17: Why Life is Unfair: How When We Stop Believing Life Is Supposed to Be Fair We Can Empower Ourselves to Move Forward
In this episode, I discuss why I believe life isn’t fair and how when we can let go of the lie that life was ever supposed to be fair, we can empower ourselves to move forward and heal.
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This episode contains discussion of child sexual assault. Listener discretion advised.
In this episode, you will learn about:
Why life isn’t fair and why it was never supposed to be fair
How when we stop looking at life in terms of fair and unfair we can empower ourselves to move forward
How healing from childhood sexual assault taught me this lesson and how by realizing life was never meant to be fair, I was able to move forward
How to move forward when healing from a relationship with an alcoholic parent
How it’s important to allow yourself the time to grieve when you had a traumatic childhood
How sadness is natural along the healing journey and grieving process
How to feel your feelings after a tragic incident, for example a sports injury
Episode References:
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk M.D.
Resource Round Up
Practice Patience & Self-Compassion
Meditate
Journal
Check out these journal prompts to assist with your healing journey: Journal Prompts: Why Life is Unfair
Start a Gratitude Practice
Read Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear
*Listen to the episode for more specifics about each suggestion.
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
6:58 Teaching
24:50 Listener Question 1
42:37 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 0:00
Hey 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. And I also use 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. Hi, beautiful. My name is Amanda Durocher. And this is New View Advice. If you're new here, this is a healing centered advice podcast. So my intention here is to offer you tools and resources on how to connect back with yourself as well as this being a safe space to have difficult conversations. Sometimes I feel like we just need to acknowledge the pain we've felt or to know we're not so alone along the healing journey. And that whatever we've been through someone else has been through it too, may not be in the same version may not be the same details to the story. But the pain we all feel is universal. So it's my intention here to help you to heal as well as to create a safe space for us to do this collectively. So today's topic actually isn't the topic I originally chose for today. But last night, I had a dream with this topic in it. And it was so clear that I was doing a podcast episode on it and exactly what we were going to discuss. So I decided to roll with it. I thought it was a way that my intuition was trying to speak to me. So I decided to go with it. So this week, we're discussing the concept of life being fair versus unfair, and how life actually isn't fair. And how if we can let go of the idea of life ever being fair, that it can actually empower us. So I'm gonna first talk about myself. And I'm gonna give an example from my own life about how I had to come up against this belief. I really believe it's a lie. We are told from a young age that life's fair, or that life's supposed to be fair, because I truly believe life isn't fair. And the sooner we can discard that live from our lives, the more healing that can happen, and the more healing that can happen quicker, because I believe that the longer we hold on to this lie, the more stuck we can become. And the more frustrated we can become, because it's part of the healing journey is really forgiving the fact that life isn't fair. And I truly believe that the moment we can understand that life was never fair, that life was never meant to be fair, it actually empowers us to move forward. Because we realize that that unfairness no longer needs to hold us back are the creators of our own reality. We have the power to heal what we've been through, we have the power to take responsibility. And on our healing journeys, we're letting go of being victims, or we're moving into being healers, healers of our own lives, healers of our own traumas. And for me, it's just it was so empowering for me, when I finally realized that life was never fair, that that was a lie that I believed that I had been told that I think I picked up from adults, but also from the movies and from TV shows that you see justice being played out in the movies, and you see, the bad guys get what's theirs. And in child movies, you see parents realize the wrongs of their ways, right? And so many movies, you see parents who aren't great, or don't show up, and then they go through this whole transformation throughout a movie. And then they're like, I'm so sorry, I'm going to show up and be the best parent now. And the truth is, that's not real life. You know, I think so many of us live in a fantasy world and identify with lies that we've been told from entertainment. I mean, I'm a screenwriter and I truly just the more I analyze myself, I can really see the power of movies and how all these subconscious patterns went into my mind when I was a child, and how storytelling is not real life. And that's what you learn in a screenwriting class, right? They're always like beginner screenwriters always think their life is interesting. Your life is not a story. A story has a beginning, middle and an end. And a story has a person who changes something within them. But life isn't normally a story. So many people actually never change, right? So many of us have parents who we can see never have changed. And in movies, people always change or if they don't, they have consequences. But so many of us have seen people who have done horrible things, and it looks like they don't have consequences happen. So I bring that up. Because for me, that was part of, I think, why I really believed that life was supposed to be fair, and that I got like, the short end of the stick. You know, I really felt like what the hell this is so unfair. It's so unfair, that I lost my child that it's so unfair that all these things happened. And the truth is, life was never supposed to be fair. I wish it was but I was never supposed to be fair. The truth is we live in a world with racism. We live in a world with sexism. We live in a world with rapists. We live in a world with murderers. We live in a world with adults who do not deal with their trauma and continue to hurt people. Right? The expression hurt people hurt people. You know, I also believe healed people can heal people. But life was just never meant to be fair. So when you identify with the idea that life is unfair, I'm a victim. Why did this happen to me, you're actually giving your power away by believing that life was ever supposed to be fair. It's just a lie. It's just another lie of this world. It's just another lie. We tell ourselves, I really believe that most people could say that something unfair happened to them in their lives. Especially if you're listening to this podcast, I'm sure you can think of something that felt unfair. And through this conversation, I'm not saying that you can't hurt your feelings about the fact that life isn't fair. I have had so many feelings about it. I think it's fucked up. But it's true. So I'm excited to have this conversation with you. And I hope that you're interested in this topic as well. So I'm going to start this episode by talking a little bit about how I used to believe that life was unfair, and how that really kept me in the victim mindset, as I've mentioned, and how when I switched my belief, and I saw that life was never fair, that we aren't born into a world where life is fair that it actually changed my life and allowed me to move forward and to heal by no longer identifying with the fact that life was unfair. By choosing to realize that life was never fair, I felt empowered to move forward. And then I'm gonna answer two questions. One questions about someone who had an alcoholic parent and how they feel like it's really unfair that they have to heal so much from someone else's addiction. And the second question is about someone who went to school on a baseball scholarship and became injured and feels like life is really unfair now that they don't know what to do. So I'm really excited to have this conversation with you. And let's jump on in.
