Stopping the Self Judgement

Have you ever felt ensnared by the relentless grip of self-judgment, a harsh inner critic born from the depths of past betrayals and traumas? Together, we embark on a journey of healing, peeling back the layers of internalized blame that have been imprinted upon us since childhood. Through personal revelations and the powerful narratives of those I've guided, we tackle the complex task of understanding and overcoming self-judgment. The steps I share are not just theoretical; they are battle-tested pathways to help you reclaim your joy, your identity, and ultimately, your life.

As your guide, I delve into the transformative essence of self-awareness and the meticulous practice of self-care that transcends the superficial. We dissect the significance of the words we whisper to ourselves – their power to forge our subconscious beliefs and the capacity of positive affirmations to reshape our thought patterns. This conversation is a call to arms, beckoning you to wield the tools of genuine self-care and affirmative self-talk as weapons against the lingering shadows of doubt. By joining forces through the shared experiences on my social media platforms, we create a community where growth is nourished, resources are abundant, and continuous support is a given. Let's embark on this empowering quest towards a life liberated from the chains of our past.

For the Powerful and Profitable Trauma Informed Coach 5 Day Challenge, click on this link to join the challenge: https://www.kushlachadwick.com/5day-powerfulandprofitable

Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:03

Hey everyone, it's Erin Anderson with the Erin Anderson B-Trail Trauma Coaching. I am super excited that you have tuned in. Today. Let's keep talking about how to heal from B-Trail Trauma. Welcome to the other side of the struggle. This is a podcast where we talk about trauma, how to heal it and then how to take it and use it to unlock your mission and your potential and to use it to live your very best dream life.

Speaker 1: 1:50

When you're dealing with B-Trail Trauma, it can be hard to know how to heal it, how to stop the pain and to know what your next steps are to take in your own life, and these are the questions that we try to answer here. Trauma has the ability to rob us of our joy and identity, which is why it's so miserable to experience. But with the right tools and with the right mindset, we can totally reclaim that joy and even use this trauma to strengthen ourselves, so that way, trauma does not knock us off of our joy again. Living your dream life should be a non-negotiable, but trauma tends to try to negotiate that with you and even though trauma is not something that we will completely ever be free of in our life, the pain is negotiable. This is why I created Aaron Anderson B-Trail Trauma Coaching and this podcast is because I want my listeners, I want my clients, to live, truly live, free from the prison that trauma can put you in. I want you to live on the other side of the struggle. Hey, my loves, welcome back to another episode of the other side of the struggle. Okay, so I gotta be honest with you guys. This podcast has actually been rolling around in my mind for the last little bit.

Speaker 1: 3:48

Honestly, because one of the things I see from a lot of my clients is just this extreme self-judgment and no, like it's not just them either. Like this is something I see not only in clients, but I see this in church members, I see this in neighbors, I see this in random people walking down the street. Like I see this in a lot of people. There's just a lot of self-judgment out there, and it's not always necessarily your fault either if this is something that you find yourself stuck in right, and the reason why is because a lot of times when people find themselves in betrayal trauma, there's actually been a whole history of trauma behind that. So, for example, a lot of my clients come to me because you know their husbands have been into pornography. They're feeling that deep sense of self not self-betrayed but they're feeling that deep sense of betrayal. Right, why am I not good enough? What's wrong with the way I look? Why can't I satisfy him?

Speaker 1: 5:03

And these are some of the things that are going on in my clients' heads, but every single time, almost without fail, if we kind of follow their story back a little bit, there's usually some type of childhood trauma or some type of developmental trauma earlier on. Okay, and that could be. A lot of my clients have been sexually abused as children. It could be neglect or abandonment in some way shape or form. And abandonment doesn't mean, like parents actually just like drop them off on the side of the road, right? It often means, like you know, the child is feeling very, very vulnerable, crying, wanting some help, wanting someone to sit with them in the emotion and comfort them, and the parent dismisses the emotion, pushes it away, tells them to stop crying, right? I mean, we get those kinds of things a lot and those types of things do create a type of trauma as children. So what do we do about this, right? So what ends up happening is the child learns.

