The following podcast is a deer media production.

Hey, this is Alexis Haines and welcome to Recovering from Reality,

where I illuminate the messy and magical path of coming home to yourself.

Whether you're on the road to recovery, seeking self-care techniques for surviving the

capitalist machine, or just need a moment to remember that you're not alone in your loneliness,

we're serving up the ultimate truth. Your challenges don't define you, how you deal with them does.

So are you ready to recover from reality?

You can always find people to tell you that your terrible thoughts are true,

but like if you were punching yourself in the face, literally your friends wouldn't be like,

keep going, that's good. That looks good, right? But we emotionally punch ourselves

unnecessarily, and we think that it's supportive to validate, right? And I think the part of

the reason we get so caught in that, and we get so caught in our stories about other people

doing us wrong, is that we think the only option, we believe something bad,

is see this is what's wrong with believing things are truly bad, quote unquote,

if something bad happened, then someone has to be to blame. And we think it has to be the other

person or it has to be us, right? And so I think that's partly why we get so attached to our stories,

like about our parents or about whoever is because we're like, well, this suffering happened,

this bad thing happened, if a bad thing happened, who are we going to blame for the bad thing?

If I don't believe it's them, then I'm subconsciously worried it was me, like I was the problem.

So I have to believe they were the problem. And like the only way out of that back and forth

trap that I have found is to be at least contemplate the possibility that nothing that what happened to us.

That is, that it just is.

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