When people hurt us or wrong us, we often automatically assume that the problem is us. We find ourselves asking "Why don't people like me?" or "What's wrong with me?" or "What did I ever do to them?" Developing the ability to depersonalize others' actions and realize that the things people do often have very little to do with you can be life changing. Check out the Light After Trauma website for transcripts, other episodes, Alyssa's guest appearances, and more at: www.lightaftertrauma.com Want to get more great content and interact with the show? Check us out on Instagram: @lightaftertrauma We need your help! We want to continue to make great content that can help countless trauma warriors on their journey to recovery. So, please help us in supporting the podcast by becoming a recurring patron of the show via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lightaftertrauma You can also check out Alyssa at www.alyssascolari.com Transcript Alyssa Scolari [00:23]: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Light After Trauma podcast. I'm your host, Alyssa Scolari, and I hope everybody is off to a good week. I am doing pretty well. I have been keeping up with my reading, which honestly has been helping me get through some difficult times. I just finished a book called The People We Meet on Vacation. Honestly, I do not recommend, unless you love a good rom-com, then you might like it. I just don't think that I'm a romantic comedy kind of gal, I didn't like it at all. I really expected it to be a little bit better in terms of like... The book is kind of like flashbacks of these friends who are on vacation in different parts of the world, and I just thought that I was going to get to feel like I was traveling with them, and that we were going to travel across the world with this book. But honestly, so much of it was just about sexual tension, and I swear to the lord almighty, if I had to read one more sentence about how he gently and softly swept a damp curl from her face and tucked it oh so softly behind her ear, I will vomit. It's just not me. It's just not me. No offense to the author. The writing is good, the wit is great, there were a few moments where I chuckled out loud, and I think that if you love romantic comedies, it's perhaps good, I was just not impressed. So I'm looking forward to my next book, which is going to be The Guest List by Lucy Foley. We will see. This one is, I think has murder in it, which I'm already much more inclined to like, and at the end of the day, I just don't think anything is going to top Where the Crawdads Sing. I'm almost sad that I've read it and that it's over, because I feel like there is no book that is going to top that. I'm sure that's not true, but right now my brain is still in Kya's world, and yeah, I just wasn't ready to leave that world. So anyway, I digress. I hope you're having a awesome, awesome week so far, let's get into it today. So, we are going to talk about kind of a somewhat difficult truth, and this is a truth that I have had to grapple with a lot over the course of my life, especially lately, and the truth of the matter is that not everything is about you. And I know that that can come off as harsh, and I probably shouldn't say it that harsh, because I have had people quite literally say that to me when I was a child, and it was really actually painful to hear, because I wasn't trying to make everything about me, I just was desperate for attention and help of some sort, so I shouldn't say it like that, right? It's not necessarily that not everything is about you. The nicer reframe for that is that you don't always have to take things so personally, because truly so many things that happen are not personal. And this is a really hard concept for so many of us, especially trauma survivors, because our brains are wired for protection. So our brains are always trying to seek out a threat, and we are trying to eliminate any potential threats before we end up getting really hurt. So when something happens, we just assume that that person meant it intentionally, or we just assume that that person hates us, and we assume that the problem is us. And we ask ourselves, "Why me? Why does this happen to me?" And that's us taking things really personally and assuming that people's behaviors are a reflection of who we are, and that is simply not true, and it really is one of the hardest things to unlearn. I mean, at least for me. I have had to grapple so much with this idea that people's actions and their behaviors and the things that they say are not about me, right? And let's talk about a couple examples, and I have a lot of personal examples about this, so I'm going to go to my personal examples. So for one, and this might seem kind of simple, but going to the doctors, right? As a fat person, going to the doctors is always a really stressful experience, because they almost always say something about my weight, unsolicited. And so I've gotten to a place ...
