The speaker introduces themselves as a random and goofy person who may have ADHD tendencies. They have been in a long-term relationship and will be discussing relationships in their podcast. They hope to connect with listeners who are seeking clarity or understanding in their own relationships. The speaker aims to be open and honest about their experiences, even if it may be embarrassing. They discuss their struggle with setting boundaries and expressing their needs, fearing rejection. They realized that suppressing their feelings and avoiding tough conversations is not healthy for a relationship. They emphasize the importance of taking responsibility for one's own happiness and well-being. They talk about their journey of self-discovery and self-acceptance, acknowledging their own unhappiness and the need for change. They reflect on the tendency to prioritize others' happiness over their own, and the importance of self-care. They highlight the significance of introspection and taking
In the first episode, I just want to kind of let you get a feel for me and how I am. I'm definitely a random ass little goofball that probably has ADHD, not diagnosed, but definitely the tendencies. I have a problem hopping around from thing to thing because I personally see a connection, but it may seem abrupt and unrelated at times, and I'll do my best to keep that to a minimum. My life has been pretty ordinary.
I got married super, super young and have been in this relationship for 19 years. The podcast in which I'm coming to be will be mostly about relationships. Some will be about mine, some will be broad ideas and thoughts. I hope that my personal experiences can be connecting for people in the audience that are just seeking clarity or maybe they're like me and they've been in a long relationship from a very young age and just seeking to understand themselves more.
My goal is that we can get to know each other and that my topics will be interesting and I will give my honest feelings and opinions, obviously. That's what life is. Everything's based on our own experiences, and I'm just hoping that my experience can be beneficial to somebody else. I've been through a lot of different things, and I'm going to be open and I'm going to be honest about that in a way that might be embarrassing even to myself at times, but I'm okay with that because I think that to really bring something to the world, you have to tear yourself open to do that, and I'm willing to do that.
I'm willing to expose myself for the goods, but definitely also for the bads, and I hope that the goods and the bads. You always want those to balance out so that you have more good in the end, and that's where I'm at, so let's get started. The first episode that I wanted to do is called Take Your Own Blame, and the reason why I this topic is I have been personally somebody in a relationship that has felt like I was the quote-unquote good guy, if you will, and I know that a lot of people, when they hear about certain things that have happened in my relationship, we have a tendency to typecast and be like, oh, this was good, and this was bad, and victim, et cetera.
Those kind of ideas get tossed around, and I think that at the end of the day that we all have to take our blame for the parts that we played into scenarios that maybe weren't good, maybe something more detrimental happened to one person than the other. I'm not going to deny that. I'm not trying to gaslight myself, or I don't feel like I am. I just think that you have to be open to the fact that you make mistakes, too, and some of the mistakes that we make, they lead to other future mistakes, and that's what I'm trying to be honest about in my scenario, I guess, that I'm going to bring forward in this episode is that I have a problem at times because I've done some research, and I am not good with boundaries with people.
I'm not good with stating my needs and wants, and what I've discovered is that newsflash, people can't read your mind. Is that insane? Is that insane to think that people can't read your mind and to expect that? Yeah, it's not really a great quality. I learned to be that way because in my mind, if I set a boundary or if I said no, then that meant somebody might get upset with me, and that upsetness or frustration might lead to rejection, and rejection, I think I spent a lot of my childhood growing up feeling very, very rejected and not fitting in, and so when I finally found somebody to love me, it very much became something that I had to absolutely maintain, even if it was hurting me at times, and I wasn't very open to having a conversation about what was hurting me or why it was hurting me.
In fact, I wasn't very open to even feeling why it was hurting me. I was very much like, I should repress this. I don't want to feel this way. This is bad. I went into a lot of talking myself out of feeling the way that I'd feel. I don't know if anybody else has ever experienced that, but unfortunately for me, I did that so much that I downplayed my feelings so frequently that it got to a point where I found it very difficult to even know how I felt anymore, and so it is very problematic because how can you also hold a partner accountable when you are in this state of being where you chronically don't want to feel any type of negative feelings, and so you blame yourself or run away from how you're feeling, and you refuse to bring it up to somebody because you just want to be happy, and newsflash, oh, that's not happiness.