So today, I wanted to give a teaching example from my own life, where I used to identify with life not being fair, how my life wasn't fair, and really identifying with the idea that life was supposed to be fair. So it kept me in a victim mindset, and how when I flipped it, and I realized life was never supposed to be fair. And just to erase fairness from my idea of life, that it actually empowered me to heal and to move forward. So today, I'm going to be talking about being raped in my childhood. So I understand this can be a really hard conversation for a lot of people, I invite you to stay. But if this is too challenging for you right now, feel free to turn this episode off, or to fast forward to the music, which will queue question one. But I do want to talk about this because this is one of the reasons I started this podcast is because as someone who is a survivor of childhood sexual assault, I think it's really important we start having this conversation. I think that through the me to movement, we've started talking about sexual assault, but I don't see anybody talking about how common this is with children. So I just want to share some statistics with you about how common sexual abuses with children, and how this needs to also be a conversation we start having because there are millions of people who need to heal from this. So these are just some facts I found and I will link them in the show notes. There are more than 42 million survivors of sexual abuse in America. One in three girls are sexually abused before the age of 18. One in five boys are sexually abused before the age of 18 30% of sexual abuse is never reported. 90% of child sexual abuse victims know the perpetrator in some way, approximately 20% of the victims of sexual abuse are under age 890 5% of sexual abuse is preventable through education. I wanted to share those with you because those may be staggering for a lot of you. But as someone who's well versed in this, I'm very aware of those numbers. I'm very aware that what happened to me is not rare. And that's why I'm really passionate about having this conversation. So as I mentioned, if you're still here with me, thank you, and I invite you to be open minded and an ally for this. And many times victims are shamed into silence. And as I mentioned in those statistics, many times people know their perpetrators. And that causes a lot of complexity. That's really hard. And it creates really traumatic home lives really traumatic childhoods. And this is a conversation that I'm passionate about having and I want to create a safe space for anyone who's experienced that in their own childhood here. And maybe you'll see yourself in my story. Maybe you'll want to write it and have more of a conversation about it. But I just want you to know I see you I feel you and this is a safe place for you. I know that there were a lot of times I tried to talk about being raped in my childhood, and people can Hear it. People shut down. People check out, I just invite anybody who's having a really strong reaction to it. If you can't even hear it, imagine what it was like living through it. We need to be protecting children from this, this is preventable.
So we need to be protecting children by having these conversations and by not shaming people, by not shaming victims by not being too disgusted to talk about this, to allow victims to come forward, so can stop so that victims can come forward and heal. So for me a little bit about my experience with this. I was raped when I was six, by a friend's father, but I actually disassociated the experience. So the memories, the trauma, the trauma, and my body didn't come back until I was in my mid 20s. So when it came back, I was devastated. It was shocking to my awareness. I didn't believe it for a while, I definitely went through the stages of grief for a very long time. And I was in denial, even when my memories started to come back. So what my memories look like for me coming back, were through nightmares. And then in my daily life, things would kind of just drop into my awareness. I had trouble focusing on anything for about six months, it was like living like I had just been raped. Because I went through the shock. I went through the grief, the absolute devastation, because I never went through that as a child, I never got to go through the shock. I never got to go through all these feelings as a child because I checked out. And I didn't have anybody who was creating a safe and supportive environment to help me to see why I had all these PTSD symptoms. So I didn't realize till I was 25, how much PTSD I've been living with my whole life. I actually thought I was crazy. And I thought that I was overly emotional. And I had believed for so long the lies that people told me about myself, because nobody understood why I was the way I was. And I was way I was because I experienced such an extreme trauma. So I didn't like being touched, I would cry at random times, I felt very uncomfortable. In certain situations, it was very hard for me to feel safe, I don't think I felt safe throughout my entire childhood. And I mentioned this for anybody else who's disassociated and who might feel crazy along the way. I feel like I went through disassociation all on my own. I didn't read books about it until after I'd gone through the hardest part of it. So if anybody's currently going through it, the Body Keeps the Score was a game changer. For me. It really validated everything I had been through and made me know I wasn't crazy, because the body really does keep the score of all the trauma we've experienced. So the body doesn't lie. And my body had been holding on to this for a really long time. And the process of me releasing it was really, for me, I released a lot through sleep. So I suffered from nightmares for about a year that would release this trauma. So I would have memories sometimes, or I would feel it. So my consciousness would look black, but I could feel like I was being assaulted. And I couldn't move. So those kinds of nightmares. I also had the nightmares where I could hear what happened. But nothing was happening to me, it was like my senses came back in layers, and not all at the same time. And to this day, I can't tell you exactly the details from beginning to end what happened to me, I can give you a general idea, I won't do that. I'll spare you the details. But I know what happened to me. I know a lot of details of it, but not in any particular order. And that's just what it's like to have disassociated and to have memories come back. Also, I think we all know that memory is fickle. Memory is funny, we don't often remember details to a tee or two people will remember a memory differently. And it's really like you have the emotional memory, more so than the details of it. I know I've gotten in arguments with people about what happened, like on a certain date, because we both remember it differently. And that's just kind of how memory is. So healing from trauma. A big part of it is not identifying with the memories themselves not identifying with the details. But just allowing whatever comes into your awareness to be and not judging it because a huge part of healing from trauma. And I really learned this practice through