. In the United States, there might be 25% of the people who make New Year’s resolutions, who will resolve that they are going to do better at self-care, whatever that means to them. In the UK it was only 12%. So we’re talking anybody from an eighth to a fourth of the population are the only ones that are saying I’m gonna do better at self-care. And why is that?  Try something with me. I’d like you to repeat two sentences. Don’t worry about whether or not their true -that’s really not my concern.  Are you ready? Number one: I’m working on self-care. Number two: I’m working on pampering myself.  My question is: did you feel any different when you spoke those two sentences? Also, think about how you, your family, and others might react to hearing you say it. Do you think they would react the same way to both sentences, or would there be different reactions?  I can only speak for me, but I gotta tell you straight up the inner critics in my head - 0MG. they went ballistic when I used the word pampering. Why is that such a bad word? Because we were taught that it means we’re selfish. We were taught that it means we don’t care about other people. Folks, I am here to tell you: we were taught wrong. Hi, I’m Mary Young. Thanks for joining us again on lessons from life. Today we’re talking about another facet of being gentle with yourself:  self-care. Or as I like to think of it, pampering ourselves.  So just out of curiosity, when was the last time you had a massage? Or spa day? Picnic in the park?  Night out on the town?  Watch your favorite sports team…IN the stadium?  When was the last time you told somebody no?  When was the last time you had a quiet drive in the country, or took a long weekend, or spent time just doing what you wanted to do and not doing anything you didn’t want to do? How about reading a book, or relaxing? Soaking in a bubble bath?  How long has it been?  If you’re like most of us, it has been way too long. Why?  Why is that?  Do you have cell phone (I promise I’m going somewhere with this)?  My cell phone has a low battery indicator that lets me know when it’s running out of steam. It actually tells me when it gets dangerously low, and it tells me it’s gonna shut itself down if I don’t plug it in and recharge it. My laptop does the same thing.  So why don’t we do that for ourselves? It just seems like one of the constants in today’s world, especially in the US, is that people are always tired. Or let’s be really, really honest here, overtired. Sleep deprivation is a real thing, and it’s not just going without sleep for 24 hours. It’s not getting enough sleep because you’re up too late, and have to get up too early, just to try and get everything done.  I really wish that we could look at ourselves in the mirror, and see a battery indicator on our forehead like we do on our phones. It would be bright green when it’s full, and it would be going down to a vivid red when it gets into the danger levels. Maybe that would remind us you have to take care of yourself before you can take care of anybody else.  You have to. And I know, I know every one of you is going: but Mary, wait!  Mary, you don’t understand.  You don’t have to say anything. I know. I really do! I know why you can’t: My parents have reached the point where I have to take care their business as well as my own. nobody else can do it I have three kids under the age of four I have a job that expects me to work, not just the eight or nine hours at my office, but to be on call in the evenings and on weekends and on vacation, because  I’ve got all this technology that lets them reach me at any time of the day or night, and that’s before we bring in that two hour commute each way I gotta pay for my house I gotta pay for my car I gotta pay for my kids college I’m going to night school in addition to working full time, so sleep is a luxury I have to work three jobs just to make ends meet and don’t forget all that afterschool stuff my kids are involved in, And that’s all before we start talking about… I gotta clean house and cook meals I gotta go grocery shopping gotta keep the yard looking presentable  If we’re doing all that, how in the world are we ever going to find time for self-care? It’s just not possible. And yet…if you don’t make the time for the self-care, none of the rest of this is ever going to get done.  So let’s talk about what keeps it from happening. Remember those two sentences that we read out loud? I’m working on self-care.  I’m working on pampering myself. Why did my inner critics go ballistic when I said pampering, even though they didn’t have any problem at all when I said self-care? Here’s .my thought.  Americans don’t value self-care as a virtue. Self-care sounds like luxury, especially if you’re working three jobs to make ends meet. It sounds like pampering, and pampering is selfish, and it’s wrong to be selfish.  But self-care is critical to maintaining physical and emotional health. You can’t do it without it. So why is it that so many of us buy into that myth that self-care is luxury, that it’s wrong? Is it because we’ve never known anything else? We’re just doing what our parents did? We just want to be liked and accepted and admired? Could it be that we just think this is how you adult, and that part of adulting is being tired until the kids are 25?  Or until you find yourself in an early grave?  