Victimhood

Welcome to the game. Men going deeper podcast, a podcast series by the gay men’s brotherhood, where we talk about personal development, mental health, and sexuality. Your hosts today are Calan, Michael and myself, Matt collectively we have over 40 years of experience in the personal development world and if this is your first time listening to us, we want to welcome you.

We each have our own coaching practice, but in this podcast, we’re always giving away all of our best stuff. Today. We are talking about victim hood. I’m sure it’s, everybody’s most favorite thing to talk about, but we, we see a importance in, in bringing this up in this podcast. So we’re excited to be unpacking it. We’re going to be exploring how have we been victimized victimized as gay men?

What impact do you see in our community from this victimization? What is your personal experience with victim hood? How have you moved through victim hood? And what advice can you offer people who may be stuck in victim hood? So lots of good stuff. We’re going to be going over today. And we will continue these discussions on the last Thursday of every month in the gay men’s brotherhood zoom hangout,

where you will have a chance to share your own experiences. That will be February 24th. This podcast and YouTube channel is listener and viewer supported. If you really enjoy what we’re creating, you can support us by heading over to our Patreon page in the show notes and contributing to help support the show that helps us continue making content for you, to, for you and supporting our community.

And we do thank you in advance. The gay men going deeper membership doors are open. If you have been waiting to join in on more zooms and some coursework and going deeper on your personal development journey, come and join us in the game and going deeper membership. We have a lot of great programming plan for this coming year. You can head over to gay men going deeper.com

and register today. All right. So before we jump in, I want to read a review on apple from Carl Richards and he says, great insights. It’s refreshing to hear a podcast that’s real Gridley and gets to root truth with suggested ideas and solutions to live the gave life. So thank you, Carl. We appreciate your love. All right. So victim hood,

we chose this topic because we, we, we see the, the importance of being able to understand, well, first of all, what it means to be in, in victim energy and the importance of this on the healing journey, right? So what does it mean to be a victim? This is somebody who has been mistreated or perceived as being mistreated,

and this could be either by the system or individually, so it could be systemic or individualistic. These sorts of things can show up as like neglect abuse, abandonment, oppression, or marginalization. So it could be homophobia, transphobia, or racism, shaming being controlled, being lied to being criticized, being denied, access to human rights or privileges. So I first want to start off by just saying that this being in victim hood is,

is very, it’s a, it’s a normal and a natural stage that we move through on the healing journey specifically related to grief. When we are healing from grief, we often go through the first three stages of the grief cycle are going to often be associated with more of that victim energy. So the, the five stages of grief are going to be denial,

anger, bargaining, or blaming. I like to kind of play with both of those. And then those are the first three, which can often be associated with this victim energy. And then the last two of depression and acceptance on the grief cycle are usually when we start to move towards surrendering and forgiving. Right? So, so it it’s important. It’s important in the victim stage of the healing journey to allow yourself to feel what perhaps you didn’t feel when you went through the traumatic or the,

or the experience where you experienced the victimization. Oftentimes when we don’t, when we’re not aware of the needs that we had in the times when we were victimized or traumatized, we would get stuck. And we, we ended up staying in the victim cycle and we, we have a hard time getting out of it because we don’t feel valued. We don’t feel validated in our emotions.

And that is usually the unmet need of victimization or fetal staying in victim hood is we don’t feel emotionally validated. And so this is, this is a big part of it. So, so it is not normal. It is natural to go through this, but where it becomes problematic is when we linger for too long in this space and we don’t, we don’t do the healing around it.

We stay stuck in those first three stages. And usually blaming is a big, a big part of that. And we, we make everybody else accountable for our, our suffering. And I think part of the healing journey of moving through victim hood is to take responsibility for our present, right? Knowing that maybe the things that happened in our past were out of our control,

but we do have control in the present moment now. And that’s when we start our healing journey, in my opinion. And we start to see great results when we move out of that victim energy, I want to say, too, that it does victim energy. It can become a currency for people. We get some, some of us get our needs met.

Some of us get validated for, you know, like if something happened to us and we stay stuck in that energy of punishing other people for what they did, they can give us that, that power over or that hands up in that. So we want to be really mindful of if we are using our victim energy as a currency to hold other people hostage and punish them for the things that they did,

it’s going to just keep us stuck again in that blaming cycle. So, so let’s, let’s move into the first question. How have we been victimized as gay men? I want to, I’m going to pass it over to Michael because I think, yeah, I’ll go last on, on, on the questions today. All right. Yeah. Great intro,

Matt. I think this is a really important topic. And for all the reasons you mentioned, I think, you know, it may not be the most fun, but it is probably something that’s very necessary and to be Frank something, I don’t see a lot of us, a lot of gay men in general talking about, so I’m really honored to share this space with us today and talk about it.

Okay. First question was how, how are we, how have we been victimized as came in? So, I mean, take your pick. How have we not been victimized as a gay man? I’m going to answer this first from the perspective of like the collective looking back, right? So being victimized as part of our history as a queer people,

and we’re only now just beginning, just beginning to shift that, right? And for thousands of years, queer people have been reviled by cultures all over the world. We’ve been dehumanized imprisoned for centuries in many places, even today being gay is criminal, right? Just, just for being ourselves, right? In some cases, in some cases, people today,

like I want to reiterate today, even in 2021, people are being killed in prison for their sexuality. 20, 22. Sorry, I don’t know what year it is guys. It is 2022. Thank you. Backtrack. Yeah. And, and our entire political and economic system has been built on establishing us queer people and, and not just recovery, but any marginalized people as visible and powerless,

right? So it’s not just, it’s not just gay men. It’s a lot of people that are in the system where we are other, you know, I grew up in the Catholic church. So I was announced as MRL and a center, just, just for being me, even in police. So police have brutalized us and beaten queer people for again,

centuries for a very long time, even today, still happening. And even in the, not so distant past, if you look back at the aids crisis of the eighties, we were discriminated against and people in power. This is not that long ago. Guys, people in power did nothing for years to provide treatment funding, legal rights for people who were dying.

And so, you know, I was a kid growing up in the eighties and early nineties. And I remember thinking, you know, in case fucking miserable, don’t want to be this. This is terrible. So it’s not even that long that we’ve kind of had these rights only recently in only in the Western world. Right? So, you know,

even today, it’s still very hard for gay men to raise a family. It’s hard for us to have children or adopt children, rather, even recognizing gay marriage is still something we’re celebrating today. Rightfully so in Canada was 2005, which is relatively early, but it’s only something that we’re getting to now. So, you know, and again, heck hate crimes.

We are the target of hate crimes all over the world, even today. And yes, yes. Even here in Canada, I know people think Canada is this beautiful human rights Haven. And it is, I love it. Here it is. But our shit stinks too. We have a lot of work to do here as well. So at the collective level,

those are just some examples of how I think we’ve been victimized at the individual level. I was kind of saying before how, you know, as soon as we’re born, we are othered. We’re born into society, hetero patriarchal society. And we have no choice. All of a sudden, we were just put in this camp of, oh wait, you are not like the rest of us.

