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Hello and welcome to this week's episode of midlife A F. I'm your host, Emma Gilmore. And this week we're going to be talking about something really interesting. There's a theory that's called the just world theory. And I think it's fascinating in relation to alcohol and relation to how we treat people who are struggling and how we can end up in adversity inadvertently
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blaming
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people who are actually the victims of their circumstances, I'd be really interested to hear your perspective on this to be Do feel free to send me an email or a message when you've had listen over to me
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if you're a woman in midlife has intuition is telling you that giving booze the elbow might be the next right move. Their midlife AF is the podcast for you. Join counselor psychotherapist this naked mind and gray area drinking alcohol coach Emma Gilmore for a weekly natter about parenting quirky teens, menopause relationships and navigating this thing called midlife alcohol free. If you're feeling that life could be so much more that you're sick and tired of doing all the things for everyone else. If your intuition is waving her arms manically at you saying it could all be so much easier. We didn't have to keep drinking, come with me. Together we'll find our groove without booze.
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I lovingly acknowledge the boomerang people of the Kulin nation as the custodians of current Baroque. I share my admiration for the Aboriginal culture, I witnessed the connection that they have for each other and the land and then community. As I swim in the waters and walk on the land, I feel the power of this place. I'm grateful for the Aboriginal peoples amazing custodianship, the power, beauty and the healing potential of this place. I wish to pay special respects to the elders of the Buena, wrong people. Their wisdom, guidance and support are exceptional, and felt well beyond the Aboriginal community. I honor that this is Aboriginal land, and that it has never been ceded. I am committed to listening to the Aboriginal community, and learning how I can be an active ally in their journey to justice.
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This week, we're talking we're gonna talk a little bit about the just world theory, which is something that's just increasingly interesting for me. Hi, Lisa,
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how are you?
Unknown Speaker 3:03
Hello, how are you? Everybody? It's good to see you all.
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So the just about theory is really interesting budget. The just world theory is that it kind of sits behind why often we blame people for things victim blaming is really what I'm talking about here. As you see, is it. Hi,
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I'm
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probably caught I'm so blind. Martha. Maura, the cat. Yay.
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And my friend Rebecca, I think or maybe Carly. Christine.
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Nice to see you guys. Glad you're here.
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So the just roll out there is a really interesting
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one. It's some it's one of the
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reasons that when people are being bullied or abused in life, often they can feel very, very isolated. Because and because what happens is, and this is this is kind of like the context of the theory is that as a heap as a race, we want to believe that the world is good. And we want to believe that bad things don't happen to Hi, Simone, good to see you. We want to believe that
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bad things don't happen to good people
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that thinks make sense
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that
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you know it's kind of almost like it's a little bit connected to capitalism. It's a little bit connected to the patriarchy. It's connected to the idea that if you work hard, you get rewarded for your hard work
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and
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the sort of other in other humans that if they you know the people who are not have not worked hard. They're responsible for their In situation, it's that kind of like what's it called zero sum game.
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So there's only was room for one at the top or a few at the top. And
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you know, anybody who is
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having a good time is taking you away from your good time. It's like this is very sort of like kapsalis Dog Eat Dog, it kind of stems from going back in history to kind of like early Christianity to the puritanical movement to Calvinism to do through iSM to the Catholics. Catholics come from Catholic found myself, you know, this idea that human beings are born bad.
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And you know, that original sin and basically that it's the state needs to control that terrible illness that is the essence of human by putting in all these rules and regulations and because humans left to their own devices are not good.
Speaker 3 6:06
Those the opposite 100% Opposite of what I adhere to, in terms of my belief and value system. But it's something that I have seen and I continue to see in society, and it really troubles me and I want to talk about it, because I think it has a connection to why we as a human race, don't allow ourselves to feel our feelings. Why we are encouraged to dismiss them, push them away, suppress them, numb them, escape them through whatever means necessary. Because as a society, we have been conditioned to believe that they are dangerous, bad and wrong, is dangerous, bad and wrong and scary. And there's so much to this right? It's such a nuanced
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discussion. We had a beautiful
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group last night and be it might be the lighthouse group. And we were talking about this, we were talking about the sort of how difficult we find it to be with our experience of the world and there's so many different reasons for that, right? I won't go into the details of them but there's trauma there's neuro divergence, there's things like called alexithymia there's interoceptive awareness, there's all of these things right that make it tricky for us necessarily to feel how we're feeling but a lot of that is also to do with the fact that it has was made bad or wrong when we were young. So you know I know plenty of people and I've had my own experience of this of
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Excuse me guys I just have to go do this because it's birthday
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Oh my goodness what a great Facebook and Instagram Live where you just leave it's just your room. And this room is barren in bed because we're moving house and its various
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add I walked around today just saying goodbye to my
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beautiful home wishing it so much love that this is my office my beautiful office which I love so much. And just finishing up picking picking up today but so back to the just world theory. So the just world theory is what happens with the just world theory is when other
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people are having a bad time.
