This is delicious dignity, where we cultivate a self so potent, so clear, so vital, so truthful that our life is all the more luscious for it. Let's call ourselves into being, shall we? Hello, lovelies. Welcome back to part two of this episode series where we discuss and just outline this pattern of self-abandonment that a lot of us go through, especially empowered women, especially just women in general, especially anybody who ever challenges the status quo. This is where we are just exploring how do we get to our true authentic selves, and we're admitting how difficult it can be, because a lot of us feel like failures when we can't figure out who we really are, or where we can't come from a sturdy center. And so we're exploring this pattern of self-abandonment so that we know it, so that we can see it. Because knowing it helps us feel not so crazy and puts us squarely in the position of sovereignty. A lot of times what we're missing is just language. That's all we're missing. Language to describe what it is we're going through. And in a lot of spiritual culture, or shall I say, new age culture, there's all this emphasis on the individual. Raise your vibe or do this or do that. And there's in psychology or in therapy work, there's a lot of emphasis on the individual to just diagnose themselves or get more therapy or be better, etc. And we do all of this in good faith that it is the individual that needs to change rather than just admitting that it is the culture and people around us that need to change. And because we can't control other people, we try to control ourselves. And that is a perfectly logical way of approaching things and it's admirable. However, I think we also need to discuss just how much the outer world impacts us. And we because when we can discuss that, we can know it. And when we can know it, we can have more respect for ourselves. And the number one way to stop our self-abandonment is to increase our self-respect. And if we want to respect and have compassion for ourselves, we need to understand this pattern. So that's another reason why we are doing this series. So many times we assume that the person sitting in front of us, even if we are looking at ourselves sitting sitting in front of somebody else, we just assume that we are who we are. We never ask ourselves, are our thoughts our thoughts? Are they really our thoughts? Or are they somebody else's thoughts? Is it a thought that we've adapted from somewhere or something, or empath from somewhere or something? Right? So a lot of psychology and a lot of new age stuff thinks that just because you have a thought, that means you are the pathology. If you have an experience, that means you are the thing that needs to be fixed. And I'm saying that we are just the thing that needs to be aware of what's going on. We can go about fixing our stuff, we can do our rituals. You know, I love a good ritual. We can do all those things, but we can also be aware of how the outer world impacts us and in what ways that it does, so that we can learn to not feel crazy and have some respect and compassion for ourselves. Okay, so before we go into this episode's topics, which is introjection, sensitives and empaths, and even the just world hypothesis, if we have time in this episode, before we go into those new concepts, I want to go over the last two concepts we discussed, which is projective identification and empowered women, because I did not touch upon one very common example that I see as far as this dynamic is concerned. And that is empowered women and their family and how projective identification works in that context. Because a lot of us will go back to our family of origin, we'll try to interact with them, and we'll notice or we'll feel or interpret that we are regressing to a past state, and all the empowerment and all the healing that you've done count for nothing because you're finding yourself interacting in ways that are childlike and kind of not you, and even very much like you're under a spell, right? And so I want to bring that to your attention that what you might be facing with your family is projective identification where they are projectively identifying with you as you are the child and they are the parent, and that is what they're projecting onto you. You are feeling like you are the child and they are the parent. So both of you are feeling that, and that comes with a whole bunch of expectations and a whole bunch of history, and there's been a cloud and a dynamic of history there that is holding almost you and your family hostage and captive in this projective identification interplay. Either one of you is projectively identifying with the other, or both of you are doing it to each other. So that is why you might be feeling like the pull or the spell of going back into that childlike state is so strong around your parents. It's not necessarily because you're not healed or you haven't done all your work. It's probably because the bubble of history is so strong in that projection of child and parent that you're being pulled into that dynamic you probably didn't want to be pulled in. And to see that, to see that this is someone who sees you as a child and not as a strong, empowered, beautiful, accomplished woman, but actually sees you as someone they need to instruct or tell what to do or uh control or manage in some way. And then you feel like because you feel sensitive or because you feel vulnerable around them, you internalize that projection and then feel like you have to be controlled or managed or sort of guided in some way. And that controlled or managed or guidance is not true to who you are. So then you get upset or you get angry and you behave in that way, and then they get to further projectively identify onto you that see, this is the prodigal daughter, she needs to be guided and managed. Do you see what I'm saying? You could just be under that spell of projective identification. Of course, there might be a lot of other reasons why you behave like this, but that could be one. And if you want to get out of that, the simple way to do it is to go back to that episode and listen to the rituals at the end of the episode, and