EMDR therapy, which I've mentioned before, which is a trauma therapy modality and you learn that whatever comes up, it's just what needs to come up, you know, because it's the emotional memory, the physical memory, it's whatever it's in your body and you need to heal. The details themselves don't matter. So you just have to allow it comes up to move and that's what you learn when you're healing through trauma not to judge it. Trust yourself. It's healing from trauma is one of the best ways to learn to trust yourself because that's what the process is. So when my memories came back when I started healing this I really started to feel and identify with oh my god, this is unfair. This was so unfair. What happened to me? I just should not have to heal from this. This is so unfair. This is so unfair, I should have never experienced this. This is unfair life is unfair. And I really identified with that. And what I also identified with was how unfair it was that I didn't get the childhood I deserved. So I had different types of traumas throughout my childhood. But this one really affected me. Throughout my entire childhood, I can really see. And because of this event, I never felt safe in my childhood. Because of this event, I lived with PTSD for 20 years. And because they didn't know what happened to me, and honestly, they didn't ever create a safe space for me to discover what happened to me, right. Instead, they judged my trauma I had a lot of people judge me, a lot of people got really angry with me for my PTSD symptoms, because they didn't know what happened to me. But the truth is, we shouldn't judge children and their feelings, we should try to figure out why they're acting a certain way why they may be acting out. But oftentimes, adults have unresolved trauma themselves. So they don't take the time to figure out why kids are acting out, right? Kids who are acting out, it's a sign that there's something off, they may not feel safe, they might be experiencing trauma at home, the parenting style may not be working from them, they might have a parent who yells a lot, they might have an absent parent, they might not feel safe. And so instead of judging children or getting mad at children or labeling children, we need to create safe environments for children to start communicating with us, because children are actually very honest, and know how they're feeling. And they're more in tune with their feelings than we are. But oftentimes, adults throw so much of their own beliefs on children, that children start disconnecting from themselves. So it's so important for us to love children and create safe spaces for children. So like I was saying, though, my PTSD wasn't understood. So I was labeled, I was judged. And because of this, when I look back at my childhood, there's a few things that make me sad, and that I've had to grieve one, I don't have many memories, I have very, very few memories, I was very checked out. And that's what happens when you start to disassociate is you kind of disassociate from a lot. And I didn't feel safe for a majority of my childhood. Because I didn't understand how what happened to me happened. So many victims have to heal from blaming themselves, right. So children oftentimes blame themselves for the abuse they experience. This could be sexual, physical or emotional. They blame themselves because they can't comprehend why an adult would talk to them like that. So it's a controlling mechanism, right? We don't know how to prevent something from happening. So we blame ourselves, if it happens, it's like, I must be at fault. So I have to change myself in order for this not to happen again. So because of this, I felt very unsafe. And I was trying to always prevent what happened to me from happening again. Of course, it is never a child's fault for being assaulted, for being abused in any way. Children are innocent. Adults need to learn how to nurture children rather than project onto children. That is something we're still learning in this society. But I'm very passionate about that's why I'm passionate about healing. I'm passionate about healing so that my kids can have a parent who has dealt with their trauma, the more you heal now, the more loving a parent will show up when I have children. I mentioned that because of my experience. In my childhood, I really see that I didn't get the childhood I deserved. I didn't I didn't have a fun childhood. It was trauma ridden. It was PTSD all the time. You know, I never felt safe in groups. I never felt safe in school. I never felt safe at home. I never felt safe in small groups, I would start to make friends. And then I would get really scared of what happened to me with my other friend and her dad, that I would self sabotage and friendships because I could not experience what happened to me again. So I came up with all these coping strategies, which really for me, were isolating myself. What are the different ways I can self isolate? Right, I would self sabotage because I didn't feel safe around other people because I didn't know why would happen to me happened. So to prevent it, I self sabotage. And when I started to realize what happened to me as a kid, in my mid 20s, when my memories came back, I realized life wasn't fair. I was so devastated. Life wasn't fair. Why did this happen to me? And for a long time, I had trouble moving to the next step because I just felt like life wasn't fair. Why should I have to heal this? This is too hard to feel I can't move forward. Life isn't fair. But one day I was in a meditation, sitting with myself because I had learned to meditate through my grieving process. So luckily, when my memories came back, I did have a meditation practice and I believe meditation saved my life, my connection to myself. So one day I was in my meditation practice, and I was sitting with my anger, because behind the idea of life isn't fair there. There was a lot of frustration and anger for me. And I was sitting with that, and what jobs just my awareness was the it was the question was life ever fair. And the more I thought about this, the more I realized that life isn't fair, that life was never fair for anyone that this happened to me. But this happens to other people that there was never any guarantee when I came into this world that life was supposed to be fair. We live in a world with racism, with sexism, with abusive family members with people who haven't healed, we aren't actually born into a fairer world, we're not born into an equal world. It doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for life to be equal. We shouldn't change structures, but we're not born into a fair world. Life isn't fair. The playground we're born into is rigged against us. We're born into families that haven't dealt with their trauma. We live in a world that patriarchal structures, we live in a world that has such a division of money, it's disgusting. We live in a world where everybody has experienced some sort of trauma. Your trauma might not look like mine. But everyone experiences trauma here in some way or another. And we're taught not to look at our mental health, and nobody talks about our feelings. And life was never fair. The world like I mentioned in the intro has never looked like the