A few months ago, in one of my facebook live episodes, I presented “What wrong with me?” is the wrong question.” It pointed out how the folly of blaming yourself for problems with self-acceptance.
Many self-acceptance issues go back to the scars left behind from traumas earlier in your life. You get so accustomed to blaming yourself, that it keeps you stuck in a loop of self-criticism.
You are responsible for the choices you make, but not for the traumas. No matter how much you try to change yourself in order to avoid being hurt, or what your character flaws is, they’re all about “what’s wrong with me,” from an outsider’s perspective.
Not only that, the constant blaming keeps your nervous system stimulated so much you can’t turn it off. So you’re living with constant pain and anxiety, but it feels “normal” to you. You grow accustomed to a nervous system so stimulated it’s become inflamed.
So the more of this self-criticism you do, the worse your nervous system gets.
That’s just one of traumas lasting effects.
This is why it’s crucial to get help from a therapist to work on self-acceptance and de-blaming yourself. It may take some time, but eventua0lly, you can break out of this negative feedback loop and start living a life that feels good
When an affair happens and you have a history of trauma, you’re at risk of blaming yourself. When you look for what’s wrong with you, your focus is on yourself.
When the focus is on yourself, it’s only going to be a matter of time before you find something wrong with yourself.
That’s the nature of the brain to not just look for what’s wrong with you, but over time to become more and more negative when they find something. Besides amplifying the negative aspects, it amplifies how many things are wrong with you.
So this constant self-focus is going to make things worse, in a vicious cycle. You asked the question. Your brain used the question as a command to search for what’s wrong with you. It found answers. Now you struggle with what it found, even though you told it to find them.
The answer you found for your question may be plausible, but the problem isn’t something wrong with you. The problem lies in what happened to you and how you dealt with it.
Let me repeat that. “The problem lies in what happened TO YOU and HOW you dealt with it.” Read it, re-read it, and let it sink in.
With trauma episodes, it’s easier to blame yourself than honestly look at the situation and what happened. You do and say things that make sense to you, but others are bewildered at what you did.
It makes sense to you since you’re the one who endured the trauma. You did what you knew to do. You did what was needed to survive the incident with what you knew back then. That doesn’t make you a bad person.
The scars of trauma impact how you feel, think and behave.
Your spouse’s affair represents another relationship that broke along with an attachment that ruptured. It’s another loss in your life. Something else was taken from you.
That kind of incident has ways or reactivating old trauma reactions and your old ways of dealing with them. One of the ways you dealt with it was blaming yourself.
Now is a time for finally dealing with those trauma reactions rather than running from them or hiding them from others. It’s time to change the pattern. Rather than continuing repeating dysfunctional patterns, change them!
In the video, “Overcoming Affair Trauma”, I present ways of moving past the trauma.
You don’t have to stay emotionally stuck or shut down. You can instead start putting those things behind you. Consider the possibility of changing your reactions. Instead of asking what’s wrong with me, you can instead ask how you can make yourself better or stronger.
Your mind will start seeing new options and choices that you were blind to before. When you put the traumas behind you, it opens up new viewpoints.
Click and download a copy today.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