You are othered. So I think being victimized can easily be part of our identity and my mission as a gay man now in the present day, 2022 is to be part of the movement that changes that. And I think that’s what all three of us are part of and the gay men’s brotherhood. And this podcast is to empower people, especially gay men.

Because if, if victim hood is, I would define it as the absence of power or powerlessness, then I think what I want to do is teach people how to be empowered. So I’m, I’m ultra passionate about it. And I’m looking forward to our, to our chat here today, especially as you get into these next few questions. So I answered that a bit from the collective perspective,

because I think it is really important to understand that we are just at the, this, this far into changing the tide on what it means to be a gay man in a society where we don’t have to fight for our rights. So that’s where I’m going to leave it and I’ll pass it over to Callan. Wow. Thanks for all that. There was a lot,

there’s a lot to unpack there and there’s lots of unpack today. So I’m just going to pre-phase with like, you know, I’m very much not going to get to a perfect and talking about all this and everything we say is going to be our opinions today. Cause I know that this is a very heavy, heavy topic. I apologize. I think there’s drilling happening.

You can hear that my bad. So it’s a very, very heavy topic to be diving into. And I know that, you know, some people who are heavy, heavy into associating with that victim energy, you know, they can have, they have their own views and opinions. And then there’s the opposite side where people have been like, no,

I don’t want to be associated with the victim so much so that I know people who’ve gone through things and refuse to about them because they don’t want to have that label put on them. And I guess what I’m going to talk about here in this opening question is kind of that balancing space in between. And I’m going to take it back to actually what Matt,

you said about, you know, things happen to us in the past that weren’t necessarily our faults, especially in our childhoods and our early, you know, youth and teen years. But as adults, you know, specifically adult men or adults, it’s now our responsibility to look back at that and to be able to do the healing around those traumas. So can you all hear that drilling?

Is it really loud? Okay. If it was really loud, I’d be like a cat stuffed up. Cause I can hear it like crazy. My building, sorry. My building has been like drilling and doing work for the past two years and I can’t figure out like the building. He was denying it. We can’t figure out where it’s coming from.

Like it’s been a noxious anyways, diving back in. So, so when you come to this space and I’ve come to these realizations recently where I really didn’t want to be associated with victim energy, but almost to the point where like my pendulum was swinging too far to that direction of like, I didn’t want to claim anything. Like I didn’t want to associate myself with what had happened or what went on and all these other things and through therapy,

I kind of managed to bring that pendulum back into that middle ground area where you can find that space where you can acknowledge what happened. You can go through it and process it and grieve it and get angry about it and get frustrated with it. Just like, you know, Matt said, there’s the layers to it. You know, you have to be able to go through that and you have to be able to experience those emotions and those feelings,

because they’re not just going to go away. We’ve talked about this multiple times, those feelings and those emotions, can’t just be stomped down and disappear. Like they will show up in your life in many different other areas. And so when I flew so far to the, I’m not a victim energy, I had to learn how to come back. And part of that journey for me as a learning,

how to associate with those emotions, again, learning how to feel those emotions, learning how to get into my body and feel safe in my body while experiencing those emotions. And so a lot of what Michael, you were saying, the community at large has experienced so many of these like community group energies of group traumas. So, you know, I talked about kinda my,

my micro on my personal level, but then on the, you know, the big scale thing as a community, we’ve experienced a lot of these pains and hurts and traumas. And the hard part about that is that as a community, we all have to do the individual work, but you know, the community is going to reflect everything going on. Right.

And so I saw a post the other day where it’s like, you know, when the community is always just like, we always stand up for rights and we’re always fighting for what we believe in. And like, we really do push the barrier on so many things because we know we need to, we know we need to push back when people say no to us or where they,

you know, they want to demonize us and all these other things, but then sometimes we get supporters or other people and then we turn around and we go, no, you’re not doing it right. No, don’t help us like that. No, don’t support us like that. And it’s because it comes from that hurt place, that traumatic place where we’ve experienced those pains.

And we, you know, we’ve gone so far into this energy of like, no, it has to be this way only. And you know, learning how to bring the pendulum back, to be able to be more compassionate and see multiple different sides and understand that what happened to you, wasn’t your fault. But it’s now your responsibilities and adults to sort out.

I think a lot of this packs into just our collective mentality of the gay community of like, don’t work that we’re doing now so that the future generations don’t have to do so much work. Cause it’s like you said, Michael, and the aids epidemic, that’s still going on and it’s still affecting huge populations in the world. Everything was just kind of sloughed aside and said,

oh, that’s the gate disease. And like, people like demonize the gaze because of it. But now look at Africa is the largest content, one of the largest continents in the world and they are dealing with the aftermath of it. So, and it’s not even just gay people. There’s actually a very high rise in heterosexuals because people are a lot more fluid and a lot more open these days,

but they’re not necessarily as educated as our community has been because of, because we face those things we had to then go out and educate our community and be like, look, we all need to know this information. So that’s a whole lot that I just unpack there. But yeah, there’s a lot of victimization that has happened in the gay community, especially,

you know, gay men and the queer community. And I bring it back down to like, you just got to do your own personal work. You have to take responsibility for yourself and you have to take responsibility for doing the work because nobody’s going to do it for you. It, it has to come from inside. And the more we can do that for ourselves,

our individual selves, the more it will help and heal the greater community at large. So yeah. What about you, Matt? Yeah. You guys both had some really good things to share. I think that the main things that stand out for me, obviously conversion therapy I think is, is one of the most crucial things we can do to a human being,

a human being. I’m all about authenticity and inspiring people to be their most authentic selves and conversion therapy is the opposite of that. It’s like, here’s your authentic self and we need to change it because it’s not right. It’s defective. Something’s wrong with that. And I just think that that what that does is it just tells us that we have to start rejecting ourselves and we get shamed and then we internalize shame and then we shame others,

right? It’s just this really nasty vicious cycle of shame, which leads to cruelty. And I think that the gay community has been victimized, probably, probably one of the biggest ways that I, that I see would be like having to hide, like that’s this, this whole notion of having to hide, like my whole upbringing revolved around hiding this secret,

which was huge. It was like trying to hide on a mountain. You know what I mean? And it was so exhausting and it, it really laid the foundation for my whole life. Like how I relate to the world was really driven by that one thing, that one aspect of me that I felt so ashamed of, that I had to hide and,

you know, hiding our love. That’s another thing you think about like where we have to hide, who we love, we can’t freely and openly love people like that. We want to love it’s that’s just fucked when you think about it. Right. So just that, and, and it being illegal to marry too, right? Like we were, a lot of us have dreams of wanting to,

you know, get married or even have kids and things like that. And it’s like that totally up until a certain point in time in our country, at least we weren’t able to do those things and it was very much frowned upon. And another thing too, is that like, we’re experiencing this now. It’s like, we started doing ads for our business and there’s like so much,

so many haters, like dropping some seriously, like bombs. Yeah. Like just like, yeah, like some really mean things and stuff like that. So it’s like, it’s still happening, you know? And I think this is like it’s birth of religion, really. Like, I, I, you know, that you see a lot of the people that are leaving comments it’s like about sitting and like all these things.