Happiness is not derived from pretending to not feel something, and I went on that way for years, years, and I definitely think that that stunted my growth for sure. There were definitely big things in my relationship that I deserved to feel upset about for sure, but I didn't want to hurt somebody else's feelings. I didn't want to have the uncomfortable conversation, and what I'm realizing now is that's not love. Love doesn't do that. Love allows for you to have the tough conversations, and I thought that was me being loving by not sharing the things that I felt like were difficult, and I didn't want to deal with the rejection that I might feel if that person didn't agree with me, so in a sense, it was all anxiety.
It was all me trying to have this weird type of control in the relationship, and really, the truth is that when we are in a relationship with somebody, that everybody has free will to do what they want to do, and we should also have the strength to be able to say what we want and to love ourselves fully and know that I'm going to say what I need to say, and that person should listen to me and seek to find understanding with me, and if they don't agree, like, is it the end of the world? You know, like, sometimes it may feel like it is the end of the world, but how do you get through that? How do you work through it together? Living in a life of avoidance of feelings and, you know, ignoring things that are hurtful is certainly not recommended, and so I think that oftentimes when you grow up and you maybe have a lower self-esteem, you maybe don't have the best feelings about yourself, you are very, very likely to also experience what I experienced as you want to make other people feel very happy, and you can.
I bet you can. I was just very... Alright, picking up here, I just have to say that, you know, one of the things about when you are the one in the relationship that's maybe the softer person, maybe you're the one that struggles with stating what you want or maybe you have a hard time just when there is a confrontation, maybe you break down and cry, maybe you flee, maybe you just immediately try to come to a resolution, and those are things that I think I still struggle with.
It really has come to my attention within the last year I started going to therapy, I started recognizing things within myself because I found myself very, very unhappy, and you get to this certain point of unhappiness where you have to take charge of how you feel, and when you do that, when you're really tired, when you're really, really tired of being unhappy and you're really ready to take it on, it's such a powerful place, but the place that you have to start is with yourself.
When you realize, I'm sad, I don't want to feel sad anymore, it's like you have to look right at yourself and say, what am I doing? What am I doing that's not good for me? And I think that that's part of that taking your own blame is you have to be in a headspace that you are ready to confront yourself and look at your habits and look at your relationships and look at the way that you take care of yourself and be willing to say, I'm not doing a good enough job at this, I'm not that great at this, I need to change, and really be ready to look at the ugliness of yourself because we all have it.
We really do, but most of us, I'm not going to lie, most of us are pretty comfortable in our day in, day out that we don't really want to face it. A lot of us don't even want to face that truly we're actually unhappy. We are unhappy people, and that was me for the longest time. I had a depiction of what I wanted my life to seem like to other people. I was not the type of wife that complained about my husband.
There were times that people obviously saw me upset or something, but I always, always wanted everyone in the world to think I was happy all the time. I am a very cheerful person, but there was a lot of time that I wasn't happy, that I pretended to be happy and people thought I was. The only one that knew that I was unhappy was probably my sister because she knows me so well, but I could fool a lot of people into thinking I was happy, especially when I'm a type A people pleaser.
I think when you're making other people happy, it's really, really easy to be in denial about yourself because as long as you are feeding other people's egos and making them feel good about themselves, they're not sitting there wondering how you're doing, you know? That's not something on their mind. I mean, think about it. If you're making someone else's life incredibly easy or as easy as you can, yeah, they're not worried about you. So I think that that's a good little lesson to think about too when we're taking our own blame here is we also have to take ownership that this is our life as an individual.
Sure, relationships are everything. All of our relationships with other people are super important. We're human. I think that that's exactly what God wanted for us is to be interacting. That's why he said love is the greatest commandment because it is so big. But everything starts from within, you know? The world is our mirror. Our relationships are our mirror. The way that we treat ourselves is where it starts. My first step of taking my blame, it started in January of 2023.