that'll be a good way to get out of that dynamic and then go visit them again and see how you fare. You'll feel that ick or that sticky tar spell-like feeling. You'll feel it lessen a little bit, I guarantee you. And it will take time, but it will go away. I just wanted to bring that to your attention before we go forward because that's such a common experience most of us women feel when we visit our family of origin. And I think that we need to see that for what it could be. What is underneath, what is the pattern underneath the reason why we abandon ourselves when we're talking to our families. Okay, now we get to the meat of this episode. So the first concept we need to explore is the concept of introjection. Introjection is a normal part of development, as in child development. You know, when you're young and then you grow up, this is how we develop as children. Now you might say it's a normal part of development, and it is, but when as we become older and it becomes chronic, or the things that we've introjected they become a problem, that's when we have a problem, right? But it is something that everybody goes through at some point in their lives. I want to start off with showing you how it starts off as a child and then how it might influence you as an adult. So let's talk about this from a child's perspective. Let's grow up with the child, so to speak. Interjection, like I said, is a normal part of development. And this is where a person unconsciously absorbs the ideas, the feelings, the attitudes, the beliefs of other people and makes them part of their own psyche. It means taking in the external beliefs and adopting them as they as if they were one's own. Now, what makes introjection different from projection or everything else is that what the children or the children, so let's start with the child, that what the children are doing is that they're looking into the faces of their authority figures or their caregivers, and they're seeing mirrors. They assume that whatever they're seeing in the mirror is who they are. In a way, they don't experience any kind of separation and they don't experience any kind of or they don't have the ability to reject what they're seeing or question the fact whether what they're seeing is a mirror or really who they are. They just assume what they see is who they are. Why do children do this? They do this because they fear abandonment. If you are not like the people around you, then there's a high chance you're going to be abandoned. So maybe in that way it's also a survival instinct that just happens, and that's why people consider it a normal part of the developmental process. But they need to feel like they can maintain a relationship with their authority figures or their caregivers so that they won't be abandoned, they won't be rejected. Because if you think about it, a child is completely and utterly dependent upon their parents. Completely. They're utterly dependent upon adults. So the desire to be pleasing, the desire to be like the people around them is high, right? Now, as you grow up, you can see how this becomes a problem. So now it becomes a psychological defense mechanism where you unconsciously absorb and internalize the beliefs, attitudes, or voices of the other people around you, especially authority figures or people you consider important to your survival, into your own psyche. And you adopt them without consciously questioning or filtering them. Then we have, and I'll give you examples of this in a minute, but we do have to understand the concept first. Then we have something called introjects, which are these mental structures that are formed from these emotionally charged memories and all your significant relationships and relationships with authority figures, caregivers. And these mental structures, they become part of our psychology and they influence how we perceive ourselves and how we interact with other people. So they're kind of like imprints. You know, if it's reminding me of that Twilight movie where you see the wolf guy, I don't even remember what he's called, but the wolf guy, he imprints on this baby. But I mean, the jury's out on whether the baby imprinted on him or whether he imprinted on the baby. But he has no control over it. And that's kind of how these imprints work. They there's very little control that you have on it. And the reason you don't have control is because you don't you don't know to reject this thing, or your fear of abandonment is so high that you don't know how to not see your environment as a mirror. Now, how you know that it's an introject, it's because it feels like a foreign element in your own psychology rather than your own personality. And that is why that's one of the clues. There are many clues, but that's one of them. Now that I've given you all this concept stuff, let me give you some examples. So in episode 46, where we went over the rose mysticism part four, which is planting the internal, eternal mother. And of course, you can search for this in any podcast player, it'll come up. We talked about the internal mother and the voice of your internal mother inside of you. What is it like? And I told you in that episode that my internal mother was my worst horrible critic, right? That is an example of an introject. The voice of my mother became an introject within me that acted as my internal mother, but it was actually a cruel, criticizing influence in my life. And it influenced how I perceived myself and how I perceived my interactions with other people. And that's one example, and you can look it up if you want to hear the full episode. But let me describe to you one specific event from my childhood that is a very good example of this. You could say this is a more extreme example, but it's a really good teaching story for how interjection works. So when I was a child, I had these immense feelings of anger and rage towards my mother. And I was sitting on the bed and I was just feeling a lot of anger and a lot of rage. And I was feeling that way for a variety of reasons, but it was primarily because I felt insecure and on guard and hyper-vigilant all the time around my mother. I just felt like she had