And it’s like, whoa, you know what I mean? Like the religious conditioning on this planet has really, really rooted people in hatred for anything that goes against the beliefs that they hold for themselves. So I just think that, yeah, these are some of the things that I’m noticing and yeah, I’m gonna leave it there. I have a lot more in the following questions,

but I’ll leave it there. Okay. This is, I’m really excited about this question because I think there’s a lot of meat in this one. So what impact do you see in our community from this victimized station? And I’m gonna throw it to Callan’s this time. Ooh, there’s a lot here. I’m going to bring it back to, cause we’ve kinda been circling along this,

you know, marriage, legalization of marriage. So in Canada, 2005, like Michael said, we’ve, we were actually, I think the third, second or third country to legalize it, but being clear, each individual province had legalized it earlier. But as a whole, as a country, it became, you know, law in two, five.

So provinces, individually had earlier dates where yes, it was legal even earlier than that. But as a country, as a whole, it became legal. And so, you know, we were kind of an early trailblazer. And so in Canada, kids who grew up here are growing up in that era. Like if they were born in the, you know,

2000 onwards there and they’re in like, oh my God, they’re like 22 years old. Now my age, they are growing up in an era where their memories only started in a place where it was legal, you know, other countries, maybe not, but in Canada was. And so the energy that comes along with that transition has, you know,

been playing out for, you know, over two decades. And so they have a very different perspective than Michael. You were talking about, you remember the days beforehand, I remember it being bad. I don’t remember it becoming legal or being a big deal. But I remember once I had those thoughts to think about it or to look at it, it was becoming legal.

Like I graduated in 2005. And so, you know, it’s, it’s so wild. It’s all, it’s all just so wild. But being able to marry you wouldn’t think would have such a huge impact, but it makes a massive impact across the world. And other countries look to the countries that are legalizing it and go, well, they can do it.

Why can’t we do it? And it’s, you know, it is sad to say that it is rooted in religious belief and that’s why it was fought against. And that’s why it’s still continues to get fought against because people have a belief system where it needs to be this and that. And I’m very proud of the new generations because they are breaking the molds even more than we broke them,

holds being like now who cares, like all these boxes and all these labels and all these things that we need to be put into, or that people try to put each other into, are breaking down and changing and evolving and growing. And I love that because I love growth and evolution and change because if we’re not here to do that, what are we here for?

Like by belief is it’s a giant school. We’re here in earth and we’re here to learn and grow and evolve. And if you’re not doing that, then you’re devolving and you’re dying basically. And so it has a huge impact in the community because our psychological wellbeing around this topic in Canada is a lot more well adjusted than, you know, people over in the middle east.

And I’m going to use that example. Cause I lived there for five years, the middle east, it’s still like, oh, are you friend of Dorothy? Like kind of style? Like it’s the old, like, you know, fifties, sixties kind of maybe even further back energy of like, oh, it’s known about, and people know about it,

but nobody talks about it and it’s secretly accepted quietly, but out in public, absolutely not. And it’s still technically illegal. You can still go to jail in specific countries that they still couldn’t commit, you know, murders or what do they call honor killings? You know, you disrespect the family, they can honor kill you. And so it’s, it’s messed up.

And so the psychology that they grow up in is very different landscape than psychology. We grew up in, in Canada being able to have these rights in these freedoms and the impact of that on a community at large, it’s kind of like, okay, well we’re really doing well over here in north America, westernized cultures, like, you know, UK,

Australia, we still have her bags shit that we need to deal with. But then we also have all of our community, family members across the world and all of these different countries where it’s not accepted. And I think that social media and the online world is starting to change that rapidly. I think that, you know, laws and governments take a lot longer to catch up because to do any paperwork and all that,

it’s just like, you know, you could give a company, a billion dollars to do one thing and another company, a thousand dollars to do it. And they’re both going to achieve it, but one’s going to spend a billion and one’s going to spend a thousand dollars. Right. It’s kind of like that mentality with governments. It just takes so much more like so much longer to get it through all the paperwork and the processes.

But once these kinds of impacts start to change the countries next to them, start to evolve and start to change. And so I think the impact of this victim energy is, you know, we maybe didn’t experience the same energy around marriage here in Canada, but I definitely felt it over in the middle east, which is why I couldn’t make that a long-term something that worked for me because I couldn’t hold somebody’s hand.

I couldn’t do all this. And I, I, I didn’t feel like a victim because I chose to go there. But somebody who grew up there and I’ve met many locals who were gay and it was quiet. And the energy of the mentality of, I don’t necessarily know if they would be victim energy, but it was just like, it was so crazy in their mind to be like,

oh, you could walk down the street and hold somebody’s hands and get married and do this. They’re like, no, no, no, no, no, you can’t do that. You got to get married, you have to have a wife, you have to have kids. And it was almost like a brainwashed victim energy of like, oh no,

that’s just what you have to do. And it reminded me of like way back in the day here, it used to be the same. And so I think that there’s huge impacts that can come from the globalization of all this. And I don’t know where I’m going to take, but there’s my big spiel about the impact of victimization on a community at large,

just using that kind of like marriage as an example. Michael, what about you? Yeah. Solid points. I think it is important to talk about that aspect. And also, you know, it’s more of the anecdotal stuff as well, so there’s a lot of impact. So I think it’s challenging to answer this because this, this victim hood is wrapped up in a lot of really deep stuff.

Shame, insecurity, trust our ability to trust others, trust ourselves vulnerability. And this is a lot of the topics that people kind of have a resistance towards talking about. So I think that impact is kind of like what we talked about at the beginning, which was we internalize a lot of this stuff. Right? So being victimized as a community or as an individual,

we’ll do a number on your psyche, collective psyche and individual psyche, and trying to get to the bottom of that, trying to entangle that is, it’s an emotional minefield in there. What are these emotions we’re dealing with? Where are they coming from? And then how do they manifest in your day to day life? Right. So shame is not something that like most people I think just like,

oh yeah, that shame. I recognize that that’s not really know how that works. Maybe for us three, we can recognize it. Not even all the time really, but I think we, we just know it doesn’t feel good or it feels heavy, but we don’t quite want to go into it. And we don’t quite understand how it impacts us.

So I think, yeah, well, when we internalize that, and this is, I’m saying subconsciously internalized, that feeling of being powerless, right? So I’m, I’m again, I’m, I’m kind of equating victimizing with powerlessness. We internalize that. And I think we, you know, in the next questions, we’re going to get a little bit more personal.

