Click HERE to listen on iTunes, or you can click HERE to listen on many other platforms. If you would like to, you can read the transcript of the episode below.
Please subscribe and SHARE with anybody you think would be helped by this message. If you love the podcast, please leave a review on iTunes. Thank you and have a great day!
This week we talk about emotional scars and I share what I’m working to heal this week. Real growth comes with accepting the pain as well and feeling it. It’s hard but it’s real and it’s where we will find what we need to become who we are underneath it all. Enjoy!
TRANSCRIPT:
If you struggle with depression, you may want to be aware that I will go deep here and I am not a therapist or psychologist. This is just my experience, and I hope it helps… but try to respond to your own needs as you listen. It’s always okay to disagree and stop if it’s not resonating with you or actually helping you. I love you my friend!
Today I want to talk about scars and how they play a huge role in our lives. You see, in our lives we go through experience after experience and very often we are disappointed. Very often we make mistakes and those around us make mistakes and we experience emotional pain from those mistakes. The problem is what happens to this pain. Scars are when an emotional wound is not cared for and it gets stuck. It doesn’t heal properly and keeps us stuck. We try to hide our scars but they still hurt and control our responses to our daily lives. We are trying to hide them from the outside world and from ourselves. We are ignoring the pain, but it doesn’t go away. It needs attention. Our bodies, physical and emotional are made to heal; but they can’t heal when we don’t listen and respond. So, the problem then is that the scars that we are unaware of in our internal world are impacting our lives negatively.
I often come across emotional scars when I least expect to. I watch a commercial that has a father and daughter hand in hand with smiles on their faces and I start to well up with tears; yesterday we were watching a music video from an animated film on YouTube and the scene was a mother pig cleaning house and then shocking her husband with her dance moves and voice… I immediately got emotional. My instinct is to hamper these feelings. I have deep wounds that came with loss and pain that I haven’t fully felt. Wounds that came from experiences where I have anchored myself to stories and beliefs about who I am because of these experiences. Stories and beliefs that are keeping me stuck. Keeping me holding back or making myself small, or judging myself and others. This week has been emotionally rough. I am doing some deep work at identifying some things that I have been hiding from. Stories I have told for so long and am working to change, but have been trying to cut corners. I have been learning to identify the sources of my emotions, and working to change the thoughts that are those sources… but I have been ignoring the emotions themselves, dismissing them. It feels a lot less vulnerable and a lot more safe to realize what’s going on and then work to change the thought, than allowing myself to experience the feelings that have been trapped for so long. I haven’t wanted to acknowledge the feelings and allow them to flow. This just doesn’t feel safe.
So lately, I have been struggling with thoughts that have led back to scars… emotions that are trapped from experiences of loss that I haven’t allowed to move through me and feel. I haven’t allowed myself to greive. One of these has to do with my ex’s father. He was in my life for a long time, and losing him in my life cut deeply. I started to go through the grief, first in denial and then eventually to anger and bargaining. But I didn’t allow myself to really sit with the sadness… to sit with the fact that he is gone from my life. That he is done with me and that I am not going to get back what I lost with him. This may be hard for many people to understand, and I can imagine it is painful for my husband… but when I met my ex, closely thereafter I met his father. He was a man of confidence and pride. He was wise and had weathered a lot in his life and he was strong. I saw him as what I had longed to have in a father. I didn’t know really what I had wanted or been missing, but he was a loyal and very loving man, in his own ways, and that was what I needed. He was far from perfect, but I loved him as he was. I didn’t agree with all about him, but he had been there for me. He even came to my wedding when I married my now husband, despite the fact that I know that it grieved him. He came to visit when I had my eldest son and he played with him and laughed with him but I saw the pain in his eyes. As I think about this, I am crying and trying not to shove the feelings back down. For the last several years I have told myself that I was a victim in losing him. That he abandoned me as others have before. I have clung to that story and shoved down the feelings that my body and heart have been trying to use to help me grow and grieve and move forward. A couple of weeks ago however, my husband crossed his path. He didn’t see my husband and my husband didn’t make himself obvious. When he told me I felt immediate pangs of pain and loss. I have not yet dealt with this. This was the man that I met when I had just turned 18. The man that I called papa and the man who came when I had my first car accident. He was the man who flew me out of the country when his son and I split and who I knew loved me deeply. He was my emergency contact and my business mentor. I remember when I was 18 and on a road trip with him to California. We were driving and he and I were talking about a book I was reading. We played a math mind game and I nearly won. He looked at me and told me Wow, you are really bright. He said he hadn’t realized how smart I was but that I had incredible potential. I don’t remember anybody like that ever saying that before. My mom always believed in me, but it was different coming from someone who was not my mother. Coming from a successful businessman who saw me and accepted me as I was.
