So you're spending quality time with you, yourself, and you recognize that it is a practice. You're carefully engaging your guts, not fleeing from them through your brain or your brain numbing accessories. You're climbing down into your own meat jacket. You're scaling down your spine and into your core.
every day with your consciousness. You're re-entering your system and feeling the sensations of your existence, your experience, both now and across time. It feels perhaps like giving yourself a hug from the inside out. That feeling that you get right before you successfully restfully sleep.
You being with you in peace and in harmony. You get back with yourself, feeling you noticing your life, moving through some challenges with stress, emotions, misalignments. You start believing what you're finding in this exploration, maybe for the first time ever, really honoring yourself.
and you practice gently staying inside of you, in your amino acid assembly and with your conscious existence.
How wonderful. Only to find a constant showing of your worst goddamn memories of behavioral slips and slides, semi to fully intrusive recollections of not your best moments. You know the ones, the times that you've been most humiliated or way after the fact you've decided you should.
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have been humiliated. The things that you've put in the regret column and not let go. All of the memories that you judge yourself for staly forever. Blocking out all light like the dust cloud after an asteroid collision and making sure that you are stuck living in perpetual cold choking darkness like you estimate you deserve.
And all of that darkness has a tendency to include, you know it, those big drowning emotions, sadness, grief, anger, and beyond, creating a, let's call it thrilling internal environment for you to try to function with. It's 3 a.m. You're transported back in time five or 50 years ago. Wow, time travel is real.
Or you're trying to go about your daily business, but there's a personal low-light reel streaming continually behind your eyelids. So you live in a low-grade humiliation at all points that no one else can see. Or maybe you're speaking to a friend or a coworker that you have to collaborate with, and you realize you're not listening, not over the sound of your own reminders to...
Never forget that time you done fucked up, idiot. Which, ironically, creates a new social fuckup when you get caught zoning out. But you're definitely not saying, new positive information I just remembered about me. And look at these positive emotions about me, too. Let me recollect and ruminate on that instead.
No, no. That's because we tend to have this penchant for overthinking, which is mixed with a penchant for perfectionism that we can never lay down. Overthinking plus hypervigilant perfectionism equals self-torture forever, putting us in a perpetual state of my interests include
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never-endingly thinking about how I'm the scourge of the fucking earth. So yeah, there's obviously a lot to say about painful memories, humiliations, and points that we can't forgive ourselves for. But I have to say, they might be most interesting to consider if we spread out the basis of these potential embarrassing memories.
So I want to say that there are three options here and that it helps to identify which one is the framework of the way that you are harassing yourself. In our first option, yes, an error occurred and it occurred in social reality. As in other people witnessed an offense that you made or believe that you made and therefore,
You are embarrassed. This is the classic embarrassing event that most of us think of when we think of embarrassing events. There must be an audience, right? Well, not really. It's also possible to have negative events that only went down for a very select audience or an audience of just you. But in your
imagination, you fear what others would think if they had seen your misstep or if they somehow found out about it later. So maybe you harass yourself through the voice or the eyes of another party or even just a generalized audience without faces. And this is what keeps you up at night.
Or option three, it's also possible that no one else is involved at all. You are mortified of your own self, of your behavior, just within your own being. This unpleasant memory is disturbing to you from your own perspective and none other needs to be involved. Not even imaginary social compatriots are chiding you. It's just...
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you unable to let go of that memory of also you. And while it's potentially true for all of the above options, I think this last condition especially suggests a misalignment has taken place between your values and your actions. Right? In two cases, we punish ourselves for shit that we believe others are judging us for.
or could judge us for. And in the other instance, briefcase number three, we don't have to fear our social safety to obsess over our actions. In this case, we punish ourselves without anyone else involved. And it suggests that we are coming from a different place, a different mechanism. I think it helps to know which of the three types is grinding your gears because each
type might have a different solution? Do you need to own up and apologize for something or work extra hard to reset a relationship? Or do you need to get away from a group of people around whom you just feel extremely judged and fearful and unsafe? Or have you behaved in a way that doesn't jive with you yourself?
and you need to get right with your own ideal versus actual actions. Decide, and you might have potent material for moving forward from your least favorite memories, and the rest of this work might not even be required. In any case, what the mother fuck self are some pretty common words in the brains of trauma survivors.
Often we don't even know who we were in these instances of embarrassment or regret. And that creates a lot of fear and aggression in ourselves. We might feel like we're trying to identify and understand a complete stranger who somehow has to be meshed with our accepted selves.