It started in January of 2023. I had went through several things and I realized I'm falling apart here. I am falling apart. I am sad. I am so sad. Sorry, it's making me want to cry right now, but it was hard to come to that feeling because I have two kids. What kind of life am I living for them? And then I was like, I'm not living a life for them. I'm living a life for me.
And then I got to thinking about how I'm almost 40 and I'm like, I'm on the second half of my life here. Is this how I want my life to go? Is this how my life is from now on? That I just live through the motions? And then I think about my younger self. You think about that younger self, your idealistic self and what they expected for you. And even your kids, as you're watching them grow up, you see them.
They are so excited for the future and they know. They know that they won't put up with this or that or et cetera. And yeah, that's really tough when you realize that you've fallen so far away from that, that you're just kind of letting life happen to you. You feel like a bystander. It's not a good feeling. And that's where I started. I started right there. I thought, no, no, this isn't a life for me. I have got to do better.
I've got to do better. I didn't know where to start. So the only thing I knew to do when I knew that I wasn't doing a good enough job is I felt like the first step that I had to do was just to start taking care of my physical a little bit more. And so all I started doing was yoga. And it wasn't every day. It was really just on Saturdays. I'd come down into my basement.
I would burn incense and listen to some music and just stretch and move and think and not think. Think and not think. I just needed like a little bit of time to myself because I realized that was a huge problem. I wasn't spending any time with myself. I didn't even know anything about me anymore, as many moms go through. But, yeah, like that was the first thing that I had to take charge of was getting back in touch with myself, opening up myself to a better care routine, which has gotten even better.
And maybe in a future episode we can talk about that. But, yeah, that was like the step one. And then the step two was like the recognition of certain, like, realizations about my relationship with my mom. You know, realizing that my grandma, you know, she has her own... Pause! I really should say just yawn. But, anyway, yeah, there's just so many layers to everything. And I realized that I had problems with myself because I had problems with my mom.
And then I've been in a relationship that is very long term. And there's love there, but there is a lot of bad behaviors. Bad behaviors. A lot of things that made me question my worth and my value in that relationship. And that made me very unhappy. And I even had, like, thoughts like, yeah, I just want to be done. Like, if I felt like I could leave, I'd be gone. And I think that we just need to normalize that everybody has these bad thoughts, you know, or negative thoughts.
Everybody does. It's what you do with them, you know? And for me, like, at first when I started thinking about all of these things, it was still, like, in a victim mentality that all these things had been done to me. And I didn't want it to be that way, but I'm just saying, like, I was just more on the negative side of it at that point. And so I hadn't fully, I was just kind of processing.
And I don't think it's wrong when you are processing to feel that way because it's part of how you're processing. That's your initial gut feeling. It's probably very self-protective to not initially go right to, oh, this is me. This is my fault. Here's what I did wrong. But I think if you want to push past being a victim and you want to push past your anger and you want to push past these very human, very real feelings, you have to look at what your piece of the pie is, you know? You really have to dig in there or you're not going to change.
It's going to keep happening to you if you keep allowing it to. If you keep ignoring your pattern of behavior that leads you to getting stepped on, it leads you to not feel good about the situation. Yeah, it's going to keep happening. I just want to say that, you know, no matter what you do, you have to be prepared to challenge yourself. And that is my whole purpose of saying that you have to face your uncomfortable things just like I had to face the fact that I wasn't happy.
That was a very, very difficult thing for me to even admit. I would never tell anybody, I'm unhappy. I don't even know if I actually verbalized that to anyone at that point. But it was like, ugh, I'm unhappy. I don't like where my life's going. I don't like how my marriage is. I don't like so many things. And I had no idea how much my world was going to implode from there. But this was just that starting point of, I don't know, it was like the kindling of the fire.
It didn't create the fire, but it was building the fire. And I just want to say that, yeah, you have to have your starting point. You really do. And when you do, push forward. Push forward. Challenge yourself. Do not let yourself off easy. Even if you know the other person that may be involved in your scenario, you may feel like they are in the wrong. And they may be. But I'm guaranteeing that all situations, all confrontations, all friction in life is revolved around two people.
