15: Healing from Bullying: How Being Bullied in the Past May be Affecting Your Present
Bullying can be very traumatic and have long-term effects in our lives.
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In this episode, you will learn about:
Why bullying can be traumatic
How bullying from your past may still be effecting you in the present
How to heal from bullying and the bully wound
How being raped manifested as a bully wound for me
How I recognized my trigger and healed this pattern.
How a past rumor can still affect the present
How to heal from the trauma of being bullied by a “mean girl”
Episode References:
How to Do the Work: Recognize Your Patterns, Heal from Your Past, and Create Your Self by Dr. Nicole LePera
Follow Dr. Nicole LePera on Instagram for more free resources
The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities into Soulful Practices by Casper ter Kuile
Chakra Resources
Learn About Your Seven Chakras and How to Keep Them in Balance (Via Chopra.com)
Beginner’s Guide to Chakras (Youtube Video)
THERAPY RESOURCES
Therapy Aid (low cost therapy for essential workers, and a few other qualifying groups)
Check out my Instagram Post for Questions When Interviewing a Therapist
Interested in learning more about EMDR? Learn more about EMDR here.
Resource Round Up
Feel your feelings
Sit in meditation
Or try this Healing Exercise: Dialogue with Your Inner Child
Try a movement practice
Create an intentional ceremony.
Use your creativity.
Write your bully a letter you never intend to send.
Therapy & Specifically EMDR
*Listen to the episode for more specifics about each suggestion.
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
4:09 Teaching
20:34 Listener Question 1
44:22 Listener Question 2
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This podcast was transcribed by an AI tool called Otter. Please forgive any typos or errors.
Amanda Durocher [intro] 0:00
Hi there, I just wanted to give you a heads up that this is a podcast that discusses heavy topics such as rape, grief and trauma, as well as uses explicit language listener discretion is advised. Welcome to New View advice, a safe place for you to ask your most vulnerable questions about life, relationships, healing, and so much more. I'm your host, Amanda Durocher. And I believe our fears and traumas are often what holds us back from living life to the fullest. Join me here each week as I offer advice on how to move through whatever is holding you back from being your best self. Let's get started. Hello, and welcome to new view advice. If you're new here, my name is mandatory Fisher and I'm your host. And if you are a returning listener, welcome back. This podcast is a podcast where I answer questions about life, relationships, healing, and so much more. The goal of this podcast is to offer advice on how to connect back to yourself. So my goal here is to help you connect with you. It is not my intention to tell you what to do, my intention is to help you connect back to yourself. So I am so grateful to be here with you today and to be having this conversation about bullying. So I chose the topic of bullying because in August, this is a wound that I was working through. So I was sitting with past bullying wounds and different layers that we will talk about later in the episode. And how bullying was still affecting my present day life. Even though in my present day, I wasn't necessarily being bullied. So bullying is something that I think a lot of people have experienced. And I think there's a lot of shame over being bullied. And I think that so many people in today's society play down the effects of bullying, especially the older you are I think we're having more conversations with the younger generation today. But I think that these conversations are new. And I know that they weren't really there when I was a kid. I know we talked about bullying and health class in this big sense. Like, oh, if you get beat up at school, you're being bullied. Or if somebody yells at you and calls you a mean name, you're bullied, but we didn't really talk about bullying in the full spectrum of what bullying is and how traumatic it can be. So I just quickly wanted to define trauma for anyone who might be thinking that bullying is not a trauma. So according to Dr. Nicola para, who's the holistic psychologist, and has an amazing book, how to do the work, she defines trauma as any experience where an individual lacks the ability to emotionally regulate or process and then release the event causing dysregulation to the body's nervous system. trauma impacts each person differently due to their own conditioning, and modeled coping skills and cannot be qualified or measured. I absolutely love this definition of trauma, because this has been my experience. And I really agree with the fact that we can't judge each other's traumas. And we can't compare. Because different things can affect different people differently. And it depends on what your home environment was like. It depends on what your coping skills were, it depends on how safe you feel. There's so many factors that come into how trauma affects you, and how it can get stuck in your body. So two people could be called fat, one could just let it go. And one can be traumatized for the rest of their life and develop an eating disorder. We don't know. And it is not our responsibility to judge others trauma, it is our responsibility to heal our own trauma. So I'm really excited to have this conversation today. Because I really feel like bullying can be so traumatic because I've really looked at how much being bullied affected my own life. So I'm going to do a little intro today where I'm going to talk about my experience. And I'm going to walk you through how I knew I was triggered, how I healed this trigger where I'm at now and just walk you through an example of healing a past wound. And then I'm going to answer two questions today from two people who have been bullied in their past and have awareness about how it's affecting them in the present moment.
