When You Feel Like a Bad Person (and You Question Your Path)

Here's something I'm imagining about you. I'm imagining you're somebody who values kindness, who works really hard to be a healing presence for others, who likes to set up her life so that she's got a spacious nervous system, that she's soft with the people she loves. And I also think you're a badass who likes to push your edges, who likes to grow your capacity, who likes to take on a little bit more than you can chew right now because you know it'll help you grow. And I'm imagining that every once in a while you don't live up to your values.

You snap. You ghost people. You curl up in a ball saying it's too much and secretly hate everybody. Then you go into a whole spiral where you have an internal litigation about are you a good person or a bad person and if you're a bad person should you be doing healing work at all. Now, if this resonates, I think we need to talk about this because it might save you years of internal debate. Now, this is a healer's journey. I'm your host, Inge Broer. And today, the block we are diving into is that internal question we might hold.

Am I good or am I bad? And it is time to let that deep internal question go. But before we do, let's talk about it. So, I'm imagining a scenario where you are possibly pushing your edges in something. Maybe you're working out more. Maybe you are um holding more client sessions. Maybe you are creating marketing that pushes your visibility edges and your nervous system is just sort of a little bit more on edge. It's a little bit more activated because you are growing and you have chosen this growth and you are going in the direction that you need to be going.

It leaves you a little bit more stressed and a little bit more snappy and a little bit more leaky in your boundaries. and you have less tolerance for things you normally have a lot of spaciousness for. And then you do the thing. You do the thing that you hate that you do. The wounding comes out, the snapping, the shortness with people, the withdrawing from them, the everything that you stand for, you're doing the opposite. You stand for being connected. You stand for being a safe place for people.

And you are not that. Now, this happened to me like in a really really big way about 2 weeks ago. I got um bacterial pneumonia. And after like four weeks of sort of battling the viruses that my kids pick up from daycare and pushing myself with boxing, pushing myself with this podcast, um growing new programs, launching Healer Embodied for the first time, like all of this I chose. All of this I am so proud of. And what happened is that my kids were home from daycare a little bit more than I was comfortable with.

They were sick, they were needy, they were tired from the travel, I was sick, I was needy, etc. And it made it so that I stopped using my usual practices and I just went into survival mode. And then I got really sick. And it led me to being the meanest version of myself I can even imagine. I said things to my kids that I really wish I could take some white out into their brains and and and like white out. But all I can do is seek to repair, seek to reconnect, seek to have some nice moments with them as we move forward.

But the reason I wanted to record this episode is because under all of that, there is such a deep level of shame and pressure. And these two things go together. The shame of reacting the way that I was reacting. And in the context of my life, it honestly makes sense. Like my needs were simply not met. That's not a justification for how I behaved. There's a there's a difference there. I hope to do a lot better next time. But underneath that, there was like such a strong desire to completely hide away and a deep pain at my partner seeing me act like this cuz I was so ashamed.

I wish at least nobody could see it. But my partner saw me, my kids saw me, probably my neighbors saw me snap a few times as well. And so that shame and that pressure, we're kind of like working together. The pressure of like you are a healer, woman. You like have a whole business around this. You have a business about being connected. You have a business about staying kind and soft. And what I noticed is that pressure was doing the opposite of helping me. The more pressure there was, the meaner I got.

And so I had to use some of my tools of course of letting go of like naming what was going on and taking responsibility of what is really mind mine. And so that's the block here. The block isn't that we meet our edges, but the block is believing that when we meet our edges and we inevitably behave in a way that is less than optimal, that that disqualifies us from our chosen profession. That disqualifies us from what we are able to provide. Now, I was sick. I did have to cancel a few sessions. I did have to ask my students to wait a little bit for certain materials in their courses.

I did have to take care of myself there, but I didn't quit my business. I didn't um I didn't stop valuing what I value because I personally didn't meet my inner standards. I still value it. And now I get to return to my values of kindness, of taking care of yourself, of trying to make sure you have support. And I get to show up again humble, humbled, but also um reconnected to how important all of that is. And I get to restart my journey of self-care. I get to fine-tune and ask myself like, what do I actually really need here?

And it might not look like what I needed 6 weeks ago, 3 months ago. I get to return to this work with extra compassion both for myself and my clients because people are going to come to you after their moments like this. After the moment they snapped, after the moment they got way meaner, after than they believe themselves to be. after the moment that they gave up on things that are really important to them, after the moment they walked away. It's everybody has these moments. Everybody meets their edges.

Everybody gets out of their window of tolerance every once in a while. And the the thing that makes you a good healer is can you walk yourself back after that happens? And can you take a stand for helping others walk themselves back when that happens as well? We are professionals of repair not of perfection. We are healing because something somewhere got disconnected. So we reconnect. Doesn't mean we stay connected the whole time. Right? So to get ourselves out of this block, I want to offer the following.

So who you are under pressure isn't your truth. Okay? That's not like your true nature revealed. It's simply who you are in that context. In the context of having met your edges, in the context of being outside of your window of tolerance, it gives you an indication of where your wounding is. It gives you an indication of what inner defense mechanisms are still active in you and still believe that they can do what they need to do. But it's not who you are. So the first key here in undoing this block is to let go of taking one moment or three moments or 17 moments and determining that is who I am.

Add the context. This is how I react when my needs aren't met. I'm under this much pressure, etc., etc., etc. Two, let's get underneath this belief that being calm and regulated all the time makes you a good healer. Being nice equals being a healing presence. Well, you know what? No, it actually doesn't work like that. If you show up in your healing sessions and you are like very calm and very nice, that's nice and calm. Is it healing? Not necessarily. There are moments where your clients need you to sort of ride a wave with them.