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It doesn't fit with a just world theory. And what happens therefore is often as human beings the tendency is to perceive that the person who's having a bad time is in some way weak
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inferior
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almost contagious in their experience and that in some way or other they must have caused it. Now, I don't believe this at all. But I have had personal experience of this happening to me and I've seen it happen to others the way our systems are built, you know our school systems, our even our police force our
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our work systems, our
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even our neighborhoods, you know
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there's this I know from from you know, I have had children who've been bullied at school. My husband was bullied at school. I was lucky enough not to be bullied at school. Oh, he's completely
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unaware.
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But I have been buddy twice at work. And it was devastating. really devastating. And the worst thing about it is Hi, Marcia, good to see you. The worst thing about the experience was how isolated you feel. And the reason you feel isolated is because everybody runs for the FARC in hills, right? When you're being bullied. And we've been through something like this ourselves as a family just recently, and it has been
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devastating.
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And the most devastating part of it is not that somebody hurt you, or somebody wanted to hurt you. But what is the most devastating part of it? Is that everybody around you treats you like, it's catching.
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So I'm just reading that back. Is that back? Or is that Christine?
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No, I hear this about feelings being present in our feelings for the Tax Practice, doesn't it? And just to notice is enough in that moment, and yes, isolation is real. Yes. And it's just it's just so interesting. Like I I remember when I was being bullied at work, and I'm not really allowed to, and this is the other thing, right? This is how our society works. Is that when things happen, or Hi, Chris, it's so good to see you. I'm so glad you're here is thinking about you today, actually. And that lovely, amazing retreat I had with you. And I was actually listening to Byron Katie, talking on Dan Harris's podcast, and I was thinking of you as well, because you did some great work with me on that. And that really helped me with something I was going through. ages ago, like because Christine was my naturopath. And she's also run some amazing retreats with her partner, business partner, Becky. We were doing some work. And I think it was on body image. Actually, you probably won't even remember it, but it stayed with me. But yeah, when I was when I was at work, even though all the people that I work with were lovely. As soon as I got a new boss, and she decided that she was going to go after me because she was obviously for whatever reason. Everybody ran for the hills. Nobody wants to touch the person being bullied, right? Because number one, you're scared it might happen to you. And number two, there's sub this just well theories this, this cannot be right, right. It doesn't make sense in the world. And I as an autistic, ADHD human being have a very strong sense of social justice. And I feel things very deeply, which I never knew until relatively recently, because I always believed that I didn't feel anything at all. But what's actually is the truth is that I feel things very strongly. And so I put lots of barriers in place to help me keep myself safe. So we do lots of work on this in my groups, we do work on internal family systems and parts work. And, you know, the main part of what we do is actually being with our experience of what is and you know, every day I say to my group, let's come on, let's share with each other, how we're feeling today. And then try and identify if there's anywhere in our body that we can identify it. And as neurodivergent people who have struggled with trauma, female assigned at birth humans, because generally most of us have dieted or exercised our way so that we've suppressed our natural interoceptive awareness, which makes it difficult for us to feel our feelings, right? Of course it is. And there's so many different parts to this, which I'm wishing I talk about all the time. But going back to the just world theory, it's it's so prevalent in what we do, and it's why often, people when, when you come to people, and you say, I'm having a really bad time right now, I'm not feeling great, which I'm a big fan of like, I think that my personal opinion is, if somebody asks me how I'm feeling and they are not prepared to receive the answer, then that's, you know, that's for them to deal with, because I will not and I refused to
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lie and say,
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I'm fine. You know, it's, it's not true. And what's really interesting for me at the moment is how difficult people find people not having a good time. And what is really particularly interesting about that is it's just it's the inability for us to understand the complexity and the nuance SNESs of feelings, right? So for me, I one moment I'm sad and I I'm feeling like crying another moment I'm feeling humiliated another million, I'm feeling alone another minute, I'm feeling frustrated, another minute, I'm feeling angry. And being with those
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feelings for me as
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part of what stopping drinking has enabled me to be able to learn to do, and it's taken me ages, like I'm four and a half years in now. And I'm only just starting to be able to feel my feelings. And that's because I've done heaps of work on improving my interoceptive awareness on learning about my neurodiversity. Also, understanding how my body reacts to experiences in
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the meanings that I make about them.
