S01E22 The Girl at the Pool Who was Grateful When She Should Have Been Angry

In this episode, Laura reflects on three painful moments from her youth where she was shamed for her body, from a boyfriend throwing a towel over her at a pool to being reprimanded at her first job for her belly showing briefly under her sweatshirt. She examines how these small but lasting experiences created shame conditioning that made her feel resentful to those who should have protected her, leading to decades of people-pleasing and disconnection from her own needs and feelings. Now, with the wisdom of adulthood Laura invites listeners to examine what their younger selves are still carrying and to finally take their own side, understanding that building inner authority means acknowledging the voices from our past while choosing to lead with the wisdom we've gained through all our hard-won experiences.

Transcript

0:08

Hi everyone. Welcome back to a Life in Color. The last few episodes have been pretty structured around inner skills and generational humanity, and laying out that framework, this episode is gonna be something different. I am not gonna lay out a framework. I'm gonna get a little bit more vulnerable, and it's gonna be a little bit more personal. I was driving in the car earlier today I don't know about you, but my mind just wanders when I'm driving. The longer I'm in the car, the further. The more ground I cover, it just wanders. I do some of my best thinking. But I had about a 20 minute drive I started thinking about how many stories I have from my past, from my youth that were related to people making me feel shameful or embarrassed or less than for some one reason or another. most of us, especially women, carry a handful of stories from our teenage years or our early twenties or maybe even younger, that still pop into our heads decades later. There often small moments, at least for me, there's small moments like a comment that someone made or. Even just like a look or a correction, something that made me suddenly feel embarrassed or exposed. at the time, they might've only lasted a few seconds. I'm not even talking about big dramatic events, but tiny moments that somehow stick I think we all have these they become part of our inner narrative that we carry about ourselves and they color the way that we think in the future. There were three stories that occurred to me in the car today. That made me surprisingly emotional for that younger version of myself and the messaging that she carried from those stories. So I wanna tell you three stories and then I wanna talk about what those mean to me and my reaction to them now. The first story is from high school. I was at the pool. I was hanging out with a bunch of friends and my boyfriend at the time, I was in a bikini. I was feeling good, I was relaxed, and all of a sudden he threw his towel into my lap. obviously I was surprised. And he told me that I guess my bikini bottom had shifted and like a little bit of hair was showing out the side of the bikini and that I needed to be more careful and people might see that. at the time I felt grateful to him for protecting my modesty and, but I also felt a lot of shame, a lot of embarrassment. Like that was humiliating. This was in the nineties. This was in the days of like Cosmo Magazine and 17 Magazine and I don't know if you remember like they used to have pages where they talked about the most embarrassing stories or, they were all about things like this. There was so much body shaming and just shame culture in general on top of everything else. So I had so many feelings and I don't know why it was such a short encounter. We all moved on with our day, but I think of that moment frequently. I don't know why, for no reason. It just pops into my head. So, yeah, I carried a lot of shame from that. I just felt like I needed to get myself together. I needed to be more aware of my body and how I was sitting and what I was wearing and how I was looking. the next story happened also at a pool, different pool. Same boyfriend. He was a lifeguard. This was several years later, and I was there visiting him while he was working we were sitting at a, like an umbrella table with several other people that I didn't know and partway through the day, he told me, Hey, you need to sit differently. I was wearing shorts and he was like, the guys are looking under the table at you and you need to sit differently so that they don't. so, of course I sat in a way that was far less comfortable and I felt embarrassed. I didn't wanna be the center of attention in that way. again, I felt grateful to him for protecting me We'll talk about that in a second. And then the third story happened when I was at my first job out of college. It was a really stressful time and I had gained some weight, it was the first time in my whole life that I had any kind of a belly. My clothes weren't quite fitting the right way and I was not accustomed to being aware of my body in any way. So I was at a customer's house and we had been sitting around her kitchen table and talking about her project. And when I stood up, I didn't realize for a second that my sweatshirt had shifted and was kind of riding up a little bit, and a little bit of my belly was showing under the sweatshirt. It was literally for like one or two seconds, and I noticed it and I quickly adjusted. But I saw her look at it, and then later I found out that she had reached out to one of the leaders of the company. It was a very small company to say, Hey, what's going on with Laura? She's a mess, like her belly's hanging out of her shirt. It's very unprofessional. You need to talk to her. And that person did. Came to me and he said, Hey, this is what she said. And then just looked at me. And I know there was no malice behind the comment, but it felt to me like he was saying, can you defend yourself? what's going on with you? it felt so isolating, like I was alone, like I was unprotected. So I felt very apologetic. again, I felt shame. I felt embarrassment, and I felt apologetic for letting my body turn into what it had been turning into, or sitting in a way where I wasn't aware of the bottom of my sweatshirt, or I don't know. and I just was thinking about those versions of myself and I got really emotional because, whereas that younger version of me felt shame and gratitude and, sorrow she wanted to apologize, adult me, this version of me, felt anger and not at her. Anger on her behalf because instead of shaming me for body hair or holding me accountable for someone else's behavior, if it was this version of me going through those situations, I would have expected to be notified gently like, Hey, I think your bathing suit shifted in case you care. Not shamefully. I would have expected my boyfriend to call the other guys assholes for looking under the table and hold them accountable for their behavior rather than putting the onus on me and the way I was sitting and presenting myself as if I was responsible for their behavior. And I would have expected a leader much older than me to realize that I as a 23-year-old woman didn't need to be shamed in that moment, and instead needed protection because nothing I was doing was unprofessional. It was not a Suits environment, it was a remodeling company. It's not that the clothes I was wearing was unprofessional or even out of the ordinary. The customer was being unreasonable and commenting on a young girl's body. That's what was happening, and I would've expected that that was the conversation and then the end of the topic rather than bringing it to me and asking