Hey, what's up? You're listening to Healed as Fuck and I'm your host, Erin Javins. Welcome back. As always, this podcast uses language and discusses topics that may not be suitable for all listeners. Listener discretion is advised. All right, so I guess let's get started with the elephant in the room. Yes, I know that it has been three weeks since I dropped an episode, and I really wish that I had some super great reason for that. And I almost tried to come up with one for you guys. But this is a place where we hold ourselves accountable. So this is me holding myself accountable. The truth is that I was. Extremely busy. I had a ton of events and I was going to be late on the first episode three weeks ago. And then that sort of snowballed because I felt guilty because it was going to be late. And then task paralysis set in and then task avoidance set in and then it just kept snowballing and all of a sudden it had been three weeks. So this is me holding myself accountable and holding my feet to the fire and getting this episode out to you guys. And as of this week, we are going to be back on track, so. Another episode will drop on Friday and we'll be back on track from there. So I owe you guys all an apology. I am sorry. I I wish that I had some great excuse as to how it happened, but I don't. I'm just a human and I made a human mistake and that's really all I can say about it. I am sorry. I I owe you guys better than that. You guys are so incredibly supportive and I know that people look forward to these episodes and I I ****** ** and this is how I'm holding myself accountable for it. So I appreciate your grace and your patience, and I'm really genuinely sorry. So

on that note, that's actually what we're going to talk about this week. We're going to talk about holding ourselves accountable and what happens when we **** ** in our healing journey and how do we recover from that and how do we move on. So how are some of the ways that we set our own selves back in our healing journeys? Well, that happens a lot of ways. One is that we drop our boundaries. We make exceptions. We allow people into our lives that we know are not healthy for us. Another is that we expose our own selves to our own triggers, knowingly and willingly, because we think we can handle it. We think it's not going to bother us anymore. We don't think it's an issue, and we let it happen. When we do that and we have setbacks and we acknowledge that we have setbacks, we're responsible for holding ourselves accountable. But how do you do that? How do you hold yourself accountable and how do you move on from that?

I know that for me personally, whenever I set myself back in my journey, that it is associated with a lot of guilt. I get angry with myself and I have a lot of guilt about having undone all of the work that I've done to get to where I am. And so I have to check myself in that guilt, and I have to learn to let go of that guilt and accept. That just like getting to this point, it's going to be another series of events, right? Like I'm going to have to continue to run that race we talk about. It's a marathon and not a Sprint and it's probably going to go on forever. It's it's going to be an ongoing process. I'm not going to wake up one day and never have to do work again, right? I'm not going to wake up one day and never have to process through my triggers or my trauma or or deal with my emotions. Right. Like I'm going to have to do it forever. That's part of having mental illness. That's part of having experienced trauma, is that it is permanently altered my brain. And so now I have to live with this new brain, and this new brain is going to be with me forever. And so I just have to accept that when I do something knowingly, that sets myself back because I thought that it would be OK. I thought that I could handle it. And then I realized that I can't. I have to accept. That the same grace that I expect from other people in regards to my healing journey I have to give to myself. Because it's just part of the process. I just have to hold myself to that standard of grace. I have to forgive myself, and then I have to buckle down and do the work to move on from it. I've had several incidents happen in the last couple of weeks that brought up feelings for me that I had not experienced in a really long time.

And they weren't incidents that I thought would be triggering for me. I didn't associate them with past trauma they, but they did bring up feelings for me and so I had to sort of sit with that for a minute and sort of evaluate. Why were these? Situations bringing up these feelings for me. Why was I feeling so triggered? Why was I experiencing this and sort of take stock of that? And so that's been really interesting for me because I haven't had. New triggers in a really long time. I mean, it's been years since I had any new triggers that I didn't anticipate. And so going through that in the last couple of weeks has been really interesting to me. One of those feelings in particular that I've been struggling with recently is. Accepting my place in people's lives. I really struggle with sort of this self doubt. So when I have a friend, I sort of assume that that person doesn't care about me as much as they say they do, right? And that absolutely comes from my trauma. It definitely is deeply rooted in that and probably also a little bit from my neuro spiciness. And so I've I really struggle with when I'm in friend groups. Sort of trusting and accepting that people really care about me as much as they say that they do and sort of. Feeling secure in my place, in that friend group or in that friendship.

And so, because I know that about myself, because I'm self aware that that is something that I struggle with. I've worked really hard, especially recently. To trust myself more in those situations and to just trust in other people more, it's really, it's really something that I I have a hard time with. And just trusting that when someone says that they're my friend, that they're my friend and that it's OK to trust that.

And I know that I'm not alone in that. I know that trusting people is a is a huge thing that people in general struggle with, especially if that is something that is rooted in trauma for you. That learning to trust people, learning to take your relationships at face value and to believe that you mean as much to someone as they say that you do. But that's a thing that a lot of people struggle with. So I'm not, I'm not alone in that. It's not unique to me. It's just one of those things that I've really been working on recently. And so I've really been trying to just sort of take it, you know, at face value that these this person says that I'm their friend. This person says that they care about me. And so that has to be true because they wouldn't say it if it wasn't.

I will say that doing that is sort of a double edged sword because on the one hand it can feel very freeing to just accept that people care about me the way they say that they do. But on the other hand, you know, there's always that sort of nagging in the back of my mind that I have to silence that tells me that I am setting myself up to get hurt, and that when I get hurt that I will have no one to blame. But myself, so it's definitely a process. I have not fully mastered it yet, but it's definitely something that I have been working on recently. I will also tell you that a lot of those same feelings come up. Even with just something like recording this podcast. It is hard for me to accept when people tell me how much an episode means to them or how much they've enjoyed listening to it, or how much they look forward to it. There is a little part of me that is like, but do they really? I mean, are they just being nice or do they really mean that? And so it is something that I struggle with accepting. That feedback, that positive feedback from people in and sort of sitting with it and accepting that it's true and that it's real. And so on that note, I want to tell you guys, as always, I appreciate you so, so much. I know that this is another really short episode. Next week, tentatively we will have our very first guest episodes. So it will be a little bit longer, which will be super exciting. I'm very excited for that. Again, that is tentatively we have to work out some of the details on that, but that is something to look forward

to and I hope that you guys go into this week. Giving yourself that grace, and even if you have had a setback or you have set yourself back, maybe you were faced with a choice that you had to make and you knew that you know either way you were going to come out still having to do more work on your journey. I hope that you give yourself grace on that and understand that even if you set your own self back that it's OK. You can forgive yourself and just just, you know you have to. You have to be willing to run the race, and sometimes that race is really hard and it's OK to take a break. It's OK to say I I'm not in a place to do this right now and to take a break. So I hope you guys have a fabulous week. There will absolutely be another episode drop Friday. You're back on schedule. I'm holding myself accountable, so I know that you guys are on this journey with me. As always, I appreciate you so, so much. Thank you for being here with me and I hope to talk to you again soon. Bye.