Amanda Durocher [teaching] 4:09
So I want to give an example from my own life to discuss how a past wound was affecting me in the present for anyone who's new to this concept and is learning to look at their wounds and to see where they're triggered. I thought that this might be a great example to show my process and also, maybe for you to reflect on a place where you feel triggered in your own life and how that might not be what's happening in the present. But it might actually be connected to something in the past. So for me, the wound that was up was this bully wound. That's what I'm going to call it. And it was up because as I mentioned in my last episode, but for anybody who didn't listen that I had a tic tac go viral. And on this tic toc. There were a lot of positive comments, but there were also some negative comments. I was gonna say a lot of negative comments, but the truth is there weren't actually that many negative comment Since, but I felt like there were a million, but there were probably like 1% negative comments, and they really affected me. They really triggered me, how did I know I was triggered, I knew I was triggered because I couldn't stop talking about it. It was up for me, I couldn't stop feeling it. My phone felt unsafe. Every time I opened social media, I felt anxious, I got a ping in my stomach, I felt like a sense of safety had been ripped out from under me. And I couldn't figure out why. So I just kept talking about it. And everybody I talk to, you just kept saying, oh, people say mean things on the internet all the time, don't take it personally, or oh, those people are just unhappy in their own lives. So they're just projecting that onto you. And I understand these concepts. And this idea, and I believe that that is true. But I couldn't let it go. I knew that I was triggered, I knew that something was deeper than this, because I could not let it go. And honestly, what the people were saying on the internet wasn't that bad, or it just didn't make sense. Like some people thought that I was the worst person in the world for giving three reasons that I liked being sober. And it's like, that just doesn't make sense. So I knew I was triggered because I couldn't let it go. So after about a week of ignoring my trigger, and what ignoring this trigger look like was talking about all the time, so I wasn't ignoring it numbing out, eating an unhealthy diet, if I'm honest. And in a lot of cleaning, I clean when I'm avoiding. That's my sign to myself that I am avoiding doing something. So that's a sign of resistance for me. So after about a week, I finally sat with this trigger. And what that looks like for me is I go into meditation, or I sit in meditation. And this looks like sitting in a comfortable spot, breathing, putting on some calming music. For me, it's bilateral beats. I like David grant. Bilateral beats are a healing modality. So it's a sound healing. So I find it really helpful when I'm sitting in a meditation, especially a difficult one. So I sat with it. And I asked myself, I kept asking, Why is this bothering me? Why is this bothering me? And it was uncomfortable, and I had resistance. But I've done this long enough that if I just kept asking myself, I'd get a knowing. And when you get to the root, you just know it. You feel it in your heart, your body relaxes, or even might clench, but you're like, oh, yeah, that's it. So I didn't realize I considered being raped. As I was bullied. I didn't realize that I put them together, that somewhere in my consciousness, my inner child considered that being bullied. And now I'm like, this obviously makes sense, because bullying is to seek harm, intimidate or coerce someone perceived as vulnerable, and you're no more vulnerable than when you're being raped. So, of course, of course, this is a form of bullying. Of course it is. But I had never put it together. So being triggered on tick tock actually triggered a wound that did with rape. They don't seem like they correlate, necessarily, but they did. Because what happened with the TIC tock was that my sense of safety was ripped out from under me, a safe place, social media, where I usually use it to numb and zone out was all of a sudden, a place where I was getting hit with negative comments. And that was something new for me. And that was a trigger for me. They don't necessarily have to make sense, but the wound added up. Because being seen on tick tock at such high level reminded me of being seen in high school. And after being raped in high school, you know, I didn't want to be seen at all. I wanted to hide under a rock, I couldn't even be in my own skin anymore. When I think of high school, I think of feeling like I'm almost half outside my body and that when I ever dropped down into it a little bit, my skin was on fire. Like it was like spiders crawling all over me because it was so uncomfortable to be grounded in my body, because there was so much unresolved trauma in it, that I literally was running on fight or flight constantly. It did not feel safe in my body. So I bring this up only because this is what came up for me from a tick tock. Right? Does it necessarily make sense to you doesn't have to it aligned for me. That wound triggered this wound, and so I had to heal it. And how do you heal it? I sat with it. And I let myself have a lot of hard feelings that I hadn't allowed myself to have. I cried a lot. I screamed a lot. And I forgave myself for being vulnerable. Because that's something you'll find if you have a bully wound that so many of us have decided it's unsafe to be vulnerable after being bullied. With that being our vulnerable authentic selves oftentimes got us into trouble. And so I had to forgive myself for that. I had to love myself for being 14 years old, for feeling so old at that time. And now seeing how much of a child I still was. And I realized how much this wound how big this was, and how this had actually kept me in fight or flight around other humans. So I can be really relaxed by myself. But I realized being around others, I still would fly in to fight, fight or flight, and even just talking to others. So I took the month of August to detox off fight or flight. What did this look like, I did nothing. And this was part of my healing. Because the more I allowed myself to drop into my body, the more present I got, the more relaxed I got, another layer would appear, another memory would appear, another moment or another feeling would arise. Because the fight or flight was me running from not the actual incident, right, I'm in the present moment, I'm very safe. I'm nowhere near these people. And I'm in the present. But the feelings are still stuck in my body. So I'm running from my own self, I'm running for my own body in this moment. So the more I allowed myself to relax, the more I was able to allow this to move and heal. So as I mentioned, to heal it, I brought awareness to it. So just allowing this moment in this realization, into my consciousness, brought healing in and of itself, I sat with it every day, I allowed myself to feel my feelings. And there were a lot of hard feelings that needed to be felt. But as I brought this memory to my awareness, and this connection to my awareness, and I allowed myself to cry, I was able to move that energy. By just focusing on the trigger and the Tiktok. And allowing myself to maybe feel feelings there, it wasn't connecting me back to the original wound, I had to bring awareness to the original wound the bullying in high school, and then I had to sit with that, and then allow myself to feel those feelings. So cry, yell, just feel depressed, I really allowed myself the time to just sit with how sad that was, that I had to experience that, that I lived through that, that I didn't have any support system at that time that I didn't have a friend system to support that. Those were all real things I experienced, I just sit with. And so every day I sat with him every day, we would feel and maybe a new layer would arise a new memory attached to it, because this one incident of being raped. And if