massive mood swings and that she was really inconsistent and unreliable. Now, those are words I would use to describe her today. But back then, I was just feeling rage and anger. And it was especially around the time when I knew or anticipated that I would get beaten. Now, I wanted to be a good girl because that's what all children want to be. They want to be good children, because good children get loved by their mothers. But I was feeling, I was sitting on this bed and feeling huge amounts of anger and rage towards my mother. And, you know, back then, even now, you know, feeling anger and rage against your mother is like a no-no. It's like a, it's like, it's not something you do because mothers are these saints, right? And I wanted to be a good girl, but I'm having all this anger and rage. And I'm watching, and the TV was on. And I suddenly looked up and saw the TV, and it was a picture or a video of a tsunami that was happening in that moment. And I think it was in Japan, or I don't know where it was, but it was a tsunami. And I remembered looking at the TV and thinking, I caused this tsunami because I'm a bad person, because I have all this anger and rage, and I caused the tsunami. I'm a bad girl. And I should not be angry, and I should be a better girl because then I won't cause the tsunami. So you might think, how does that even happen? Why would a child think they caused a tsunami in a different country? Right? And that is because the feeling of shame for causing a tsunami is easier than the feeling of hatred and anger that I had towards my mother, who I was entirely dependent upon. It's easier for me to blame myself for being a bad girl and causing a tsunami than it is to realize that I don't deserve the way I'm being treated. And therefore feeling those feelings of being unloved and abandoned. And my mother says that I'm stupid, I can't understand math, or I can't do my homework or whatever. So it must be true. I'm a bad person who causes tsunamis, as opposed to I am a daughter who is abandoned by a mother and hates her. So that is an example of an introjection of a highly critical, mean voice that says, I'm bad, I'm stupid, I don't know what I'm doing, etc. Because guilt and shame to control my anger is a really good strategy to not be abandoned, right? Because if I'm angry, then I will be abandoned because I'm a bad girl. As a child, and even as you grow up as an adult, right, if you had a similar experience to mine, is it any wonder that I grew up to have this hyper-critical, really mean voice inside of me that is constantly violating everything that I do and discoloring it and contaminating it with its just cruel voice. So that's an example of an introject because I in I I had an a normal process of introjection as a child, and it grew up to be an introject within my psyche. And it's normal, it's even tender. You want to belong so badly, you want to be loved so badly, you want to not be abandoned so badly. You just accept whatever is being shown to you in the mirror. If they say that I'm stupid, then I must be stupid. If they look at me with anger, that means I must have done something to be a really bad person. So that is how introjection works. You assume that what you see in others is what you see in yourself. And let's say that you are a generally highly responsible person, you will naturally take on the responsibility of this introjection because you're completely responsible for the way other people are doing things or the way they're treating you. And therefore, you're just going to assume that, especially if it's a negative introjection, you're going to assume that you're fundamentally inadequate. I want to go on a small tangent here. You know, the first time I came across introjection as this defense mechanism or this just as a concept was when I was reading this book called Sacred Enneagram by Christopher Hewartz, I believe is how you pronounce his name. And the Enneagram is one of my favorite tools for understanding your psyche, your soul. It's kind of like a personality test for your soul. And I am a type four, which is otherwise known as the individualist or the romantic. And introjection happens to be the primary defense mechanism of a type four person. And so when I was reading about this, I was like, wow, this describes so much of who I am. But again, like I said, it's normal. So but I do consider me, I consider my template to be like a special case in how introjection can go so wrong. Now, this is where I want to take a small tangent and show you introjection from somebody else's perspective. And this is how Christopher Hewartz describes introjection in his book, The Sacred Enneagram. So the Enneagram, for those of you who don't know, is a personality test for your soul. At least that's what it feels like to me. And he was describing introjection as the primary defense mechanism of the type four, the individualist or the romantic, which is my type. So everyone has a type, there are nine types, and I'm a type four. And here's how he describes introjection. Now, of course, he's doing this through the lens of a type four person, but it's still introjection as a concept. Because everything is internalized, fours frequently personalize external events, believing that other people's bad moods or broken systems are a reflection of their own shortcomings. This causes a constant loop of melancholy and longing as the ego continuously feeds on a reservoir of self-created negative self-data. Isn't that just so poignant? He also says that fours instinctively internalize negative feedback and rejection and painful experiences. And instead of deflecting criticism, they absorb and swallow it whole, making it part of their identity. I think that that statement, swallow it whole, is such a good phrase to describe introjection. You just swallow it whole. You don't chew it, you don't digest it, you just swallow it. And earlier I used the symbol of the mirror, and here, swallowing it whole is another way to describe introjection. By internalizing blame and criticism first, fours try to soften the blow of external rejection. It creates a false sense of control in a situation where they feel