So there's something in that process that you could have done differently. There really could have been. There could have been something that was done differently. And search for that for yourself when you're ready. Maybe it has to happen a few times. Hello, I am 38. Poof, I almost forgot how old I am. I'm 38 years old. It took me a long time to get here. And even though in many different ways I've grown in different ways, but this is the first time that I really challenged myself on the things that I know I don't do well, which is speaking up for myself.
And the only way that I really got through that and worked through that and I'm still working through that is therapy. Having a therapist has allowed me to be able to speak on a more affirmative measure. I speak what I want to say without worrying like I did before. I would be so terrified to tell somebody how I felt about something because I just knew if I say something and I don't word it just exactly the right way, they're going to be mad at me.
And if they're mad at me, like, oh, that's going to be treacherous. They're going to reject me. And it just goes back to that whole self-doubt thing. And when you doubt yourself, you know, like you are timid. And life is not supposed to be lived timidly. We are supposed to be bold. And the one thing that I really learned from my therapist was, dang it, if you have something to say, you say it. And she'd say, has your partner ever said something that you really didn't like? And I'm like, well, yeah.
And what did you do? I just listened to it. Yeah. You hear things sometimes that you don't like. That doesn't mean you reject them. It doesn't mean you walk away from them. And in my head, I was like, but it could happen, you know. And so it's just, it was terrifying. It was terrifying to me. And I've gotten better, but I won't say that I'm cured. I've gotten better, but sometimes I have to say certain things.
And, yeah, I'm, my life has changed greatly from January of 2023 to where I am right now. And some of it is way more complicated, but we'll get into that, those subjects later, perhaps. But I will say that my mindset and the changes that I've made have led me to greater happiness and greater confidence. And that's all I really want to share is that when you break down the things that you're doing that are contributing to problems that you're experiencing, especially in relationships, you're going to be able to build on yourself.
And I think whenever we are able to build ourself and work on our weaknesses and not be afraid of them, but just recognize them. Give them a name. Give them a name. Hiding and shying away from them just makes them worse. It really does. It really does. And you can do it. You can do the hard work. I'm still doing the hard work and I'm going to be doing it for a long time. But I can say that basically a year and a half of slowly but surely working on it, you will get there.
And I hope that this podcast and the subjects that I bring up will be insightful, but they'll also be helpful to you. So I just want to close out with just my kind of like last few like just step by step. I said maybe that can help you. So the first thing that I want you to do if you're in a place where you are experiencing a lot of pain, if you are in a place where you're experiencing a lot of relationship turmoil, I just want you to take a little bit of time to maybe just light an incense.
Maybe listen to some low music and just sit on the floor and close your eyes and just be with yourself for just a little bit. Just give yourself five, ten minutes of that. And just do some deep breathing. And then check in with yourself after. Give yourself just like a little rest. I think that sometimes we just need that mental rest. Find some time and space for yourself. And then be curious about your pattern. What am I doing that might be perpetuating this? What am I afraid of? Think about your fears.
Because I think a lot of our answers to problems that we experience are based on our fear. Think about what you're fearful of. Why your behavior might be the way it is. I think that that's a big lockdown. And then go from there. Maybe you need to go seek therapy. Maybe you need to seek guidance of a friend. Maybe you're not getting enough personal time if you're a parent especially. Maybe you and your partner are not having enough one-on-one time.
Think about what relationship needs built. Maybe it's building a relationship with yourself more. Maybe it's working on your relationship with a parent. Maybe it's working on a relationship. Almost every relationship, there's always a relationship that could use some work. Think about how you could do that. And then just stay consistent with what you want to do to change. I think that the biggest thing with changes is giving yourself some very actionable items to do. For me, the action items were just starting on a routine of getting healthier, getting into therapy, starting to journal.
These were all little things that I did to help me along my way to start getting me to create my voice again. And then there's obviously more to that. But I just want to be able to close out these podcasts with ideas to help you. And that's what my goal is.
