S1E2: Maybe It’s Not Your Fault

SHOW TRANSCRIPT

Hey, hi everybody. Welcome to the podcast, Into the Depths, episode two. I’m the host, Jennifer. Thanks for joining us. Last week on episode one, we talked a bit about how stuff hides, how we have blind spots and there are things that we don’t realize and we don’t notice in our lives that could be harming us and making our lives more difficult and how we need to have somebody help us develop awareness.

and recognize what’s going on below the surface, those areas where we are oblivious to self-sabotage and get to the place where we can accept and admit that we may have a skewed perspective, right? So this week, I want to talk about how we got where we are because I think a lot of people blame themselves and feel like because it’s their fault that they’re in this place that’s not going so well.

that they have all these wrong ideas around why they can’t move forward and why they have to remain stuck. And so what I want to discuss is what if how you got here isn’t actually your fault? What if the reason you’re stuck or you’re spinning through all these cycles, what if that all that stuff that led you here wasn’t actually your fault? So let me explain what I mean. Nobody wakes up

every day and says, you know what, I think I am going to get in my own way today. I think I’m going to try to make my life harder.

You know what would be really great today? I want to wake up and I want to focus on negativity. I want to focus on ways I can sabotage my success, my progress. I want to make sure that I’m a bad mom or a bad wife or bad employee, right? These are kind of silly, but you know, nobody gets up in the morning and says, let me think up all these new lies and labels and limitations so that I can stump my growth and keep my life small and make my relationships worse or whatever.

Those we get here kind of by accident. We’re not intentionally getting to the place where our life doesn’t work well. We do however, once we recognize it, we have control over how we move forward, how we get out of these ruts, how we break those cycles and move forward. So let’s take a step back though and just think about this. you haven’t already thought about this, here are some things that I want to bring to your attention.

So for some self-reflection, how did I actually get to this spot? What led to me being in this place, in this life where I’m not that happy, where I don’t feel successful, where I don’t feel like I’m living in my identity or my purpose or making a difference in the world? Where do all these misconceptions about life come from? How did we learn self-sabotage? What shaped our outlook? So some of these might seem…

kind of common sense, but I want to point them out anyway, just so you can start thinking about in your own life, how did these things contribute? So first of all, how did we grow up, right? What did our parents or guardians model for us? Were they really negative people? Did they complain all the time? Or were they joyful, happy people who were always uplifting and always positive and speaking truth and…

you know, we’re going to tend to do life the way it was modeled for us. Sometimes those are good things and sometimes they’re bad. And sometimes they’re so bad that we can say, no, I’m never going to behave that way. I’m going to choose a different approach. That does happen. But we tend to do the things that were modeled to us in childhood. So, you know, were you taught good money habits, how to budget, how to handle investments wisely?

Were you taught healthy ways to handle conflict? Did your family scream and yell at each other or did they sit down and have calm, rational conversations? did people in your family champion each other? Did they speak positively to each other and encourage each other or were, you know, were you, maybe the siblings were competing or maybe, excuse me, maybe the parents didn’t get along so.

You know, the kids didn’t learn how to have healthy relationships for example, for us, when Tim and I got married, it was really important to him that we take trips and do vacations. And I thought that was so stupid. When I was growing up, we didn’t really take trips. We might have gone camping once or twice in the summer. You know, we did drive to the beach a couple of times.

All in all, me growing up, vacations were not a priority and I didn’t realize the value. So my husband had to help me see that taking trips and making memories with your family, doing things that you wouldn’t normally do in your day-to-day life is actually very enriching and having those memories can really build connection and bonding within the family relationships. so, but I didn’t know that because I hadn’t seen it.

model that hadn’t really experienced it. So, you know, how we grew up shapes us, right? It’s kind of a no-brainer. Family dynamics such as, you know, birth order, how many siblings did you have? What spot were you in? Because that can affect your personality and your outlook on life. Were your parents divorced? Did they stay together? Was there a step-family situation where you had lots of different siblings? All of those things can, they shape us, right? They mold us and

give us a certain type of outlook on life. Our environment matters too. So we’re, did you grow up in the city? Did you grow up in the country? Did you grow up near the beach or some water? Did you grow up in Alaska like my kids did? So they’re used to the cold. They like the cold. They don’t like the heat. So the location where we spent most of our lives, that can make a difference. Or what if you were

a military family and you moved every couple of years and so you had experience in all these different places but you also had difficulty building close relationships. I know that a lot of people that I know who grew up in a family of lesser means, what we would consider poor or impoverished, those types of families I’ve noticed they tend to have a scarcity mentality, an attitude of lack.

