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.