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But yeah, it's, um, I'm losing both threads. So my apologies is be a bit bit rambling, I'm afraid. But the just wild theory basically is the world is good and bad things don't happen to good people. And so if something bad happens to a good person, that fucks with our worldview, and and for me, over the last year, my worldview has been shattered. And it's broken my heart. But that doesn't. And there are days when I've been so angry and so upset, but in the same day, in the same 30 minutes, I might feel joy and awe and delight, and love, and laughter. And all these things exist at the same time.
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Just give me a second, sorry,
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I'm just gonna call a second.
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And all these things exist at the same time. So this is
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all these things exist at
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the same time.
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And that's, that's the so people are like, I'm feeling sad right now. And people are like, they try and save you from the sadness. And it's so it's okay to feel sad. I'm okay with feeling sad. And in fact, I need to feel sad. But what happens for some of us is as children we were not allowed to feel. And we were told to suck it up. You know, even excitement and joy. So Chris says, this morning, I was talking to a friend about feeling numb, yeah, even after the news of a friend has died. And the fields or lack of fields about that. Any emotion is okay, that's exactly right. Are things done, and I appreciate that. That's so nice, isn't it? That's exactly what I always say to people that say, you know, I often if you're nothing from the neck,
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I just being aware of that. That's
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just an experience. It's just data, it's information. At the moment I'm, you know, floating around. Because my you know, for whatever, there's, there'll be some reason why my body doesn't want to feel what's going on, right. And it's a nice protective mechanism. I used it for years, I didn't even realize it was a thing. Like I totally just thought that's how I was I was like, I don't understand why everybody else feels all this stuff, my doubt. But it was not true. Like, for example, I one of the main reasons that I used to drink was because I could feel, and again, this is trauma response, neurodivergent response, but being highly, highly sensitive to, from a safety perspective to everything that was going on, in space. So for example, if we go on holiday with friends and family are always used mainly with friends, I will be acutely aware that this person was pissing this person and often that person was being annoying and talking over that person, especially if they were people, my people, that I was feeling very socially responsible for everybody's experience. And that was one of the reasons as well that I used to drink was just kind of like just flocking back off. And even you know, for me with bullying, I take these things into my body. And that's why for me Somatic Experiencing work, dancing, singing, swimming, walking is so important, in order for me to process, my experience of what's happening and get it out of me breathwork there's a wonderful thing that I tend to practice I do every 12 or so we explain a bit longer than that. It's called the presence process, which is a book called Michael Brown, called Michael Brown by Michael Brown. Really fantastic experience. I tend to do with my group as well on a regular basis to 15 minutes breath work in the morning, continuous breathing, and 15 minutes in the evening before you go to bed. And then you read a passage of the book and it's really about emotions. And this idea that you know, emotions are energy in motion and the meanings that we make about the situations that we're in our causes our distress. They're very, very multifaceted is fluid. No way I'm linking it back to not drinking is this whole idea that when we are having an experience, we will miss shun avoid and abandon ourselves? So, for example, we were talking last night about,
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you know, the meaning that we make about
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being on our own, for example. So if we are we don't have an I'd have plenty of clients who have this experience, if we is this experience that we drink, because otherwise there's this vast amounts of on used on structured time, and how and the meaning that we make about that, you know, that I don't fit in that, why don't I have friends who I have to call people, why isn't anyone and often that will come from a belief from when we were young. Often we would have felt alone as children, for whatever reason, you know, we may just be sensitive folks. And again, this is why we say You know, this trauma stuff is not about blaming anyone. It's impossible for us to go through the modern world without experiencing these things. Because we are well doesn't isn't set up. We're not nomadic tribes wandering around with grandparents and aunts and uncles picking us up all the time. We're living in a capitalist world where generally both parents have to work. And there is not we our needs will not be met. And as children, we make that mean that there is something wrong with us. And we also don't have the emotional maturity, to understand that the pain will end. So when we're children, and we cry ourselves to sleep, we do that, eventually, people are like, Oh, they self soothe? And the answer is no, that they've that that's not the case, they haven't subsumed, they've just run out of gas, so to speak. And what they then formulate the belief is that this pain is unbearable, and nobody's ever coming. And so one of the things that we have to do as adults is learn to reparent ourselves through this stuff. And this is this is everything right in my mind is that we have to learn to number one, accept what we are and where we are and how we feel not push it away, or try and escape it with whatever coping mechanism we use. Now, for some of us, that's alcohol, and that's disapproved of by society. But for others of us, it's being busy being very organized, being very, very tidy. And those things are what approved off by society or exercising or you know, but anything we do to kind of escape, push
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away, push down
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our experience of life, this was part of the same pattern. And, you know, this repair hunting ourselves is about saying to ourselves, no, it's okay for us to feel what we're feeling right. So, you know, if we are afraid of being alone over the weekend, and we're afraid of those long expanses of time, because of the emotional experience that we will have, when we are going through them because of the meaning that we make about the experience, ie, there's something wrong with me, I'm I shouldn't be alone, because I'm alone. X, Y and Z is that that causes us the pain not the actual experience of being alone but because as children we weren't attended to through no fault of anybody else is our belief is the pain will never end. And if we lean into it all hell break loose, we'll start crying will fall apart. You know, this is where this is control anxiety over everything is is like if we allow ourselves to feel the feelings, the whole world is gonna fall apart. Because we've got to control everything, hang on to it grasp onto it so tightly. And it's like no, the opposite is true.