Like there’s just never gonna be enough. I struggled with this a lot and I’ll talk about that more. Or there’s some families who really have a strong victim mentality where they blame everybody else for their problems and it’s sort of, woe is me, lots of self-pity. These are things that they don’t realize they’re doing on, they’re not doing it on purpose, they just don’t notice it. But those are attitudes and outlooks on life that we pick up, right? And our community,

matters too that shapes us, especially when we’re kids. know that my husband was a little bit ornery when he was a kid and he hung out with a couple kids and they used to get into all sorts of trouble just doing ornery things.

So who we hang out with matters. And even into adulthood, scientific studies have shown that we do tend to become like the people we hang around, which is why it’s really important to get in different types of communities and get around to broaden your view, your worldview, and understand different types of cultures or religions or different things. So if you just stay sheltered in this little pocket or this little same community for 20,

years, it will skew your thinking. And that’s not necessarily always bad. There could be some good there, but it will make you a less well-rounded individual. So it’s good to get around some different communities and spend some time with some different types of people. Like I was sharing last week about when I moved into management, I made sure I got around other managers because I wanted to glean as much as I could from them. anyways, I won’t belabor that. You get that. So

Another thing that really contributes, so the first one being how we grew up, the second one being our personality. And I want to be really careful here, like we’re not moving into labels. Labels are not good for us. all of us are so different and we have unique aspects to who we are and the different personality traits and

To me, it just is proof that God is so brilliant when he created humans and making us all so unique in our physical features too, but just in our personalities. I remember when both my kids were born and seeing some other kids around born and just being amazed that even as babies, how different all the personalities were. It just kind of blew my mind and it just makes me really in awe of like just

how smart God was when he created us, when he created the world. hopefully you already have a pretty good understanding of your own personality. And if you don’t, there’s so many different types of tests out there. I don’t recommend one over the other. I think doing a few different personality tests is probably really a good idea. The point being, again, not to label yourself, but to understand yourself. And this is one thing that concerns me.

is I hear a lot of people say well I’m an introvert I’m an extrovert or I’m this type of score on the Enneagram and again those things are helpful we need to understand ourselves but at the same time we if we lock ourselves into a box that’s not good for us so even though for example my son has was always very much an introvert growing up he didn’t have a lot of friends he didn’t really need that and I did encourage

that to a point. I didn’t just let him become a recluse. also, even though the family, we all pretty much agree he isn’t an introvert and we’re not afraid to say it, we also know that that doesn’t mean he will only be isolated. That doesn’t mean that he can never have good, close, healthy relationships or enjoy going out. So be careful that when you find out what your personality traits are,

that you don’t use them as a label to put yourself in a box because the thing is science has proven that personality is actually not locked in. Like you can change aspects of your personality and I didn’t think to look up any of the scientific studies. I’m sure you could just go look it up for yourself but we can live differently. We can make some changes. Shy people can become more bold and confident. Bold sort of…

brass people can learn to tame that down. there’s, even if we have certain types of traits, we can also temper those a little bit, learn to shape those different traits or even change something altogether. So I just want to make sure that we are accepting to the idea that that is a lie. When we want to debunk that lie that says, this is just who I am. This is the way I am. This is, you know, the nature versus nurture thing.

My nature is this way, my personality is this way and it can’t be changed. That is not true. That’s baloney. And so I just want to make sure we’re all clear on that as we move forward. And I will say too, like we have to be able to recognize when we’re making excuses because we want to reject those excuses. You may not have control over.

certain circumstances in your life, the way you grew up, different things, but you have control over how you show up. So if you’re an introvert and you want to be more extroverted, that’s possible. You can try. You just need to learn what works for you. We can be a better person. The idea that we cannot change, that our personality is cemented is wrong. And so I really love this quote by John Maxwell. You probably have heard it. I’m sure it’s really famous. says,

Change is inevitable, but growth is optional, right? So around us in our life, there will always be change. Something is gonna be different. Nothing ever stays the same. That’s just circle of life stuff, right? But we have a choice if we’re gonna grow, if we’re gonna adapt, if we’re gonna try to become better, make our life better, or if we’re just gonna give up, give in and let life happen to us. We have a choice. We have agency. So personality.

