Hi guys! Welcome to Episode 438 of the Wildly successful Lifestyle podcast! I don’t spend a lot of time on social media anymore, I have found it influences me too much and I want to be influence by my own thoughts instead. But I do get on periodically and when I do I find that people can be so funny and creative and sometimes inspiring.
I read a post once though that has stuck with me for years. And it simply said “Forgive yourself for what you did while you were in survival mode”
It was and still is to this day comforting. I think we all at any point in our lives can look back at a time in our life when we were in survival mode.
I know for me, I feel like I lived my young adulthood in survival mode. Trying to figure out how to be an adult in a world that I was not prepared for. We all have our own version of that story, right? Sometimes, In our minds we think everyone else around us has it figured out or everyone else has a leg up that we didn’t get. We think we are the only one struggling to make sense of a world that doesn’t always make sense. We imagine that our situation is uniquely bad and that’s why we are where we are. Whether that means how you were raised, the kind of family you have, the color of your skin, how your brain works, your financial status…whatever it is that you think is uniquely bad, because you have this going on and no-one else understands or has been through it. Whatever that is, I want you to know you’re right. There is not one other person on this earth that has lived your exact experience. Not even your siblings. Maybe similar but still very different. Are you feeling really isolated right now? I hope not, that isn’t my goal. My goal with saying that is to remind you that you cannot compare yourself to anyone else in this life. If you’re gonna knock yourself for your uniquely bad situations, then you also have to give yourself credit for making it this far in spite of your uniquely bad situations.
We tend to be lopsided in how we judge ourselves. We tend to be harder on ourselves than we would be anyone else. Think about it for a minute, if you were watching a movie and the star was playing your life, you’d be rooting for them and you would be proud of them for making it this far because God knows there were times you shouldn’t have made it out alive or at least were lucky to not be in jail. Maybe not that bad, but maybe. Those were the times you were in survival mode. Trying to figure life out, maybe trying to numb life away a bit because being a responsible fully stable adult can sometimes feel overwhelming. But then again so was being a teenager, oh and then there’s our twenties that’s where I think a lot of us are lucky we didn’t end up in jail or a straitjacket. Between figuring out how much partying we can do and still pay our bills and the roller coaster ride of relationships that we thought were gonna last forever but didn’t. Those were overwhelming too. Come to think of it, when isn’t life overwhelming? Quite a question to ponder. You might say well as a child I wasn’t overwhelmed, oh really? So kindergarten was a walk in the park for you? Leaving the only thing you’ve known for the first time in your life, thrown in a room with other kids who may be jealous of your stuff or vice versa, and OH, maybe don’t want to play with you because you’re not their cup of tea…that was overwhelming too you just adapted easily at that age.
My point in all of this is I think a lot of us go through life thinking in the next stage of life it’s gonna be easier. But life is by definition, growth and adaptation. I looked it up. The actual definition speaks to life being identified by growth and the adaptation to environment by an organism. And we are an organism. By definition in order to be living we have to be growing and we have to be consistently adapting. The act of adapting means we become better suited to our environment.
So the problem is not that we are constantly having to grow and adapt to our environment. That’s called LIFE. The problem is we think there will be a time when we can stop growing and when we wont have to adapt anymore. We think eventually we will no longer have to deal with difficult people or difficult situations. We think “I should be at a place in my life where I don’t have this problem, where I don’t feel overwhelmed, where I’m not jealous of what other people have and where I’m not affected by other people because Im not their cup of tea.” We have all the same problems as we did in kindergarten, we just aren’t adapting as well as we used to. We think that eventually something’s gonna change or give and we will just be able to coast right through the rest of our life. We look to a time when we won’t ever feel overwhelmed, we don’t ever have to adapt or grow again, but that’s called death and I don’t think most of us want to go there yet.
The problem isn’t that we have problems. The problem is that we think we shouldn’t have problems.
Eckart Tolle said in a video recently that “Its not that our parents didn’t understand us, it’s that we thought they should.” So you could replace “our parents didn’t understand us” with any scenario we come up with in life. So you can replace it by saying “it’s not that my husband didn’t come home on time, it’s that I thought he should”
Your husband not coming home on time is a neutral scenario until you make it mean something. If he came home early and you were having a surprise party, you wouldn’t like it so much. If YOU were running late, his running late would be fine. It’s all about what we make things mean.
So by definition we will constantly as long as we are alive, have scenarios that are overwhelming, uncomfortable, and require some level of adaptation. That’s comforting to me, you know why? It means Im doing life right. Im rising to the occasion. Im meeting the challenges and overcoming them. Im living. Im constantly having to grow and learn and adapt and overcome. That’s not a problem, that’s a beautiful part of life. In yoga this morning our instructor said before class that we are gonna do hard things in class today, this practice is going to be really hard. And she was happy about it because when you practice doing hard things, you get really good at doing other hard things too. Nature has a million examples of how struggle makes a tree stronger or a break makes a bone even stronger after its healed, what makes us think we are any different?
Those moments and you will probably have them again, those moments when you were in survival mode, they made you who you are today. Your uniquely bad situations have made you stronger. Take any really bad thing that’s happened in the past and I bet you could come up with something good that came from it. And if you’re going through something uniquely bad right now…just know that you’ve survived before and you will survive and get on the other side again. You always do. And if during one of those moments when you were in survival mode, you did something that haunts you, forgive yourself and let it go.
You are getting stronger with every struggle you overcome.
My challenge to you today is to think about some of the hardest times you’ve had and what good came from it, there’s something if you really look. And if you weren’t your best self during survival mode, forgive yourself and let’s move forward together. But if you’re going through something hard right now, know that this too shall pass. It always does. Share this with 3 people who you want to uplift today. I love you guys, I’ll talk to you in a few days.