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It's like a piece of us that's been pushed out from our own self-membrane via exocytosis needs to be brought back in endocytosed. So that moment that we just can't forget, whether it's been observed by others or only by us, it might be an indicator of a portion of our mind that we don't appreciate because it isn't consistent
with the rest of us. And that is because it very likely is a traumatized part, a segment of our thinking or personality that we're having trouble rectifying.
This is often because that part has been developed under extreme conditions and it moves in one direction while the rest of us goes in the other. Maybe in the face of trauma or abuse, we went gentle while some portion of our mind went Rambo. Or maybe we went quiet while another piece of us screamed for attention. Or we became
dirty fucking hippies, while some abused part of us remains a controlling, authoritarian, butt fucker.
Of course, this experience of revisiting our turd-tainted memories and our shadow parts and interrogating ourselves about them, yeah, it includes the potential for pain, guilt, shame, and aggression to emerge far after they are useful. They can no longer be applied to the situation in question. And when we're being cattle-brotted by this segmented portion of our memory,
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or reminder of pieces of our personality that we do not love without having a broader sense of self or connection to self available. Well, pretty soon the pain, guilt, shame and aggression, it's all that we can see. It's all that we can identify that we are because our thoughts are filled with it.
We're so focused on not being that guy, on hating and disavowing that guy, that we accidentally become that guy through creating a highly negative internal environment that sets us up to make the same or similar or just as mortifying of mistakes. So we can get lost in our own self-judgments.
and they can start to masquerade as the self or become the closest thing to a self-concept that we have. When we accidentally recreate the very behaviors that we hate, we create a self-fulfilling prophecy that starts to take over our concept of us. It leaves us with nowhere to go.
If we only assess ourselves to be our worst memories and most negative feelings about those actions, well, we've lost our physical being. We've become disembodied. And then we can do nothing but drift through immaterial hells of our own making, contemplating how we are the dogshit of the universe. So, going back to our example from last time.
If you believe in freedom and autonomy for all, especially in relationship, but also have memory of yourself acting in smothering and controlling anxious attachment patterns in a relationship, and maybe you can also recall things like losing your temper when those patterns didn't produce the results that you desired, yeah, it's really easy to now beat ourselves up.
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after the fact with a head bursting full of trauma education and idealism. We were less than healed in action as a relational partner and we feel poorly about it, especially considering we have such healed thoughts in our heads about relationships when we are alone. But we might lose that thread when we are in the throes of socializing for real. Am I right?
Yeah, it's very simple to judge ourselves in ideal versus actual. And it's kind of first nature. We were taught to do so. But of course, if we can recognize where this internal angst against ourselves is coming from, we can earn ourselves some grace, some forgiveness, and a better method for moving forward.
the anxious attachment and angry outbursts we were just discussing, they come from trauma, right? From fear, from feeling out of control, from being injured and disempowered, from growing up in circumstances that did not match your developmental state and what you needed in order to be the healthiest you. The rest of your beliefs.
your valuing of human freedom and cooperation and autonomy, those come from being in a grown, healing state, in control and empowered, from the conditions that allow you to be your best self. And this is how those painful, prickly memories tend to work. Traumatized versus ideals of best self, which then turn around to abuse.
us.
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So let's try to recognize that the moments when we make mistakes, when we slip up, when we act against our values, when we earn judgment from real or imagined others, when we behave automatically but not very intelligently, when we give ourselves more self-critical material to work with, those are the times when we've already been small and beaten down.
and helpless to take the highest road, injured and perhaps at the mercy of another party. When we're already in a trauma mindset or a state of destabilization or chaos, when we haven't been aligned with life in the sense that our needs have not been getting met and we've been struggle-busting to just keep ourselves afloat each day. And yeah, from that painful, shaky, unsure
trauma-derived but not yet healed internal condition, as we have no choice but to engage with life from that place anyways. Yeah, no shit. Mistakes occur. A whole range of behaviors can emerge that are not reflective of any one of us as a whole. Any number of behaviors can be evoked, which simply were not intentional.
And that's because we were not acting as a whole intentional being in that reduced state that set us up for making errors. In that condition, with limited perspective available, because our brain is again, destabilized, performing very rigidly and generally screaming, survive idiot, life is pain. We're acting from our most frightened and therefore loudest.
and most automatic and unpurposable parts of our memories and behavioral programs. We are not acting from ourselves. So I think it helps to work with the sensations of both of these conditions to notice the contrast, to feel each one, to seal them into your brain as realities, and to recognize the power that you have.