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But it's so hard because it feels so unsafe.
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It feels so unsafe for us for so many reasons. I'm not going to go on too much longer because it's only a half an hour live but what I wanted to say to you is if somebody is hurting if somebody is saying that somebody is hurting them
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a please believe them.
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Please believe them. Because, you know, this is how domestic violence becomes the situation that it is, is, you know, this idea that something's domestic that people are provoking other people's sisters such an old fashioned
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patriarchal, sexist,
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capitalist ways of controlling people that you know Yeah. And the trauma, you know, when Peter Levine talks about trauma, he talks about trauma and not being, you know, what happens to us was that's, that's, that is part of it. But it's what happens inside us without an empathetic witness. And I love that so much. So it's, it's, you know, you're having this horrible, horrible experience, and everybody runs for the hills. And everyone tries to go, oh, well, you should try this. Would you like to go back and try that? You know, how many how many of us love, you know, love being told what we should do? And we come to somebody and we say, I'm in pain I'm hurting? Well, you should do that. Well, you should do this the same way that we've got neurodivergent children. Everyone's like, oh, you know, have you tried to reward chartering? Yes. But I just this is just to say, you know, if you've got a friend, and they are sad, even if they don't come back to you, reach out, if somebody's hurt, being hurt, let them know that you're there. Let them know that you can find them for a cup of tea. You know, it just doesn't take much to show people that they're not alone. Because it's the worst feeling in the world, to feel that you're alone. And it's not just about you know, other people. It's also ourselves. And this is when, when I talk about us, validating ourselves, validating our experience, it's literally that it's literally saying, Hey, this is frightening for you. Being alone on this weekend is frightening for you scary. The meaning you're making about this is there's something wrong with me. And you know what? I hear you had all these experiences when you were younger, that made you feel that that was a really scary place to be and the interpretation upgrades making is that is this and so let's first of all, let's not dismiss it, let's not say you know, suck it up, find something to do busy so that we shouldn't feel like that. You're right, you know, come on.
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It's not that it's like,
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I see you. I'm with you. I got you. Right next year. I will I can stand next to you and I can hold your hand and this is re parenting I can stand next to you and hold your hand and we're going to move forward anyway. So it's not dismiss dismiss ignore ignore and I'm not going to drink I want to drink me can't drink I don't want to drink it's what are you feeling?
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Where's the pain?
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Let's sit in on that fucking pain.
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You deserve to have your experience
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we are strong enough to hold it here.
Speaker 3 27:53
It's all about creating safety inside ourselves right? It's all about that and we need to make ourselves a safe place for us to be no one else can do that for us. We can do we only we can do that. Right. And there's so many other factors around this you know, and there's privilege and as you know, being in very violent and horrible places.
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Things that we don't have control over
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and so you know, just really
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thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of midlife AF with Emma Gilmore. If you enjoyed it, please share on Instagram for your friends and tag me at hote rising coaching. If you want to help me grow the podcast please review the episodes for me on Apple podcast that really helps. If you would like to work further with me please go to my website www Haute rising coaching.com for my free and paid programs or email me at Emma at Hope rising coaching.com sending a massive cuddle to you and yours for me and mine and remember to keep choosing you
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
