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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this episode of the Stable Living Podcast. My name is Shane Jacob, your host, and I thank you for taking your time to be here with me today.
Today's subject is, it's very personal to me. Um, it's an uncomfortable, talk about discomfort. It's an uncomfortable subject for most. I know it has been for me. Uh, I neglected it, tried to avoid it.
I rejected it, and I spent a lot of time in my life trying to figure out how to manage what was going on inside my mind regarding acceptance and forgiveness.
So usually when you think about forgiveness, you think about forgiving other people. “I'm going to grant you forgiveness,” right? You think about, you know, like it might, you might feel like it's your duty to forgive others. I want to focus and begin with ourselves because that's where it begins.
And what I want to talk about is the way that we do or do not accept and forgive ourselves because it's such an important thing. Because here's the deal. It is discomfort. And here's the thing about that. That's why we ignore it.
Okay. We say things like, you know, it comes up and it's like, I don't want to think about that. And I don't want to talk, just leave it alone, and it doesn't do anything. When we do that, it's still going on in our mind. It's unresolved.
The estimates are extremely high about how many, you know, what percentage of people have unresolved shame that is causing a negative impact in your life. It's through the roof high.
If we don't have, here's the thing, our brains are designed to guide us three easy ways, right? Seek pleasure, avoid pain, and conserve energy.
When we hear, have a thought about something that we have done that creates discomfort, something that we have shame over, something we have guilt over, we immediately go to, “Don't want to think about it, don't want to talk about it.” You know, it's discomfort, move away, stay over here, stay safe, go do something else. And so we leave it alone.
So unless we intentionally intervene, unless we take over with our prefrontal cortex, our thinking part of our brain, and take over and say I'm going to go in and I'm going to think about this rather, go in, maybe I'll describe it that way, go into my mind, and I'm going to observe what's going on with these thoughts, and I'm going to do something on purpose to resolve, move past, create shame resilience, and so on.
Because left alone, trust me on this, okay? You don't want to leave it alone. Left alone, it can be very devastating and destructive, harmful, painful, a lot of suffering involved here, okay?
You might say that I am the poster child for unacceptance, lack of forgiveness, and for shame. And I'll tell you more about that in a second.
So most of us are carrying around this weight, okay? The weight, what I mean by that is what we are making what we did mean.
So you did something. We've all done something. Most of us have done numerous things. Some of us do things quite frequently that we are ashamed of. We wish we didn't do it, we regret it, and we look at it.
And the meaning that we make out of it is that we are somehow defective or deficient or wrong or damaged or incomplete or, what's another word, that something's wrong with us because of what we have done, okay?
So the weight, when I say the weight, it feels like weight. And the weight is because of what we made the thing mean.
So, here's what happened to me.
Okay. Now my example is very, it's egregious, meaning it's pretty extreme. The thing that I did caused a lot of damaging and a lot of suffering.
One of the things, I've done quite a few things that caused quite a bit of suffering to other people, a couple specifically. And those things were so damaging, so harmful, so much pain and suffering that I caused the other people.
And I had no idea what to do with it other than believe that, in my case, some of it was unintentional, but regardless, I had been the cause of all this pain and suffering and loss.
And so I made that mean that I was, something's wrong with me, permanently defective.
And as a result of that, what happened to me is that I went around for 20 years trying to prove that I was worth a damn, trying to work myself to death to prove that I had value, and drink myself to death to escape the shame that I had, and a combination because of how I felt about me, okay?
And a lot, this was just happening in the background. This isn't something I set out to say, I feel really bad about me. I think I'll go drink myself to death. That's not what I said. It wasn't a conscious thought.
This is me looking in retrospect of what happened to me because of unresolved beliefs that I had about me based on things that I had done.
So my result was my life suffered, and so many other people's lives were negatively impacted, and they suffered because of what I did. Ongoing because of the thoughts that I had about me.
Now, why am I telling you all this story?
Because the things that you have, okay, that you have done, and like I said, we've all done some things, okay? We've all done some things, whatever they are.
And here's how you can start to recognize it, just to start your awareness. Think of the things that you don't want to think about that you've done, okay? That's where to begin.