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in one of them, especially as you are trying to heal the other. I think it helps to introduce the big you, the most holistic version of you, your best self when you're in a relaxed and empowered state, to take that awareness, embody it, and introduce it secondly to the small you, your trauma self.
the disempowered, trapped in time and circumstance, wounded, scared, and tiny perspective version of you, which was probably developed and then frozen in time through abandonment and trauma. Take a moment and just try to feel this. Feel the young, scared, shaky part of you, the part that maybe makes mistakes and that you return to
after making mistakes. And feel the biggest, most safe part of you, the part that acts and thinks and feels the way that you really want to. It seems authentic. It seems firm. Can you feel both sides of yourself? One powerful, strong, as grown up and capable as anyone else?
knowledgeable and self-assured, functional, and you feel the same on the inside as you're assessing yourself on the outside. The other side of you, none of that. Not powerful, strong, often feeling unnoticed and trampled upon, or very noticed and spit at. Nervy, wanting to please, wanting to blend in.
wanting to succeed, lacking confidence or know-how or support to do it. Maybe think of times in your life that you've tapped into each of these conditions. There might be long periods when you were trapped in the disempowered sub-self state, and you may have racked up libraries of embarrassing moments in those times. And or there might be small instances of returning to that condition.
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like a single week or a certain event that really fucked you up, got you freaked out and flailing. Very vibrant blips that flood your system with the sheer visceral memory of them. But I bet you also have some memory of feeling the opposite. Whole, in control, honored, respected, self-possessed.
the big, strong, secure you might be able to take another view of this embarrassing moment or parade of regretful times intruding on your self-time and to provide comfort to the small you. Hey, yeah, you know, we didn't do our best, but we're also here to say that's fine. We
tried as much as we could, and we're still on our side. Tapping into the big you might help you to accomplish that goal of self-forgiveness because it's coming from a place of authority and permission granting rather than waiting for somebody else to give you the allowance. And you might be benefited in this effort by reminding you of all the very real ways
that you are so grown, capable, strong, and unique. It really is something to finally note, to finally honor, and to behold. Alongside all the truthful reminders that you're also just about the same as everyone else. At least the way your brain functions is more or less the same as everyone else.
We're here together learning about automatic responses, accidental actions, and incidental behaviors, speaking continually about how our brains are easily hijacked by internal and external stimulation events that make freedom of will a bit questionable as they override our full selves. That's because these programs were put into us
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with powerful connection to surviving. Therefore, we ignite these tiny and specialized portions of our psyches and then our overseeing regular day selves. Just don't get called into the emergency meeting in time before an action is already set in motion. And this happens to all of us. Your brain is not uniquely fucked or faulty.
You are not uniquely embarrassing or regretful. And most of your mistakes and messy memories, they don't mean anything about you. Just that you're a human with a working brain like all the rest. And what happens in that brain is simply that a stimulation event, maybe immediately before a cringy moment,
or maybe at the start of a domino effect that led to a cringy moment months later, was perceived by the thinker and it was reacted to without asking for your, the full yous, overarching supervising guidance. So your lower level brain drove the car after receiving a piece of harrowing news.
and you were not involved wherever that car wound up. Again, it happens to all of us. You are not special or especially doomed in any of this. All brains do it. Stimulus moves to perception and immediate reaction. This action takes place without oversight and there's an instantaneous behavioral action that maybe is not our best choice.
This is the little visual for how I like to imagine it. Pew, a little laser beam shoots into the brain. It hits only a very small particular portion of programming and sets that software in motion. The rest of the computing system is completely unaware and excluded from all of this excitement and action. Until that is the stimulus derived operation.
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has already completed. Now your brain will ask for your full authentic input. Now your full overseeing holistic adult self can only review what has already happened. So it's like having to watch a play after opening night, too late to help with all of the glaring errors that were only observable from off stage review.
That leaves you with no option but to issue very harsh notes to yourself about what went wrong and fearful warnings for the next time. It's because you weren't allowed to be in the planning or editing process of your own actions during the development of this play. Your mind, your fuller, higher self then tries to give retroactive feedback
so the next production goes more smoothly, just like everyone else does. But your brain realizes, of course, that you could be shoved on stage at any point, unexpectedly. So you need to be perpetually prepared for a better performance. This is where we get the hypervigilant obsession with our mistakes and mishandled moments.
that keeps the atrocious events at the top of the mind. But what if instead of having a congested brain indefinitely keeping your least favorite moments of you at the forefront as a way to be fearfully prepared, you instead paused and noted what went wrong as we just began to. How your survival system was set off
and your mentality was split from that point onward, which again may have happened long before the event in question. Start thinking about how this drove you to automatically react, not intentionally respond in ways that were adaptable to some situation, but it was not the situation that you are now thinking about. And you might want to consider
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this happens to everyone else. Identify the stimulus, the automatic thought, and the instantaneous action that you don't feel right about and try to understand it from your big grown self downward so that you don't have to live in constant anxiety and fear and critique dreading the potential challenge in the future.