I don’t know. I don’t know why, but I have some thoughts. First off, if you’ve ever flown on an airplane, and if you actually listened to the safety briefing that the flight attendant gives, they say “if there is a sudden drop in pressure the oxygen masks are going to appear. put your own mask on first before helping anybody around you.” what they are really saying right there is that if you’re not getting enough oxygen you’re not gonna be able to help anybody else. Loss of oxygen or lack of oxygen will kill you. Think about the spider plant. Now, if you know the spider plant, you’re seeing it in your mind right now. It’s pretty cool. I love spider plants. They’ve got all these nice little leaves hanging out, and then the way that the plant decides to make more plants is it sends out a little shoot, and so you have this not-quite-stick coming out of the pot, and at the end of that shoot, that very flexible shoot, is a teeny tiny new plant. And most times when you see spider plants, they’re being displayed as hanging plants in the house and all the little shoots dangle below the pot with the little babies hanging off of them. Here’s the thing. The important thing to remember about spider plants is that if the soil is dry in the parent pot, you don’t water the baby that’s hanging below it. You water the parent pot where the mom is. That new little plant that lives at the end of the shoot?. It gets all of its nutrients through that shoot from the parent plant. If the parent plant is dying because it’s not getting watered, the babies aren’t gonna live either. So flight attendants tell you to take care of yourself first. You can’t help anybody else if you are suffering from hypoxia because you didn’t put your oxygen mask on. And there will always be people who argue with that.  You are the only person on this planet who can take care of you. You are the only person on this planet who is like you, and you may not think you’re all that much because we all have issues with confidence, but trust me on this one. You are. And so am I, even when I don’t feel like it.  When I was growing up there was a hair coloring product with the tagline because I’m worth it. Can we steal that and use it for ourselves, for self-care? Because I’m worth it. Pampering:  because I’m worth it. I cannot pour from an empty pitcher, and that means I have to care for my needs. I have to pay attention to my needs, and I have to give my needs the same respect I give my boss’s needs. Or my child’s needs, or my parents needs, or my best friends needs, or my spouse’s needs. I am worth it. You are too.  You are worth treasuring.  You are worth pampering.  You are worth so much more than you realize,  And so much more than you believe.  And probably so much more than other people will ever tell you, so I’m telling you now.  you are worth it. You are worth the massage. You are worth the sports game. You are worth the occasional treat. Maybe you can’t afford to go to a pro sports game every week - can you save up and go once a year? Maybe you can’t afford to go on a big vacation. That’s okay. If there’s one good thing I learned in the military, it’s that whenever possible, your vacation time should be spread out over the year, not taken all at one time. Now I know this depends on how much vacation time you actually get, but I also know that your body/mind/emotions would appreciate a long weekend every couple months more than it would appreciate 50 weeks of nonstop stress followed by a break.  And if you won’t do that for yourself, can you do it for the people who love you? Here comes that other voice again… but Mary, they’re the reason I have to do all this other stuff!  What would happen if you explained to them that you are working on self-care  -- or hey go whole hog and tell them you’re working on pampering yourself?  They’re either going to understand, or they’re going to think you’re selfish.  If people really care about you, they’re going to rejoice when you’re doing something that takes care of you. No, really.  They will. If they care more about themselves, then they’ll try to make you feel bad for taking care of yourself (and that’s a whole different podcast).  You are worth taking care of. You are worth pampering.  If massage is what recharges your batteries, then schedule one as often as you can afford it. If hiking up to a waterfall is what does it, then give yourself time and permission to do that.  The big thing is: give your self time and permission to do whatever recharges, relaxes, refreshes, and refills you, because if you let yourself go empty you can’t help anybody else. Part of taking care of yourself is learning what you need, and making sure you get it. I don’t care what you call it. You can call it self-care. You can call it pampering. You can call it something else. What I care about is that you do it.  And if somebody says you don’t need that or you’re not worth that, you look them right in the eye and tell them they are wrong, because Mary says I do need it and I am worth it.  I promise, you do need it and you are worth it.  So go pamper yourself. Work on your self-care. Find what you need, and give it to yourself, and watch your life change.  Thanks so much for listening.  Remember, as you go make it a great week, be gentle with yourself and take care of you

I actually posted this as an article on LinkedIn, so instead of posting a transcript, I'll just link to it: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/living-above-line-part-ii-mary-young/   Thanks for listening!