is not locked in, we can change some things if we don’t like certain things. And I would say the third aspect of how we got where we are, how we got to this place of stuckness or whatever you want to call it, is our different experiences because, and this could be in childhood, but also in adulthood, all the things that happen to us, everything we go through shapes us, right? So there’s so many different…

situations like travel, such as when I went to Australia and just had all those different amazing experiences that were so enriching and made me face some fears that I didn’t even know that I had that I was hiding behind. The type of school that you go to makes a difference and different families can choose different types of education. There’s no right or wrong way. It’s whatever works best for your family, whether you’re homeschool, public school, private school, whatever.

When I was in school, I was told that I was a good writer. I always got A’s on all my papers and I learned to love that. So that shaped who I was. I didn’t know that I had a love of writing until I realized I could do a decent job at writing a paper. And then people began to tell me that. So that shaped me. One thing that I absolutely love is, unfortunately, I grew up in a small town where there was very little diversity in my school. And I felt

that left me what word am I looking for? I feel like I missed out on learning about different cultures and races, but my children went to a high school that was super diverse. It was one of the most diverse culturally in the entire US, which I thought was really cool for being in Alaska where there’s so few people. And that…

was so good for them. I was just so thankful for the different experiences and the friendships that they were able to develop there. So another thing being different clubs that you have in school or even as an adult, whether you’re like on a baseball team or you’re in a book club or whatever, all of these things shape us because the people that are involved in those teams or even just being on a team itself, you learn different skills.

by being a part of a team that you wouldn’t necessarily learn if you were never on any kind of a team. But I remember when my daughter went to middle school and she decided she wanted to try debate and

I didn’t know anything about debate and so I feel a little bit bad about this, but I thought debate was so stupid and my husband and I looked at each other like we didn’t do this in front of her, but we were like, debate, what in the world? Why would she choose that? And that ended up being the best thing for her because she realized that she’s really good at public speaking. And in fact, in the sixth grade when she was just learning how to do this, she won an award. And so all of that shaped her and it helped her understand

some of her gifts and talents that she wouldn’t have necessarily noticed otherwise. But because she got involved in that and they helped her hone those skills, then she was able to embrace that and realize how much she loved it. And different types of college, trade schools, I feel like I don’t need to go super deep into this, just different religious experiences, like if you go on some sort of mission strip or just the different traditions that you might have in a certain type of church.

relationships, so many different relationships can affect us. Whether you have like a really great mentor or you didn’t have any mentors at all. Whether you had people growing up who would speak encouragement to you or you didn’t have anybody who cared about you and tried to encourage you at all. Or maybe you had a lot of bullying experiences which gosh I really hope you haven’t but that can be really detrimental. That will shape us right? We lose

some of our self-confidence, self-worth or whatever when we are mistreated like that, especially when it’s on a regular basis. One example would be, you my husband grew up without a dad. His parents were separated and so he had these three wonderful men from his church who would step in and do things with him like hunting and fishing and those things that he wouldn’t have been able to do because he didn’t have any other male figure in his life. so many different types of relationships that can

affect where we end up. Different things like military service, different things like health issues. Maybe you had a child with diabetes or a debilitating disability where you have physical limitations or even loss. Like if somebody really close to you passes away early, such as you become an orphan because your parents died or even a loss of moving to a new place. There can be a lot of

Dynamics that go with with moving as well or another major thing might be a bankruptcy Where your your whole life changes you used to live this lifestyle now you’re living this lifestyle Different types of jobs careers different hobbies that we choose and there’s just so many different experiences out there that shape us so and then another Important thing that I want to add on here is that trauma we all have different

levels or different areas of trauma in our lives. And, you know, there’s two types, from my understanding type A where something really bad happens to you that affects you very negatively. It’s something that is done to you, such as abuse or a terrible accident or whatever. But there’s also part B trauma where you don’t get your needs met, such as a certain amount of neglect, right? Or your parents didn’t know how to show you love or whatever. So that’s a very generalized.

