The Therapy Edit - On worrying about hurting those you care about

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

In this, the third of a special ten part series of The Therapy Edit, Anna talks through the second of The Uncomfortable Truths; I Will Hurt People I Love.The Uncomfortable Truth: Change Your Life By Taming 10 of Your Mind's Greatest Fears is Anna's 5th book and is set for publication on the 8th August!Pre-order your copy here and have it delivered straight to your door on publication day. Here's a teaser from Anna about what to expect in this long-awaited, transformative book.‘Some people don’t like me”“Bad things will happen to people I love”“I’m going to fail”… these words underpinned my anxieties and nightmares. I bet they feature in yours too.Our fears are anchored in the unavoidable truths of life; all things reach an end, bad things happen, and we lack the control we crave.As an experienced psychotherapist, who’s had years of therapy, I realised that ploughing endless energy into trying to control the uncontrollable is keeping us all tired, wired, and worried. Ignoring fears doesn’t make them less true, it makes them more powerful. I decided to try a different tact and it changed my world.Instead of doing everything I could to ease and avoid life’s uncomfortable truths, I sought a deeper acceptance of them. Through using this approach, my clients and I discovered that fear began to loosen its grip. We were living more intentionally and peacefully.So, face your fears one a chapter at a time, and discover who you are without worry, doubt and people-pleasing holding you back.

Hello and welcome to the Therapy Edit podcast with me, psychotherapist Anna Martha. I'll be bringing you weekly 10 minute episodes to encourage and support your emotional well-being. Hi there, welcome to a little mini-series that I'm doing at the moment is 10 weeks long. And today, episode three, I am going to talk about the fear that we have of hurting people. So this is all based on my brand new book, The Uncomfortable Truth. which is out on August the 15th. And there are 10 uncomfortable truths in this book. And I've done a couple already.

So you'll have to listen back for those. And those two were the fact that some people don't like us. And then I'm going to fail, the fact that we're going to fail. And it's all about how can we become a little bit more accepting of these uncomfortable truths. Now, today's uncomfortable truth is the truth that we will help. people we love. I will hurt people I love. You will have and always will along the way in big and small ways hurt people you love whether you know it or not. And it's so uncomfortable, right? When we think about the conversations that we have not had out of fear of hurting someone that we

love, when we think about the elephant that we have left in the corner of the room because we have worried what it would be like to actually name it, to name it and talk about it, the opinions that you've held down, the needs that you haven't expressed. You know, we have limited our relationships because of this fear. And I think having been working on this uncomfortable truth myself and becoming a little bit more accepting of the fact that I will hurt people I love and it's not even out of my failure. It's just the fact that we're just complex human beings trying to do our best. And sometimes I will feel things or say things or express something that may feel hurtful to someone else. That's not saying that I am being hurtful. It's just saying that

sometimes we feel hurt by one another because maybe we feel disappointed because someone isn't able to do something we hope they might. Maybe we feel hurt because someone isn't able to reciprocate when we have given them something. Maybe we feel like we're grieving a relationship that's changed since we've become a parent and maybe we're harboring hurt. And we will hurt people. But how different might it be? If you actually felt more accepting of the fact that you will hurt people along the way,

sometimes completely out of your control and beyond your knowledge. And actually, I have found that as I've worked on this truth, I am more open to having difficult conversations. I have found that my relationships have actually gotten a little bit deeper and richer because I have spoken about the elephant in the room because that relationship matters to me or I have expressed a need or a feeling. So I haven't maybe been letting resentment get in the way of connecting with that other person. So whilst I think sometimes we think we're protecting relationships out of worrying about what people think or worrying about I hope and when actually, when we fear this truth, we actually can end up limiting those very same

relationships. So I'm going to share an excerpt from the book, straight from the book. And then I'm going to share a couple of thoughts on why this might be a tricky one for you. And then I'm going to share a couple of tips, okay? But be rest assured, we're just doing top level 10 minutes in this, in this episode. But the book obviously goes into so much more detail. And if you enjoy listening to a podcast, you can have a listen to the audio book, which I have read myself. And as I'm recording these episodes, it's given me strong memories of sitting in that booth. So yeah, I can't wait if you'd have it. So here's the excerpt. You do and say hurtful things. You always have done and you always will. Sometimes you hurt someone intentionally. You want to. They might have hurt you

and you want them just to know how it feels. You probably know them well so you know their weaknesses and their regrets so you can use just the right words to inflict pain. When you hurt them, you feel both pleasure and shame. You also hurt people accidentally. People have wince inwardly because something you said pressed on a sore place within them

and then they've gone away with your words resounding in their ears. People have felt unimportant to you or dismissed by you because of the way you've treated them. You're not even aware of how what you did or said change the way they feel about you. Perhaps someone is not sure as to whether to bring it up or not, or whether they're being too sensitive. If you knew you'd hurt them, you'd feel mortified. You didn't mean for it to come across like that.