you have a big trauma in your life, you may be able to relate to this, that that wasn't the only trauma that happened, right, that had a ripple effect. And it had incidents with other people, my parents, other friends, girls, the girl who brought me there, the guys involved, how I would still see them, the school system I went to, and how that one incident affected so many other areas of my life, and how for me, because I didn't have the support system to help me work through this at the time, what was confirmed over and over again, throughout the rest of high school was how unsafe It was to be in my body. So through bringing this incident to my awareness, I was able to see the ripple effects, I was able to heal it and I was able to sit with it and feel it. And so to heal it, you have to feel it. And I had been avoiding feeling it for a very long time. And even though I've sat with it, I will say that by being sober, I wasn't able to numb in the same way I used to. And that I really all I could do was sit with it, and to feel it and allow it to move. And it took me about two weeks of just allowing myself to be really sad. And after two weeks, I did a ceremony, I felt ready to let this go at a whole new level. I felt ready to offer forgiveness to the people who had harmed me. And I most importantly, felt ready to offer my self forgiveness in a way I hadn't allowed myself before. And so what this looked like for me was I drove to one of my favorite places in the world that drove to Sedona. You can do this in your own backyard. But I think Sedona has amazing healing energy. And there's something about taking a pilgrimage, I'm reading the book, The Power of ritual. And he talks about how pilgrimage doesn't have to be this week long thing it can be in our daily lives. And it's just setting the attend intention to be present with nature, and maybe to bring a healing element to that. So for me, my intention was to go to Sedona with a crystal and to leave that crystal behind to represent leaving this wound behind. And so I did a ceremony there. And I let this go and in my awareness I brought the people who harmed me to my awareness and I truly forgave them. And as I've mentioned before, forgiveness isn't for them for the people who have harmed us forgiveness is for ourselves. We forgive to let go so that we can move forward so that we can let these burdens off our back. Just so that we can live as lighter beings, and so we can live with more love in our hearts. I knew I hadn't fully healed this, but I was in denial of it. But how I really knew I still hadn't healed this was, if I sat with this image, or if these people came to mind, I would imagine myself harming them, physically harming them. And for me, this is a sign I haven't healed something if I'm imagine physical harm on someone and for me with rape, I mean, to be honest, and I admit this openly, because I think this is very common for rape victims, I would wish physical harm on the people who did physical harm to me. And I'm not a physically harming person. I don't harm people physically. But I had experience such a life threatening experience that, yeah, in some of my deep dark fantasies, I would imagine killing these people. And I've read many books on rape. And that's a very common thing. So if you live with that, just know you're not alone, and that it's common. And it's to me a sign that there's still something to be healed. And so for me, now, I view these people and it's more neutral. Do I want to bring these people into my life? Hell no. But I feel neutral about it. I can see it with a bigger perspective. And I can see it with love for myself and I can let this experience go. But this was through this healing experience I had in August and the key for me was to give myself the time to come out of fight or flight because I was running from some really hard feelings that were still stuck in my body. So another thing I just wanted to mention about this was that though it felt at the time that I wasn't doing good and that I had gone backwards because a lot of us on the healing drink be like oh my god, I can't believe I feel this bad. But what I talked about with my therapist was actually from this experience I've so there's fight flight and freeze, and I had gone straight up to freeze so it wasn't even safe enough for me to do fight or flight. So I went straight up to the freeze response. And I completely disassociated numbed out, didn't connect to my body, I was out of my body I was flighty I love as I mentioned Nicole Dr. Nicola para, she talks about in her book disassociation and how that's a trauma response and how she doesn't have many memories from her childhood. But the feelings still lived in her body. And I love that she talks about this because this is exactly my experience. I don't have many memories from my childhood. Memories have come back to me that needs to be healed and but I don't have many memories. And people will say things and say times that we had or try and like kind of fight me on things that happened and I'm like, I don't fucking know. I have no memories. I have no memories really till my friend Dolan died. I barely remember college. And I have a few things but like barely remember any of it totally wasn't present, until I had a friend die. And then it's like my consciousness came back into being it was like it's time to grow up. It's time to heal this up. So I bring this up because if you suffer from disassociation Are you experienced that and you have shame around it. I know I've had a lot of shame around it. So I bring this up, because that can be a freeze response. So as I was coming down from this freeze response, I had to go back through fight or flight. So August was all about me coming back down through fight or flight. And so I actually had to feel those feelings of fight or flight along with the anxiety, the depression, the sadness, the terror, oh, my gosh, so much terror. And I had to feel those in order to get back to homeostasis, which I am more grounded than I've ever been. I'm not perfect. I don't even think I'm 100% of my body yet. But I didn't realize how, before bringing this to my awareness how out of my body I was. But I can see that now. So this was such a healing experience for me. I relied on a lot of self care practices. It's I was healing this wound, which included meditation, journaling, feeling my feelings. Yes, this involves lots of tears and lots of releasing of pent up anger. This also involved movement, I did yoga, specifically hip yoga, a lot of this trauma was stuck in my hip area that's very common for rape victims or sexual assault victims for people who have experienced sexual trauma, or even anything that's really unsafe, because it can be very ungrounded. So that can affect the hip region or lower back pain can be a sign of that as well lower back and hip pain. So I did a lot of yoga. So after I did this, this was took about a few weeks in August, I just allowed myself to re acclimate to this new way of being and to be kind with myself and to integrate this healing. For me, this was a huge healing. And if you have a bully wound, it could be just as life changing for you to heal it as well because for me, the bully wound created a real fear in people and in relationships, so I wasn't so I didn't feel safe to be my true self in relationships because that vulnerability aspect was very fearful for me and it was connected to this incident. So that's an example from my own life, I really hope that was a good and helpful teaching example, to show you how something from my past was still affecting me in the present and what I did to heal it. And how really, for me healing, it was a lot of just feeling my feelings and allowing myself the space and time to do that and not judging myself for or being sad, right, not judging that sadness, or judging that depression and knowing it would pass. I'm trying to learn how to communicate my inner world to you out loud, because it's so inherent to me inside my head. So I hope that was helpful. And let's jump into two questions.