But trauma, the things that happen to us that are traumatic definitely shape our thinking and can skew our way of looking at the world. So how did we get where we are? How did we end up here in this place where we are self-sabotaging and living under all these lies, labels, and limitations? We didn’t do it on purpose. It’s not our fault that we got here. But once we recognize where we are,

we have the ability to work our way out and create a better life for ourselves. So all of these things that I shared might be, like I said, feel a little elementary, feel like common sense. I’m just bringing it up because I know there are some people that have not thought about those things. Why am I the way I am? And it’s really important to self-reflect on that. So back to my question, what if…

The way you self-sabotage, what if all of this self-deception and all of your blind spots, how you got in this cycle of stuckness, what if it’s not your fault, right? Lias, labels, and limitations are sneaky. They’re subtle. We didn’t choose to believe them. I kind of said that at the beginning, but as a child, there’s only so much that we have the capacity to understand about life. Our brains are not able to fully understand all the things that happen to us.

And there’s a lot of brain research out there, trauma research that shows our brain’s entire goal is to make sense of the world and protect us, right? So sometimes our brains tell us things that are not necessarily true because they’re trying to make everything fit. And as a child, our brain is doing the best that it knows how, right? It only has a certain amount of capacity. And…

I would encourage you to go do some brain research. think some of the things I’ve learned is actually really fascinating and helped me understand why I think certain ways and why I behave certain ways. But what happens, and this is very generalized, but what happens is that when we think the same things over and over and over, we’re building a trench in our brain, essentially, similar to like a river going down a river bed and how it builds that groove into the ground. And so when you’re doing that over,

a long period of time for decades, it is very hard to try to learn a new way of thinking and shift to something different. And these trenches, I mean, in the Bible, it’s called a stronghold. It’s just a bunch of thoughts that are built up that create this kind of knot in your brain, so to speak. And we have to be intentional about creating new pathways, about thinking differently. And that means when we…

are trying to do something new, we have to really practice it over and over and over. And I’ll get more into that later. I just wanted to throw that out there that, you know, we are not stuck in a certain way of doing life. We have the ability to change. It just can take a little bit of work. So I also want to throw out this last thing. When it comes to change, sometimes it’s made more difficult because we’re carrying a lot of shame and condemnation. Sometimes people don’t

grow because they don’t believe they’re worth it. They think with all these bad things that have happened to me, it doesn’t really matter. Or they think that I can’t change. They think that they don’t have the resources, whatever. There’s lots of weird ways that we can look at it. But because we don’t feel worthy, because we feel like we’ve ruined our lives or whatever, we don’t try, right? Or it feels so overwhelming. We don’t know where to start, so we don’t even bother.

And the truth is, you we don’t have control over how we grow up. We don’t have control over all of the circumstances that we, or experiences that we endure, right? But we do have control over moving forward. So if we’re blaming ourselves, that’s not a good place to start. We’re not going to be able to break free and get out of that. So we need to be able to deal with the fact that

you know, some of our shortcomings, some of our weaknesses, some of our mistakes, yeah, okay, they may be our fault, but in general, the whole concept of how you got here isn’t. So we recognize the problem and what we wanna do is be able to get to a point where we can let go, right? To where we can, okay, I made a mistake, I just need to forgive myself and move forward.

We can’t live our best life if we are embracing shame. We have to learn how to eradicate shame from our lives because shame is focused on, I’m a bad person, which is different from guilt. If you feel guilt over something that you did, it’s you feel bad about what you did, but shame says, I am the problem. I did something wrong. you know, it’s I focus, me focused. And so I don’t really have time to go into a lot of that right now, but I would encourage you if you

haven’t looked into dealing with shame, that’s huge. It’s something that needs to be addressed. So I would encourage you to go do that. And just remembering, we don’t know what we don’t know, right? We’ve all done the best we could. And so when we get to a place of awareness, that’s when we can be like, okay, I don’t need to berate myself for doing things wrong all these years. What I need to do is put my energy into moving forward. How can I?

make this better? How can I stop choosing those wrong thoughts and behaviors? How can I start choosing better ones? So don’t waste your time on shame and condemnation. Don’t waste your energy on that. Learn how to work through that, get some healing, and then focus on how you can do better

Let me wrap up. So as we go about this week, I invite you to explore the depths of this final thought. What if you choose to believe that self-sabotage is not your fault? What if you actually are worthy and capable of a better life, a more beautiful life? Change is possible.

What would it look like to be free of the constraints and the condemnation that you have put on yourself? So spend some time in self-reflection this week pondering that and I will see you back next time for episode three of Into the Depths. Bye everybody.