TRANSCRIPT “...What I want to say to young girls is forget about likability. If you start thinking about being likable you are not going to tell your story honestly, because you are going to be so concerned with not offending, and that's going to ruin your story...”                                                                                                 -- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie   I haven’t been a young girl for a few decades now, but when I read this on the Facebook page “A Mighty Girl” today, it spoke to me.  If this were a blog instead of a podcast, I’d bold print this part:  ...you are not going to tell your story honestly, because you are going to be so concerned with not offending, and that’s going to ruin your story.   I struggle with this one a lot, both as I work on ideas for podcast episodes, and as I work on convincing myself to complete my current book project, which I haven’t really touched in the last year.----more---- Hi, I’m Mary Young. Thanks for joining us on the Lessons from Life Podcast. Today’s topic is  “Who am I afraid of offending?” So who am I concerned about offending?  It’s a combination of traditional, conservative Christians, friends who don’t share my beliefs, and my family members. So let’s take those one at a time. Traditional, conservative Christians --  I will tell people I “suck as a Christian,” because I don’t typically act the way all those church-people did in my childhood, adolescence, & young adulthood.  Or how they told me I should act.   In fact, I told my al-anon group one time that “the God of my understanding is not the God of my childhood.”  That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in God, or don’t have a relationship with him, but I find myself hesitant to publicly share what I really think or believe because I can imagine a slew of comments telling me how wrong I am, with the commenters cherry-picking Bible verses to prove it.  And then I would need to respond to those comments, either defending my own beliefs, or capitulating to theirs.  I don’t want to have those conversations, so I censor myself.  I need to stop doing that.  My beliefs and value system are mine, not anyone else’s, and God and I have had long talks about them over the years while I was developing them.  He lets me know when I’m out in left field, and his opinion really is the only one I care about, in that area   On top of that, I know many people today who seem to hold the same beliefs and values I do, so why do I still feel like I’m the odd one out?  For that matter, why do I still feel like I need someone else’s approval or agreement of my own thoughts, ideas and feelings, anyway?  That’s something to ponder with my therapist, I think.  Meanwhile, I’ll work on not censoring myself in my podcast and book. I have to admit though, I have another “likeability” fear when it comes to God - but it’s in the other direction. I have a lot of friends who either don’t believe in the same God I do, or don’t believe in any god at all.  I’m concerned about alienating or offending them.  My friends who don’t believe in the Judeo-Christian God have very valid reasons for their beliefs, just as I do for mine.  And while I want to be free to talk about my beliefs, as a natural part of conversation, I don’t ever want them to think I’m trying to push my beliefs on them, or to use a more traditional term: trying to “save their souls.”  That’s not my job.  Which is a good thing, because I suck at that kind of thing worse than I suck at being a Christian. J  But it’s a hundred times easier to stop worrying about offending people with my faith journey than it is to stop worrying about offending my family.   Family goes to the core of our identities - to the core of MY identity. I am a Young, and a Smith; youngest daughter of a truck-driver and stay-at-home mom; and grand-daughter of Appalachian coal-miners, all of whom brought me up to believe that family is the most important thing there is, and we should all stick together.  And yet I have lived my entire adult life away from my family, and once I was out of college, trips home were only once or twice a decade.  The majority of my emotional healing journey was based on coming to grips with childhood events; recognizing and admitting truths about my nuclear and extended family; and seeing how all of that impacted how I became the person I am today, and why I still react to some things the way I do. But I find myself hesitant to speak that truth out loud in public, in case family is watching or listening, and takes offense at what I say. But without truth there is no freedom, and no healing.  So I live away from family, and speak my truth to trusted friends, hoping family will never hear me say it. And when I do that, I’m cheating both myself and my siblings.  For all I know, instead of living in denial, they could be going through their own emotional healing journey, and it could be comforting for them to know that someone else thinks Dad’s entire family was alcoholic.  Or they might also be feeling like they’re the world’s worst child for thinking that while Mom did a lot of really cool things for us when we were growing up, she wasn’t really as supportive as she sounded, and actually fits a lot of the character traits of a narcissistic personality. Then again, if I say all that out loud, and they hear it, and they’re NOT thinking that way, I could find myself effectively disowned.  And that’s a scary thought. So I do worry about offending them, and as Adiechie says in that bit I quoted at the beginning, it ruins my story, because it keeps me from being honest. I think it’s interesting that as I was driving the 500 miles home for my mother’s funeral, 15 years ago, one of the thoughts that crossed my mind was “Now I can write my  book.”  My subconscious has known, far longer than I have, that I’m afraid of offending my family.  That I’m afraid that somehow sharing my truth, my reality, my memories, my fears and my nightmares will be seen as unjustified criticism and result in banishment. Ya know that relationship with God that I mentioned about 500 words ago?  It used to be a lot like my childhood family relationship. I was afraid of being honest with God - afraid of offending him, afraid that my questions and doubts were proof that I didn’t really believe in him. I was afraid that one day he would decide he’d had enough, and stop loving me.  And it would be my own fault, for not being a good enough Christian - not trusting him enough, not doing enough for him, not loving him enough, and most of all, not being like the church-people told me to be.  That emotional healing journey I’ve been on for the last 20+ years was also a spiritual healing journey , and it’s probably been 5years since I was afraid of making God so mad he wouldn’t love me anymore.  For me, that’s been one of the biggest benefits of my spiritual healing journey....the realization of how very much God loves me, and what that means for me in my life.  But that’s a topic for another podcast, maybe. For this one, if I’m gonna be authentic and vulnerable, whether it’s in this podcast or in my  current book project, I have to be honest and open, both about my family (without worrying about offending them), and about my faith.  Because I can’t speak for other people, but for me, I wouldn’t still be here if it wasn’t for my faith, and for my relationship with the God of my understanding. And I can’t keep that out of the story of my healing journey, no matter who it offends. So that’s my take-away for this quotation I stumbled across on Facebook today.  My question for YOU would be who are you afraid of offending? What’s keeping you from telling your story honestly, or maybe the question is who’s keeping you from telling your story honestly? You can certainly just listen to me pondering about this, and walk away and go “man...she’s talkative. I would never share all that.”  And that’s OK. You don’t have to. I just want to be the best me I’m capable of being, and that means being authentic and vulnerable.  And that means facing up to who I’m afraid of offending, and not letting that stop me from being honest with my story. Until next time, thanks so much for listening. Now, go make it a great week.