Think about the ones that feel discomfort and you're like, “Well, I don't want to think about that right now. It feels so uncomfortable.” That's probably where you want to be thinking, okay? That's probably the thing or those type of things. That's just a good indicator.
And the things that you have that you feel uncomfortable about, the things that you are ashamed of that you've done, the things that you're making mean something about you, whether it's on purpose or intentional or not.
You really have to go in and open your awareness and say, what did I do? And what do I really think that means about me?
Be intentional about it because if you are not intentional about this process, I'm going to give you more about some simple steps to help you because if you leave it alone, the reason I told you my story is because if you leave yours alone, hopefully you won't have a negative impact like I did, okay? Because it was tremendous, okay?
Wrecked marriages, wrecked, you know, wasn't a good dad for my kids, it literally affected lives. Bad, I had a lot of negative impact. Hopefully that's not you, but you're going to have negative impact. And if you have unresolved shame right now that you're making mean something negative about you, it's impacting your life.
And not only that, it's the same as my experience. It's affecting the other people around you and you might not be aware of it. So why the hell wouldn't you want to get cleaned up and be done with it? The answer is you probably would.
Let me be clear about this, okay? Acceptance of yourself and forgiveness of yourself and loving yourself has nothing to do with absolving things that you've done, okay? It doesn't have to do with being irresponsible. It's not justifying. It doesn't make them right. The things that I've done, so many things in my life that were not right, okay?
The fact that I changed what I made them mean about me has nothing to do with those things. Those things are not justified. They're not right. I don't want to do them again. It doesn't make them right, okay?
It doesn't absolve me from the responsibility and it doesn't justify whatsoever any behavior. So let's just get that. We're separating ourselves from behavior, okay? We're still responsible for behavior, okay? We will still have consequences for the thing we do, no doubt.
We just don't want to have further consequences negatively impacting our lives, ongoing, based on something that we made mean about something we did a long time ago or that we did yesterday, we did earlier today. It's just going to stay with us and have a negative impact on us for the rest of our lives unless we clean it up, okay?
So we all experience shame. Every human being will have a point in their lives, I believe it's part of the human condition, where you'll do something that you'll regret. And if you don't, you will make it mean something negative about your value, okay? You'll make it mean something's wrong with you in some way because of what you've done, okay?
So there's a large percentage of us that we refuse to let it go because we just can't figure out how to make it make sense. Some of us have thought about the things that feel bad, the things that we're ashamed of, the things that we regret. And we want to hold onto it because we think we need to suffer because we feel guilty or we don't know how to make it make sense.
If it doesn't mean something's wrong with me because of what I did, if I did a thing that is against my values, okay? If my value is not to tell a blatant lie to somebody in a close relationship that I love, and I told a blatant lie to somebody in a close relationship that I love, what am I supposed to make that mean about me? Does that make me wrong? Me wrong?
So we can't make sense about how, what it means. So our brain just says, “Hey, something wrong with you. You don't want to do that and you did it and it's wrong. You believe, you judged it to be wrong. You did the thing. Obviously something wrong with you.” Is what your brain is talking to you, okay?
So we need to override that and change that belief to say, I did something that is against my value. I do regret it. I'm going to have the consequences, and that has nothing to do with my value.
Because sometimes people do things they wish they would regret, and it doesn't mean they're deficient. It means they're a human being, okay? This is the difference that I'm talking about.
So we basically use the thing that we did or the things that we've done ongoing that we are ashamed of. We use it to assess or to evaluate ourselves. We use it to assess our value without even deciding to on purpose, okay?
So we did this thing and automatically it's a pre-programmed choice, not a conscious choice. It's a pre-programmed conditioned response, I'll call it, that we just have thoughts that something is wrong with us because we did this thing. We're deficient, we're broken, we're something, we are messed up.
And those thoughts that we repeatedly think become our beliefs and we operate through the lens of our beliefs. And then that's where the negative impact in our lives and the people around us come from, okay?
So back to my story. I wasn't having fun in my lifetime for quite a while, drinking every day and working. Pretty soon it was, at times it was fun for a minute, but it didn't take very long to catch up with me to where it wasn't very fun anymore.