I have struggled with this pain so much. I have wrestled with it and shoved it down because I didn’t think I could handle it. I certainly didn’t think it was fair to lay the burden on my husband. It is hard enough for him to remember that I was married before him, and so just sharing with him about this ignites a sort of shame in me for having been married before. It’s a chain reaction of feelings that I can’t unfold just a little of, so I have kept them neatly packed away until they crossed paths.
Every so often I have wondered if he was still alive. I have wondered if he still lives nearby. I have wondered if he ever thinks of me and misses me. When my divorce took place, it wasn’t the loss of my ex that I grieved so deeply as much as it was Christmases with his mother and father. I found myself feeling too busy to be inconvenienced by these scary and unsafe feelings AND not even acknowledging that they were there.
This week I have begun Mastin Kipp’s Claim Your Power book. It’s a 40 day journey and it’s incredible. I’m on day 4 though and this is pouring out. I had to write out stories I have told myself and when I first remember telling those stories. My memories are flooded by my ex’s father. His mother is a whole other amazing story, but I saw her less frequently because she lived far away. The memories of both of them are full of joy and full of pain because they are no longer around. I haven’t accepted this loss. I never sat with and acknowledged how hard it was to lose them. I never even acknowledged losing them. When I went through my divorce, we kept in contact, fairly frequent contact and it softened the blow. Then I started dating my husband and was balancing his emotions about me still being involved with my Ex’s parents. I was struggling with trying to manage their emotions, because that’s what I used to try to do. I didn’t want him hurting because I was still so involved with my ex’s father… I was struggling with how they felt about him and his family and how they might be grieving. I never once stopped to feel my own feelings. I finished college, got married, and then pregnant… by the time I was a mother I definitely didn’t have time to process it all. Then we moved to Washington state… and then one day it ended. I won’t go into it. He and his family are very private and in no way am I trying to share too much, but it just stopped. Our relationship ended and I broke apart. I was so incredibly consumed and sad… I now am starting to realize and actually acknowledge that I had post-partum depression. We had a new house with way too many responsibilities, in a new town in a new state and I had very few very new friendships… and a baby… who had an eye turn that I was trying to digest and work on; oh, and a 3 year old. My husband was struggling himself and I thought I had to keep it all together in order to control everything. This is what I told myself. I had to protect everyone around me and keep myself safe, and feeling all of that terrible shit was so incredibly not safe. It was a lot easier to focus on the external and try to control it all.
I am sharing this story because as this is coming up for me I am realizing how deeply I had it buried, and also how much this has impacted me. I am raw from the pain. There is a lot I hold onto from that relationship and my experiences with him as my father figure in my life for 14 years. I am sharing this because I know you too have stories like this. They won’t be the same, but we all have these stories and experiences. Things we haven’t felt and have buried deep, so deep that we often don’t even realize it’s there because we have gotten so good at numbing and distracting that we don’t recognize the pain as being at all related. Until one day we are triggered by something feeling so random and then we are overwhelmed by emotion.
I am sharing because this scar is still there. It is still blocking you and hiding it doesn’t do any good for you or those around you. It hurts and it feels painful to face but ignoring it doesn’t solve the problem. It magnifies it. It keeps you stuck surrendering your power until you can acknowledge and sit with it.