Amanda Durocher [listener question] 20:40
Dear New View Advice. When I was in high school, someone started a rumor about me that I was a slot because I slept with a guy at a party. I was drunk and regretted it. And not only did I regret having sex, but suddenly I had a reputation for being easy and steady. I tried to convince myself that this wasn't true. But a part of my teen self liked the male attention I started to receive. I'm now a 27 year old woman, and can see that this has caused me a world of problems, and that my relationships with men had been far from healthy. I can see that though this wasn't true about me. When the rumor was started. Somewhere along the way, I started to believe that I was a sloth, and that having sex with guys was the only way to keep them around. I've been working on healing my relationship with men. But I realized this rumor really got in my head, and it's something I need to heal. But I don't know how, how do I heal this? If I now see that I have been a sloth and this rumor is true. Any advice? Thank you so much for this question. This is a really vulnerable question. And I think so many people can relate to this question. So I really, thank you for writing this in. And for having so much awareness, you have so much awareness around this core belief. And what I mean by core belief is a belief that you believe about yourself, it doesn't necessarily mean it's true. And you have so much awareness and consciousness. And I love how you've brought up how you can see that this incident is affecting your present day life and you're looking to heal this, that's an amazing intention, that you're ready to heal this wound and you're ready to move past this experience. And I just really want to thank you and say, I'm so proud of you. That's an amazing awareness you have. And I'm really grateful you wrote this question. And so I just want to start by saying I'm so sorry, this happened to and I'm so sorry, for anyone who's experienced anything like this. The teen years are hard. It's still childhood, and we're learning different things in childhood. So this question has a lot to do with sex, and the relationship between men and women. And I think that that becomes really prevalent in our teen years. And we can have a lot of wounds and a lot of childhood patterns that are created. Because these are new issues arising new topics that are arising moving into adulthood, that we didn't necessarily experience in our first 12 years or our first 10 or whatever amount of years, that these years can still have very lasting impacts, just like childhood wounds. So I want to thank you for asking this question, because it's so important for us to have this conversation. So the teenagers have so much change, and are really when we start to crave adult independence. And this can be a lot of challenges with it. So many of us don't have parents who were emotionally available when we were teenagers. So we were left to figure out much of this transitional stage on our own. And sex and relationships are two of the things that we're really learning so much about in our teen years and started to form real belief systems around. And it's really unfortunate that so many of us didn't have parents we could rely on to really teach us about sex in a healthy way relationships in a healthy way. So we're left to figure it out on our own. And oftentimes, that means we're learning from our peers. So that would mean if you're 14, you're learning from other 14 year olds, and if you can hear it now that's really problematic. So it's children, learning from other children about adult situations and adult topics that can have lasting and devastating effects. So it's so important if you have children to have these conversations with them to be an open and safe place for them to come to. It's uncomfortable to have these tough conversations with your kids. But I also think that it's really important, because you might see in your own life, as I've seen in mine, how devastating leaving kids to learn these things on their own can be. So I want to start backwards with your question and start with how you ask how you can heal this if this is true. So I want to challenge your belief and I think you're a woman who has an inner teenager who needs to be seen and heard and healed. And until then you may find yourself playing out a pattern that needs to be looked at because a part of you is begging to be looked at, but I don't think You need to attach a label. So I don't think you have to label yourself anything. I'm a big believer in the fact that we don't have to take labels on that we don't want. There are beliefs attached to labels. So how you're conflicted with this slot label is you are coming up against beliefs and what you know about the word slot, and having been called a slot in your teen years, has left a an effect on you and imprint on you. And now you're like, what if I do slip around, does that make me a slot, and I invite you to not label yourself or to sit with yourself. And as I mentioned, see what the real label is. And I think it's an inner teen who has a wound that needs to be looked out, I really think we need to stop labeling ourselves with harmful words or with words that make us cringe or feel shameful. We do not need to take on any of these words. And oftentimes, the labels we give ourselves are things that people have said about us or have told us we are an often are not words, we have chosen to give ourselves. So many times we take these labels as true, because somebody said, You are a sloth, you are an alcoholic, you are a bitch, you are mean. And we take these labels as truth because it hurts so much when somebody said it. And it had a devastating effect on our innocent consciousness. So I think that the more labels we can remove from ourselves, the more clearly we'll be able to see ourselves. So with your question, how do you heal this? I think one of the first steps is to bring awareness to this and to not label yourself but to sit with this inner teenager who have so much awareness around and I'm so proud of you, and sit with her. Would you call that 14 year old girl who had sex and regretted it and was probably a little too young for the situation she found herself in? Would you really call her a slut? Would you really call a 14 year old outside of yourself that you saw on the street who was struggling? Who did not feel safe? And who felt a lot of shame? And didn't know what to do a slit? Would you actually do that? Because if you're having trouble deciding if a label belongs to you, I invite you to picture yourself at the age where the wound occurred. So for you, it's this teen party that you've mentioned, and I invite you to sit with that girl and ask yourself if you would call her those mean words. And I don't think you would, I think you would see her more clearly, for a scared girl. Not yet a woman, not to quote Britney Spears. But really, I think you'd see that she was a young girl put in an unsafe environment, and how that environment elicited and created an environment of bullying. Someone calling you a slot, a school calling you slot even if it was one person, two people 10 people, when you're in high school can feel like everybody you know, you can be so in your head and a little self absorbed at that age that even 10 people saying something about you or knowing something about you can feel like the whole school knows something about you. So it can be really damaging, and really traumatic. And for me, what I'm hearing here is that you need to give yourself a lot more compassion and a lot more love for what you experienced. I think you've brought a lot of awareness to this. But I think you need to feel a little bit more of this. And I invite you to really view this version of yourself outside of yourself. So you can sit in meditation, visualize in your third eye, or you can journal to this version