And I wanted out, but I didn't know how to get away from my shame. I didn't know how to escape.
So I was reading books. I was trying to read every personal development, self-improvement book I could think of and listen to tapes back in those days. I read and read and read. I'm very proud of my Audible library. I have tons of books in there that I've read for, really for years and years.
You know what most of them said? One thing that a lot of them hadn't caught on, most of them said to accept yourself. To love yourself.
And I just, I don't know what the hell they're talking about. I couldn't get it. It seemed wrong. That's fine for you because you haven't done what I've done. You can go ahead and love yourself and accept all your this and that and the other.
The other thing it seemed like is in order to accept myself, I've talked to, there's a great podcast I have, I'll think of the number maybe in a minute or not, but look it up. It's about acceptance, self acceptance.
But I couldn't accept me because how could I accept me? It just seemed like I was giving up, rolling over, accepting failure, accepting defeat, accepting mediocrity. I hadn't evolved. I hadn't changed. I hadn't reached my goals. And after all the things I had done, how in the hell would it make sense to accept and forgive myself. Why?
And if you've ever had similar thoughts of why would I, you know, don't I need to pay for this somehow? Isn't this justice that I get to have a diminished or destroyed life because of what we did?
And again, I am not talking about restitution. I'm not talking about recompense. I'm not talking about making it right. I know that we have a moral obligation to make the things right that we know that we've done wrong. That's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about what we mean and make it mean about ourselves.
If you've had similar thoughts about things that you've done or if you take the time, and I'm asking you to take the time, to think about the things that caused you a lot of discomfort or things that you know you're ashamed of, and think and discover your thoughts.
What do you make that mean about you, okay?
I'm going to give you some thoughts that you might want to adopt so that you don't have to carry this weight, okay? It feels like weight, but this weight, this unresolved shame, is negatively affecting your life. That's why it feels like you're carrying around all this weight because you are telling yourself you're defective.
Here are a couple of thoughts that I have and that I believe that you might want to consider for yourself. Okay?
I believe that there's not any bad people. Whoa. None. Not you, not me, and not anyone else, regardless of what they've done, okay?
The more that I internalize and believe that, and people say, well, what about people that have done this and people that have done that. And I heard an analogy one time that talked about when we were all born little babies, you know, all of us came into this world.
Some of us believe that we're children of God and we're all equal and we're all a hundred percent value, okay?
Now, as we grow up and get older, human beings do horrendous things. I've done a couple of them, okay?
We do things that are pretty hard, hard to understand and hard to see and hard to sometimes talk about and deal with.
But I don't believe that that change our value as human beings and as souls.
I believe we're going to have to answer for it. I believe that we need to, we need to work on improving our behavior constantly, just as a duty of being alive.
And I believe that the things that we've done, we need to make well to the best that we can. Some things can't be made well, okay? But to the best of our ability.
So number one is I don't believe there's any bad people.
And that includes you, regardless of what you've done.
Every human being does things that are against your value system, that are out of alignment with your values from time to time. Otherwise all of our actions would be perfect and they're not. They're not in perfect alignment with your values.
So just knowing that seems like it makes it easier to accept that that's going to be the way it's going to be.
It's not that we're going to try to constant, you know, we're not going to try to avoid it. It's just going to have to be an acceptable fact that we're going to do things that, again, against our values.
And again, I say this often, but I separate value and worth, okay? Your value is non-negotiable. That's the thought. Your value is non-negotiable. You might want to consider that one.
You know, sometimes I do things that I wished I wouldn't, that I regret. When that happens, I own it. In other words, I take responsibility for it, okay? I repair it to the best of my ability. And then I let it go, okay?
Horses are a good example of forgiveness. I've talked about that before in this podcast. They don't harbor stuff. They don't roll over and become a martyr and let you, you know, be unfair to them all the time. That's not what they do. But they do let it go.
Once you change your behavior, your interaction in a relationship, if they've interpreted something to be unfair and you change it, it doesn't take long and they fully let it go. They don't hold any residue.
Horses are a good example of forgiveness.