We can, I can share an example of that, but at the end of the day, there’s a lot of pain inside of us. And whether we know it or not as a collective community, I don’t think, and this is a generalization. I don’t think we’ve really gotten to too far in learning how to heal that and how to deal with it.

And that’s why I’m super proud again, to be part of this podcast. And the game is brother, because I think, I mean, I know that that is part of what we do. So, you know, this may be the first generation where we are talking about these things openly. And you know, that goes with the fact that previous generations,

and this is not a knock to them. They had to fight for survival. They had to fight for rights, which we now have. So in having those rights, I think what’s great about this generation. Is that okay? We have them now, what are we going to do with it? And that’s the important part. That’s where we can start to look at,

okay. We have been victimized as a culture, as an individual. What do we do within that? That is the power right. That we’ve talked about. So that’s at the collective level, again again at the individual. I think another way I see this, this, this impact a lot is in how we relate to others. So if you think about it,

we internalize a lot of the stuff. We don’t know how to deal with it. It just stays there unexpressed. And it bumps up with other people how we relate to others, especially other gay men. There’s that internalized homophobia, perhaps shame all these different wounds that we are carrying and they get triggered with other people. So I think, again, this is a generalization,

but I do think gay men have a particularly hard time having a healthy, secure relationships. And I think that we perpetuate a lot of these unprocessed emotions from, from being victimized in, in our relationships. And I’m speaking for myself as well, by the way I have certainly been, my pattern still is a pattern that I see coming up in my current relationship.

So it, by no means is something that I’ve resolved or figured out, but it is a commitment I think, to continue to dive in and see, okay, here’s where I’m feeling like I’m being victimized or here’s where I’m feeling shame. My trust issues are coming up. Now on that note, I’ll pass it off to Matt. That’s amazing. We’ve got some action going on today.

Yeah, that’s great. So hopefully nothing starts on my end. All right. So I’m going to frame this in the context of, of trauma, because this is very alive. And I think actually, I’ll, I’ll go back a bit. The birth of this came out of this exact question because we all were seeing the impact that shame had and trauma had on our community.

And we’re like, people are not accessible. People are hiding, people are this. And it was really impacting my ability to connect with other gay men. So anyways, that’s what, that’s where this all comes from. But so if you look at trauma, okay, so trauma and victim, but I think are really directly connected because when we experienced trauma,

we often go into victim energy and you look at the four trauma responses. You have fight flight freeze and fawn. Okay. So fight is going to probably manifest itself in the sense of defensiveness, right? So you see in the gay community, you have those, those really mean gays that are like, you know, you look at them wrong and they like,

they, they lash out, they’re defensive. They’re like, I’m not going to let you hurt me because I’ve been hurt so much in the past. That’s one of the manifestations that I see and flight is another trauma response. And how that shows up in the gay community, I think is, is people hiding people, hiding, not willing to connect and put themselves in community,

the lone Wolf syndrome that we’ve talked about in previous episodes. I think that is a flight response, right? It’s like, I’m not going to even put myself there. I’m going to stay away from community. Because that is where I, I was hurting in the first place was by other people. And then the freeze response, you know, you’re looking at things like avoidance,

emotional avoidance association, numbing, distracting, these sorts of things. So, and, and in my opinion, that is one of the fuels to us not being able to be intimate and be vulnerable, right. Because we are frozen out of our emotions. We’re not allowing ourselves to feel right. How can we show up and connect with one another? If our emotions are completely stifled and,

and disconnected from, right. And then funding is really interesting because that’s more of the pleasing nature. So when people experience traumatization, especially, you know, oppression or marginalization, they become, you know, really good and really polite and kind, and doing all these things and trying to please everybody, because they don’t want to experience the rejection or the oppression anymore.

And it becomes very self abandoning and self self betraying, right? So those are kind of the ways that I see it show up out of trauma. And then the biggest one, I would say probably for me, and that it has the most impact on me in relating in the community is people shutting off their ability to be, to show up in intimacy and vulnerability,

which I said already, I think when we, when we experienced so much shame and we internalize the message that something is wrong with us, why on earth would we take off our masks and show up vulnerably and intimately, because we are afraid that we’re going to be told that we’re defective, broken, disgusting, all the things that we heard in the media or,

and, or heard by people saying them to us. So we learned to hide and we can get really good at hiding. And I think we hide behind things like materialism, right? We have all the fancy things. We have the most amazing job. We are know everything, everything around us is manicured, right? This that’s kind of, one of the stereotypes of the gay,

the gay culture is it’s like, everything has to be perfect and look perfect. And the perfect dinner party and you know, all the perfect little napkins and everything, because it’s like, that’s one of the ways that we overcompensate for the shame that we’re feeling. And then my last point is around criticism and condemnation. Because again, when we’re rooted in shame,

shame leads to cruelty towards self and others. So if we’re feeling, if we’re cruel to ourselves and our internal dialogue is, is around bullying ourselves, we’re we can only treat people the same way that we’re treating ourselves vibrationally and energetically. So we ended up being cruel to other people than we say, mean things. And we believe people online. And,

and we, we, we put that out and again, I want to just really speak to that. Those people are probably the people that are having the fight trauma response, right? They’re, they’re, they’re activating their defense mechanisms to try and keep themselves safe. Right. And I just think that our community there’s so much trauma in our community. It’s unbelievable.

And there’s so much trauma in the world to, to speak of. And for those of you, who’ve never heard me speak of a trauma. Like I, when I speak about trauma, I see what the three types of trauma, we have physical trauma. We have a touch with trauma and we have interpersonal trauma. Right? All three of them are inundated in our community with different,

in, in different ways. So I do, I do think that if we want more, more peace and love and empathy and compassion in the community, we need to do our own individual work. Like you said, Callen like this, the collective, the community will only shift when each individual in the community does their part. Right. And when one of us does our part,

we are on the outside of the bucket, pulling people up. Right. But when we’re not doing our part and we’re stuck in, in cruelty and shame, we’re trying to pull people back down into the bucket because we don’t want people to go out out of the bucket and be free. We want them to be with us in our misery. Right.

So I do think that, yeah, I do. I do, but I, I do, I do want to say too, I feel very hopeful because I’m what I’m noticing now, just even in the last few years, and maybe this is because, you know, it’s a condition bias because I’m doing this work all the time, but I do see way more gay men doing this work.

I see way more gay, male coaches, life coaches, embodiment coaches. Like I’m just surrounded by people who are pioneers and doing this work alongside us. And I’m like, I, it makes me so happy because we need more of this. We need more leaders, leaders towards consciousness and healing in this, in the gay community. And I just think that we’re finally at getting to a place where,

like you said, Michael, we’re not so focused on getting our rights. We have our rights. And now it’s like, how can we, we become more wholesome now that we have a rights, how can we bring more consciousness in? So, yeah. All right. Let’s, let’s personalize this, I’m curious. We’ll start with you, Michael.