Scars from loss in our lives control us when we don’t accept the loss of the pain. The pain took place, and when we ran from it; when we hid it and shoved it down, the scar formed and the emotions trapped us in that story, in that cycle of pain and all of the triggers that would exert control in our lives until this moment. Now we are in this moment and we can choose.
And this can feel so overwhelming if you’re like me and you think, well I can’t handle this… There are too many scars and what difference will working on healing just one scar make. It’s anxiety producing to think of all that we have to take on. And that’s why we don’t start with that thought. That’s why we have to call bullshit on that way of thinking and start to remind ourselves of the truth amidst the pain we face.
You see, every experience we have of deep pain is a part of our growth. When we face the experience, allow ourselves to feel it and go through the grieving process, then we are able to see the lessons. The end of the grieving process is acceptance. I talk so much about acceptance, but the truth is, we can’t really accept what we are refusing to see. If we are just going through the motions, trying to do all of the work on our thoughts but refusing to accept where our pain is, what has happened and what we have lost, we are still clinging to our stories and can’t actually fill that space of our lives with the lesson and the blessing and the next step.
Today is a bit less organized than I usually try to have it, but I am ok with that. It’s real people and I am not here to be liked by everyone, or admired, or represent something; I am here to be real, and to show you that you are enough. And you are, but the way to being you is by accepting you. The way to accepting you is accepting the pain that is in you, really acknowledging it, feeling it, allowing it to move through you freely without fear of it taking over. I am realizing that this is the next step in embracing who I am, is feeling the pain I have shoved down for so long. I have been doing a lot of this with journaling, but finding the core beliefs is most beneficial because the recurring themes in our daily lives that we battle with are because of the core beliefs. The experiences that we used to create beliefs and stories long ago that are entangled with our identity. I know that I want to let go of my ex’s father. I know that I need to accept that he is no longer in my life; and I recognize that my denial of it was keeping me clinging to an idea of him still being there, even if it was in the painful denial and struggle with the loss of him. I need to let him go. I need to move on. I need to allow myself to learn.
It is the grieving of our pain and loss in life that we find acceptance. That we find the peace with the circumstances we have clung to. That we find the lessons that will propel us in our lives with glorious momentum in growth and freedom. I want to love myself. I want to embrace my life.
I also realize that another thing I have been struggling with deeply is that all of this thought work I talk about and am working on, all of the things I live my life by now and hold so dear to me… all of it, he would be against. The man that I knew, is not in agreement of the way that I live my life. And in clinging to this idea of him and not accepting things as they are, I am still holding myself up to his standards and judgements. I am not slamming him, because he is incredible in his imperfection; I am saying, it’s ok that he doesn’t believe what I do. It’s okay that he wouldn’t accept what I represent now and I realize that I am okay with him not accepting me as I now am; as a more real and vulnerable me, as weak as he may see that as being. These are the layers that are leading to freedom.
Last night I was clinging, desperately, one last time to all of it. I was distracting myself and unable to sleep. And now, today I am embracing it. I am enough and it is all okay.
I no longer want the scars of this loss to be a problem in my life. I want to allow it to be the blessing it was meant to be. I want to get all of the lessons out of it that I am supposed to; the lesson of seeing that I am enough even if those people that I love so deeply (because I still love him) don’t accept who they see me as; the lesson of realizing that what people are rejecting or accepting is not actually us, it’s what we seem to represent to them and it’s not personal, so whether he is accepting or rejecting of me or what I represent, it actually isn’t me he’s accepting or rejecting, and seeing that frees me even more to being myself and not trying to control other people’s perceptions of me; the lesson of seeing how much my clinging to this lost relationship has affected my fear of other people’s opinions of me. I see him in people I meet and am reliving perceived judgements and rejections in whomever I am projecting this experience and pain onto in my daily life. In accepting this and realizing these lessons I am actually now at a crossroads to actually taking these lessons and growing. I have a choice now of living in the light of what I have learned with gratitude for the loss and pain. I am humbled by the experience and realizing that I need the pain to become a more authentic version of myself. The more pain I allow myself to process in my life, to feel and allow to move through me; not allow to control me, but the more I can sit with it knowing it won’t control me, the more I can see and feel and experience my actual life. I can keep changing my lens with the upside of the pain. The truth the pain helps me to see. I also realize I can’t rush it. I won’t do it perfectly, I’m not supposed to and neither are you.