movies. There's a lot of hurt people out there. There's a lot of hurt people running this world. And life was never fair. And it was never supposed to be. And when I realized life was never supposed to be fair, I realized that, okay, so it's really bad thing happened to me, this horrible thing happened to me. And it's not quote unquote, fair. But that doesn't have to stop me from moving forward. Because life was never fair. And by not feeling like I got the shorter in the stick, just realizing this was the trauma I experienced in my life. This is the trauma that my soul was asking me to look at so I could move forward. I didn't have to put it in fair or unfair, it just was. The reason it's so important to stop identifying with life being fair or unfair, is because when you think life is fair, or unfair, you're judging it and you're thinking it should have been another way. Right? But the moment we realize life was never fair, our trauma just becomes what it is. It just is. It just happened. It's something we have to heal. It's tragic and heartbreaking. But it was never going to be another way. Life was never fair. The rules were never fair. What we experienced is awful. But it just is, it just is awful. We don't have to judge it, and put it in this fair, unfair dialogue. So when I chose to see my trauma, as it was, that I was a victim and also a survivor. I don't have a problem with the word victim. I love the way Chanel Miller puts it. I don't have a problem with the word victim. It's just not all that I am. And the more that I chose to take responsibility for my life responsibility for my healing, that I no longer blamed life, right? That's what we do when we say it's unfair what happened to us we're blaming Life. Life. That's not fair. You didn't give me what I wanted. That's you giving away your power, that your life could have been any different. So my favorite Oprah, quote says it best that forgiveness is when we give up the hope that the past could have been any different. And I truly feel like that is what we start doing when we choose that life was never fair. That there's no fair or unfair, it just is. And that's the moment that I chose to see that. Okay, this is just something that happened to me, this just is there's no going back. There's no changing it, there's no getting dealt a different set of cards, this just is what I have to deal with. This just is what I have to move through in order not to be so anxious, so depressed, have these suicidal thoughts. It just is what I have to deal with. It just is. You don't have to judge it. It's heartbreaking on so many levels, you have to feel the feelings and go through the grieving but you don't have to judge it. You don't have to label it. There is so much pain and suffering on this world. Life isn't fair. Life is hard. And that's okay. The more we heal, the more we're going to help generations to come have less to heal from. I truly believe that. So that was a bit longer than I expected. I hope something in there was helpful for you. I hope that you understand what I'm saying with this concept of fair versus unfair and how life really doesn't have to be judged that way of life being fair that really when we give up the idea that life is supposed to be fair, we can move forward and heal. So I hope that was helpful. And if you have any additional questions, I'd love to hear from you. And let's jump on into a few questions.
Amanda Durocher [listener question] 21:44
Dear New View Advice. I grew up with an alcoholic mother. She was emotionally abusive and on occasion would be physically abusive. But for the most part, she would yell and say horrible things to me. For most of my childhood I dreamed of moving away and being able to start over. I left for college and haven't lived with her since. For a long time, I tried to move forward with my life. But unfortunately, I realized that I'll never be able to move forward without looking back. I've run from my childhood for so long. And now that I'm finally looking at it, it feels daunting and heartbreaking. I realize now how much her addiction hurt me. It feels so unfair, that it's her addiction, yet, I'm the one dealing with its effects. I've tried talking to her about it, but she can't hear it. I feel stuck. How do I move forward? Thank you so much for this question. I think that this is a great question. And I think that so many people will be able to relate to your question and what you described here and what you're working through. I think that so many people have parents who suffer from alcohol or a different dependency on a different substance. And I think that today we're going to be talking about alcohol. But I think that this answer and this experience can really apply to a lot of people who have a parent who has a substance abuse issue. So I looked up the statistics, and I just wanted to share that 28 million Americans have a parent who's an alcoholic, and 11 million of those are children under the age of 18. So this is very common. And this is another conversation, I don't think we have enough. I think that so many children suffer from this and they suffer in silence, because I think that a lot of times when a parent suffers from a substance abuse, oftentimes, the parent is able to function in daily life. So they're able to hold a job, or even if they're not able to hold a job, they, their problem isn't seen as much as it's seen at home. So I think that the children and the spouse, see the alcohol or substance abuse the most. So I know that a lot of people who have an alcoholic parent, at least that I know, their parent was able to hold down a job, they were able to go out in the world, they had a social life. And people didn't realize how bad the alcohol problem was because the alcohol abuse was done at home, under the home roof, not as much and public. So many kids look to their parents for advice on what to do. And they see that the substance abuse isn't talked about. So they go to school, and they don't talk about it either. Because the alcoholic parent won't talk about outside the house or they see the other parent, cover up the abuse and hide it. So then the children learn to hide it as well. And we oftentimes don't create safe environments for kids to feel safe to open up. But oftentimes children will be very anxious or depressed, who have a parent who suffers from substance abuse. And they can also be a child who acts out or child who's very quiet and very well behaved. There's so many ways children can go. And it's important for us to create safe environments, so children can come forward with the issues that are happening at home. So thank you for this question. I am so sorry that you have a mother who had an alcohol problem. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry, you experienced this. And I'm so sorry that you're now seeing that you can't move forward without looking at this. I'm also really proud of you for looking at this. But I also know that the only way through this is to look at it. So you are asking the right questions. You are just where you're supposed to be your feelings are normal, your feelings are valid. It does not make what you're going through any easier. But you are right where you're supposed to be. And you're right on track. And truly, this is a big trauma you experienced right your entire childhood, you had a parent who had a substance abuse issue, she might have gone on and off with this, you know, she might have had some times where she wasn't drinking so much. But it sounds like for 18 years, this is what you experience. And that is really, really difficult. And that is really, really traumatizing. So be patient with yourself on this healing journey. You're not going to heal this overnight. But as you heal the layers, you'll feel it come off. You'll feel yourself lighten up. You'll feel that lightness come in, you'll feel freer of this pain of your past you won't feel like the prisoner of this pain, like you describe how you tried to just throw it all behind you. But you realize you have to look back to go forward. And I think that's so beautifully said because I think that so many of us before we look at our trauma do we try to run from it? We tried to outrun it. So we use a lot of coping strategies to outrun it. And we just stopped out running it when we realized that we have to look at it, but there's just nothing else to do. There's no way forward. Our lives aren't great, you know, that's what I found when I started looking at my past and healing my relationship with my parents healing my grief healing my trauma. It was like, My life wasn't good. There was just nothing else I could do. I tried out run it for so long. I tried to numb it. I tried to avoid it. I tried to ignore or it and I just couldn't. And I think so many of us start our healing journeys when we're kind of at that rock bottom, and we're forced to look at it. So I want to say, I'm really sorry that you had a parent who had an addiction that really hurt you. As I mentioned, your feelings are valid, that is a very real experience you experienced. And it is unfair, that that addiction hurt you. And it does suck, that you're looking at it. And she's not. That's something that we also realized during this fair, unfair thing is that it's not fair that you're looking at it. But it's the truth. And it's your only way forward. So there is no fair road you could take. It just isn't fair. Life is unfair. Like I've said over and over again, this episode, life is unfair. We just have to stop lying to ourselves that it was ever supposed to be fair, that it was ever supposed to be picture perfect how you heal from this, that your mom was supposed to heal from it first and then help you heal from it. It's just not how it is. It's unfortunate, but there's no other reality. There's no going back. There's no changing the past, there's no changing who your mother is. And that's part of this healing that you'll have to go through, that you are going through is that your mother may never change. And what does your future look like with that? Is she still in it? Do you set boundaries with her? But the truth is for you to heal, you have to take responsibility for your own healing journey. And by identifying with it being unfair, that you have to heal this, you said you feel stuck, right? You feel stuck. It's unfair. Why do you have to do this? This sucks. The truth is when we just decide to flip the switch and realize it is unfair. Okay, now what? Life's unfair, okay, well, how can I move forward, life was never meant to be fair. This is something I have to heal from. This just is my next step in healing. This is what I have to look at. This is what I have to feel. This is what I have to grieve. Yeah, it sucks. That's part of healing. Part of healing is accepting right? You know, this fair, unfair thing. It's part of that grieving phase. It's part of that acceptance grieving phase, it's accepting that life is unfair. That is part of the grieving process. You are accepting that life is unfair, you are accepting this happened, you are accepting that you have to heal this. That's part of the grieving. That's one layer. One layer is finally accepting that you're the only one responsible for healing this, that your mother caused a mess. But she's not responsible for healing this, she cannot heal this. I wish that someone else could do all my healing. For me, it's just not how it works. We are responsible for our own healing journey. We are responsible for our own inner work, and we were responsible for feeling our feelings. We're responsible for moving forward. We cannot blame our parents, we cannot put all the blame on our parents for who we are. Once we are adults, we are responsible for who we are. And when we live in a place of Life is so unfair to me, we don't take responsibility for our lives. It does not make it any easier. But it makes it possible to move forward. To have this knowledge, just flip that switch to no longer believe the lie that your past could have been any different. It couldn't have it is what it is. We cannot go back. All we can do is heal it. Where you are in the present moment. Everything that happened to you happened. It made you who you are today. And I bet you're a really great person. And I bet you have some amazing qualities. And I think it's amazing that you're looking at this, I think it's amazing. We're having this conversation. I'm really proud of you. I'm so proud of you. I'm so proud of anybody who's healing their past looking at their relationship with their parents willing to take responsibility for their lives. Your mother's addiction is not your responsibility, but your healing journey is and the more you heal, and the more you accept that your past can be different. And the more you feel those feelings you weren't allowed to feel as a kid because it wasn't safe. It wasn't safe to feel those tears, wasn't safe to feel that anger. It wasn't safe to be that devastated. It wasn't safe, to feel frustrated. It wasn't safe to scream at your mom. Now it is and I'm not saying go scream at your mom saying scream into a pillow. Allow those feelings to come up, allow that anger to come up. There are a lot of feeling stuck in you. That would be stuck in anyone who experienced your childhood. Emotional and Physical abuse. There's a lot to heal there. And how you're going to move forward is taking responsibility. Taking responsibility for your healing journey. And accepting that this is what you're going to heal from this is what you have to move forward from. It's not easy. I'm here to have these conversations because it's not easy. Healing from your past healing from your trauma. Healing from the damage our parents have done to us is the hardest thing we'll ever do. Healing from it's harder than living through it because when you heal from it, you're allowing yourself to feel all the things you didn't feel then to put down those defenses you built up. It's really hard, but it's really rewarding and it's really be worth it. I am so passionate about healing. Because I'm not special. I'm not different than anyone else. All I did was do the inner work, I had constant anxiety, I was constantly depressed, I was suicidal, I had so much pain, so much trauma inside of me. And I don't know. But what did I do, I allowed myself to feel all my feelings, and it was really fucking hard. But it was really fucking worth it. So I also just want to say that for you, I don't think your mom will ever be able to