What is your personal experience with victimhood? Oh, you’re still got stuff going on. Okay. Let’s see Our alarm situation. I hope the fire alarms and that there’s also not an actual fire. Well, there’s a actual fire situation. All right. Cool. Well, I guess actually that’s what is your personal experience? So the next questions are, what are your,

what is your personal experience with victimhood? How have you moved through victim hood? And what advice can you offer to people who may be stuck in victim hood? And my personal experience with victim hood might blend kind of these last three questions together, but I can unpack them as we go along. So my personal experience with victim hood comes from my childhood and my parents separating.

I was very young and like in early elementary school, when my parents separated, it was not a clean separation. It was very messy. My dad brought somebody else into the home very quickly without telling any of us. And just assume like, none of us would notice this woman in her child living in our house. And so there was a lot of blame that I placed on my parents for that.

And a lot of blame I placed on my dad because I just not, like there was parts of my life getting into adulthood that I was a victim when I was younger. And that’s the energy I lived in. Cause you don’t know what you don’t know as a child, especially as a child. And then as I got older, I moved into the angry and like blaming of like,

well, my dad’s a douche. Like my dad literally couldn’t even save his own life. If he had to talk about anything. Like he literally is like, everything is fine, kind of a personality and not everything was fine. And so that’s where I kind of learned my perfectionist or just like, don’t talk about stuff, energy, because it was just like that.

We just didn’t talk about things and that’s what fucked me up. And so it kind of moved in to this blaming area of like, you’re such a Dick, how could you do this? Like, how could you bring this horrible person into our life? Like, are you, you’re like, you’re not an adult enough to just be by yourself for a little while and kind of sort your own shit out before you bring another person in.

And he was very codependent. Like my dad’s very codependent, neither of my parents graduated high school. So like he had that, like, it was a lot that went there. And so I lived a lot of victim hood in my childhood and all the things that I went through, a lot of it goes back to this horrible woman. And so it’s really hard to talk about and to think about it.

But therapy has been the number one game changer in that regard in just like I, I do this work and I do personal development work, but you can only figure out so much by yourself. You have to have other people come in and bring their perspectives and bring that stuff. And for me, building a relationship with somebody who I trust in order to share that stuff with who is a professional,

that was probably the biggest game changer in that regard. And so that really helped me move through that victim hood, even as an adult. Now, even in past recent years of moving from, I would still live in that victim energy of like this woman did so many awful things to me and treated me so poorly. And I still held onto that even though I was like,

oh, I forgive them. My written letters of forgiveness that I did, all the things I thought I was supposed to do and pardon me. And I intellectualize it a lot because that’s where I go. And then working with the therapist really helped me move through with the victim hood so that I was able to sit with it comfortably. I like it was uncomfortable,

but I was able to sit with it, compassion and with somebody else who could have compassion for me to be able to sit in it and to go through those emotions. And I think I needed that guide, that person to help me do that. And that kind of started unlocking things, which was amazing. But I still didn’t quite understand because I,

I couldn’t figure out how to switch my brain. Cause it would just, no matter how much work I seem to be doing, it would always come back and I’d always be in the victim hood again, like when it would really great on me or when I was down in my life or when something was going on and it was heavy. All of a sudden I was the victim again,

in that energy. I’m like, can’t, I just fucking be done with this already. Like, and so what eventually ended up happening is working with my therapist. She kind of explained things in such a different way. Cause you know how they always say get into the body. And I, Matt, I know you talked about this a lot of get into the body,

you get into the body. And I was like, I am, I like I do physical things in LA, but it wasn’t until she explained something to me that, you know, this woman had, it was almost like, you know, you were talking about conversion therapy earlier. If you’re told something enough over an extended period of time, over like years and decades,

you’re going to start believing the shit that you’re told. And so this person told me all these horrible things about myself that I believed for so long. And I, it’s not that I believed I was a victim, but I was carrying that energy like it was in me and I just wasn’t acknowledging it. And so I’m told all these things for so long and then that voice that was her starts to become my own internal voice.

And it becomes the thoughts, I think, and the thoughts I tell myself and working with my therapist, she recognized that I need to name that voice. And I, she threw out a name and I was like, that’s actually her name. So I was like, so I’m not going to use that. But like, now I can name it like,

you know, the bitch or whatever. And those negative thoughts that I have that aren’t actually mine, but were drilled into me over time. I can now shift and go, no, this isn’t actually my thinking, this is my pre-programming that I need to get out of. And also the other part that got added to that was to get into my body is when those thoughts come up or that anger,

that like instant anger and that cause I’m a fight mode. That’s what I usually default to. And then when that comes up, I need to physically get into my potty. And that means like going and doing like a strong yoga pose or something like that, that it takes me out of the energy I’m in, puts me in my body and grounds me there because I’ve never felt safe in my body because I’ve never felt safe outside of my body because my life as a child was so up and down and all over the place.

And so realizing all of this through working with a therapist has blown my mind wide open and it’s changing my life in ways that I wouldn’t say are necessarily like life-changing or big things are happening. But the internal world is shifting slowly and thus the external world I’m noticing is starting to shift as well. Like things that I wouldn’t necessarily go do or didn’t want to do are thought I didn’t want to do now.

I’m like, oh no, I do want to do that. It was my internal. You’re not good enough from that time that was programmed it to me. So that’s how I’ve experienced victim personally. And you know, that’s how I moved through it and how I continue to move through it. And then the advice that I would offer people is, I mean,

I’ll say it at the end again, but find a therapist like we’ll put some links. I, you know, there’s some links to Canadian ones and some American ones that I know of specifically LGBTQ therapy. Cause I think that that’s very important to have somebody who has this similar lived experience so they can genuinely understand. But yeah, that’s kind of those three questions wrapped up into one for me.

So yeah. So now that Michael has got no alarm, let’s go to him quick. Thank you. I thank you for coming for sharing that. And I know that that’s something that you, that you’re a journey that you’re on right now. So, you know, thank you for your vulnerability and that I think a lot of people will resonate with that.

Okay. So yeah. The question, what is your personal experience as victim hood? I had a, I had a hard time with this. I really sat with this one for a while because Mother Teresa One sec. Okay. Because like Callum was saying at the very beginning, I was one of those people who has a visceral reaction to the sense of identifying as the victim.

Like I, I was like, no, no, no, no, no, that’s not me. I’m all about empowerment. So I had a harder time figuring this out, but I will answer this in three parts. So I’m gonna answer this kind of in three separate perspectives, shall we say? So the first is from the perspective of me as a child In that she’s finishing up in the,

in my childhood. I was like a lot of people I think bullied or mocked for me, the thing was, I was the youngest kid. First of all of my family, my older brother was athletic and muscular and all those things, a good boy should be. And it wasn’t. And so, you know, plus I was a shy, I was a shy kid from as long as I can remember.

