Transcription
You don't heal until you get to radical acceptance. And radical acceptance is, this is not going to change. This relationship is not ma, the jackpot's not coming out of the slot machine. This relationship is not magically going to turn a corner. It's not going to be just going to speak my truth and you're going to get it. There's no magical couples therapist that's going to turn this around. It's not going to change. That now, acceptance doesn't mean you're okay with it. Acceptance doesn't mean you're signing off on it. It is you see it clearly. It is not going to change. It is not your fault. And when they do hurtful things, it's still going to hurt. Some people say, "Well, I accepted. Why does this still hurt?" I'm like, "Cuz they're saying something hurtful." That's how that works.
So, and armed with that, you then walk through what I always say, a very long dark corridor called grief. And that grief corridor often leaves people thinking, "Did I do this wrong? Cuz I feel absolutely terrible." I said, "Just keep walking. I promise you the light's going to come on just as you round that bend." They come around that corner and they say, "Okay, I worked this through." Again, it is a heaviness. People who go through this say, "I wish it had been a different. I wish my parents had loved each other deeply. I wish I'd had a happier childhood. I wish I'd been able to give my kids a a marriage, you know, happy marriage between their parents. I wish I'd had a different kind of a career. We we can have that wistfulness, but life hands us what it hands us." And I we see that, you know, that's no one lives a perfectly programmed life. And anyone who does, sadly, we're just waiting for that other shoe to fall, shoe to drop. It's always going to drop. That's the nature of life.
And so, um, that you and I always, that's why I always say like, I whenever I'm at a party or anything, I'm always trying to find the people who have actually been through something because they're always the most interesting people. People are like, "My life's great and everything's great and I love everyone." I'm like, and then I'll go find the people who have suffered. I'm like, "Come sit next to me." And so, um, but it's a, that that acceptance, that's what starts the ball rolling. And it's the hardest part of this process because when a person finally gets their head around it, they just engage with all of this differently. And we all carry this heavy stuff. Through that heavy stuff, we can find meaning and purpose through the suffering. Some people go on, they go back to school, they become therapists. Some people become coaches. Some people, um, some people volunteer in domestic violence programs. Some people go back to school after being told they were dumb their entire lives. There's a lot of amazing things. People make art. But people take that pain, they take that suffering and they take, above all else, the clarity because I got to tell you, it's like batting with weights on. You take the weights off the bat and all of a sudden you're bashing that, you're bashing that thing over the the the back fence in the stadium because now a lot of people are never had weights on their bat. But once you get the weights off that bat, you are just sl grand slam after grand slam because you just are, you have there's a strength in you and you're no longer wasting your time doing the heavy lift of the impossibility of trying to appease the narcissist.