hear it. I think it's hard for a lot of us when we realize our parents are children and adult bodies to that they're not perfect that at one point, we may outgrow them, even though they're older than us. So when you're on your healing journey, you may find that you become more mature than your parents. And that can be really hard. So your mom may never be able to hear you talk about this, she may never apologize to you, she may never acknowledge all the pain she caused you. So it is so important for you to acknowledge the pain she caused you. Because what I have found is that, when I'm looking for someone else to hear me, or to see me, what I'm really looking for is for me to see or hear me. Because for example, when I was healing from rape, I would talk to my mom about it. And she would apologize for my childhood. And it didn't matter. It didn't make me feel any better. What I was looking for really was for me, to forgive. For me to feel it, nobody else could say there were sorry, I had to repeat to myself that I was sorry, that happened to me. Because somebody's word, it just didn't matter. It just didn't make me feel better for the pain that I had gone through. It just didn't fix it. What I was looking for was me, was me to show up for myself was me to see it for me to acknowledge it. Because though we all are pain and suffering is universal, and we all can relate to one another. And we all have the same feelings, right? That same anger, that same rage, that same sadness, that same depression, the details of what we experienced only we know, only we know how hard it was for us. So only we can forgive ourselves, forgive others, reassure ourselves and really allow ourselves to feel those feelings for as long as we need to. Because my first piece of advice to you. And my suggestion is to not judge yourself. You're saying how do I move forward, you are moving forward. You have to be patient with yourself. This isn't easy, as I mentioned, and it may take longer than you want it to. This isn't an overnight fix. You're not going to forgive your mother overnight, you're not going to forgive your childhood, you're not going to feel healed, you might not even feel better for a long time. But I promise, the more you feel it, the more you heal it, the more layers you pull back, you will start to feel better. And I promise it gets easier, the more you do it. But at the beginning, it can feel really frustrating. And you can feel stuck, as you mentioned, because we don't fully know how to move through a layer. So a layer can take months because we don't know what we're doing. And we're trying to figure it out. So for you be patient with yourself, you are on the right path, you are asking the right questions, you are feeling the right feelings, I would just want to reassure you it's not easy. And I know you just want to move through it. But that's just not how it works. Do you think that your younger self deserves for it to just be rushed through? You experienced 18 years of trauma? If there was an 18 year old child outside of you, and they experience 18 years of trauma like you did, and they came to you to tell you what they experienced? Do you think they'd be able to explain it all in a day? Do you think they'd be able to tell you everything that happened in a day feel all their feelings in a day? No, you would be patient with them, you would create a loving space for them, you would allow them to come to you when they wanted, you would allow them to feel their feelings as they needed to. And then if they needed a break, you would allow that and allow them to come back later. And that's what you have to do with yourself. You have to view this part of you your healing your childhood, as a child outside of you, you have to do that inner child work. I'm really passionate about inner child work. I don't know a single person who's gone through the healing journey and not done any inner child work. If that's you, please let me know what you did because I don't know a way around inner child work. I was thinking about this recently after having a conversation with someone and I just don't think it's possible to heal and to move forward without that inner child work. I think it's so important. So patience is my first suggestion. My second is inner child work. So there's lots of book on inner child work. But my practice as I've explained in previous episodes, you can listen to episode five I go into my inner child practice but a quick summary of it is that I sit with my inner child in a comfortable in a safe place. And I bring my inner child forward And I allow the memories, the sounds, the words, the phrases to arise in that moment when I get to a meditative place. So this involves me listening to meditation music, you can listen to a guided meditation to get you to that place, where then you can drop in a question and ask your inner child what they want to look at today, what they want to feel. And the main thing is not to judge what arises. So sometimes it'll be exactly what you expect. And sometimes it won't. And you'll be like, Why am I looking at this tape, just trust the order and trust what arises, just trust it. If you struggle with meditation, if that sounds too difficult, I also recommend a journaling practice with your inner child. And I'll link in the show notes, a blog post, I have about dialoguing with your inner child. Because I think that if we start talking with our inner child on the pen, it can be easier for some people than meditating with our inner children. But I also think specific journal prompts for you could help. So I'm going to give you three journal prompts, and I'll list them on the website. But three journal suggestions I have for you is one, when you think about your childhood, right now, what memory arises, what are three words you would use to describe your relationship with your mother, and elaborate three, I want you to journal about all your feelings around this being unfair about how what you have to heal from how your mother's addiction, how your relationship with your mother, how your childhood, how was unfair, get it all out, allow yourself a time to get it all out on the paper, feel all those feelings because for me, I really did have to feel like what I experienced was unfair first, in order to move forward and let it go. So allow yourself in a journal, to just get out all your feelings around it. So for you, I just want to reassure you that you are exactly where you're supposed to be. You're dealing with some hard stuff you're dealing with stuff that a lot of other people don't have to deal with, and a lot of people do deal with, right? I mean, both are true. And your traumas real, your feelings are valid. I'm so sorry, you have a mother who can't see that. And that's when that inner child practice that parenting yourself. Practice becomes so important, because it's so important for us to reparent ourselves, and to be the parents we never had. And to create space to have that childhood we didn't get to experience. Thank you so much for this question. I really hope something in this answer helped. So if you have any follow up questions, I want you to know this is a safe place for you feel free to reach out. I'm sending you so much love today.