Remembering a tragic day in our history.

I actually posted this as an article on LinkedIn, so instead of posting a transcript, I'll just link to it:  https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/living-above-line-mary-young/ Come back for Part 2, where I talk about how important it is for supervisors to encourage their team to live above the line.

TRANSCRIPT When I was young, I thought life progressed in a straight line...you’re born, you grow up, you get married, have kids, have a job, then the kids grow up and you grow older, and eventually you die.  A simple, straight-forward, linear progression. I don’t consider myself young any more, and I’ve learned over the decades that there is very little about life that is simple or straight-forward.  As to that linear progression, I’m thinking it might only apply to my calendar age.  ----more---- Hi, I’m Mary Young. Welcome to the Lessons from Life podcast.  I’m calling today’s episode “Who am I, and why should you listen to this podcast?”  Seriously, why should you take 5-20 minutes out of your busy life and listen to an invisible stranger? I feel like I should have a compelling answer to that question, and I really don’t. But let’s start with introductions.  I’m Mary Young, and I like to call myself a “rolling stone now happily gathering moss.”   By that, I mean I used to change jobs every 2-3 years, and change housing locations every 6-18 months, but am now finishing up.11 years in the same house, and 13 years in the same job. I grew up in the mid-west during the 1960s, and still have very strong memories of being told I couldn’t do things I wanted to do because “girls don’t do that.”  I’m old enough to remember when it was mandatory for girls to wear dresses to school, and we couldn’t wear long pants to school unless it was below freezing, and then they were worn *under* our dresses, and we had to take them off when we arrived, and put them in the cloakroom with our coats.  I watched the original Adam West Batman on TV, and remember when the Brady Bunch and the Partridge Family were brand new shows.  I saw the original Star Wars movies in the theaters, when what is now episode 4 was the only movie.  I’ve lived through bell bottoms, pet rocks, lawn darts, no seatbelt laws and riding bikes with no helmets.  I still remember Mom telling us to come inside on a hot summer day, and making us watch TV. We could never do that in the middle of the day in the summer time. We were supposed to be outside playing. But Mom said it was history being made, and we needed to see it.  I was  8 years old, and never paid attention to the news, so I didn’t really understand how incredible it was, as Walter Cronkite told us what was happening, and we heard “...3...2...1...Lift Off.”    A few nights later, my grandma stayed up with us (mom always went to bed early), and we watched more history being made as Neil Armstrong took that last step off the ladder of the Lunar Landing Module and walked on the moon. Again, at 8 years old, I was just happy to be allowed to stay up late and play cards with Grandma. But as I write these memories today, I’m choking back tears.  I saw history being made.  But you know what? We see history being made every day - we just don’t realize it.  It’s not always something big and flashy like the moon launch...it just is. Who else am I?  I’m a daughter, but have never been a wife or a mother. Well, not a mother to humans.  I’ve shared my heart and my home with some wonderful dogs over the last 15 years, once I stopped being a rolling stone.  I have spent most of my life in male-dominated career fields, and it wasn’t until writing this episode that I realized it might have been because of all those “girls don’t do that” messages in my youth.    So that answers the “who am I?” part of the question.  The other part of the question is “Why should you listen to this podcast?”.  Ummm....So I’m not talking to myself?  :)     No, seriously...I would love to give you a compelling answer to that, but I’m not sure I have one.  I can tell you why I’m doing a podcast, and that might be a roundabout way of answering the why should you listen question. I mentioned at the beginning that as a little girl, I thought life had a very linear progression.  If I’ve learned anything over the last 5 decades, it’s how mistaken I was in that thought.  As an example, I got my associate’s degree AFTER I got my bachelor’s. If life were truly linear, I’d have done it the other way around.  John Lennon said: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”  Truer words were never spoken.  My last semester in college, I didn’t even show up to take the final exam for my “introduction to computers” class, because I knew I was never going to work with computers.  I was going to be an author, and an IBM Selectric typewriter was the highest technology I was ever going to use.  Today, those typewriters are museum pieces, and I teach people how to use my company’s computer system to run their business.  I’ve been working in the computer industry one way or another ever since I left the Air Force over 25 years ago, even though it was never what I had planned.  I don’t know if you’ve noticed the graphic that goes with the header of this podcast -- it’s a very wiggly line that works its way from start to finish.  That line represents life, and how it really works out for us.   There are set-backs and plateaus, mountains and valleys, roundabouts that make you feel like you’re spinning your wheels, but eventually you make it to the finish line.  My plans for this podcast are to just reflect on that wiggly line, as I’ve seen it in the last 50+ years.  I call it “Lessons from Life,” even though that sounds pretentious to me, because everything that happens to us, everything we experience, is a lesson, if we let it be one.  So in my episodes, I’m going to share whatever I’m thinking about, and it may be something that interests you, or it might not.  Sometimes it might be a trip down memory lane. Other times, it may sound like a self-help episode.  But whatever it is, it will be authentic and vulnerable.  And just because one episode doesn’t speak to you doesn’t mean the next one won’t, so please keep listening.  The topics will change from week to week, but the authenticity won’t.    Thanks for listening, and I hope you come back.  Until next time, go make it a great day.

