In this episode:
You don’t have to be a sober person in recovery to have a history of making poor choices. In this episode, I discuss coping with the highs and lows of dealing with other humans being flawed individuals and how you can extract information from your experiences to keep you mindful and not jaded. People only show us what they choose to reveal, so how can we be kind to ourselves when we miss red flags?
Resources:
Bottomless to Sober – Workshops, Writing Classes, and Coaching
Transcript:
Jessica Dueñas:
Hey everyone, welcome to today’s episode. So I wanted to talk about the topic of self-compassion. And the reason why is because I realized it’s something that I need to practice more for myself. There’s a recent circumstance in which I found out some really unfortunate news about somebody who I highly respected and admired. And I feel like a part of me immediately made it about myself and judged myself really harshly. and was like, well, you should have known better. You know? And so with that being said, I’m honestly probably going to break this up into two episodes just so that each episode is more clear in its topic. So first I want to talk about practicing self-compassion when other people let you down, essentially, right? Like you have this vision or an idea of what a person is, and then their true colors and you’re like, holy shit, I did not anticipate that. And it’s funny because this is totally it’s totally unrelated, but not so, you know, recently I’ve been also kind of following the media about Lizzo. And obviously I wasn’t there and I don’t know what happened or didn’t happen. But again, it just it just kind of stings like to have someone that I admire and then see these new versions of. these people come out. And I think, A, one of the big takeaways is it’s just that reminder that we as humans are very imperfect. And if anything, I as a person in recovery need to always remember, right, where I was at one point when I was making deceitful choices, right, selfish choices, choices that didn’t benefit anyone except for that urge to drink. And… reminding myself that I’m not the only person who struggles with poor choices, right? And that you can have other people, like just because somebody isn’t struggling with addiction, it doesn’t suddenly make them like a perfect angel or a human being. Because I think that I have this notion of, well, people in addiction or in recovery, they can have these struggles and they can have these dark, sordid histories, but no one else on the earth’s population can. And then I suddenly like hold other people to these weird higher standards. And really what I think current events are showing me is that I totally need to check myself and that anyone, anyone and everyone is subject to having a vast complexity in their lived experience, not just sober people. So anyway, with that being said, I’m going to read a little passage that I’m going to post on my Instagram at some point. And I wrote. When people show you who they are, believe them. However, people don’t always show their real selves. We don’t know what we can’t see. So remember to be kind to yourself for not knowing certain truths. You’re doing your best. I’m gonna read that one more time. When people show you who they are, believe them. However, people don’t always show their real selves. We don’t know what we can’t see. So remember to be kind to yourself for not knowing certain truths. You’re doing your best. So I, I had to write that down because it is very important for us to first remember that right. There are times when people will show you their true colors very clearly and it falls on us to decide what we are or are not going to do, right. So I’ll give an example, say, with friendship. Let’s say that you are early in recovery and you told a friend that you are quitting drinking, you’ve decided that you don’t want it to be a part of their life, of your life, and this friend is like, oh, well, can’t you just have one after you’ve already said that you’re done with alcohol? Now, that’s giving you information that you can choose to believe or not to believe. The information that I’m getting from a scenario like that is that friend does not care about your wellbeing. Point blank period, right? What I’m getting from that is that friend is more concerned with maintaining a relationship with alcohol than they are with you maintaining your health. Right? So at that point, when a situation like that presents itself, you have the information that you can decide what to do with it. You can either choose to continue that friendship, see what happens, or you can choose to remove yourself from that person, understanding that they’re just not in alignment with where you are in terms of your relationship with alcohol. Another scenario of people showing you their true colors. I’ll give an old example from someone I dated in the past. So after I had gotten divorced, I was in a relationship with somebody who never would let me tag him on social media. where if I were to tag him, he would always remove the tags and remove the tags. And his argument was, oh, you know, I like to be a private person. And there was something about that really bothered me because he stated that, but then, you know, I had gone to meet his family, I had been in his community, et cetera. I had gotten very, very involved. And in my mind, I was like, well, then why can’t… You know, I’m not blowing up the social media posts even back then in terms of my personal stuff, but I was like, why can’t I post like happy