Speaker 1: 6:25

This child is feeling all of this emotion, all of this angst, all of this uncomfortableness, right, and instead of saying, well, mom and dad shouldn't have treated me this way, they tend to blame themselves. And the reason why is because the child's psyche does not have the reasoning ability to be able to look at an adult, someone that cares for them, someone that's supposed to be their caretaker, someone that's supposed to help them and be there for them, the person that they look to for their survival. They're not able to say, okay, well, they're having an emotional thing going on right now, they're in the wrong, they should not have done what they did, and so I need to set boundaries. No, a child, a child's brain, doesn't think that way. What a child's brain does is it says oh, mom and dad are angry at me, it's my fault, mom and dad don't want to have anything to do with me, they don't want to spend time with me.

Speaker 1: 7:44

Something's wrong with me, it's my fault. Mom and dad won't take care of me, they don't care about my emotions, they don't care about the way I feel. It's my fault. And the reason why is because a child only understands that their world revolves around them, and so if their world is broken or if their world is painful because they see themselves at the center of their world, then they must obviously be the one at fault. They're the ones that have to be wrong.

Speaker 1: 8:25

Okay, and this follows us into adulthood, and we tend to attract relationships into our sphere and into our lives that reflect that belief to us. Right, somehow it's my fault If my husband's looking at pornography. It's my fault If my children aren't doing what I feel like they should be doing because it's for their best interest, then somehow I'm the bad mom, and so that behavior has been learned as an early age, but it's never been resolved, and so it does turn into a self-judgment when betrayal comes our way. So what do we do about this? How do we heal this? Well, I want to give you three steps today and they're actually really simple steps to help stop the self-judgment.

Speaker 1: 9:30

Okay, because in order for you to actually heal your trauma, be able to move forward with your goals and to be able to create the life you want with the resources you want, the self-judgment has to stop. It's actually a self-sabotage when you sit there and say that you're not good enough. You're not good enough, you don't deserve these things. Something is fundamentally wrong with you and until you've fixed what's fundamentally wrong with you, you don't deserve all of this. Goodness, right and I've seen this a few times in the people I've coached Right, when you sit there and say those things, it is literally the highest form of self-sabotage. And so when you get into the child-to-trauma, the betrayal trauma, then you turn around and actually start to get into self-betrayal and that needs to stop right now. That is not something we want to do and it's not your fault. Like I said, if that's something you're dealing with, this is totally not your fault. This is something that has been a learned behavior, right, and so we get to forgive ourselves very quickly. We need to set the boundary, and this is your first step. Set the boundary that that stops here.

Speaker 1: 10:51

Okay, I remember, actually, when I realized like the thoughts I was actually having about myself, I was walking up and down my sidewalk on the side, by the side of my house, and I was on a phone call, like some sort of a training phone call, and I can't remember the whole details of what exactly happened, but I was sitting there saying you, stupid fool, what is your problem? Why can't you do anything right? You're such a failure You're just going to fail at this again. All of these like really mean things in my head and I stopped for a second and I was like holy cow. I don't feel very good right now, like I feel a ton of shame. I am feeling a ton of self-judgment and just FYI, guys, shame is actually the opposite of Godly sorrow. Shame is something that's gonna keep you in a very, very nasty cycle for a very, very long time because, again, remember, we don't deserve these things.

Speaker 1: 12:13

However, when we start saying to ourselves hold the horses, this is something I can change, I am not going to speak to myself that way anymore. I am so very sorry, self, that I was causing you so much pain with my words. I am so very sorry, self that I had such horrible thoughts about you. I am so sorry, self, that I was betraying you and that I never really saw you. See, one of the things I hear a ton from my clients is that they really would like other people to cherish them, other people to see them, other people to really acknowledge they have a voice, other people to really hear them right To not dismiss their experiences, not dismiss their emotions. But what they're not understanding is they're often doing these things themselves, and the thing is the reason why we've got to set the boundary with ourselves that we're not going to talk that way to ourselves. This is actually where the boundary comes from.

Speaker 1: 13:49

When we don't allow other people to speak that way to us either, you cannot expect or even intend for someone to treat you better than you are treating yourself. People do it. Yes, those are just fantastic people, right? But if you find that you have a lot of people around you that are not respecting you and not kind, not giving you the time of day, not really listening to what you're saying, the chances are somewhere down deep inside of you, you might be showing up that way for yourself too. And again, we're not going to judge ourselves for this right. This is a whole podcast about stopping the self-judgment. No shame, no guilt. It's just bringing something to our awareness and being like oh, I get it, I understand that this is something I am doing.