TRANSCRIPT We are bombarded daily by truly bad news -- wars, rumors of wars, accidents, murders, and on and on. Couple that with the challenges that each human being faces, and it's no wonder that most of us are in need of inspiration. The problem is that the most inspirational people in our midst rarely share their life story. They simply work their way through each day, doing what they do best - facing life head-on with determination, endurance, and courage. We need those people to share their stories so we can draw inspiration from them for the living of our lives. - Chaplain Murray. When I read these words, they really hit home for me. We all have stories.  But most people you run into on any given day have no idea that their story needs to be shared. They have no idea that their story can help change someone else’s life. They have no idea that they can be an inspiration; that they ARE an inspiration. ----more---- How many times have you been in a situation and wished you could talk to someone who’s been through it? That’s why we have support groups, but they’re not always the answer.  Some people can talk to their families, but that’s not always the answer either, for a variety of reasons.  Here’s the thing. We all have experiences in our lives that can benefit others. They don’t have to be big, earth-shaking things, but for some reason we always think they should be. That’s actually one of the mistakes, or delusions, that keep us from sharing those experiences. We don’t think we have anything to give. BUT WE DO. Hi, I’m Mary Young and you’re listening to the Lessons from Life Podcast. Thanks for joining us!  Today, we’re talking about sharing our story so we can inspire others. Each of us has a unique life-history, but we also have experience/strength/hope that can or will help others. For some reason, we don’t think that the mundane parts of our life can inspire others. We don’t think there’s value in the mundane. So we ignore or discount it. But we don’t know what others need. And we’re discounting OURSELVES by thinking we have nothing to offer. Especially when we compare ourselves to others (and we usually do). I’m basing this on my own experience, not on any research studies.  Here are examples of why I think that. - I was the first person in my family to go to college. I had no idea what it would be like, or what to expect. It would have been so wonderful to have someone share their experience with me. It didn’t really mean anything to me when my parents told me it would be fine. For one, they were my parents. They HAD to say that J More importantly, as far as I knew, they had no idea either. Neither of them gone to college. I would have loved to know that I wasn’t the only person to be scared about moving away to school, or who wondered whether I would really fit in at college, or if I even belonged there. - When I was joining the military (both times), it would have been great to be able to talk to other female veterans who could help me with the pros and cons for each branch, and job choices, and even just joining up. I talked to my friends, of course, but they were the same age as me, with no military experience. - When I was 15, my dad had a massive stroke. He lived, but he was handicapped and unable to work, and Mom was a stay at home mom. Our income dropped 75% overnight.  Mom did whatever magic she needed to do to keep us afloat. To this day, I don’t know what all she did, because she never talked about it, and she’s no longer around to ask.  Which is a shame, because I could have used her wisdom when I was unemployed for 2 years, and again more recently, as I recovered from my own stroke.  But Mom never thought anything she did was all that special. It was just life. These are just a few examples, but I hope they give you some ideas, and help you see my point. Here’s the thing. We talk about being authentic and vulnerable, and we do our best to live it. We walk through what life throws at us on our journey, gritting our teeth and sticking it out and doing what needs to be done. But we keep it to ourselves, because we're too busy living life and getting through whatever issue it is to spend much time talking about it. And because we think it's no big deal - it's just life. I’m here to tell you that it IS a big deal. Let’s take something mundane, like menopause. Yeah, I know. I say menopause, and your brain says: Wait, what? Menopause? Really? What kind of story can you have about menopause? It’s just part of life. You deal with it. Yes, really. It meant SO MUCH to me when I could talk to other women who have had hot flashes and mood swings. Sometimes we’d just laugh together about how much it sucks, and other times we’d share advice on how to make it more bearable. But I needed to know I wasn't alone.  I wasn’t the only normally-nice person who could go from zero to bitch in a nanosecond, and it didn’t mean there was anything wrong with me or that I was a bad person. It was just menopause. Sharing our stories helps us know we’re not alone, and we’re not crazy or abnormal. That’s the important part. That’s why stories matter. Like I said before, we all have stories.  But most people you run into on any given day have no idea that their story needs to be shared. They have no idea that their story can help change someone else’s life. They have no idea that they can be an inspiration; that they ARE an inspiration. I'm with them - sometimes people will tell me I’m inspirational, and I get embarrassed. I don’t see myself as inspirational. Condi Rice is inspirational, coming from poverty and prejudice to where she is today. That football player from The Blind Side is inspirational, overcoming his childhood to become a great football player. Those are the stories people want to hear. At least, that's what we tell ourselves, every day. My life is just a normal, average, everyday life. Who could be inspired by that? And we sell ourselves short, every day, BECAUSE WE DON'T BELIEVE WE'RE SPECIAL. WE DON'T BELIEVE WE HAVE ANYTHING TO SHARE. WE DON'T BELIEVE WE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE. WE DON'T BELIEVE WE EVEN HAVE A STORY. We just have a life, and sometimes it's kicking our butts. Or we think we're a failure, because our husband walked out on us, or we're alcoholic, or our child does drugs, or our relative committed suicide, or we had an affair, or we lost our job, or whatever. Each of us has a story. And each of us have people in our lives who need to hear it. We don’t know who those people are, or what portions of our story they need to hear. We don’t know who has circumstances similar to ours, because we all do our best to avoid authenticity and vulnerability, even while we long for it.  Since we avoid those, we don’t know who would benefit from our experience, strength and hope, or who has experience, strength, and hope we could benefit from. And I have to be honest with you. Finding those people can be a little tricky. After all, we can’t just walk around shouting our issues to the world: Menopause!                                     