I am all about positivity. About looking at things with beauty and choosing my thoughts and being intentional; but as I am learning from Kipp Mastin, Brene Brown, And many others, that a lot of my power comes from the pain. I am learning that I have a choice, but just saying the nice things while not acknowledging the pain is not living an authentic and humble life where I get to experience freedom from the chains that bind me and keep moving forward. I am not in this alone and neither are you. God is in this with us every single step of the way and today I am giving myself permission to live. I am asking you to accept your permission to live your life fully; experiencing all that there is, knowing that even the hard feelings are here to teach us. They are a gauge of our thoughts, but we need to process them. Let us stop being controlled by scars we are unwilling to share. The scars are still there and hiding them just keeps you from healing. Saying affirmations blindly while covering our scars doesn’t promote change and growth. The lessons that will establish lasting change are within.
So I encourage you this week to work on grieving one story. Figure out a story you tell yourself and think of the first time you told yourself that story. Think about how it felt and allow the feelings to move through you. Journal about it pouring it out onto the page and then reflect on it. See the lessons you can in the pain. Allow yourself to slow down and feel it, but don’t allow it to control you; allow yourself to see it and feel it, and know that you are still here and now and safe; and then rewrite the story with the new perspective.
I am rewriting the story with gratitude for the time I got to have this man in my life. I am grateful to be able to reflect with clarity on the fact that he both wasn’t perfect nor was he a villain. He just was human. I can see now where he had weaknesses and learn from them appreciating him in his humanness and see his incredible strengths with a renewed inspiration. I am free to see him for real and allow his influence on me now to be good and powerful, while not controlling over my life. I am so grateful for all he taught me. For the way he inspired me. And for the lessons I am learning now with where I have grown ever since we parted ways. I accept that he is no longer in my life and I am now open to God filling that hole, the space that I barred up reserved for the pain in that experience, as I am no longer clinging and can let him go. God wants to bring blessing from that experience, he always has, and has wanted to fill that void, but I wouldn’t allow it. Now I am free… now I can move onto the next thing. It is not daunting, it’s beautiful. It’s uniquely my story, just as yours is uniquely yours.
So reflect and allow yourself to grieve in writing. Accepting it and seeing the truth. Forgiving ourselves and others and opening to the next stop. In this, try to allow the tears to flow. Don’t hold them back. Aletha J Solter talks a lot about the healing power of tears. It’s biologically incredibly beneficial for us to cry, so try to allow the tears out.
This is enough, and it’s a lot. IF you’re not ready to do this just sit with the idea and allow it to be thought food. Allow your mind to chew on it and see where it leads you. You will feel a pang of something. Maybe tomorrow you will be ready to start to face it. Start with a blank page and no interruptions and give yourself space and grace and allow the truth. Don’t worry about judgement and just be fully real and see what happens.
I hope that today was helpful for you. Thank you for meeting me weekly in this vulnerable space. I am so incredibly grateful for each of you. I truly have thought that if my stories and thoughts can help at least one person, then I am incredibly grateful. I would love if you share with me in this journey what is helping you; where you’re finding inspiration and growth. Your scars are beautiful. They are a part of your journey that you don’t need to hide anymore. Let them be reminders of the beauty that has come into your life as you heal from each wound. Let them become triggers of self-love and compassion; triggers of inspiration and gratitude. Let them be something that makes you uniquely you. Remember that owning your story is powerful, and when you do that you can be a blessing to the world. You won’t ever be able to give what you are meant to give when you are hiding and clinging in fear and shame, anger and suppressed pain. I love you sunshine. You are enough even if you feel lost and alone right now. It is worth it, this work toward embracing who you are. You can do this and you will do this and I’m coming with you.
Sincerely,
Holly Ann Kasper
The Radical Imperfectionist