of yourself. But I want you to really look at how old you were when this happened. And how it was not your fault. How you were not a sloth, how you were put in an adult situation at a young age, how whatever was going on in your home life may have contributed to you ending up in this situation, how it was not nice how people chose to call you a slut and shame you for what happened. That's a real mixed message in the world we live in. And you received a mixed message of I'm a slip that I get attention. So it's a bad thing, but a good thing. It sounds to me that you've been playing out this pattern of unhealthy sex, unhealthy relationships with men because it brings you attention. So the other thing I want you to do is I want you to bring awareness to this part of you that wants attention and thinks that sex brings you this it sounds to me like it's not fulfilling this hole. Because you're gonna be looking for something within yourself or for something to be healed. Oftentimes, relationships with men and patterns with men can reflect our father wounds. And people hate to hear that but it's just true. So if you didn't feel safe with your father, you might not feel safe with other men. So I want you to as you are healing this and really looking at yourself and really looking at the age you are and healing this, I also want you to reflect on your relationship with your father, and see if there's any correlation there, you have a great awareness. So I think you can hear that. But I want you to look at the other men in your life at that time and also in your childhood and see what else might need to be healed here. And where you may have been lacking that attention that you needed that love you needed, right, because that attention you were seeking is really you were seeking love, and you were seeking love externally. And as a child, if our parents don't give us the love, we need, or we don't feel that love or we don't feel safe, we will seek this in other places. Because if we're not taught how to cultivate it within because we don't have a safe environment, we start looking for it in the wrong places. So I have a feeling that might be something that you could look at, and see if that is something that happened in your life. So I have three suggestions for you for healing this. And the first one is, as I just mentioned, I want you to sit with your feelings. So you have an amazing awareness as well around this. And awareness is the first step. But it's not the final step, the next step for you is I want to invite you to sit with those feelings that I've mentioned. So here you're thinking, so the keyword is thinking, so you're in your head. So you probably have done some healing work. And you can see your patterns, right. So you're analytically looking at it, and you're like, I can see how this event affected me, but I don't know how to get past it. And to me, that's a sign that you have to drop into your heart. And you have to allow those tears to flow, maybe that anger to be felt a sadness, but you have to drop into your heart and feel this incident. So the awareness is a great first step, but it also involves your heart. So awareness can be a little in our heads, and I invite you to drop into your heart. So a way you can do this, as I've mentioned before, is that you can sit down and create a safe space and invite your inner teenager forward. And as I mentioned, really look at her and how old she was, and how she may have been naive, searching for love outside of herself, and how she was looking to be seen. And I think when you really look at her, you're gonna see she's not a sloth, and that she was a scared young girl who found herself and adult situation at a young age. And if you're someone who has trouble sitting with it, so by sitting with it, I often mean meditation, but I use the word sitting with it, because people think meditation is sitting on a pillow and getting calm and relaxed. And that's one form of meditation. But what I've really discovered throughout this past month is that meditation isn't always relaxing. So for me, it's oftentimes my vehicle for healing, which isn't necessarily me calming my nervous system, it can actually bring up a lot of feelings that bring me into a heightened sensory experience. So that's why I use the word sitting with it sometimes instead of meditating on it. But for you can sit with it, or I invite you to do a dialog journaling exercise, and I'll link this in the show notes. But I've created a blog post, walking you through the steps of how to do this with yourself, that basically you would do the same thing that you could do with sitting with it or visualizing this, but on paper. So you would write dialogue back and forth between you and your teen self. So you'd write Dear inner teen, and what you want them to know. And then you would write Dear adult me, you would write from the perspective of your teen self, and back and forth. And I have a whole blog post that describes that and a process for doing that and how you can release that in a ceremony. So I invite you to check out my blog post if that sounds like something that could be helpful for you. So the second thing I invite you to do is movement. So I invite you to move your body. So this is a wound around bullying but also around sex. It's important to bring awareness to your root chakra. So if you are unaware of the chakras, I'm going to give a quick breakdown of chakras. There's so much information out there. There's books, there's blog posts, there's people who are experts in this. I'm going to give a quick rundown just so everybody's on the same page here. But basically we have seven major chakras. These are energy centers in the body that correspond to nerve bundles and major organs. And many of our traumas can get stuck on our bodies in the seven major chakras. And for people who have wound around sex it's often stuck in the root and sacral chakra. So those are the first two chakras. So the first chakra is the root chakra is located at the base of your spine and this chakra represents safety and grounding. And when it's aligned, we feel very grounded. And when it's out of alignment we can feel unsafe, fearful, anxious and flighty. The second chakra, which is right below your belly button is the sacral chakra. And this is our creative center. And our creativity is also connected to our sexuality. So when it's in alignment, we feel creative and sexual in a healthy way. And if you think about it, this makes a lot of sense that our sexual Quality and creativity are related because sex can literally create life, right? So that's creative energy, it's creation. So they're very connected. So when it's out of alignment, we can have intimacy issues, lack of creativity and emotional stunting. So we put a lot there. So that's in our stomachs, too. So we put a lot of trauma in those first two chakras. And if we're not connected to them, we can be very ungrounded. So a lot of people who experienced disassociation aren't in their first two or three chakras. So the third chakra is your solar plexus chakra. This is located right above your belly button. And when this center is in alignment, we have good self esteem good relationships with our power. And when it's out of alignment, we can have poor self esteem and poor relationship with our power and either feeling not powerful or being abusive with our power. So the fourth chakra is the heart chakra, so in the center of your chest, and this is where our love and self esteem stems from. So when it's in alignment or self loving and have healthy relationships, and when it's out of alignment work, we have codependent tendencies. And we can also self sabotage and have self hatred. The fifth chakra is the throat chakra, it's exactly where you think it is, and the center of your throat. When this chakra is in alignment, we speak our truth and we communicate easily and clearly. And