Bankruptcy!                                     Infertility!                                           Cancer!                     Aging!             Unemployment!                                          Sandwich Generation!                  Drugs!                                   Failure!   That wouldn’t work well at all (and it would be *really* noisy). But... If we know ourselves, and if we’re open to sharing ourselves --warts and all-- we’ll find ourselves making connections we never expected to make. We’ll not only learn that we really *do* have a story; we’ll see how sharing that story brings hope and encouragement to someone else. Or we’ll be strengthened and encouraged by hearing their story. Sounds good, doesn’t it? And at the same time, it sounds a lot like pie in the sky. Really? Me? I have a story? I’m not anybody special. I’m just a mom. Just a grandma. Or neither of those, because I’ve never had kids. Just a working man.  Just a student.  Just a husband. Just a wife. Just a daughter, or a son. There’s nothing special about me. I don’t  have any story to share. I *know* some of you are thinking that right now. And I don’t want to stand up here and say “You’re so wrong!” because that’s not positive and encouraging. But you know what? You’re so wrong! :) Actually, it’s not so much that you’re wrong as that you’re human, and that’s a very human response. So let me ask you this. Is there something you wish you could go back and tell your younger self? If there is, you have a story to share. Has there been a time when you thought: “if only I’d known about that before ...”?  If there is, you have a story to share. Have you accomplished or survived something  you never thought you would? You have a story to share. Has there been a time when you thought: “I wish I could talk to someone about this...whatever”?   If there is, you have a story to share, because somewhere out there, someone is wishing they could talk to someone about that exact same thing, but they have no idea who would relate to it. Has life kicked you in the teeth so much and so often that you’re toothless? Then you have a story to share, even as you see another life-kick heading your way, and even if you don’t think you can take anymore. Our human tendency is to think stories have to be BIG! And SPECIAL! And FLASHY!  We don’t realize that sometimes the biggest stories are the quietest. We all remember Thomas Edison, because he invented the lightbulb, among other things. But he had something like 99 failed attempts before he was finally successful. We make a big deal about his successes, but the real story is in how he persevered in the face of all those failures. So don’t sell yourself short. You have a story to share, and someone out there needs to hear it.   Sharing our story gives us two benefits right off the bat. 1) we begin to see the victories we might not have noticed before, and 2) we find out we're not alone. Let’s start, right now, by helping you discover your story.  I’m going to ask you a couple questions. You can write them down, or just answer them in your head. I wish I could go back in time and tell myself ___________. When it feels like life is kicking me in the teeth, I ________________. I am currently experiencing (check all that apply) __menopause                      __pregnancy                        __infertility                __singleness __empty nest                        __divorce                   __money problems  __newly married      __childbirth               __toddlers                 __teenagers __childhood issues   __unemployment               __sandwich generation        __health issues                   __family issues   Your answers to those questions are the beginnings of figuring out your story. But now what? Sitting in your house or car, answering a couple questions from a stranger in a podcast -- how will that change anything?   You know what?  You’re right. I can’t change anything. But  YOU CAN.   Step 1 is figuring out the story you want/need to share, or the story you wish someone would share with you. The questions you just answered can help with that. There are more questions in the podcast transcript. After you figure out your story, you have to tell yourself it’s OK to share it.  When your inner critic says “no one wants to hear this!” remind yourself of the things you wish someone had told you. Someone out there wants to hear YOU, and YOUR story. After you’ve given yourself permission to share, find your audience and start sharing.   We’re all different, so we’ll all have different sharing methods that work best for us.  It could be a facebook post, or a blog. It could be letters to your family, your kids, or your grandkids.  Some people might talk into a tape recorder.  Others could find a support group. You could also share today’s podcast with your friends, and see if their answers to the questions at the end or in the transcript match yours. If they do, maybe you need to share your stories with each other.   You could even look at all of this and say “not today.”  That’s OK, too.    But you have a story, and it wants to be shared.  Take whatever time you need, but don’t cheat yourself, or the rest of us, out of your story.   You could be just the inspiration that someone else needs.    ****************** Thanks for listening to today’s podcast about discovering and sharing your story. I promise we’ll talk about this again.  Until next time, thanks again for listening, and go make it a great week.   See next page for the questions I promised to share.----more---- These questions can start to help you figure out your story.   I am currently experiencing (check all that apply __menopause                      __pregnancy                        __infertility                __singleness __empty nest                        __divorce                   __newly married      __childbirth __toddlers                 __teenagers              __childhood issues   __unemployment __sandwich generation                  __health issues                   __family issues   My biggest success is ____________________________________________________ An area where I feel like a failure is _________________________________________ I wish I could go back and tell my younger self ________________________________ I really wish I knew someone I could talk to about ______________________________ I wish I had known ______________________________________________________ When it feels like life is kicking me in the teeth, I _______________________________ When everything is going right, I ___________________________________________ My biggest challenge right now is __________________________________________. I’m handling it by _______________________________________________________.  