helpless. And the last thing he says is that while fours quickly introject negativity and feelings of deficiency, they often repel positive data about themselves, which reinforces their sense of being fundamentally flawed or missing something. Now, again, this was done in the context of fours, but this works for anybody who's introjected a lot in their life. I want to give you another example of how somebody else described introjection. And this is the one and only Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Dr. Estes, who in her book, Warming the Stone Child, describes introjection. This is how she does it. Once someone has been misused, all kinds of evil thoughts are introjected into their psyche. The introject is sort of like a hypodermic needle filled with junk. Thoughts and feelings that are introduced in your body without your permission, but quickly, and you might say somewhat unconsciously, become part of you and they take over. Just like a chemical takes over and makes you do, act, and feel certain ways that are not necessarily part of your conscious volition. Now I love the symbol of the hypodermic needle and filled with junk, that's a very good phrase as well. And basically she says that you can be loved until it's poor. Pouring out of your years, but you will still have evil thoughts of yourself. Let's say that in the context of an empowered woman. Let's connect that pattern now. So you can love yourself, you can do all the therapy until it's pouring out of your ears, but you will still think negatively about yourself until, as Clarissa Estes says, you receive true guidance and you incorporate that guidance into your own psychic system. Until you do that, it makes it very easy for evil thoughts to continue. So in her book, Warming the Stone Child, she's basically saying she's arguing against giving a lot of love to a child who just feels fundamentally inadequate or has been orphaned in some way or abandoned in some way. She says that this child will naturally think evil thoughts about themselves. And no amount of love can fix that. Only guidance can fix that. Only your intuition can fix them. Only incorporating this guidance into your own psychic system can fix that and stop you from having those evil thoughts about yourself. That was the whole point of why I did the planting the internal eternal mother, because we're replacing that with we're replacing those evil thoughts or that chronic way of feeling badly about who you are when you're actually not a bad person. We're replacing that with an internal, eternal mother. So yeah, I just wanted to give you two different angles of how people have approached introjection. One has approached it in the context of a personality soul testing system, and the other one has approached it in the context of working with the orphaned or abandoned child. So let's just connect the pattern just a little bit in case it already hasn't been obvious. I think it's been super obvious, but let's connect the pattern. What we learned in previous episodes, let's combine introjection with that. You're an empowered woman. You have the tendency to introject, or you might have already introjected. And you might have the tendency now to swallow any criticism whole without without putting any responsibility or putting any kind of blame or fault on other people, you just swallow it whole. You mirror your environment. You think that somebody else's mood has something to do with you. And you also know projective identification exists. Can you see how easy it is to get knocked off your center now? Can you see how easy it is to abandon yourself? Again, I'm showing you how to have compassion for yourself and know these things so that you can be aware of who you truly are. And one way you can work to lessen introjection, if this is something you still chronically do, is just ask yourself simple questions like, does this person's bad mood actually mean something about me? Or what if this incident didn't have anything to do with my worth? Those two questions can immediately help you separate who you are from what you're seeing in your environment. So you don't mirror it, you don't play a matchy-matchy game with it. You simply just notice and accept what it is without making it a measurement of your value. And this is where I want to tell you something that has been bothering me ever since I first heard about it, and that is the law of attraction. When I first heard about the law of attraction in Esther Hicks, and I sort of saw how people were applying their understanding of the law of attraction. And this was back in the day, right? This was like maybe 10, 12, 15 years ago, and maybe it doesn't happen so much now. I don't know, but back in the day, it seemed like the law of attraction was almost forcing introjection, but putting a spiritual twist on it. It was forcing you to see your environment as a mirror of who you are. So that person with a bad mood is actually a signal that you have some negative energy about yourself, and therefore you're seeing this in your outward environment. This person cannot just be in a bad mood. It is that you are in a bad mood, and that is why you attracted them into your life. Do you see what I mean? It was, and it was really crazy making for me to dive into those teachings in any kind of serious way because that's what it felt like was happening. And it took me a long time to parse out what the truth of the law of attraction was, and maybe one day I'll do an episode on that, because there's some truth to it, but not all of it feels very true at all. This is what I felt like the law of attraction was doing. It was almost encouraging and forcing introjection in people. So I just wanted to bring that to your notice because, especially as an empowered woman, especially as an empowered woman, it will be natural for you to ruffle feathers a lot of times wherever you go. That will be natural. That's a natural way that life works. But you might think, oh no, law of attraction says that because I'm not getting these opportunities, or because this person is being a douchebag to me, or because this person is gossiping behind my back, that means there's