when it's out of alignment, we can be very arrogant or shy, and have trouble using this voice and have trouble speaking the truth. Our sixth chakra is the third eye chakra, so it's in the center of our forehead. And our sixth chakra is connected to our intuition and our foresight, and our imagination. So that's how it is when we're in alignment. And when we're out of alignment, we can have a lack of direction, a lack of clarity and a lot of confusion around trusting ourselves in the seventh chakra is on the top of our heads. And this is the crown chakra. And when this chakra is in alignment, it represents states of higher consciousness and a divine connection, a connection with source God, whatever word you use, all names of God are welcome here. And when it's out of alignment, we can be cynical, and untrusting, closed minded and disconnected with spirit. So I give that quick breakdown because maybe something in there clicked for you. And you thought, oh, that area of my life's really out of alignment. Maybe I should look into that chakra. Because movement helps us to bring our energy in order and helps us to move energy, and really helps us to get these chakras in alignment. And so, like I mentioned, if you look up chakras on the internet, there's so much information. And you can also see that sometimes physical illnesses can relate to the chakras being out of balance. So movements really great for this. And I invite you to try yoga. So I really leaned on my yoga practice in the last month because it is a slow moving practice. And you can bring intention to different parts of your body. And you can see where your body itself feels out of alignment. And that can often help us to move energy. So in the past month, I really focused on hip yoga. So exercises around opening up my hips, and oftentimes I would do a pose. And I would just start crying. Because I was releasing energy. And that's really what yoga does. It invites us to move energy to feel those feelings. And it also allows us to breathe through it. So inviting in that breath. And it helps us to slow down. So a lot of times you go into a yoga class and fight or flight are busy and stressed. Another word for fight or flight is stressed. So if you're a very stressed person, you are in fight or flight most of the time. And so yoga helps us to slow down and come back into our bodies. Another great kind of movement is intentional dancing, so is to find a playlist and to dance and just intuitively move your body and allow yourself to move your hips, move your upper body, move your shoulders, move your head, move your neck, whatever feels right and just to move with the music, because these slow type of movements help us to like I said, move the energy, whereas cardio can actually keep us in that fight or flight response if we're already in it because it can keep you in that fight or flight so can be really stressful on the body and it won't necessarily have the same intention that we're going for here. So we're not trying here to win exercise or to be the best at exercising. We're trying to intentionally move our bodies for the healing sake right for healing our body. So I invite you to be really intentional with the movement practice you choose choose what's best for you and to move this energy and if one of those chakras I do scribed if the chakra is interested, you look them up online, but focus on moving that area that you feel like may have stuck energy. As I mentioned, when sex is involved, oftentimes it's the root and the sacral chakra. So exercises for your hips, and your lower back. And the bottom half of your body can be really helpful for moving that stuck energy and becoming more present to how your body is feeling and what your body is trying to communicate with you. So the third thing I invite you to do is also a ceremony or a moment of intention that you could have in nature, or at your house and a quiet and calm place, or under the full moon in your backyard, whatever feels good for you. And so for me, when I do ceremonies, it's usually towards the end of a healing. So it's when I've sat with something for a while. And on your healing journey, you'll see that healings get quicker and easier, it doesn't mean healings don't arise, I think I'll be killing my entire life. But it becomes quicker. And you'll also get in tune with your own cycles, and your own rhythm with it, and what the ebbs and flows look like. But when you feel like you've brought a lot of awareness to this, when you feel like you've really sat with a lot of the feelings. And when you have the awareness of what you're ready to let go of, I invite you to create a ceremony. So for me, this usually looks like finding a place in nature, and sitting with this healing and writing it down on something and having a physical copy of what I'm looking to let go of. So that will just be a statement or it'll be a list of people I want to forgive it will be myself. And I'll sit in meditation with the earth and I'll ask Mother Earth to help me let this go. And I'll sit in that forgiveness energy. And I'll really send that forgiveness out. And you'll know when you're ready to forgive, you can't rush forgiveness, because in order to forgive, you have to sit with every feeling. And you have to fully move through those feelings in order to forgive something. And so that's why forgiveness can be so hard because we're all so resistant to that pain that we've been avoiding since the incident that has been stuck in our body. So for you since this rumor was started and this experience at this party you went to in high school, there's a part of that still stuck, there's that energy still stuck in your body. So it's important for you to move it but in order to move it you have to feel the feelings you didn't feel when you were a teenager. And that can be really hard. So when you're ready to let this go, and you feel like you have felt more of the feelings because I do think that's the first part for you here. I invite you to find a place in nature and to create a ceremony around it. So I invite you to bring the elements rain, water, fire, air, whatever works for you, Earth. I'm currently reading the book, The Power of ritual. And it really just affirms for me everything I've been intuitively doing, and how important it is to be intentional in our daily lives. Because intention is how we heal, intention, awareness. So intention of moving forward intention of healing intention of letting things go, because so many of us are living on autopilot. And the more we can drop into the present moment and become intentional in our lives, the more we'll be able to really live. And the more we'll be able to move through and let go of the things blocking us from being the versions of ourselves we know we're capable of being. So I hope something in this answer helped. And I hope that one of those suggestions helps you to be able to move through this. And I just want you to know you are on the right path. You are asking the right questions, you have a lot of awareness. There's nothing wrong with you. Be kind to yourself, the best thing we can do is be compassionate with ourselves as we look at these hard experiences we've had as we look at these traumas, and we allow ourselves to heal it. It's so freeing to go on this healing journey, but it's not easy. That's why they call it inner work. That's why a lot of people don't do it. I mean, it's not easy, but it's so rewarding. And the more we release and the more we let go, the more addicting it becomes because you just know that everything inside of you that's blocking you all that trauma that on the other side of it is a new version of yourself. That's more kick ass, more confident, more lovable of themselves. And it's just really empowering to move through your own blocks. So I'm really proud of you and thank you so much for this question. I'm sending you so much love.