Not in the full, you know, intensity that they're in, but they need to feel felt. They need to know that you have range, that it doesn't freak them out what they're going through. They need to know that you have spaciousness and capacity to meet the edges that they don't want you to see. And that might mean that you need to sometimes push a little bit further. Dig a little bit deeper. Ask a question that goes to the heart of the thing they desperately don't want you to see, but the very thing they came to to meet you for, the very thing that they need to heal.

But they're also trapped in them. Like, I want to look nice and calm and like I have it all together. Being a good person also doesn't always mean effective. Good is in the eyes of some unknown societal something. It's not a real thing. Healing is really in a casebyase individual basis. We don't It's good to start from a calm baseline, but what we really need is to be responsive. It's to be attuned. It's to be with the other. And when we try to be only calm, what we can often do is we can create a distance like, "Oh, you are I don't like all that going on inside of you.

You're killing my calm." It creates a distance. It creates disconnection. In fact, we are feeling humans. We feel each other. And so the game isn't always to stay perfectly calm and regulated. Staying always calm and regulated also means that you don't get that intimacy and trust that happens from repair that happens to a commitment to truth and responsibility and responsiveness and attunement. Okay. So all of that to say is that your context isn't your character. Now, if you want to be a professional healer, you do need to set certain things in place.

You do need to be responsible with your life. If the last six weeks for me were my whole life all the time, it's true that me doing the work of the healer would be a lot harder. But it's not like that. I have very good discipline about myself healing practices. I set my life up to have a lot of support. I have um really great sleep hygiene, etc., etc., etc. All of that compounds to create enough stability to really be able to hold my clients, to meet them, to be committed to truth with them, repair, and help them really do the deep healing that they want to do.

Your context isn't your character, but it is something you need to take responsibility for. And when you drop under your inner standard and that you still care and you want to litigate whether you're a good person or a bad person, it means you still care. Okay? It means you're you're not gone. It means you're still in the game. It means you care. It means you're going to you're going to figure this out somehow. Stop litigating this as if it's a you thing. Okay? Let go of the shame and really start seeing it as a contextual thing.

pieces of the puzzle of your life that need to be put together in a different way. Take responsibility for it. What we're doing here on the healer's journey, we're not dabbling, playing acting at healing. Okay? There's plenty of people out there performing it. And that's another aspect of this block. We create these perfect scripts of what to say. We spent hours thinking of how to approach a conflict and say the perfect thing. But and I was doing this with my kids too. Like I like when my son was really young like I had internalized all the gentle parenting scripts and I felt really good about that.

But what was happening is I was creating a layer between me and life. I was performing being something. I was trying on the identity of being something without really anchoring it fully in me without actually being real with it. And I think we do that with the healer identity. We perform this nice floaty you can't hurt me thing when that is not real and it is not healing. The best thing you can do is actually be freaking real. Be a real human. If you think of somebody who really needs healing, who needs to be put back together to love themselves again, do they need somebody who's performing all the right words and all the right gestures, or do they need somebody who can like full on be a warrior by their side and help them do that?

And yes, they might use exactly the same words because some words are a magic. But when they come from a real place, it's different. So let's decide together that we are no longer thinking about am I a good person or a bad person. I am simply somebody in a certain context and what I value is healing. What I value is regulation. What I value is connection. And I am going to get up again and again and again and again and again and make those values real in my life. I'm going to be a soldier for these values.

I am going to take a stand for them. And that feels different in the body. Do you feel it? Like it feels more grounded and probably a little bit more messy. It might feel a little bit more hot. It might feel a little bit more honest. It might feel a little bit wobblier. It might feel a little bit more uncertain meeting your clients from that place. But also, it creates more intimacy. It creates more realness. It creates more love in your life. And so if you were to let go of this idea of needing to perform a certain picture, needing to be good, to be safe, to be trusted, to be powerful, and instead you get to be you as a healer.

Imagine that. Imagine you get to be the actual real you. Taking a stand for healing, taking a stand for connection. The actual real you who after she shows the worst of herself gets up and decides to love the living daylights out of herself to forgive herself, to connect with herself, and to take fierce responsibility for what led her there in the first place. Fierce responsibility for her health, fe fierce responsibility for her boundaries, fierce responsibility for her practices, fierce responsibility for the support she needs, fierce responsibility for her own needs.

Who would you rather have as a healer? The one who does that or the one who stays in bed thinking, "Oh, I'm such a bad person and I shouldn't be doing this." And then when she finally gets up, she anxiously performs being a nice healer and pretends like nothing happened. I know which one I would choose. Would you choose the healer who never ever has a breakdown and never goes beyond her edges and always stays within the comfort zone? Or would you choose the healer who does go beyond her edges sometimes and builds her resilience and repairs with her people and loves herself into greater capacity.

Again, I know which one I would choose. You're not disqualified by your breakdowns, okay? Like really, you are not. You're just being shown where your support system needs a bit shoring up. And this is the game. Like, welcome. You are in it. You are on the healer's journey. We're doing this together. Let's figure out how we can help each other love ourselves back into our healing work, our responsibility. This has been the healer's journey. I'm your host, Inge Broer. If this is the kind of work that you feel is at your edge, you want to be doing, you want to be your feet held to the fire, healer embodied is the place for you.

You'll need to have done Raiki one, but this is where we really take responsibility for the healer archetype and we go pro. I'd love to see you in there. Music is by Lana Chakra.