Speaker 1: 14:51

Trauma teaches you to hate yourself, to judge yourself, and in order to unravel trauma, you have to be able to unravel this self-judgment, believing that you don't deserve any better. And once in a while, I've even kind of had a couple of really fiery clients where they get really angry really quickly. And, granted, if you've been dealing with trauma and betrayal most of your life, anger is going to accompany that right. So, again, no judgment at all on you if this is something that you're experiencing. But oftentimes, as we peel back those layers of self-judgment, there is a sorry, as we peel back those layers of anger. That's what I meant to say. There is a lot of self-judgment behind that and the anger is up as a protection so that way they're not consistently hurting themselves over and over and over again. So we have to set that boundary number one and say I will not treat myself that way.

Speaker 1: 16:12

And the more you start giving yourself the respect you deserve, once you start giving yourself the kindness you deserve, once you start giving yourself the best friend you deserve, and once you start giving yourself the self-love you deserve this unconditional love Then you start to recognize what that kind of relationship looks like. You start to recognize very clearly what is and is not okay for someone else to treat, to say to you or treat you like Right, and then we can start explaining to them this is not okay. And this also creates a very solid boundary because you understand what's behind you being saying those things, you can also understand what's behind somebody else saying those things. Right, if you have been sitting here saying, oh my gosh, you're so stupid, you're such a fool, what is your problem? Right To yourself, you're trying to control, sometimes, things that are completely out of your control, or you're trying to push results on yourself that are not yours to gain, or maybe you're trying to force results to come too quickly to you.

Speaker 1: 17:45

There's lots of different reasons, right. When somebody looks at you and maybe says those same things, you can understand that that is not in alignment with who they are. Because you're understanding that those words are not in alignment with who you are. We can literally say when somebody comes to us with those cruel words dripping right off of their lips and saying it's unfortunate that you see things that way, I can see that that's definitely not something that would make you happy. However, you do not get to speak to me that way and this is beneath you anyway. That kind of talk towards any other person is beneath you, because you recognize that that kind of talk to yourself or any other person is beneath who you are. We get to set boundaries with other people once we start setting them with ourselves, and so if we want to get respect from someone, this is something we have to be able to give ourselves as well.

Speaker 1: 19:02

Okay, Number two for every negative you think and hear, find two positives to say out loud Okay, now you have a lot of negative forces that are fighting you. There's not a single person on this earth that doesn't have this problem. Okay, we've got good and evil seriously coming at us all the time, and so oftentimes these voices that you hear in your head are not even your own voice, but they're so good at mimicking our voice, they're so good at putting all of this evidence in front of us, right, they're so good at all those things that we often take it as our own voice. But honestly, if we're going to be like super raw and honest with ourselves, we would never treat ourselves in a way we don't want to be treated by someone else. A lot of the time I'd even say 99% of the time the voices we hear in our heads that are not kind are not our own voice. That's actually the result of entities working against you and working on you, and so what happens is when you witness and just simply hear like the negative thought and you stand up and say two positives, you are training your brain to actually hear the truth.

Speaker 1: 20:54

Your brain is wired to listen to your voice, and your voice alone. First. The reason why is because it is the voice it has heard the longest and the most. Now, granted, you might say, well no, the first voice the baby hears is its mother's voice. While that's true, you eventually move away from mom. You are not with mom all the time. It is your voice that you hear most of your life and therefore, your brain trains itself to hear your own voice, your own speech. This is why our words matter. It takes whatever you say and stores it in the subconscious, and it will not let you move past anything, because your subconscious is there to protect you. When you use words that are damaging, all of a sudden, your protection alarms go off and you say this thing, xyz is not safe. That's what it's saying. Your brain is saying. Therefore, I want to say as far away from it as possible. So if we say two positives for every untruth and every negative that we hear, we tend to start training our brain to calm down, it starts to regulate our nervous system and we're able to open up two possibilities of the things that we can actually do around us.