Figure. You can either take everything that we've talked about throughout this podcast and use it to recontextualize your shamey, staggering, paralyzing, regretful moments to lean toward self-compassion, informing your brain of how it often reacts without your consultation when a stimulation event rings traumatic or when you're already in some compromised state.
and then how it runs itself into the ground, brooding upon it. Or you can pretend that you don't know any of this information, that it somehow doesn't apply to your brain in particular. You can identify with your strongest, most automatic reactions and call them just broken you. You can continue to let your head run wild.
in real life and after the fact, in the ways that it obliterates you with harsh thoughts and punishments. You can live a life of not-to-your-best moments, followed by non-stop sessions of tormenting yourself about them, followed by, please God, anyone accept me for the taint of the earth that I am. But you shouldn't if you're smart. And you can continue evading your full authentic self.
who would be able to see through all of the bullshit that I just described, all of these things that you maybe have been working to ignore. Truly, the choice is yours. Keep beating the shit out of yourself or accept that brain education applies to you too. And it literally is a choice.
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If your brain uses knowledge for your own progress, or if it just collects information as a hobby, that very much is up to you. If your mind comprehends and forgives itself for its extremities and errors in the past, or continues to use them as self-defeating, self-entrapping, self-destroying media productions that truly limit you from ever obtaining a life you want to live,
That also is up to you. Again, it's all about where you put your attention and begin integrating. So my point is, you know trauma by now if you've been here for any amount of time. You know how a brain runs on those dribbles daily like Duncan if we do not purposely put ourselves in a different mental condition. And
getting lost in our own painful memories of self-hate, it's ignoring everything that you've learned, that you've come to understand, rejecting it, choosing self-harm over self-education. So the question is, how do you want to live if you choose with progress, clarity, logic?
and peace. Then the only option is realizing you, your full self, are so unique and individualistic, capable, strong, and wise. But your brain is not special. It is roughly like every other traumatized brain, and it has the same shortcomings.
then using that acceptance and recontextualizing your shitty memories with it. All of this psychological information that you've carefully accumulated can be put to very good use, to healing use, sealing in the message that the data applies to your own situation and past situations, not only the unknown subjects of studies that we talk about.
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So, my fucker, I encourage you to aim for sitting with your self and feeling into that truth. Feeling into the information that normally doesn't really make it past your brain. Really having emotions around what it's like when your brain is in a trauma state. When you're behaving in pre-established patterns.
What does that feel like? When you're functioning on fewer spoons than you'd prefer, what are those sensations and cognitive patterns and all the verified reasons that these things take place? Notice them, identify them in your life and connect them to those feelings. Then try to find the relief in knowing it's not you. It's your brain on trauma.
doing its best in challenging circumstances when it feels this way and things go awry. Remember all the Insta posts and podcast ups and YouTube vids that have taught you this much, that have taught you about brain mechanisms after trauma. And then connect with yourself, putting you back into your body while you carry that knowledge down into your core.
with you and feel it again. And keep sitting and keep softening and keep integrating. Keep accepting all the information that you've learned, integrating it with the experiences that you've had and feel it into your core.
That is how you'll find out if your brain, like mine, eventually accepts this information and locks it into place and eventually becomes empowered by this practice. Empowered enough to state enough when self-critical reflections start shining again. We know better, we've learned better, we took it upon ourselves to do so.
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and we don't need to punish ourselves anymore. This memory is important, it indicates many things about our pasts, but it is also done once we have gathered that information. Enough is enough, and you are enough. Self-condemnation is so fucking boring and unoriginal and truly
unreasonable, illogical, unintelligent, and pointless, you'll eventually realize. It's time for new fucking thoughts. It's time for yourself to get involved, rather than living, which really feels like dying, from your trauma brain and all of the resulting critique. So, remember.
You are yourself, courageous, capable, curious, unique, secure, and strong. And you are also no different from anyone else in the brain. It makes mistakes. It is your choice how to handle the relationship with yourself afterwards. And that's where your full self holds all the wisdom, the knowledge,
and the power. Now, fuckers, I have a lot more to say about self-forgiveness and letting go of burning memories. You may have heard kind of important parts of trauma recovery, but let's say enough is enough for now. The memories of a not to our best moments and the constant glass shard containing cud chewing that comes along with
can be laid to rest for today. Next up, we talk about perhaps the greatest challenge to spending time with us, continual attempts at disassociating once more. I'll see you there in our third to final self-exploration venture, if you dare. While we talk about escaping into the body, into the brain, or altogether,
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into the ether. Alright, that's it fuckers. Take care until then and get off your own goddamn back. To not do so is to repeat trauma unto yourself. Cheers y'all. Bye.