I don’t know where that comes from, but I just was. So I remember being bullied at school. And then I had an older sister who went to my school. She’s seven years older than me. And I remember like this must have been grade one or even, even less than that. But she had to like come to my defense. I remember she had to like come to my defense on the school yard.

And from that moment there, that’s the first time I remember adopting the belief that I can’t protect myself. And that really stuck with me for a very, very long time. Like I needed other people to come to my defense where if I, if I was ever feeling victimized, I would need someone to come to my defense and that perpetuated this belief that I couldn’t protect myself and not stay with me,

you know, for a while. So even as, even as I grew up that I didn’t, I didn’t realize this of course, but that stayed with me even within my own family. I was mocked. I don’t know if I’d call it victimized, I guess in a sense it was like a psychological, but I was mocked right. As being soft as being sensitive,

all these things. I was teased because I wasn’t, oh yeah. Michael, he’s not, he’s not going to play with us. He’s going to stay at home with grandma or whatever. So that is how it should have as a child, as an adult. Here’s the second perspective as an adult. I think what I’ve learned is the difference between being victimized and feeling victimized.

So it is a perception and sometimes we actually are victimized people take away our power. Yes. Sometimes it is a perception of being victimized. And I think that is a very, very, very important distinction that I have come to realize that. And I will say this, luckily for me, I’m very grateful that in my adult life, most of my victimization has been a perception of it.

So I notice it happening when I get, when I feel myself getting defensive. When I get this like fight not you’re talking about the responses for me, I think historically it’s been flight and still is, but for me, I have the sense of wanting to fight, wanting to justify myself, wanting to justify my actions, my behaviors, my words,

whatever. And when I see that happening, I’m like, okay, I’m probably feeling like someone has intruded on me or done something to victimize me. And that’s where I can kind of go within, talk myself out of it a little bit and then realize, okay, what’s, what’s really going on here. And that I think is a very important skill that I,

I would really love a lot of people to learn, which is the difference. I’ve actually been victimized in the perception of it. And then finally, and this is, I think the one that’s most important for me is how I victimize myself. And this is big for me. I can, I’ve talked on this podcast a lot about that inner critic,

the, you know, the, the judgmental version of me, the perfectionist, everything that, you know, we talked about earlier and on many episodes, that part of me still is in there and he still does want to shame me and criticize me and all the things. And I’ve been, I’ve been a victim of my own limiting beliefs have been a victim of my own stories of victim,

of my own shame. I’ve been very nasty to myself. I’m have, I have hidden, I have argued against things. I blamed others. I blame society. I’ve been defensive, all these things. But when I look at it and really boil it down, a lot of that has been because of myself, every victim needs a villain, right?

Can’t have one without the other. And sometimes there’s a very clear distinction victim villain, but sometimes it’s within. And I think that’s a very, for me has been a very effective place of my own growth is realizing, where am I? Where am I in the villain for me? And how am I victimizing myself? So that’s, I think where I want to leave it for now.

And then in the next question, we’ll talk about how we move through it. But I think those are the three ways that it’s played out in my personal life, my childhood in my adulthood, and even within my own psyche. Thanks for, thanks for dealing with the sound in the background there guys. Mm it’s all good. It’s probably louder for you.

Cause it didn’t. It was obviously you could hear it, but it wasn’t like crazy. Thanks for both of your guys’ sharings. I always loved hearing and like experiencing your guys’s vulnerability. It’s really beautiful. So I kind of had an interesting experience with victim hood. If you were to ask me two years ago, if I was victimized, I would have been in like,

definitely like not right. I, I kind of took on the whole like dissociate don’t don’t let people know that they’ve had an impact on you. That was a huge defense mechanism I had. I never would let people know that they got under my skin and my most recent awakening. It brought me towards humility, which I was able to start to admit to people that they go get got under my skin and right.

We can only really heal when we allow ourselves to feel the triggers that are trying to, to penetrate us. And, but what I’ve, what I’ve learned is I have kind of two facets. So the first one would be childhood. A lot of things happened in my childhood, similar to Callan. And I had a lot of stuff around with parents,

familial relationship, family system stuff, and then grappling with my, with my sensory processing sensitivity and being gay. Those were two things that I was told from a very young age, both within my family system and within the collective that those two things are not acceptable and you have to change them about yourself. And that, that was the victimization really, that I experienced.

I experienced a dissonance between who I am and who I thought I had to be in that space in between. Those was so wide. And I did everything in my life. Every choice was revolved around, not letting people see my authentic self. And, but on the other side of the coin, I was quite lucky actually. Like I feel like in the gay world,

because I never really experienced a lot of, a lot of oppression or marginalization or anything like that. Like I, I have, I’ve had people tell me, like they don’t really, like, they never knew I was gay. Like they don’t know until like, til I tell them, I think that plays a big part in this. Because if you,

if you’re somebody that is a little bit more outwardly gay in the stereotype of what that means, I think the struggle is a lot more intense and people can see you you’re a visible minority. Whereas I don’t describe myself as a visible minority in, in, in being gay. And also I did become, some of it was manufactured, right. I played hockey,

I rode motorcycles. I was Uber masculine and I tried to be extra masculine too. And I think that was, that was probably a fun response to my trauma. I was trying to fit in and I was trying to be like everybody else, cause I didn’t want to be marginalized. So, but where I did internalize it’s the same as what Michael said is I it’s like vicarious collective victimization or traumatizing because I saw how other people were treated for who I was as well.

And that was very traumatizing for me. And I felt victimized. And then what that did is it internalized the homophobia inside of me. And then I started to victimize myself, right. I started to shame myself for any expressions of femininity. And I actually, it kind of reminds me of a time. I was at the stampede in Calgary and a couple of my friends were,

were behind me and I was walking ahead and there they were, they were laughing and they’re like, look how Matt wiggles has bummed when he walks. And I was like, so mortified. I was like, oh my God. And then from that point forward, I, I tried to walk without a wiggle in my bum. And then I was probably like 12 years old at that time.

And funny enough, I’ve developed hip issues and lower back issues throughout the course of my life. And it’s probably because I was being rigid and I wasn’t allowing my body to move the way it naturally wanted to move. So these things start to manifest themselves in our body weight, but in the way that we show up in the world. Yeah, I think,

okay. And then the last point I had was I took the route of not wanting to let people know how much they impacted me. I repressed my victim. I didn’t allow him to have a voice. And I was so triggered all the time of people that were in victim energy. And this is just in the last few years, I’ve recognized this and I’ve worked with people for the last 15 years and I’ve worked with so much victim energy.