Speaker 1: 22:28

Okay. So, for example, if you're hearing, I am such a horrible mother. I can't believe that I did XYZ. Right, if you're hearing, I'm a bad mom, I'm a bad mom, I'm a bad mom. Let's stop for a second and say, no, I'm not a bad mom. I cooked dinner with my kids last night and we read scriptures together. That's things that good moms do, I take. I really care about the way my kids think and feel. I am present with them when they're having a really hard time. My mind is constantly thinking about how I can improve for them. All of those things are true. The bad mom piece, not true.

Speaker 1: 23:21

We might feel broken and sometimes that comes out on our kids, but that's what we get to share with them. Hey, I am so sorry, like if you just blew up at your kids. Yeah, of course we want to stop that kind of behavior, right, but what we need to do is we need to take some ownership Remember, that is the fifth pillar, ownership and we simply go to them and say I was in the wrong. I should not have spoken to you or treated you in such a way. That was not okay and that's out of character and out of alignment with for who I am and who I want to be for you. I just had a lot of big emotions today. I really needed some space. Please forgive me. I'm going to try to work on this and that's what we do. We just take some ownership over what it is that's happening in our lives, okay, not saying that kids are resilient. I don't want to dismiss their experience either. No, we definitely shouldn't be screaming and yelling at our kids, right.

Speaker 1: 24:34

But when you take the ownership of the wrongdoing and instead of blaming them because they did something to trigger you, right, that helps establish a certain type of trust, because they want to know that you're going to take what they felt seriously, what they went through, seriously, okay. And another thing like, if you really want to up that ante a little bit too, you can also say to your kids hey, I am totally imperfect and I'm totally going to screw things up, I'm going to leave scars on you and I'm so sorry, and it's because I'm still trying to. I'm still trying to figure things out. I don't have it all, I don't understand it all either, but when you need perfection, go to the source of perfection. Please, I am here to teach you that I'm not the perfect parent. When you need perfection, you need to go to your perfect parent. And what a better lesson to teach our kids than to have faith in God and His perfection when we are totally like coming apart Because we need His perfection too. Right, we can really have and teach some beautiful lessons from our weaknesses if we just own them.

Speaker 1: 26:04

And ownership looks like saying the truth out loud, at least twice, and the more truth you feed your brain the exact opposites of the negatives you hear. Okay, look for the evidence. It's there, I promise. If you look for it, you'll see it. Okay, your brain will start to rewire and start to think this way. Start training to hear your own voice and start really saying you're a fantastic human Because you're going to be saying it out loud and looking for all the evidence, and that is going to stop the distraction of all the things that maybe we're mucking up. Okay and truly, before you say well, I need to be aware of my weaknesses. You'll still be aware of your weaknesses, but you're going to be more aware of your strengths. And the more we focus on what we're good at, the more we focus on our strengths, we build on those things, the less room we have for the weakness, and the weakness turns into strength.

Speaker 1: 29:38

Okay, the third piece to this take self-care seriously. If you're struggling with self-judgment, you're also struggling with self-care. I guarantee it. If you want to stop the self-judgment, you've got to really take what you're feeling seriously. Okay, that doesn't mean you're going to blow up on everyone. Matter of fact, it's an invitation to slow down Instead of speed up, which is what we tend to do. It's an invitation to slow way down and just acknowledge that we're having an emotional reaction.

Speaker 1: 30:23

This is actually self-care. You might look at self-care and be like, okay, that's massages, that's going, and getting my hair done, taking myself out to lunch, reading a book in the bathtub yes, those are all self-care things too, don't get me wrong. Those all feel good, they help replenish you. But it's also self-care to sit with yourself when you're having an emotional reaction, instead of trying to push it away. That is not what we want to do. That is not what we're here for. We want to be able to sit with ourselves. Science has actually proven that it takes 90 seconds for any emotion to chemically burn out of your body Okay. Therefore, when you just sit with the emotion and we say things like I see you, I hear you, I feel your presence, I know you're here, Thank you for showing up. I'm going to get curious about why this happened.

Speaker 1: 31:36

Sitting with yourself and just feeling, without re-triggering the emotion or what happened or why it came up, it's an opportunity to slow down and just get curious. And as we get curious, we start to gain answers to what is happening and what we need to do. If we're stuck and we're like I don't know what to do. That is an invitation to acknowledge your feelings. Take some self-care, get curious.