Amanda Durocher [listener question] 44:27
Dear New View Advice. When I was in high school, I was bullied by a fellow classmate. She was terrifying to me. She never physically hurt me. But she was so mean to me. She would say mean things when I walked by her in the hallway, or she would whisper about me when I was around. I also heard from many people that she would say nasty things about me. I was so afraid of her and was so grateful when high school ended, and I've never have to see her again. Though this was years ago. This mean girl still haunts me. Someone will bring her up or she'll pop up on my social media and I'll freeze my body will panic and I'll find myself replaying things She said about me when I was younger. I doubt she thinks about me anymore, but I'm still terrified of her. Any advice on how to let this go? Thank you for this amazing question. I love how in tune you are with your body and how able you are to describe what happens in your body when you feel triggered. This is such a great awareness, like how you said that, when you see this person on social media, you freeze, and your body will panic. And you'll find yourself replaying your past. That is great awareness that so many people aren't even aware of. So thank you so much for this question. I also think this is something so many people can relate to. I know, I can relate to this. And I'll talk a bit about my experience with this as a teaching example, but thank you for this question. I think this is so relatable. And I'm so sorry, you experienced this, I think that what you're describing here sounds like a trauma response. It sounds like you might have some level of PTSD from having been bullied in high school. And it sounds like it was consistent bullying. So that can really create trauma in the body because you felt unsafe on a regular basis, maybe every single day you went to school, and that can be really traumatizing. So I invite you to be kind to yourself about this. And not to downplay what you experienced, because it sounds very traumatic. And I'm really, really sorry, you had to go through this. I don't think anybody deserves to be bullied. And it sounds like you were bullied to a pretty big extent. And you didn't have anybody to help you through this at the time. So it sounds like your body went into fight or flight, or even into freeze and you kind of just went through the motions to get out of high school. So to get to safety, and how you viewed that was just to manage and get through high school. So I just invite you to be really kind to yourself about this. The pain, you experienced Israel and your body is clearly communicating to you the pain that still stored in it. And I'm grateful you asked this question, or, as I mentioned, are aware of your body. And I'm just so sorry. I mean, this is just so horrible that so many people experienced this. And I just hope we can all work on healing this wound together can work on healing this wound that we have and is really in society and in humans together. So I'm going to share a bit about an experience I had as a teaching example, because I really relate to this question. So when I was in college, there was this girl who obviously did not like me. And she was the first time I had experienced face to face mean girl bullying. So this girl was so mean to my face. She hated me, I'm not sure why I have my guesses. But I never had an actual conversation with her, did not know her, there was no event to cause this between me and her. So she would say mean things to my face, she would whisper about me, if I walked by her on the sidewalk, she would point at me and then start whispering in the person's ear next to her. And this would give me so much anxiety. And she would bully me on Facebook. It was so bizarre. I couldn't understand it. I had never experienced anything like it. And I mentioned this because I want you to know that I totally understand how awful this is. Because this causes me extreme anxiety. This caused me to panic. It's caused me to never want to leave my dorm room. This caused me to like if I saw her on the sidewalk, I would start turn around and just start walking the other way. I mean, I didn't want to be anywhere near her if she was at a party, I would leave it like it was so scary. It was so traumatizing. And the truth is she didn't even you know, she didn't physically hurt me. But my emotions were hurt. And that's a real experience being mostly abused is real trauma is real pain. So for anybody who's undermining their own emotional trauma, I'm telling you, it's real. I see you, I feel you and please honor the pain that you've experienced. And allow yourself to feel how hurtful that was, because it can really create that Federer flight response, as I mentioned, because for me, it elicited a lot of panic. So after my freshman year, I didn't see her very often. So it became easier. If I saw her, I would still have these feelings, but it wasn't constant. But my freshman year was pretty constant, this just absolute anxiety, stress, panic. And so I held on to this for a while. And I realized during my healing journey that I was still holding on to this. And I didn't realize how much this experience affected me until a few years ago, when I realized how much this experience affected the women I was trying to meet in LA and how I had this terror and how this girl would pop into my head when I was trying to meet new people because I was so terrified of this happening again. So I really had to release it. So I ever this story because I can totally relate and I'm going to offer you some things that I did and I'm going to talk about how I did them and how I offer these suggestions to you So the first suggestion I offer to anyone healing from bullying, is to use your creativity. I've mentioned this in many other episodes, but it's one of my favorite healing modalities is to bring in creativity. So for me, this is screenwriting or poetry, but some form of writing is the way I really use creativity to help me heal. And so with this example of this girl, and this experience I had in college, I actually ended up writing an entire screenplay. It wasn't very good. But it's an entire screenplay about my relationship with this girl. So there was a meat character and there was a her character, I used the same names. And I wrote this story about a girl being bullied in college and friendships and whatever. And it wasn't like exactly truthful, because the creativity and imagination comes in. But I took the real feelings I had, and I put it into characters. And then all of a sudden, through screenwriting, I'm seeing my perspective, and then I'm writing her perspective, right, what would motivate somebody to be this mean? And then I'm writing other characters perspectives, and then I'm bringing healing to their relationship. And throughout it, just working with these characters, healing just started to happen. Sitting with it right. Through sitting with these characters, I was able to sit with the real feelings I had kind of outside of myself. So through these characters that weren't real, but I really had to sit with those feelings. So creativity is such a great way to heal. And this took a while for me. But by the end of it, I felt so much more healed, and at peace with this relationship, and somewhere along the way, the feelings just moved. So the I also sat with it at times, because memories would arise as I was working on the screenplay. So I brought in meditation and creativity. And that was my way of healing from this experience of bullying. But creativity doesn't have to be writing, it can be acting, you could write a scene and act it out. I know I just said writing in there, too. But you could act, you could paint, you could sculpt, you could saying whatever your form of creativity is, whatever your form of breathing in that imagination, allow that to help you heal and allow that to