And I always found it so hard to work with this type of this type of energy. And even in the, in the brotherhood, when we first started in all this stuff coming forward around victim energy, it was so triggering for me. And I’m like, why is this so triggering for me? And it’s because I wasn’t giving myself an opportunity to voice my own victim,

right? My own inner child that felt victimized. He was repressed. So why on earth would I hold space for somebody else to express what I can’t express myself? And that was the big trigger for me. So, so then what my, my healing was in the last few years is allowing myself to go through all the stuff. And that’s why this was such a really challenging year for me is because in order to heal that the inner,

the victimized inner child, I had to literally go through every single thing that happened to me, that I repressed that I dissociated from. And I had to be with all that. And I had to allow myself to feel victimized and to grieve. And the year was the most challenging year of my life by, by far. And that’s just within the last,

you know, whatever 18 months, it all kind of happened. And, and that’s when the greatest healing started to happen is when I let myself be the victim move through the victim energy. And then on the other side of that is, you know, forgiveness. And it just, in the last few years I’ve had, or, sorry, the last few months,

I’ve had the most amazing healing with both my mom and my dad. And I feel like I fully have let go of what was holding me back. Like my victim got to use his voice. And I got to tell my parents how I felt victimized. You know, my dad and I had a great cry together. It was very therapeutic and it’s almost like me allowing myself to be the victim and move through that energy.

It allowed me to like stop holding my parents hostage for my life and my suffering. Right. And I was starting to take accountability and responsibility for my own stuff. And then I started to notice this like emotional maturity coming through and like the humility coming through and the empathy coming through. And so, yeah, I just think that the growth that can happen by honoring the victim is just profound.

It’s so profound. So I wanted to, to share that. Okay. So the last two questions, how have you moved through victim hood? So is there anything I’ll turn it to you pallet? Is there anything that you feel you want to add to what you shared before? Yeah, it will be quick just cause I know that I already kind of like grabbed that up in a nice boat,

but I’ll, I’ll piggyback off of what you just said, Matt, because I also have gone through a big healing with my mom. I recently went home to Vancouver for the first time, since his, since before the pandemic, I haven’t been back to Vancouver and like four or five years since I was living in the middle east. And we never really had a lot of time together that we weren’t traveling.

Cause I was always the good son who took her on a trip because, you know, as a flight attendant, I had benefits. I could fly her to Paris for her birthday for 60th in London. And, and you know, I took her on these nice trips, but it was never a, you know, lets us sit with each other trips.

It was like, we were always doing something. So there was always distractions. But this trip home to Vancouver, there was a lot of time to sit with each other. And a lot of emotions happened similar to you, Matt. And there was one night, like I cried probably half that trip. First off it was secretly. The first day she went the first day I was there full.

She went to work that day and I just like laid in her bed and cried for like two hours. And I didn’t really know where it was coming from, but it was because I was like finally seeing all the shit, like it was in my face and also all of the stuff that she’s doing and she’s just struggling so hard. Like I come from no money,

like nothing. And like my mom had no education. And so she’s always just been like on the treadmill running and she can’t do things for herself cause she just works like 16 hour days. She’s like 66. She’d just gone through cancer. There was like a ton of shit to unpack. And when I was there I made her cry and then it was just from like so many things.

And then I went, I had a shower and then I cried in the shower too. I had also told her that I pride before. Cause it was like, I cried in a guy cause I wanted to start being transparent. And then when I came out after like a dry off and everything and I come out and I go, you need to go to therapy.

You need to go twice a month. And if you can’t do, you know, I’ll pay for it because I can’t be this for you. I can’t be this person. I shouldn’t be this person. This isn’t my responsibility. Cause there’s too much here. That’s not mine. And I’m not willing. I’m no longer willing to take that on. Cause that’s what a lot of my victim hood was,

was it was, you know, my parents’ stuff and I was a kid and, and so through my own therapies or going through my own victim hood stuff for the first time I could be like, this doesn’t belong to me. I’m not willing to take responsibility for this, but I am willing to help you figure it out. And then since then she’s had her first session now and found somebody that’s really great,

signed her up on inkblot. So I’ll put that in the notes. Cause I said, I would share with people in clot therapy and then she also gets it paid for through work as well up to I think like $500 a year or something like that. So like I don’t even have to pay for it at least for the first, however many sessions that costs.

And so me being able to move through my victimhood has also healed those relationships and that’s the big stuff that started changing. And I think that’s really going to change my family life and my family dynamic. So yeah. So it’s just, that’s all I’m going to say about how I’ve moved through and it affects people around you on deeper levels as well. What about you,

Michael? Yeah. You both said it and tell him that’s a great example. You both said the word that I have been like capital letters, responsibility, knowing where your responsibility ends and someone else’s begins and vice versa boundaries. If you want to call them that as well, that is how I’ve moved through victimhood and how I help people move through victimhood.

It’s very important and count. I love your example. It’s perfect. Knowing where that responsibility ends and says, you know, this isn’t my stuff. This is your stuff. So, you know, you want to take responsible, your power lies in owning your stuff like owning what you do with it. Yes, you will. You probably will be victimized at some point in your life.

That’s not your fault, right. But what you do with it is your responsibility. And so you know that the suggestion of getting help, getting support, talking about it, very good one, you know, taking back that empowerment. So again, if, if victim is the powerlessness, you take back your power by saying, okay, here’s what happened?

What am I going to do with it? I have this thing here. I can’t get rid of it. I can ignore it. That’s not going to actually make it go away or I could acknowledge it, accept it and figure out how am I going to, you know, move on with this. One of my, one of my favorite mantras is that I am an autonomous conscious human being.

And every time I kind of repeat that, it gives me a little bit of empowerment. So I think that’s another way that I like to move through victim hood is remind myself that I am an autonomous conscious human being. And I get to decide, I can decide things happen to me. I don’t decide that, but I get to decide to why would I do with them?

And that’s where, where my power lies. So yeah, I think, you know how, before this, before I had that, that awareness, I would say it, I would kind of do the opposite where I would keep retelling that story and keep being stuck in the cycle of victim hood, where I would blame criticized, defend, hide all the things we talked about here today without actually processing it.

And so, you know, that that working through it, that Matt said, I think that’s, that’s the only way I don’t think there is another way. Yeah, you have to work through it. There’s no way around it, over it under it. It’s straight through the middle and it sucks, which is why having support can help you. And it does take time,

right? So we’re on this podcast for what an hour. Like if someone is listening to this, all of our stories, this has eight, first of all, it’s taken a lot of time and B we’re still in it. We’re all still in it. So, you know, be patient be, be compassionate, be curious instead of judgmental. I know that’s a big one for me.

So I think those are some of the ways that I’ve worked through my victimization and how I seen it help others as well. Hm. I, I spoke to some of them already that I had on my list of things I want to talk about, but there’s one that I didn’t and calling out my ego. This was probably the biggest one for me because you know,

I experienced trauma when I was younger. My, all of those responses, I went through all of them, all four of those responses. And then the ego plays into every single one of them. And we develop these ego defense mechanisms like denial, projection, blaming, minimizing, rationalizing, intellectualizing, dissociating, right? All of them. I played out all of them.