anniversary and tag you? And something about that seemed very incredibly suspicious. And I knew back then that I should have been like, well, if you are hiding me, there’s a problem and I will not be hidden. So I am done. Right? That’s what I quote unquote should have done. that’s what I would do today. And now that I know better, I would do better. But of course, I didn’t know back then. Lo and behold, what the time reveal time revealed that he was actually in a whole other relationship. And so that was the specific reason as to why he couldn’t be tagged on social media, because he was holding a huge secret from me and from like everybody else, right? Like he was basically seeing two people at once. So He showed me who he was. He showed me very clearly that I needed to be kept a secret, but I chose not to believe it. And so then I got burned, right? The beautiful part of it is I know better now and I do better now. So one of my very clear things in relationships is that if I get a sense that you’re hiding me, I’m just not going to entertain you because I will not be hidden. So I wanted to give those two examples of to just hit on that point, right? That people can show you who they are and it’s up to you to believe them or not believe them and then just deal with the consequences. Life is always gonna teach you a lesson. It’s just a matter of how you choose your path. But the next thing I wanna focus on is the idea of people not always showing their real selves. Because that’s the thing. Sometimes people will give you the very clear signals. Sometimes you will see the red flag. And again, it’s on you to either act on it or ignore it and then deal with the consequences later. But people don’t always show everything, right? And some people are very good at being deceitful and compartmentalizing the parts of themselves that they don’t want other people to know. A perfect example of this, and I’m not saying that social media is deceitful, but a perfect example of this is someone’s social media feed, right? Like Right now, my hair is in the bonnet, like I am up early and I’m just recording, but I’m not posting myself and what I look like when I get right out of bed on my Instagram. The reason why, because I don’t really want people to see what I look like when I get out of bed. I don’t care to share that. I mean, I look pretty much the same, but I choose to curate my Instagram feed so that you see what I want you to see, right? And the point there is that everyone does that with their social media. Whatever people put out on their social media, is a curated story that they want others to see of themselves. So they’re not going to show, like I’m not going to show when I’m cleaning up my dog’s poop, because again, I don’t think that that’s relevant. I don’t think that you need to see that. If you want to see that, let me know. But I think that that’s not a valuable thing to share. But if we take the concept of the curated version of ourselves from social media and apply it to regular life, it’s very similar. People… show what they want you to know. And so in the cases of folks who are very vulnerable and open and transparent, that’s great because you get a better sense of the whole picture. But even then you still don’t see everything and you still don’t know everything. So when you are close to someone or where you have been close to someone and then you find something out major about them that came completely out of left field, it can be really hard. to process that information. And you might want to be harsh on yourself, right? Whether it was say deception, like in a relationship, right? But it doesn’t have to just apply to that. It can be literally anything that comes out about this person that you didn’t know that might be a disappointing truth about them. And now suddenly you of course make it about yourself and you might be feeling really bad about yourself. Like, how did I not see this? How did I not know this? And the reason I’m bringing that up is because you didn’t know, right? Some of us might say, well, what about my intuition? How did my intuition not pick up on the fact that this person was a liar or a deceiver or a cheater, or a gas lighter? Why didn’t I pick up on that? And I wanna invite you to think about the fact that even our intuition is our body having a response. to the stimulus that it receives, right? So as humans, go back to just basics, we see things, we hear things, we experience our environments, or we experience someone else who is in our environment, and our body scans that person and creates a decision of whether they’re safe or not. If someone is purposefully hiding something or compartmentalizing and keeping something away from you, There’s no way for your intuition to scan and pick up that this person is some sort of a risk, right? Again, there are times when those flags are visible and we choose to ignore them. But I’m talking about the invisible flags that we didn’t even have the option to choose to ignore. Right? We can’t see, we don’t know what we can’t see. And we can’t sense something that has been completely cut off and blocked away. And so I really just want us to practice that self-compassion when we don’t know the entire truth, when we don’t get to see the entire picture, because sometimes that does happen. And the other really important thing is to not take it personally when some sort of dark truth comes out. Right. Because at the end of the day, you know, to quote Dominguez-Ruiz from the four agreements, everything that other people