Like Driving in Fog

The God of my Understanding

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.

No Reason for Shame

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.

Grief is Like a Ball in a Box

Links referenced in this podcast:

Lauren Herschel's Twitter Feed

Karen Lanser's blog post about Lauren's Twitter Feed

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31 - Acceptance is Key

Transcript

Have 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.

30 - Check Your Motivation

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?

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29 - The Chameleon Effect

TRANSCRIPT

I 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 beliefs
  • Why 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

28 - You are Not Alone

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.

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27 - Will the Real You Please Stand Up?

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.

26 - A New Year, a New Name

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.

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25 - It's OK to Change

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.