My ego was so cunning. It, it could, it could navigate everything. It was perfect, but it was keeping me in here. And it wasn’t allowing me to get into my body where the healing had to take place. And my ego became well, it was my greatest asset for a lot of my life. And I have a lot of gratitude for that because it allowed me to keep myself safe.

But I got to a point where my ego was becoming my, a block to my healing. So calling out my ego meant I had to get real with myself and thanks to you too. And like Reno and Benwah and all the guys in that period of my life that were reflecting back to me, just constantly mirroring the, and triggering me and allowing me to,

to soften my ego allow might, you’ve got to become more flexible. That’s when I started to realize, oh yeah, I’m projecting or, oh yeah, I’m denying or, oh yeah, I’m minimizing. I’m doing all these things. And then I had to call myself out, catch those things. And then once I stopped engaging in those patterns, I was able to connect into the felt sense of,

of, of it. And I, then that’s when I connected to my inner child and that’s when the healing started to take place. So you’re right, Michael, this is a very, it’s a, it’s a process. It’s a, it’s a tenuous process that we go through and we have to really be patient. And we have to be curious.

We have to be all the things because for a lot of people, this is, this is the transformation of a lifetime, like ending victimhood and entering emotional maturity. That is the transformation of a lifetime. That’s when your relationships become more functional and everything just seems to come together. Right. Because we’re not keeping ourselves stuck anymore. So. Okay. Last question.

What advice do you guys have for the audience around who might be stuck in their own victim hood? I think we’ve given a lot of tips that maybe we can each pick a few that stand out for us Or PK, Callan, Callan loves therapy. I love it as well. And also for anybody out there being like, well, I can’t afford it,

or I don’t have time. All of those are just excuses. If you really, really want to work on your fucking shit, stop making excuses for it and figure it out because it’s nobody else’s responsibility, as we’ve been saying, and I’m going to get real down on this. It’s nobody, else’s responsibility. People can help you, but no, if you want to do your shit,

figure it out, Google it look up outreach programs Where can find free counseling. There’s always a way, Michael. Yeah, that one, obviously I would say I have one that I didn’t share. It’s kinda, it kind of goes back with what I was saying about taking ownership of, of your story. So literally what I will have clients do is write their story.

Literally write the story of whatever, whatever has been troubling them or whatever, whatever is in their past, but don’t, it’s not necessarily attached to victim hood, but something in their past that’s been that they’re hanging on to, we have them write their story, everything, just dump it all in there. And then what we do is go through it and we’ll honor it.

First of all, because it’s, the motions are valid, whatever comes through there. So honor it validate it fine. And then we find the meaning in it, right? So there’s a lot of questions you could ask. What was the purpose of this? What does this taught you? Those kinds of things. But the important part, the, I think the part that I really want to underline here is what I have to do after is go back and imagine that that is only half of the story.

And then they get to write the rest of it from that hero perspective. So they are the hero of their own story as opposed to the victim, because in the first iteration, they’re writing the story in that, in that victim consciousness. And then we go back and say, okay, great. Now take that and then write the rest of it,

but read it as if you’re the hero. And so if your hero in your story gets a complete shit, kicking fine, that’s, we’re not denying that we’re not minimizing that it sucks. It happens. What does he do with that? He gets, you know, I I’m a big Harry Potter fan. So I always use the Harry Potter kind of mold here.

He was victimized. He was by his muddle parents, or I guess aunt and uncle. And he went to school and you know, everyone just watched the movies and read the books, knows what happens. You know, it it’s, it’s, it’s a hero’s journey. But so often we don’t, we kind of forget that we are the hero of our own story.

So I will have them do that so that it reminds them that they are the author of the rest of the story that helps to take back that power and how you choose to write it. It’s completely up to you, what you choose to do with it. If you want to recognize the lessons, if you don’t, if you want to, whatever you want to do with it,

that is where your, you get your power back. So that’s my last tip. Love it, love it. Okay. So for me, allow yourself to feel, I’ll keep saying that until the day I die, because it liberated me, my felt sense liberated me and I can’t, I can’t think of enough. So allow yourself to feel. And I feel like if you’re somebody that naturally represses the victim energy and you’re like,

I’m a survivor. I’m not, you know, sometimes we have to go backwards. We have to go through the victim and then we actually move back into survivor. Right? Sometimes our ego is telling us we’re a survivor, but we’re actually not in the felt sense of being a survivor. And I think that leads to the next one. So don’t try to be further along than you are,

let yourself grieve. Right? Because I think when we’re looking at victim hood, what most of us are trying to move towards is forgiveness. And sometimes we are, we’re telling ourselves we’re further along or it’s like, yeah, I’m like I’m healed or yeah, I’ve forgiven them and we’re good, but we’re just thinking forgiveness. We’re not feeling forgiveness. It’s a completely different experience,

right? Thinking healing or feeling healing. It’s going to be the game changer. And for those of you that are more on like the mind set stream, like you need mindset shifts to help you move. I would say one thing that helped me was instead of asking yourself, why is this happening to me? Or why did this happen to me? You can say,

what can I learn from this? Or what did I learn from this experience? Like always looking at the silver lining because it kind of shifts us into gratitude. Like everybody comes into this life with a set of karma, right. And a set of things that they need to learn in this life. And I think some of us, we need to learn our lessons through suffering and through being a victim.

And that, and I think when we start to reframe our suffering, it allows us to liberate from it because it’s like, oh yeah, I needed that. I needed that in my experience in order to evolve into this amazing person that I am now or am becoming. So yeah, those are my tips. Any final thoughts from YouTube before we wrap up?

Don’t feel incomplete. Yeah. Well, this was a longer episode. So if you made it this far, we do thank you for, for coming on the journey with us. We have fire alarms and drilling and the whole gamut, We were filming this during the last week of March mercury retrograde, which is like is technology and all the digital stuff.

So like, it’s just funny that at all. Yeah. Yeah. But Hey, it’s real, it’s authentic what we’re delivering to you guys. So that’s what it’s all about. And I want to take a moment to just welcome all the new people to the gay men’s brotherhood, private Facebook group. We’ve had a lot of new people joining recently, and we want to welcome you if you’re tuning in now tuning into the podcast.

So yes, great to have all these new faces in the community. And if you are watching on YouTube, please subscribe and hit the bell icon, see you in the, when we get to upload a new podcast each week and comments, please comment on our YouTube because we use them for reviews. And we also will try our best to respond to all the comments that come through.

And if you’re listening on your favorite podcast platform, please leave us a star rating for only five stars. And, and it also reviewed because we use those in here as well. So yeah, much love. Thanks for your vulnerability today, boys. I appreciated that. And I look forward to the next episode, which will be forgiveness. Can’t wait to talk about that one.

All right. Bye guys.