Amanda Durocher [listener question] 42:37
Dear new view advice, baseball is my life. I have played every single day since I was old enough to walk. I am in college on a baseball scholarship, but had a bad injury last year, and it is unlikely I will ever be able to play again. Although I was not going pro. I feel like I lost a big part of my identity. And I have felt sad ever since everyone tells me that life will go on. But this all just feels so unfair. Will I ever move on? What can I do to feel better? Thank you so much for this question. I think that everything you're feeling right now makes a lot of sense. Your feelings are very valid. As you said, You're lost a part of your identity you identified as a baseball player. And now you're seeing that your future isn't going to look like you thought it would, that you may not play a sport you loved ever again. So I just want you to know that your sadness is valid, and you're allowed to be there as long as you want. I'm going to offer some tools to move through it. Because I know that sometimes we can get stuck in these phases of grieving. But if you just need to feel sad, that is completely valid. And just allow yourself to feel that. So I know you mentioned that a lot of people just say you'll move on. And I'm sure you've had a lot of people tell you that you should find another hobby. That's not going to be the focus of this answer. We're going to talk about helping you move through the grieving process because that's what you're going through. So I talked about the grieving process a lot on this podcast. But as we move through our healing journey and healing up our past or for you healing from this tragedy that happened, we move through the grieving process. So you are grieving. This part of you that you thought you were you thought that you were a baseball player, and now you're not. So you're trying to figure out who you are, and so you're going through a grieving process. So the five stages of grief are denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance. And if you listen to my last episode, grief, guilt, I talk a lot about how guilt can arise on the grieving journey and that episode, but really, about how so many emotions arise as we're grieving that fall into these five stages. But these are just five stages that we move through, but many emotions arise. So we don't just feel like anger and sadness. There's so many emotions, they just fall into these five stages. So you sound like you're in a bit of the Depression state Ah, so I also talked about how, though there's five stages of grief, they don't appear in any particular order, and they appear over and over again. So we move through the five stages of grief, many times throughout the grieving process. It's a cycle in no particular order. So you could go from depression to bargaining to anger, or from anger, to depression, to bargaining. So don't judge the order, it's just a good thing to know that we move from stages, it's helpful for us to just not judge the process that we're moving from stage to stage, it's not necessarily sadness than acceptance, right? It's like, there's all these different stages that are going to arise. And it's all normal, it's all part of the human experience. So like I said, it's okay to feel sad. But I know my own experience with sadness, that it's easy to get stuck in the sadness phase, and not to move through sadness, we can get stuck in sadness, because we feel the sadness. But sometimes we just start feeling sad about everything. And it's important to bring intention to the sadness, and to remind yourself and to be intentional about why you're sad, in order to help you to move through it. But sadness can last longer than we want it to. So there's patience. And then there's also making sure we're moving through it. So it's kind of like an ebb and flow, where we want to be moving through it, and also giving ourselves the time to feel the feelings we need to feel. So ways that you could move through the sadness or see if you're ready to move through the sadness are, as I've mentioned, in the previous answer, meditation in journaling, so for you with the sadness, I would meditate and I would just suit the sadness, I would just invite awareness to the sadness, I would see if tears needed to fall, I would see if any thoughts arose. But I would just intentionally create a calm and safe place by yourself. I always like to light a candle, and just give that sadness space. Because sometimes the sadness has something it wants to tell us. Sometimes it wants to be like, I'm sad, because, and that's why we can stay in the sadness phase for so long, because we haven't let the sadness say it's peace. So sometimes we need to allow that sadness, it's time to speak to us. If you're not a common meditator, or somebody who commonly sits with themselves, I would start with a guided meditation. So I would get grounded into your body. And through a five to 10 minute meditation, you can find one on Insight Timer, YouTube, headspace, the calm app, and I would start with a meditation first. And then when that was over, I would stay in that space in that meditative space. And I would say sadness, I invite you to be here with me. Just intentionally say that to yourself, and then see what arises, do tears arise? Does the sadness have anything it wants to say to you, do images arise, do memories arise, don't judge it, just be with it. This is how you can intentionally feel the sadness and allow it to move. Because as I mentioned, we can many times get stuck in the sadness because we don't give it the space it needs to communicate with us. So that's one way you can communicate with your sadness. The second would be journaling. If you're not comfortable yet, sitting in meditation, I highly recommend to everyone on this podcast though, just start meditating five minutes a day, even just a few days a week. But meditation is a practice. It's like going to the gym. Everybody's always like, Oh, I can't meditate. I tried. They try like once or twice, or they try like once a month? No, it's a built practice. The first couple times you do it, your thoughts are going to be running rampant. There's nothing you can do to avoid it. You just have to keep sitting with it. All right. That's why guided meditations are great. And if you can't really concentrate on the guided meditation, sit down again and do it again tomorrow. It's a built practice. The only reason I can meditate really well is because I've been doing this for years. So I can fall into that meditative space quite quickly. But it was a practice. It was something I built on every day. I used to judge all my thoughts. I used to struggle to meditate. I used to pick up my phone in the middle of it. I used to do all those things. And I still sat down and did it anyway, right. I still sat down the next day. So it's a built practice. So I highly recommend everybody start practicing meditation. It really, really helps with anxiety. It really really helps the depression. So if you're feeling hard feelings, and meditation practice can change your life but not overnight. So it's something we build. It's a skill we build, like going to the gym. So if you have trouble with meditation, I recommend