something wrong with me, or that I did something to attract these things into my life. Right? Which on one level might be true because maybe you went to the wrong place for the right medicine, but it does not mean that the way these people are treating you is an indication of your worth or who you are or what energy you carry. Does that make sense? It's you could say, you could argue that, hey, maybe you carry low self-worth as an energy, and so you went to this place that treated you badly, and you could say that's how the law of attraction works. That's neither here nor there. There is a part of you that still believes that it is your fault, and there's a part of you that still believes that you are responsible for this person's way of treating you, and it's an indication of your worth. In case you feel like that, in case you're doing that, I just want to bring this up to you. And now we have many different perspectives from how introjection works, and you know to watch for it and you know not to engage with it. Okay, my darlings. Now let's go to the second concept. And that second concept is empaths. Empaths, empaths, sensitives, whatever you want to call them. Oh my gosh, I spent my entire life rejecting the fact that I was an empath, rejecting the fact that I was an HSP or sensitive or whatever you want to call it, because the way it was taught to me and the way I understood it, it just did not feel like who I was. But that's because nobody explained it to me in the way I'm about to explain it to you. And I think we need to really take empaths and sensitives more seriously because I think in the culture there's a tendency to do what I did, which is reject that these people exist, including rejecting it in yourself, or there's a tendency to over-identify with it and make other people walk on eggshells around you just because you're sensitive. And neither of those things are valid. They're just not valid. We need to understand this concept from a more mature place, and also we need to understand it in the pattern of self-abandonment. Now, one day I'm going to do a full deep dive into empaths and sensitives, and that's not the scope of this episode. This episode is just going to see it from the perspective of self-abandonment. But let's just do a real quick pulse check on what is an empath. An empath or a sensitive, I use those terms interchangeably. They may or may not be actually interchangeable, but I use them interchangeably. And an empath is, it's like you have no skin. That's the best way I can describe this. You feel everything all the time. And that natural barrier that I was talking about before, where you can deflect criticism or you can deflect your mirrors around you, or you stop seeing everything as your mirror, that barrier is just not there with empaths. So the typical definition is an empath is someone with a highly attuned ability to sense, experience, and even absorb the emotions and physical feelings of others. And the difference that traditional knowledge says between empathy and empaths is that you can have empathy for someone, but empaths feel the state so deeply that they become overwhelmed by them and they almost, you could even say, adopt them, right? Maybe it's a form of introjection, like you can see the pattern here. But let's just focus strictly on empaths, right? It's just you feel it so deeply, and you feel it to the point to which you think it's yours. That is how I experience being an empath. And again, this is something I fought against. Other people kept calling me that. I fought it and fought it and fought it for a long time. So let me give you a couple of stories as to how I experience being an empath. So that might help you understand it better. The reason I'm explaining this to you is I think on some level, humanity is moving towards becoming more sensitive and more empathic. Some of us have just reached there in like full bloom the moment we were born, like me, for example. But a lot of us are moving to that place collectively as humanity, which I think is a good thing. So we do all need to know what being an empath and being a sensitive means. If I had to guess, a lot of you who are listening to this podcast probably are on some level some type of empath or sensitive. Now, you might not be as extreme as I am, as I'm about to give you stories of, but there is, it's a matter of scale here. Okay, two stories I think that I can give you. Uh, number one is this was a long time ago, and this is when I first decided to maybe sort of think, accept, slightly even, slightly even adopt the idea of what being an empath means. Like it was actually a thing, and I wasn't just fully rejecting it. And this is what happened at a coffee shop when I was with my boyfriend at the time. I had sat down at a table and there was nobody sitting around me when I had sat down at the table, and I was kind of in like a booth setting where on my left and right side it was enclosed, so I couldn't see who was on my left, I couldn't see who was on my right. And I sat down at this table. And after about maybe two minutes, I started feeling this lump in my throat, like almost like there was a hole in my throat. And I kept trying to swallow my own spit, and I kept feeling sore and like I was almost not able to breathe. I was massaging it and I was swallowing, and I was like, what is going on? I thought I was dying. And I just got up to go to my boyfriend to tell him that I need to leave because I'm not feeling well. And as I got up, I looked to my right and I saw this man with a tube in his throat, and he was not able to speak, but he was, I think, with a woman, I presumed was his wife, and he was trying to speak to her, and the words wouldn't come out. Now, keep in mind, I had no idea this man was there. When I sat down, he was not there. I didn't see him come in because my vision was blocked by the two little barriers on either side of me. So there's no way I could rationally have known that this man was sitting next to me. And there's no way I could rationally feel how sick and how disgusted and how horrible it felt to not be able to breathe. You know, there's no way. And the second I saw him, all