help you to move through the real feelings you have stuck in your body around this experience. So a second exercise I recommend for you is to write a letter to the person to to this girl who bullied you. I think that writing letters to the people who hurt us with no intention of ever sending them can be really therapeutic and healing. So I invite you to write Dear this girl's name, and write her how you feel right how it felt for her to treat you that way. Right? how you're feeling right now right what you wish she knew about you, right? How you feel about her. Just allow yourself to write everything you wish you could say to her, You can call her me names, you can do whatever you want. Because you have no intention of actually sending this allow yourself to write what you need to say and what you need to write in order to move through these feelings. So you might find as you're writing this letter, multiple feelings arise, you might feel terror at first, like the thought of writing this personal letter could scare you, then you may feel anger and then sadness, just keep writing. Keep writing until you feel a completion at the end, you'll know when to stop writing, you know, don't stop because you've already written two pages, just keep going until you feel like this movement through the energy and you get to the end of the letter and it feels complete. And you feel like you've written everything you want to say to this person, then I invite you to truly put this letter into an envelope. And then as I mentioned in the previous question, do something with it. So you can do a ceremony or you can just bring it outside and bury it you can rip it up and throw it in a river, you can throw it in the ocean, you can light it on fire. I think fire is a great way to transmute stuff like this and to really feel that release because it burns up. And it's just releasing with the fire in the ashes. So I invite you to try this practice, and to write this personal letter, because I find that can be really helpful. The third suggestion I have for you. I hesitated giving this but I am going to give it because I am a big proponent of therapy. But I have had people write in and tell me how hard it is to find a therapist. And I completely understand that and I understand therapy is not an option for everybody. But I also think it's really important to mention, because for anyone who does feel like they're ready to find a therapist, I think that therapy can be life changing. And for you I recommend EMDR therapy. So if you haven't heard of EMDR it's a trauma centered therapy approach. And I recommend finding a therapist who uses EMDR. So this is just one modality a lot of therapists use, and it helps to move through stuck trauma. So you do it with a therapist, and I often hold buzzers in my hand but I know you can do it with a finger eye movement too. But EMDR stands for eye movement dissents. ties ation and reprocessing. And it's a way to move through stuck traumatic memories. And I found this to be so helpful in my own life, I would not have healed from rape without this. And I would not have healed from other experiences of terror that were stuck in my body. I recently did this with my therapist and had a surprising memory arise. I won't go into the details, but it helped me to release terror. And I used to have this sense of hyper vigilance all the time. And I've really noticed how much it has relaxed my body. So I invite you to if you feel like you're able to to find a therapist uses EMDR, because I think this trauma of being bullied on a regular basis is really stuck in your body, and you have a sense of unsafety still in there. And EMDR really helps to move that and I find it really life changing. So I highly recommend that. I'll link some resources for finding therapists on my website. Again, I understand that a lot of people don't feel like that's an option for them. And I'm so sad that that's the case. And that's the world we live in and how not everyone has health insurance in at least the United States and how, unfortunately, there's still a stigma around therapy. So I like to talk about it because I want to destigmatize it. I also hope to make it more affordable for people in the future. But right now, I offer that to anyone who has stuck trauma and could find that helpful. So I hope something in this answer helps. Thank you for this question. I think so many people can relate to being bullied and I just don't think we talked about it enough. So I'd love to continue this conversation in future episodes. And please let me know if any of these suggestions help you and I am so happy that you are looking to heal and you are bringing compassionate and awareness to yourself. And I invite you to in this present moment, take a deep breath in. Deep breath out. And to remember that right now, in this present moment, you are safe, you are loved. And it is safe to release this and to let go in order to let more love into your life. Send you all my love today.
Amanda Durocher 57:15
Thank you so much for joining me for another episode of New View Advice. For those who have listened for a while you know that I was offering a free resource at the end of each episode. During my hiatus, I realized that I offer many free resources throughout the episode. So instead of offering a different resource at the end, I'm going to do a quick roundup of my episodes suggestions and remind you that you can find them at my website at newviewadvice.com/fifteen. So this is resource Roundup. So for healing from bullying, some suggestions for healing and exercises I recommend are one to feel your feelings. This is so important. I really, really, really invite you to sit with your feelings. It is safe to feel your feelings I invite you to give yourself permission to feel your feelings. And two ways I recommend doing this is one sitting with yourself and visualizing your younger self and allowing them to tell you how they feel and allowing those emotions to flow through you or to to dialogue with yourself and I'll link the blog post. I have about dialoguing with yourself in the shownotes too, I invite you to move your body and I'll link some resources in the show notes about chakras and moving your body. Three, I invite you to create a ceremony and allow yourself to let this go and to intentionally bring this forward up to your awareness and allow yourself to release this from you in an intentional ceremony. For Use your creativity. I invite you to find a creative outlet to help you to feel your feelings if it doesn't feel safe to just sit with them. Five, I invite you to write a letter to your bully and to express everything you wish that they knew about you and how you feel and what you wish you could say to them. And sixth, I invite you to find a therapist and specifically a therapist who specializes in EMDR and trauma therapy. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed this episode or found something helpful, I would love to ask you to leave a review. I'm hoping to reach 30 reviews but my 30th birthday which is at the beginning of November. So if you're listening on Apple or if you have an iPhone with the Apple podcast app, I invite you to scroll to the bottom of the new view advice podcast page, and leave a five star rating and a review. If you're not sure what to write, you can write your favorite episode or an aha moment you've had while listening or just that you love the podcast. Thank you so much in advance. I have so many ideas on how to expand newView advice but it all starts with bringing more listeners to the podcast and reviews is a great way to let others know that this is safe. It's Amanda Durocher for another episode of New View Advice. I'm so grateful to be here with you and to offer you a new view on whatever you may be going through sending you all my love See you next time
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