journaling. And you can write to your sadness, you can write about your sadness. A few journal prompts if you need a few suggestions would be one just to write about your sadness. So right I am sad and then just let your pen flow. So don't judge it just see what arises just do a free flow consciousness of About your sadness, and about the grief you're feeling to Who am I without baseball, and allow yourself to explore your other qualities or how you're feeling or how lost you feel, just allow your pen to flow. Three, if my sadness had one sentence, it wanted to say to me, what would it be, I find it helpful sometimes to characterize parts of ourselves and to see them more as people or characters than as abstract aspects. So another thing I recommend for you, because I know when we experienced tragedies, or really tragic losses, like for you, this injury is a gratitude practice. So since you're feeling sad, a way to help you to start shifting your mindset and shifting yourself back into your present day reality would be to start writing a gratitude list. You can do this a few different ways my partner and I say three things we're grateful for every night before we go to bed. But you can also write this in a journal, write three to 10 things you're grateful for that day. But I recommend doing this regularly. So you can do it in the morning, you could do it in the evening before you go to bed. But write what you're grateful for. I think that switching our mindsets to what we're grateful for really helps us put our lives into perspective. So I know there's nights when my partner says, So what are you grateful for today? And my first answer is nothing. But then he'll go and he'll say something, and then I'll be like, oh, yeah, I am grateful for that. And by the end of us sharing our list, My life isn't solved, my feelings aren't gone. But that last feeling you can have or that overwhelming sadness can shift and you can have a bigger perspective that life is going to be okay. So a fourth thing I recommend for you would be this is just a suggestion, take it or leave it. But the book, atomic habits by James clear is actually by a man who suffered from a baseball injury, and he discovered the power of small habits. So maybe for you, reading somebody with a similar story could be helpful for you. And also, I think that for you, since you don't know what you want to do moving forward, maybe building new small habits could help. And I think this book might spark some inspiration for you. So as I said, Take it or leave it, but I did really enjoy atomic habits. And I think that it could possibly help you as well. And I just want to say, before I finish this question that yes, you will move on, you said, Will I ever move on? Yes, you will, you will move on, and you will feel better. And this is a hard thing you're going through, you're very young to experience something like this. So this is very hard for someone your age, most people are in college, having fun doing all these early 20 things and you're going through a very adult tragedy, like where you've lost a part of yourself, where that's how it feels, you haven't really, I will reassure you, you're still whole, but a part of you feels broken. And that's something that not everybody experiences at your age. So be patient with yourself. And to wrap up with the theme of this episode, I also just want to acknowledge that I totally understand that this feels so unfair. It is unfair. But it also just is it's unfair. And it just is this did happen. And to move forward, you can't identify with the unfairness, you have to take the steps to move forward. But I understand why it feels so unfair. Your feelings are completely valid. And I really want everybody know on this, that this conversation isn't about that you shouldn't feel that things are unfair. You have to allow yourself to feel it. But just to move through it, we have to have that perspective shift that life isn't fair. It's not necessarily fair. That's just it's a lie. So I just want to tell you, you will move on. But it's okay to be feeling everything you're feeling. And it's also safe to move on. And it's also safe to allow yourself to move through these grieving stages and to move forward. And in order to move forward, you will have to take responsibility for your healing. And part of that is accepting that life's unfair. Instead of identifying with life being fair. I hope that makes sense. So I sent a blessing to you and everyone listening, a blessing of healing, of healing your mental body, your physical body, your emotional body and your spiritual body. Many times when we experience trauma and tragedy and loss, it happens on all four levels of our being and that these four bodies work together. And when they're in unison and alignment, we can live a life to our greatest potential. But when even one of them is out of alignment, it throws all four out of alignment. So it's important to heal all four layers of our being it's important to pay attention to our minds, to our emotions to our bodies into our spirits. And I just send healing energy out through the heart waves from my heart to yours. May you remember how holy you are. No matter what happened. And may you remember how loved you are.
May you remember how safe you are sending you all my love
Amanda Durocher [outro]
thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of newView advice. I quickly want to do a resource Roundup. So my recommendations to everyone for healing from feeling like is unfair and from whatever circumstances are happening in your life right now are one to be patient with yourself to to start meditating, as I mentioned in question two, meditation is so helpful, and it's so important and it can really help us relegate our body, to heal our feelings, to feel our feelings in a safe way. And also to ease our anxiety and our depression and to bring our bodies back to homeostasis. Meditation people have been doing it for 1000s of years, it is very helpful, I highly recommend three journaling and I'll put the journal prompts I mentioned on this episode in the show notes for creating a gratitude list to help you shift your perspective and to see a bigger picture. Five James clears book atomic habits. I just wanted to also say that I am so grateful to every person who takes the time out of their busy week to listen to this podcast. I love answering questions and discussing the healing process and having these tough conversations. If you have a question about anything from trauma to relationships, to healing, to really anything under the sun, I'd love to hear from you. I want to help you move through the healing process and I also want to be a safe place for you to have these conversations. If you have a question you would like to hear answered on the podcast you can email me at newView advice@gmail.com. Visit my website www dot newView advice.com/question Or you can direct message me on Instagram or Tiktok thank you again for joining me Amanda Durocher for another episode of New View Advice. I am so grateful to be here with you and to offer a new view on whatever you may be going through. sending you all my love. See you next time
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