say. has nothing to do with you. Everything that other people do has nothing to do with you. Even, and you know, he does say this in his book, someone could straight up come up to you and shoot you in the head, and it still has nothing to do with you. And the argument there that he states is that when people make decisions, it always has something to do with something internal that they’ve got going on. So when there’s someone in your life that you may have respected, or a celebrity who you really admired, And it turns out that there was something secretive and dark about them that has come to light. It is so important for us to remember that we did the best that we could with the information that we had. Right? And when more is revealed, it goes back to us now being empowered to make a choice. What do we do with this information? Right? Do we… ignore it. Do we act on it? Right. But again, practicing that self kindness is so important, especially in the world of being in recovery, because you’re going to find that there’s no such thing as at least in my opinion, there’s no such thing as like the good person or the bad person. We’re all humans and we’re all incredibly flawed. And sober people aren’t the only people who have a history of making shitty choices, right? It’s a human experience. In the human experience, there’s a lot of terrible choices that are made, and it’s up to us to decide what we’re okay with and what sits right with us and what doesn’t sit right with us and act accordingly. So with that being said, what are some actionable items you can do kind of given this information? Like if you recently had somebody in your life who totally let you down, what can you do? So number one, write about it, right? Get all the feelings out, write them a letter. Don’t send them the letter. Go through the art of writing them the letter where you say everything that’s on your mind, but don’t send them that letter. This is an activity for you to practice healing and for you to let those emotions that are weighing on your heart and mind off of your chest. This is not for you to go interact with them. If you choose to interact with them, That is something that you can do after you consult with like a mentor, a coach, a therapist, some sort of professional. Like I said, I’m not going to sit here and tell you on a podcast to go talk to someone because I have no idea what the context is. And if this was like an abuser or something, I’m definitely not going to sit here and be like, yeah, go talk to them. But I will tell you to go ahead and write everything down on a piece of paper. Okay. Then the next thing that I want you to do is I want you to recognize the… good that you did see of what was shown to you, what was good and what was helpful and beneficial. Because again, not all situations are just this or that. We live life on a spectrum. And I want you to acknowledge the positive sides of the spectrum here. Then I want you to go back and look at if there was any sign of a flag that you missed. Was there any hint of red in there that you just turned a blind eye to because the good was so good? And what I want you to do with those hints of red, maybe pink, I want you to just lock them away in your mind as a source of information, as a reference catalog, like an encyclopedia, for the future. And this information does not mean that it’s law for everyone that you come across in your future. But what it does mean is that if you see this hint of pink or red, again, with a person that you interact with in the future, that you step back and take a close look at the situation that you’re in, whether it’s a friendship or romantic relationship, a work partnership, et cetera, and you use that to help you decide if you’re going to move forward with this person and how, right? What safeguards can you put in place? What I don’t want you to do. is to take this one example of a person and apply it to all blanks. You know, like if you are a heterosexual woman and a guy cheated on you, I don’t want you to be like, oh yeah, all men are cheaters. No, that’s not going to be helpful. And that kind of thinking is going to be very alienating and leave you isolated in like an ivory tower because you’re trying to protect yourself. And really you’re… just not going to experience any joy or any pain because you’re sitting there and isolating yourself. So that’s not healing either. Isolation is not healing. So just putting that out there. So anyway, I hope that this was helpful. I hope that if you are dealing with a slightly wounded heart because you’ve been let down by another human being, being a human, that you remind yourself that it is okay. And again, reflect on it, write out your feelings, identify what was good. And then also lock away the red, lock away the pink, but don’t make the pink or the red law. And hopefully that’ll just kind of help you in terms of practicing some of that self-compassion to yourself for not having seen everything, right? People show what they choose to show, even you show only what you choose to show others. So when somebody finds something out about you and they’re like, oh my gosh, I didn’t know that. Again, it’s okay. It is all right. So thanks so much for your time today. I’m going to do a second part to this with regards to self-compassion, specifically with regard to ourselves, but I just wanted to do this one first. So thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed it, share it, and I will talk to you soon.
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