And I highly recommend that whatever the things are, thing or things, is there something there, most people unless that there's a slim few that have a clan that went through this already and have it as an ongoing part of your life.
And I'm suggesting that you have forgiveness of yourself as an ongoing strategy, an ongoing habit, that you develop the habit of letting it go so it doesn't sit inside and feel like this weight that you're carrying it around because whether you're aware of it or not, it's hurting your life and the people around you, okay?
Remember that my four part system for loving your imperfection.
Number one is R and R, which is recognize shame and reach out, recognize and reach out.
That becomes that you become aware when you're experiencing shame, you identify the physical things that happen in your body, what it feels like, identify the emotional signs, excuse me. And then over time you start to understand what kind of things are triggering you that you're reacting to.
We're not triggered. We get triggered, things don't trigger us. And we just have this critical awareness of what's going on with us.
And then we can examine our thoughts when we know that we're in shame, okay, and what it feels like then we can reach out. Recognize and reach out.
Who do we reach out to? We're not going to post it on media. Probably not a good idea. We're not going to go and, you know, “Hi, my name's Shane. Here's my deepest dark secret.”
Share your experience with somebody that you trust, okay? Somebody that's earned your trust. Somebody that can offer empathy, that will listen and that will understand, and that's not going to make meaning out of it about your value. Okay.
Connecting with other people, it diminishes the power of the shame. Once you open it up because it wants to hide.
Talking openly about it, it reduces the intensity of shame, it brings it into the light.
And this conversation with somebody else allows it to begin to start healing and lets it take a hold of you and lifts off some of the burden of that weight, okay?
The second one, part two is, the second step to loving your imperfection is to make amends.
And like I said, some things cannot be fixed. So we do what is in our power to heal, to make it right, to make restitution, to apologize if it seems right, to do everything that's in our power to make it well with the other party, okay?
Number, step three is to choose the next time strategy, lay it out. Hey, if this happens again, here's what I'm going to do next time.
And number four, this is from Michelle, episode number 34 and episode 36, Ace Your Life with Michelle Maidenberg, her book Ace Your Life, in that she talks about connecting the event to a core value. Okay?
That's step four is you reframe it by connecting it to a core value.
What does that mean? That means that you embrace the negative feeling, you feel it, and you connect it to your values.
So what it means is that you're not a bad person. The reason that you did that is not because you're a bad person, not because something's wrong with you, not because you've got a terrible temper. What it means is that you're a human being and therefore you're imperfect.
And the reason that you're doing these things is connected to a value that you have.
For example, I, in the podcast, I tell a story about me kind of blowing up on the phone over a lady about a payroll issue, okay?
And she had me connect my value of wanting to pay my people on time, of clear communication is one of the driving factors at the bottom of this thing that I'm blowing up over because I'm not getting the answer I want.
Now that doesn't justify it, okay? But I connect it with a core value that I have.
So I can help my brain make sense about what's going on with me.
So I can know and believe that it's not because I'm deficient or defective in some way.
More on that in those two episodes. Again, that's 34 and 36, is that right? 34 and 36, Ace Your Life, part one and part two with Dr. Michelle Maidenberg, super good episodes.
The point is of this, of the connecting, is to find at least one positive value that is connected to why you acted the way that you did or is connected to your disappointment over your reacting, okay?
So that you connect the value to the event.
You reframe and repeat your awesomeness every time you think about it, you reframe it.
So you reframe what happened because if you're making meaning that says because you did this, you're defective, it needs to be reframed.
You need not to believe that because it's going to end. It actually perpetuates more bad behavior, okay?
So you're going to have to trust me on this.
Go through these four steps.
You know, in my example… In my example of me blowing up on this phone call with this lady about the payroll that we talk about in the podcast, in the end, I call whoever I was not extremely polite with back on the phone and I apologize and make it well to the best of my ability.
And I end up by saying, I'm proud of myself for doing the best I could to make this thing well because that's the kind of person I am. I go back and make amends and heal things the best I can.
I have a next time strategy and that's the way I roll. That's the way I do things.