my feelings went away. Because in that moment I realized those were his feelings, they were not mine. Now, let me tie this back to what I told you about projective identification in the previous episode. I told you then that the reason why the projection lands is not because it's truly a strong projection, but also because there's a part of you that feels vulnerable to this projection. And that's what makes the projection land, and that's what causes you to be pulled into this dynamic of projective identification. Now come back to this story I just told you about. This man, I just instinctively knew that he was a smoker. And I was a chain smoker at the time. And I just knew that the reason why I was able to feel his pain so distinctly was because our fates were the same. My vulnerability was the same as his, which was the vulnerability to smoking. And this is the kind of empath that I was never told about. I was never told that you can actually feel somebody else's pain and you can absorb their diseases to such an extent where you can't breathe. That was not something I was ever told. So that is why I had resisted it for so long until that moment. Now, fast forward to uh four years ago when I adopted my dog. My dog is a czar, he is my soulmate, he is my everything, and I adopted him, but it was a very trying time because this was a rescue dog, and he just had so many stomach issues. He had one stomach issue after another, after another, and I spent so much money trying to fix it. Now, thankfully, it's all gone. We're good, we're a happy little pair now. But back then it was like it would never end. And after about two or three months of adopting him, I started experiencing this thing where I would get a little bit of diarrhea and for no reason at all. So I just get a little bit of diarrhea for no reason. And I would just know that he's about to have a diarrhea episode because I had a diarrhea episode. And sure enough, within a day, he would have a diarrhea episode. Now, the first two times this happened, I didn't catch it, but it started happening so often that I just knew that I had empathed his diarrhea. I'd empathed his stomach issues. And it's true, I have some stomach issues too, but no, nowhere near as bad as he was. I guess my vulnerability mattered in that moment, you know, that I was able to receive that. But this is how I empathed my own dog. And that continues to this day. To this day, I can tell if I've had a little bit of diarrhea that my dog is about to have it too. Because I will have it for absolutely no reason. There will be no clear reason why I have had it, but there will always be a reason why my dog has had that episode. So that's how I knew, that's how I still know that it's a true empath and not necessarily me causing the situation, which is something I used to really struggle with in the past. Did I really feel it or did I cause it? How much of this is empathic intuition versus how much is a self-fulfilling prophecy? And I always laugh, you know, when people say animals are so sensitive, animals are such empaths, and it's true they are. But I just think to myself and I laugh, I'm like, I empath my dog way more than he has ever empathed me. And it's so hilarious. So I'm like, yeah, yeah, you should. I'm an empathic animal, you know. But anyway, I digress. So if you feel you're an empath, don't listen to other people and kind of absorb what they're saying about empaths, you know, because like I said, they can be extremely rejecting or a little bit too accepting. Define for yourself what kind of empath you are and what situations you can recall where you felt its impact. Because that can be a clue and fit into this pattern of abandonment, self-abandonment, so that we can learn all our little patterns and all the ways in which we abandon ourselves. And this fits into that pattern so we can recognize it, we can stop it, and we can move on. For example, I had to learn not to empath my clients when I was doing intuitive readings for them. There was a reading that I did very, very early on in my career where I was doing a reading for this uh coaching buddy that I was in life coach school with, a peer, if you will. And the whole reading, I was doing this reading for her, but I was actually empathing her. And the reading started to feel as confused and as illogical and as all over the place as she was. And I was like, my readings don't normally go this way. I'm very clear. I know exactly what I need to say, how to say it, and I know exactly what needs to be communicated to the client. But in this case, I was like, maybe it could be this, maybe it could be that, maybe it could be this, maybe it could be. I started giving all these potentials and all this, what if this, what if that? And that's how I started talking to her. And I realized halfway through that I was actually empathing her. I wasn't intuiting the truth. And this is one of the ways I had to learn really early on that doing intuitive readings for my clients can be a big trigger for me of self-abandonment because I can abandon myself so easily when I'm doing intuitive readings back then, not now anymore, but back then that was the case. So you see how learning where you do these things actually makes you a stronger person because you can identify your little triggers and then you can work with that self-abandonment. Now let's connect it back to what we've already learned. You're sensitive, you're an empath, you're breaking norms, you're an empowered woman. You're way more sensitive than most. So you'll happily pick up on whatever feelings they have about you. They'll be angry with you, and so you'll happily feel their anger within you, and even believe it's yours. And you even ask yourself, how could it not be yours? Because maybe you feel a little bit of anger as an empowered woman. How can you not? And now you're around these other people who feel enormous amounts of anger, and now all of a sudden you are raging and you're believing that it's yours, and it might just not be. Now we go into the third concept in this pattern, which is the just world hypothesis, also known as the just world fallacy. And this is a cognitive bias. So