TRANSCRIPT   In this "Comfort food for the heart" short take, I'm remembering my good friend Dee Hansen, who passed away on July 26, 2018. When I first met Dee Hansen, I just thought I was going to get a greyhound.  I had no idea I was also going to get a good friend, a dog-sitter, a holiday family, and a surrogate mother. ----more---- I had only been in Georgia about 18 months when I met Dee. I’ve been friends with her longer than anyone else I’ve known here.  And being Dee, with a heart bigger than Texas, she took me under her wing just like she took in that family of raccoons, and made sure I had a place where I belonged.   When I look at my life in Georgia, Dee is woven through it like the connecting thread in a beautiful tapestry.  She gave me my very first greyhound (after testing me by having me dog-sit while the family went on an Alaskan cruise J ).  She invited me to family gatherings, first as photographer and later as a pseudo-member.   I call the Hansens my “holiday family” because Dee made sure I was never alone on Thanksgiving or Christmas. She went with me when I was house-hunting, and it was because she wanted to show me Mark’s first house that I found the house I live in today, just a couple houses away from that first one of Mark’s.   We traded dog-sitting, and she would keep my fur-kids on a moment’s notice, whether it was for an unexpected business trip or an unexpected hospital stay.  I could always count on Dee to be there for me, as she’s been there for so many others, both human and animal, throughout her life.   The world is a better place because she was in it for 77 years.    My life is forever changed because in spring of 2003, Dee didn’t just adopt a greyhound to me, she adopted me.   We’re not family by blood, but she’s family of my heart, and I cannot imagine my life without her in it.   Godspeed, Dee. The reunion at the Rainbow Bridge must have been one for the record books. And thank you. Not just for bringing greyhounds into my life, but for bringing me into yours. I don’t know if I ever said this to you out loud, but I hope you knew I love you.   When I heard about Dee, I remembered a poem I had written in 2006 for another friend. I dug it out of my hard drive, and with a couple minor edits, was able to make it fit for Dee.  I shared it with her family, and they printed it on the back cover of the remembrance document they had at her service.   Flying without wings mvy 7/29/18   Some folks are bound to earth With chains of tempered steel. Others just have silken threads They seem to break at will.   Some folks fly high because they know The art of air machines, And some, like Dee, can know the thrill Of flying without wings.   She’s soaring now, above the clouds That block my earthbound view. I celebrate her flight With a heart that’s torn in two.   She flies alone -- no Jon, no kids, No pets   – it’s solo time. We’re left behind, and yet our friend Is with us for all time. We watch her acrobatic flight With hearts that are tear-dimmed. She soars, she wheels, she dips and dives, Then skyward soars again.   We sense her joy at chains released, Delighting in her flight. And even though our sky is dark, She’s flying into Light.   One last approach over her old home, One last message to send. A feather-kiss to Jon, Then to the rainbow she ascends.   She’ll wait for him to join her there, For their hearts are so entwined That even in her new home, He’ll be always on her mind.   Love doesn’t stop for death or grief, Or other earthly things. And when the time is right, They’ll both be flying without wings.