Speaker 1: 32:18

For example, this is something that I've been doing now for a long time. It was something I had to learn, but I had something come up the other day where I had a really strong emotional reaction to it, and I was surprised, because I'm really, really good at listening to my emotions, regulating my emotions, learning from my emotions, all those things I practiced, what I preach, and so when I was having this really, really strong emotional reaction, I was surprised, really surprised. And so, instead of speeding up and blaming everybody or wanting to slug someone or screaming yell and not that screaming yelling is bad if you're doing it somewhere where it's not going to land on someone else. But it was an invitation again for me to just slow way down and get curious. And as I got curious, I realized that there had been some conversations that didn't happen years ago, that needed to still happen because there were things that were still coming up. I realized how there were certain key people in my life that I didn't trust, and if I was going to trust them again, I needed to be really, really honest about the way their behavior from years ago made me feel I couldn't brush this off anymore, and so I had to have some difficult conversations. And what was amazing is, once I had those difficult conversations with these key people in my life, that emotion died way down and as I thought about what had happened in the past, instead of having such a strong emotional reaction, I felt peace. I knew that I had taken care of the problem.

Speaker 1: 34:29

So when I say, take self-care seriously, it means care enough for yourself to be present with you when you're having an emotional reaction. It's important. Some other things about self-care every person needs some time to ponder and reflect and get their mind in a good space. Okay, I personally love to do this on walks. Walking is such fantastic somatic exercises because it gets both sides of your brain working in alignment with each other. And as both sides of your brain work, you're able to release a lot of trauma, your nervous system relaxes and you start to feel a lot better. You start to process, you start getting answers, clarity, all of those things. Okay, that's another form of self-care. It is also important to give yourself the time of day okay, and just yourself. Nobody else in French is on that time. It's time for you and you alone, okay.

Speaker 1: 35:43

And another piece of self-care is also connecting to your highest form of love God, in my case. Right, we need to connect to love every single day. It's a whole lot like a lamp. If we're sitting here trying to jam it into the wall or into the floorboards or something like that, it's not gonna do a whole lot of good to us, but when we actually plug it into the source of light, then it lights the entire room. We are very similar. We need to be able to plug into love in order for us to light up. Okay, all right, my loves.

Speaker 1: 36:25

So just in a quick recap, to stop yourself judgment set the boundary. Okay, set the boundary with yourself. You're not gonna talk that way. Number two for every negative you hear, find two positives and say them out loud. And three take yourself care seriously.

Speaker 1: 36:45

I hope this was helpful for you guys. Don't forget, if you guys would like to schedule a call with me and get some personalized help, make sure you do that. Okay, you can reach out to me on Facebook, erin Anderson B-Trail Trauma Coaching. Message me there or click on the link below. There's links in the description. You absolutely can schedule a free call with me right now. Get some help for what it is that you are personally struggling with.

Speaker 1: 37:21

Lastly, we've got another round of Unashamed Life Coach School. If you're a life coach, they would love to be trauma-informed and actually be able to help your clients move their trauma, get the results they want, so that way they can have a fantastic experience with you. They praise your name to the skies and keep coming back for more help and referring all their friends to you. If that's something that you're interested in, reach out to me as well. The next session of Unashamed Life Coach School has actually started, but we still have a couple of spots left that are open for a few more people. So if you're interested in doing that, reach out. Let's get you hooked up with Unashamed Life Coach School as well. All right, my loves, until next week, I'll see you on the other side. Bye, guys. ["unashamed Life Coach School"].

Speaker 1: 38:19

Okay, so I've got a question for you. Have you joined my free Facebook group or Instagram page yet? If you haven't, go and do that and this is the reason why I always post my freebies, updated information and all kinds of goodies for my community in that page I'm also really active. I post videos, I answer questions. So if you guys really really wanna get in and interact with me, go like me on Facebook. Go join my group.

Speaker 1: 38:56

The other side of the struggle Healing from Betrayal Trauma. Come find me on Instagram, erinandersonbetrayaltraumacouchcom, and come follow me, because I always have something good there just for you, my audience, and I love connecting with you there. I also post anytime that I have groups going on. I talk sometimes about my programs. So if you guys are interested in working with me or even just following me and getting as much free content as you possibly can, go hang out in my group, go connect with the ladies that are there. Also, come and join Immune and Unashamed for those married couples that are following me, because in that group, me and my business partner KaisinKid are also talking and offering some great content.