it's a bias in the way we think, where we believe that actions just bring about morally fair and absolutely perfect for you consequences, or perfect for the actor consequences. It means this is where people say when they believe in karma, bad actions lead to punishment. Good actions give you a place in heaven, or even a good place on earth. It's this bias that people get what they deserve. What goes around comes around. Everything happens for a reason. You reap what you sow, you brought this on yourself. And really, they're believing in the sense of divine justice, uh, divine order. And this is where the colloquial use of the word karma comes in big time, right? This uh new age bastardization of what karma is. You can see how incredibly cruel this is. Because anytime you see a person who's suffering, you believe that they deserve it or that they caused it. Can you see how that happens with women who have been victimized? That somehow, oh, you wore the short skirt, therefore you can be abused. You were asking for it. And this just world hypothesis in a child, you can see how that affects their way of thinking, right? Because they believe that if they got something, then they deserved it. They don't bother to criticize it or push back on it. They just think they deserve what they got, especially a child who's used to being punished for everything. So, this just world fallacy, when we take it into the law of attraction, you can see how much hurt it has caused. Everything happens for a reason thing when it's attributed to somebody else being the fault of it or the cause of it can be extremely damaging. It can be really gut-wrenching for a woman when she finds out that the world is in fact not fair. And as an empowered woman, you'll often find that the world is against you sometimes. Everything from the medical profession to the justice system. And part of becoming an empowered woman is realizing that naivety is not cute. You start to inform yourself. Instead of thinking that if so many people don't understand you, it must be your fault because the world is inherently fair. You can now see that, oh, so many people don't understand you because they don't understand you. Because the world is inherently not that fair. And this is not a pessimistic point of view at all. This is actually a very respectful point of view because now you can respect your suffering as well as the suffering of other people. You know, in your desire to not be seen as a victim, or not to be seen as playing the victim card, you end up victimizing yourself because you put all the blame and responsibility on yourself, and nobody can handle or should have to handle that kind of pressure. And you just can't do it. So you end up collapsing, or you end up just feeling really badly about yourself because you're too busy taking all this responsibility because you believe in a fair world. You believe in a fair and just world. If it happened to you, then it must have been your fault in some way. And I know we do that because we want to maintain a sense of control over our fates and our destiny. And maybe we do have some control over our fates and destiny, but we don't have that much control. It can be really Heartbreaking to see so many horrible people get so many rewards for being horrible people. Meanwhile, you're trying to do good in the world, you're trying to get ahead in a good and safe way, and you are given peanuts. Or it's extremely difficult for you to do so. That is not the fault of you, that is the fault of the system. And you could even say that maybe the world is fair, but the systems are not. Systems are not fair. Maybe that is something you can internalize better than saying the world is not fair, right? But you can see how the world is comprised of systems that are inherently not fair. They will be fair up to a certain point or they will work up to a certain point and then they won't. It's this idea that, you know, the just world fallacy that brings about, which is we know the cause and we know the effect. When in fact there are infinite causes and infinite effects to something. So what is the medicine for this? The medicine is to become shrewd. Someone who describes this really well is Lisa Marciano in her book The Vital Spark. She talks about how innocence is what a lot of women get praised for and even encouraged to be when really we need to become shrewd. And I think the just world fallacy and the just world hypothesis ties to this because it's almost as if we remain small and sweet and girly and naive, there's a reward to that, right? If we believe in a just world, that's naivety. We believe that we will get rewards for that. But as we get older, we realize that being innocent in this world will actually not get you rewards. You have to become shrewd, cunning even when the situation demands it. So a lot of women that I've seen that have engaged in innocence for far too long and too much, they swing to the other side of the pendulum, which is bitterness. And this is something that Lisa Marciano says. She says, bitterness is the shadow side of innocence. And it really is. People will become bitter because they've engaged in innocence for too long and too much and they've become victims because of it. So becoming shrewd, which is adopting the attitude that, yeah, the world, the some of the systems are just not fair. Maybe all of the systems are just not fair. And what are we going to do about it? That's really the question of the empowered woman. Instead of collapsing into this naivety, we rise to the occasion. You know where I have faced this the most is with my body. For so long, I believed and I was taught that you get the body you deserve. If you are overweight or you're fat, or you've got like lumps of fat and bumps of fat in places, that means it's your fault. And now that as I'm getting older, I'm realizing perimenopause has a lot to play in how my body looks. Because I eat very well, I go to the gym, I take care of myself very well, and yet I don't have the kind of body that I think I deserve because I didn't actually, I'm not doing anything to make my body look the way it does, you know, which which is like these lumps