  TRANSCRIPT Like most people, I’ve always been hugely self-critical. I would be the first to point out flaws in something I’d done, and I would beat myself up for something as simple as running late, or forgetting to buy something when shopping.  Hi, I’m Mary Young, and this is the Lessons from Life podcast. I’m glad you joined us!  Today’s episode is “Be Gentle with Yourself,” and we’ll be discussing self-talk. ----more----  “Be gentle with yourself” is a lesson I’ve learned over time, and worked hard to internalize.  That one phrase can encompass many different things. Don’t yell at yourself internally Don’t expect yourself to be superhuman Treat yourself the way you would treat a friend, or a small child. Say nice things about yourself, to yourself. Give yourself the benefit of the doubt. Take care of yourself. Pamper yourself. Be kind to yourself. Love yourself.  I think that last one really sums it up. LOVE. YOUR. SELF.    Now, it’s possible that you’re listening to this podcast thinking “Love myself? How do I do that?”  If your thoughts sound like that, start working your way through the items I just listed.  And if you’re thinking “I don’t even know where to start!” may I suggest talking to yourself the way you would to a friend, or to a small child.  If a friend came to me and said “I overslept and was late for work today,” I wouldn’t respond with: “You are SO lazy! How do you expect to keep your job if you keep messing up?”  But I used to say exactly that, or something similar, to myself when I overslept.    Think about some habit or behavior you’re working to change. For me, it’s weight loss and exercise.  Since menopause, it seems like just looking at a pint of ice cream will add five pounds.   I know that the surest way to lose weight and keep it off is to spend more calories than I take in.  I actually have a watch that tracks my steps, and an app on my phone to track my exercise and my calories. That’s been true for a couple years now, and in those same 2-3 years, I have watched my weight steadily creep upwards.  Or to say it the way I saw it on Facebook one time:  The doctor told me I need to lose ten pounds. I only have 30 more to go.    Obviously, if my weight is increasing instead of decreasing, I’m not making much progress towards my goal.  And I just re-wrote that sentence 3 times in my head, looking for the kindest way to say it.  I could have said: obviously, I’m doing something wrong.  Or obviously, I’m not very good at it.  I could even have said proof that I’m lazy, or I really suck at this weight-loss thing.    Why does it matter how I say it, if I’m just talking to myself?    Think about all the times in your life someone has tried to persuade or motivate you to do something.    Now, think about the times they were successful. Did shaming you, or calling you stupid, lazy, incompetent, etc. persuade or motivate you?   If the answer is no, then why do we think those techniques will work when we use them on ourselves?    I can call myself all kinds of names when I think about my sporadic attempts at fitness and weight loss over the last couple of years.  I can tell myself the extra weight makes me an ugly cow and proves I never finish what I start.  Honestly, doing any of that would not help me get back on the fitness bandwagon. In fact, since I’m an emotional eater, it would probably have the opposite effect and drive me deeper into a tub of my favorite ice cream.    The question is: what would I do if one of my friends was sharing her weight loss/fitness struggle with me?  I would be gentle with her.  While not downplaying the importance of weight loss and fitness, I wouldn’t try to shame her or make her feel bad.  I would look for ways to encourage her, and victories to celebrate with her, even if they were tiny.   We would celebrate her first time choosing fruit over ice cream, and the time she rode her exercise bike every day for a week, even if it was only 5 minutes a day.  I would speak compassionately, while still reminding her how important it was.  I might even tell her how much I love having her in my life, and my concerns that if she doesn’t take better care of herself, I might lose her too soon.  If I can do all that for my friend, I want to be able to do it for myself as well.  Therapists call it “self-talk,” and it’s an important part of our confidence and emotional well-being.    Maybe you’re listening to these self-talk ideas thinking: “that sounds really good Mary, but when I try it, the positive words get drowned out by my inner critic (or critics).”  I hear you, loud and clear.  My inner critics used to shout at me through a megaphone that was attached to a giant amplifier and a concert-sized speaker.  I lived with those inner critics for over 50 years, and they consistently sabotaged any of my attempts to speak positively or compassionately to myself.  As I became healthier emotionally, I became less willing to have this critical chorus constantly showering me with negative comments.     A few years ago, I decided I’d had enough, and I wrote them an eviction notice.  I won’t’ share all of it here, because it was several pages long and specific to my own reality.  For me, I felt like I had multiple inner critics, all of them angry. I pictured them as a circle of angry people surrounding me like a mob.  As part of the eviction process, I gave this mob a name -- the “circle of fuckheads.”  Using that name helped take away some of the power I had given them over the years.  A key point in my eviction notice was that I told them I’d had enough, that they no longer got to live in my head rent-free. Specifically, I said “You don’t own me, you don’t control me, and I’m not living my life to please you.”    I don’t know who or what your inner critic looks like (mine were angry family members from my early childhood), but I do know that none of us need to sabotage ourselves, and none of us need to spend our lives listening to angry or critical voices in our heads who keep us from believing in ourselves or being gentle with ourselves.  That said, just because I wrote an eviction notice doesn’t mean it’s the right activity for you - everyone’s different.  But dealing with the inner critic is necessary.   It’s been 4 years since I evicted that ‘circle of fuckheads’ and replaced them with a ‘circle of love’ -- words of encouragement from people who support me.  While I still hear them occasionally, it’s nothing like it was before the eviction notice, and it’s easier to silence the criticism and doubt, replacing it with encouragement and positivity.  To be honest, I’d probably never have reached the eviction point if I hadn’t worked with a couple of very good counselors over the years.  Working with them helped me improve my emotional health to the point where I no longer tolerated the ‘circle of fuckheads’ and their constant critiques.   Being gentle with myself is a learned behavior.  It’s something I have to practice on a daily basis, sometimes even every minute.   I’ve actually been practicing it for over 20 years now, and while I’m much better than I was when I started, I’m still not as good at it as I will be.  But I’m better at it today than I was yesterday, and I’ll be better at it tomorrow than I am today.  Because I value myself enough to be gentle with myself, even when I’m not 100% successful at something.   Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go write myself an encouraging letter about how important it is for me to succeed with my weight loss and fitness goals, and figure out a way to reward myself for the milestones (of any size) I achieve along the way.   And I’ll continue finding new ways to be gentle with myself, even on days when I’m tempted to bully myself instead. I hope you’ll do the same.   Thanks for listening.  Now, go make it a great day.