You simply forgot to invite them to the event, or you really didn't see them that day when you walked down the street, or you truly overlooked the fact that their dad was seriously unwell, while you ranted about an argument you'd just had with yours. You've hurt people in both small and relationship-changing ways, Through misinterpreted words, sarcasm, forgotten details, accidental betrayals, you could move through this world with the best intentions and you'd still hurt people. You could exhaust yourself trying to weigh up how everything you do and say might come across to

someone and you'd still hurt people. So there it is in black and white, the truth. That's the cold, hard truth guys. And it's a lot, isn't it? And we know it. We know it deep down. We know it deep down. but still we can exhaust ourselves trying to protect people from being hurt when actually

what we end up doing so often is actually not being our authentic selves, not talking about the things that need to be talked about, not having those gentle, difficult conversations that maybe we might need to have in order to have healthier relationships with people. So why might you find it hard? couple of reasons that I picked from the butcher with you. Maybe you were blamed for someone's feelings. When you were growing up, maybe you felt like you were the cause of someone else's pain. Maybe they blamed you. Maybe they just, you know, they were biting at you. Maybe they said, oh, you know, you're making me feel like this. You're, I only did that because you were doing

this. Maybe you had a caregiver that consistently seemed hurt or offended or irritated by you. so to preserve this important relationship, you've come to believe that you are the problem and you do what you can to make people happy. And you move through life with that sense that to upset someone risks causing painful disconnection. So maybe it's that or maybe it's having a fear of confrontation. Maybe you find it hard to talk to people if they've hurt you. Maybe you swallow it down and try to carry on as if nothing happens or you'd actually

rather withdraw from someone or ghost them and talk about it. Take a step away. Maybe it feels vulnerable and scary. So you try and do everything in your power to avoid causing someone hurt. Perhaps someone has confronted you in a really unthoughtful, painful way before and it hurts so much. You just, you feel fearful of having those kinds of conversations, which is so understandable. All of the reasons that we worry about hurting people are really a really understandable um but when we when we take it that step further we don't want to hurt people we don't we care about people right we're good people but but when that worry about hurting people turns into a fear of confrontation and it stops us having those important conversations or expressing needs and feelings

then we're actually yeah we're contorting manipulating ourselves um in order to be more palatable and then we can't be authentic in our relationship. So here are two tips on for getting to, yeah, a little bit more place of acceptance of this uncomfortable truth that you will hurt people. Number one, just learn to sit with the wondering. It's okay to wonder. Wonder. I wonder what they think. I wonder if they're annoyed that I said that. I wonder, I wonder. Now, learn to sit with the wandering in other areas of your life to help with this. You know, wonder what that person from uni or college is doing, wonder what, I mean, I don't know about you, but I can sit and watch TV and then I'm like, oh, what other film was that person in? Oh, what's the way they're doing

tomorrow? Oh, I wonder if that celebrity is still dating that and we can find ourselves Googling from the off. Like, we find it hard to sit with wondering, don't we? So, no wonder we find it hard when we don't know exactly what someone is thinking about us, exactly how they're feeling. And no wonder we can ruminate when we can't sit with wandering in other areas of our lives. So allow yourself to wonder. Allow yourself to wonder what the weather's going to be like tomorrow without checking it. Allow yourself to wonder what that person from school is doing without having to find out. Because the more comfortable we are with the not knowing in the small things, the more comfortable we're going to be with the not knowing and the bigger things and the

bigger questions that we find ourselves asking. The second thing is to know where you're responsibility lies. You can take, and I literally list out the responsibilities in the book, you can take responsibility for apologising, if you know you've hurt someone. You can take responsibility asking for clarity as to whether you might have hurt someone if they feel a bit off with you. You might just say, look, I'm just wondering if things are all right, did I upset you at all? But if that other person cannot accept your apology, if they give you an untrue answer when you ask whether you've upset them. That is not your responsibility. That is up to them. And I think sometimes we take responsibility for both, don't we? We take responsibility for the whole lot. We take

more than we can actually have control over. We can have control over apologising and asking for clarity in a gentle and respectful way, but we can't take control over whether someone gives that honesty or accepts that apology. And that's hard. And sometimes we need to allow ourselves to grieve, changed and shifted relationships when you say sorry of something and someone just isn't ready to accept your apology. It doesn't mean that you haven't apologised enough. It might just mean that they're, who knows? Who knows what that might mean for them? You can think back to times when you struggle to accept someone's apology. And we know it's not always that simple and it's not always to do with the person who wrong dresses it.

So there we go. A couple of things to hopefully help you find a little little. bit more acceptance of that fact that you will hurt people so have those conversations do them gently but have them talk about the elephant in the room because if relationships are meaningful to you when we fear hurting people so often we actually end up hurting the relationship and and good relationships healthy relationships can withstand well done difficult conversations and I've got lots of tips in the book for that as well but I'm sending you love as maybe you consider having a couple of these chats and I hope you love the book. I am so excited to announce that my brand new book, The Uncomfortable Truth,

Change Your Life by Taming Ten of Your Mind's Greatest Fears, is available for pre-order now and is out on the 8th of August. And in this book, we tackle some of life's big, unavoidable, uncomfortable truths such as some people don't like me. I am going to fail. Life isn't fair. Bad things will have. happen. And in this book, we tackle these big, uncomfortable trees that rob us of so much

headspace and energy as we try and control and avoid them. And as we move into a place of radical acceptance of these truths, you will find yourself living more freely and intentionally with more presence and confidence than ever before. So come on this journey with me and pre-order now at Ward Stones and Amazon. We can celebrate together. Thank you.