and bumps everywhere, like the stores of fat in certain places. I'm not really doing anything to get it to be that way. I don't deserve that, so to speak, if we want to use that word. It's just something that has happened because as I'm getting older, this is what happens. Now I can work on it and I'll keep working on it, no doubt. But I don't necessarily think that this is my fault anymore. But my younger consciousness wants to think that way. It's like, oh, you should go to the gym more, you should exercise this part of your body more. So much of self-help is about control. And this is how self-abandonment shows up. These hyper-controlling behaviors masquerading as empowerment. And by the way, that's gonna be a whole episode that we're gonna discuss in the future about how you know female empowerment has been masqueraded around in consumerism rather than true empowerment. Oof, we're gonna talk about that very soon. But anyway, so that's just to give you an idea of like how it shows up, right? This, like you would never think that the just world fallacy appears in your body, but it does. That's how it appeared for me. So let's put this all together now. You're an empowered woman. Maybe you're also sensitive or an empath, maybe not. But right from when you were young, you noticed how people respond to you. You can pick up on feelings easily, you internalize people's feelings about you easily. You think maybe it's you and that you need to adjust your tone, your posture, your opinions. And so you do. You spend a lifetime being palatable, trying to be the perfect delivery mechanism to deliver your truth. But and then you do assert your truth, you do speak your truth, and usually it's well researched and informed, and it's based in your truth, and all of a sudden you get a backlash, and you believe that you deserve it. Maybe you should have adjusted your tone a little bit more. Maybe your posture needed correcting. Maybe you should get Botox to correct those frown lines, and so you won't look so angry when you talk. You see what I mean? Because so you see how all those forces came together in just this one pattern: the force of projective identification, empowered women, sensitives, empaths, introjection, and the just road fallacy. You know, I always knew celebrities and public personas have it rough. But after understanding all these concepts and putting them together, I just can't imagine how strong you'd have to be physically to put yourself on a stage in front of millions of people and just receiving all that crap thrown at you. You must have had to have really strong boundaries and a really, really thick skin to be able to handle that. My God, I just have so much respect for these people. But okay. Okay, lovely. So I was thinking, how can you get more out of this particular episode? And number one is obviously do the little prompts that I peppered in throughout the episode. You know, journal it because journaling makes things real and you can refer to it, and you can do this many times, and each time there will be something new for you to notice. And the second thing you can do is listen to the accompaniment episodes that I will attach in this episode description, and listen to the episodes in order because each of them builds on the other. And the third thing you can do is go through the prompts that I'm about to give you. I put together a couple of prompts based on the concepts we discussed today, and I think that'll help you gain a little bit more of a perspective into this pattern. So the first question is: who are your main authority figures growing up? What were their voices and beliefs like? Describe them. What was the tone of their voice? What is the tone of their belief systems? What was the energy behind them? How did they express themselves? Write those adjectives down. And now notice to what extent do you have the same beliefs, the same tone, the same energy, the same voice? And then ask yourself, why do you have them? The next thing you can ask yourself is where can you take less responsibility for someone else's feelings? And where can you stop emotionally caretaking? The third question: where can you disbelieve somebody else's negative opinion of you? What is the proof that their negative opinion isn't actually true? And this is where, you know, going back to that episode of true feedback or judgmental projection, that's the name of the episode, going back to that episode can really help you with this one. And I'll also link it in the episode description. The next question you can ask yourself is where can you dare to believe in your own goodness? That's the money question. Where can you dare to believe in your own goodness? And the last question, where are you afraid of abandonment? Where are you afraid you won't be loved? And that last question will show you where your self-abandonment pattern might be currently playing out. Because wherever you're afraid of abandonment, wherever you're afraid you won't be loved, accepted, cherished, narried, well regarded, that's usually a place where you will self-abandon the most. Okay, my lovelies. I so enjoyed putting together this episode for you. I hope you enjoyed listening to it. It's given you some ahas. Please send me a voicemail or a text message. The link to do that is in the description. Let me know how it's going. Maybe you have a question about this series and I can incorporate it in the next episodes. That would be wonderful, I think, for you and for me, and for everyone listening, because it just gives a different perspective on the same topic. Also, consider leaving a review and rating the show because that helps me put the podcast out into the world. And as you know, I don't use AI in my work. I don't have any sponsorships that could potentially mess with my messaging. So yeah, it's all kosher up in here. And I hope you're really enjoying that authenticity. And if you do know a friend or many friends who have a pattern of abandoning themselves, this series might be a good one to share with them. Okay, my lovelies, may your self abandonment be sacrificed as fuel in the pure fire of your dignity. Much love to you. Until next time. Bye.