me to defend myself. So I felt angry on her behalf and sad, sad for her because I remember how that felt a few years ago in therapy, we were doing exercises like what I'm about to talk about. It's called re-parenting. So imagining that the current version of yourself, the older, more mature. Wiser version of yourself could go back and talk to the younger versions of you when they were in difficult moments and try to guide them in a different way than how they were guided then. At the time, even though this was just a few years ago, when my therapist asked me, it wasn't about these situations, it was about something different, and he asked me, what would you say to her if you could go back and sit with her. What would you say to her? And I couldn't answer the question. I blanked because I wasn't thinking about what would I say to her. I was thinking about what should I say to her? what's the right answer? And I wasn't clear on how I would handle it, because I was still identifying with her. I was still feeling those feelings. And honestly, experiencing situations through a lens of judgment rather than sympathy. So now to be sitting in the car today and to feel like I knew exactly what I would say to her and how I would handle the situation and how I would guide her going forward, that felt like a huge step forward in growth cause yeah, I know exactly what I would say to her if I could talk to her. If I could sit with her either in those moments or right after those moments, I would say to her, you are beautiful and you are worthy of any room that you are in and any person that you are talking to, and that shouldn't have happened to you. You should not have been treated the way that you were in those situations. And then I would explain to her what should have happened. So that she could understand what to expect going forward. What does it look like to be treated properly? And I would tell her that she should always hold a high bar for the behavior of the people around her and the way that they treat her, and that if people aren't hitting that bar, she should remove herself from that situation or from that relationship. At the very least that she should not hesitate to hold those people accountable because her expectations are not unreasonable and that her feelings matter. I would tell her that she brings so much value and deserves to surround herself with people who know that and people who are openly interested in her success and wellbeing, and that those are the only people that she should allow around herself. And I feel like being able to do that, to think in that way without identifying with that version of myself means that I maybe have overcome a lot of that shame conditioning. When I think about the fact that I felt gratitude or I felt apologetic in those moments, why? Why did I feel grateful? But it's because this is what shame conditioning looks like from the inside. It doesn't always feel like shame. Sometimes it feels like gratitude. Sometimes it feels like being protected. To be shamed for just existing, created a narrative in my head that I am responsible for other people's behavior and emotions and reactions. That I need to be aware of what everybody else is thinking and doing at all times, and how I am sitting and how I am being perceived, and what reactions I am causing in other people. the downstream effects of that are huge because I carried that type of people pleasing really for my whole life. It disconnected me from my own opinions and my own feelings and my own wants and desires. it took a long time for me to get back in touch with that. that kind of shame conditioning is common. It's common to feel grateful and feel like someone is protecting you, protecting your modesty when they do something like that instead of trying to control you And so I feel proud. I feel like I have become the adult that she needed at that time, and I'm not done with this work. I feel like I have a lot of inner authority and steadiness now. I am confident. I know that I. bring value to a situation. I know that my feelings and my voice matters. I feel like I can hold authority in a way that is strong and appropriate and makes other people feel safe. I know this about myself, and yet I still have the voice of that little girl inside my head sometimes warning me like, be aware of how you're sitting. Or how are you looking right now? Or did you just say the wrong thing? I know that voice is trying to protect me from disconnection or abandonment, and that she doesn't want other people to misinterpret me. I know that. But to have that voice coexist in my head with the confident one who's kind to herself and kind to her body and knows her worth, it's kind of a trip to balance both of those. I feel like I am getting better and better at gently, releasing the younger version of myself. You are supposed to acknowledge the feeling and then tell it it can stop. Like that's not needed right now. I don't need to worry about how I'm looking in this outfit in this moment because this other person is not thinking through that lens. I know that. But that's the journey. That's the journey that I'm on and this is what self authority feels like. I don't think it's clean and neat. I think that it is understanding the cacophony of voices that are inside of your head from all of the different situations that you've had in your whole life, and being able to cut through that noise and understand where they all came from and that they all had a purpose at one point in time, and that they're not needed now, and that there is a voice that has authority and that's your voice today with all the wisdom from all the hard one information and experiences that you've been through and the perspective that you've gained. This is why I do this work. Everything I build at a life and color, the conversations about inner authority human skills, the framework around generational humanity, it all comes back to this, to the question of what are we carrying that was never ours to carry. And what it looks like to finally put it down. This is the work. And it starts exactly here with being able to look at that younger version of yourself with compassion instead of judgment, and to take their side. So I just wanna say, I don't know what the younger you is carrying, that person that you were, I don't know what you went through. I'm sure so many of you have gone through far worse than what I just shared. But I know that that young version of you is still in there somewhere and still waiting for someone to take their side, and I think that person has to be you. You are beautiful and you are worthy of every room that you are in, and you shouldn't have been treated the way that you were, and it's okay to hold standards for the people that are around you and hold them accountable when they're not treating you the way that you should. And it's okay to remove yourself from situations or relationships if they are not serving you. Because your voice matters and your feelings matter. And you should only surround yourself with people that are openly interested in your success and your wellbeing and are more than aware of your value. That's all I wanna say today. As always, if this work resonates with you, you can find more of all of this at a life in color.co. if you have anything that you want to share with me or questions about what I just shared or any of the episodes that we've done, you can email me at Laura at a life in color.co. Thanks for sticking with me through this one. I hope that you all have an amazing day and I'll catch you on the next one. Bye now.