And when I went through that process and the times that I do, it's not just a one time deal. It's a habit to be formed of reframing what happens, going back, connecting it to the value and starting with this next time.
And then looking at the overall thing and saying, isn't that just okay? Cause it needs to be okay. It needs to be okay to error in this lifetime. It needs to be okay that you're going to do that, that you did that. You're going to do it.
So you can either have it not be okay and suffer the consequences for forever and everybody that you influence, or you can not do that.
So it turns out that acceptance and forgiveness of ourselves is really as much about other people as it is ourselves. It just needs to begin here, okay?
That's our lens. We see the world through the way that we see ourselves. We treat the world the way that we treat ourselves. We relate to the world the way that we relate to ourselves, okay?
And what has happened with me, it's pretty cool and pretty exciting because as I begin more and more to see other people the way that I see imperfect people doing imperfect things, I have more patience, a lot more patience.
I'm not saying I'm totally patient with everything that goes on, but I began more and more to see people just be able to say, they're probably doing the best they can with what they have to work with at the time.
And that's another thought you might want to consider for yourself. Everybody's doing the best they can with what they have to work with at the time.
And I just say that's another imperfect person, imperfect, perfect, another imperfect, perfect person. So it's another a hundred percent valuable person, just like me doing some imperfect stuff.
And I can see them through the same lens as I see myself. And it's powerful. It gives me more patience, more love, more empathy, more understanding for other people, okay?
And so this is about the anger that we're carrying around about ourselves, okay? And it makes it so much easier to let go of other people's stuff, like I said, and to let go of my own stuff, okay?
I'm going to, I want to reemphasize one more thing again, okay? This does not absolve anybody of anything, including us. When I look out into the world and I see people that are doing things that I don't agree with, that doesn't make the things right, okay? It doesn't make somebody else's behavior okay. It doesn't justify it, just like it doesn't justify mine.
I don't agree with some of those things that those people are doing, but I love them anyway. They're just imperfect, perfect people doing imperfect things, okay?
I have a couple people in my lifetime right now that I really have a hard time letting go of what they did to me, forgiving them. And I don't agree, I mean, we don't have to be the martyr, okay? I don't agree with what those people did to me. But I'm not going to be the martyr, but I'm going to let it go to the best of my ability.
I'm probably not going to be able to change what... I'm not going to be able to agree with what they did to me. But what I can do is I can change how I look at them. And that is what I'm working on always. And that's what I've done with these specific people. They did some stuff to me that was pretty tough, pretty hard on me, okay? Pretty hard to handle.
But I can still look at those people and say, you know what, they're just doing the best that they can with what they had to work with at the time. And I believe that. And I can look at them and I can know that they're 100% valuable just like I am. And I don't have to like anything about what they're doing. And I don't. It gives me more peace of mind, okay?
On top of everything else, just to change my perspective of how I view people in this world, beginning with me, my friends, and beginning with you, okay?
Acceptance and forgiveness of everyone else begins with yourself.
And remember, I like to look at it through the lens of the way that I look at my children or my spouse.
If you don't have children or a spouse, look at it through the lens of somebody that you love the most and treat yourself that way.
You know, if your kid did something that they were ashamed of, how would you handle that?
You probably wouldn't harbor a bunch of anger. I hope you wouldn't harbor a bunch of anger for it for your whole life and make it mean that they were defective. I don't think you'd want them to feel that way.
The point is the same goes for you. Make the same true for yourself.
Okay, separate what you have done from who you are as an individual.
You're 100%. It's not even up to you. Not even up for debate. You are 100% as you are, okay?
Regardless of what you've done, regardless of what you have not done, and regardless of what has been done to you, okay?
You are worthy by design, okay, not by decision. It is not up to you. You are 100% worthy, okay?
We're gonna leave you with one of my favorite quotes by myself, by me, and that is:
“May we not choose to reduce where we will go or who we will become based on where we have been or what we have done. May we develop the gifts our creator instilled inside of us by following the desires of our hearts and pursuing our passions. We are not products of our past alone, but with divine assistance, creators of our magnificent futures. We Are Destined For Greatness.”
Thanks for being with me. See you next time.
