Feeling Like It's Your Fault? You Deserve to Heal.

Are you wrestling with overwhelming pain and a persistent voice telling you it's your fault? In this powerful episode of The Mentally Strong Podcast, Dr. B, a psychiatric nurse practitioner who has navigated unimaginable loss, offers a deeply empathetic and practical approach to healing. She understands the pervasive self-blame that can accompany tragedy, having personally experienced the loss of three children and her husband.

Dr. B challenges the conventional narrative of grief and introduces her "Mentally Strong Method," a framework designed to help you organize the chaos of negative self-talk, process trauma, and embark on a profound spiritual journey. This isn't about simply "getting over it"; it's about acknowledging your pain, separating it from self-blame, and growing around your grief to find contentment and peace.

In this episode, you'll discover:

• Why "It's Not Your Fault" is more than just a saying: Dr. B shares her raw, personal stories of loss, illustrating how even with perceived contributions to an outcome, the ultimate responsibility for tragedy is often not yours.
• The flawed concept of the "5 Stages of Grief": Learn why this traditional model doesn't apply to complex pain and how to move beyond it.
• Understanding Trauma beyond the obvious: Discover Dr. B's definition of trauma as anything that changes your perception of reality, and how to identify and address its impact on your healing.
• The power of a spiritual journey in healing: Explore how connecting with a spiritual context can transform your experience of pain and lead to profound growth.
• Practical steps for managing negative self-talk: Learn how to rate your belief in negative thoughts and begin to gently dismantle them.
• When to seek professional help: Crucial advice for recognizing the signs that your pain is heavier than you can manage alone.

If you're ready to quiet the voice of self-blame and begin your journey toward lasting healing and contentment, this episode is a must-listen.

Topic Highlights:

• Overcoming Self-Blame in Grief
• The Mentally Strong Method
• Redefining Trauma & Its Impact
• Spiritual Healing & Loss
• Challenging Negative Self-Talk
• Beyond the 5 Stages of Grief
• Finding Peace After Profound Loss
• When to Seek Professional Support

Don't miss out on this transformative conversation. Listen now and take the first step towards deserving to heal.

🔗  Get your FREE copy of “Pain and Purpose”  mentallystrong.ac-page.com/freebook

Transcript

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it is not your fault can you actually say that you deserve to feel better to be able to feel this pain grieve can you find it in yourself to deserve to heal this is the mentally strong podcast and I am your host Doctor B I am mentally strong you did not fail them the things that you are saying inside your brain right now it's part of the trauma it's part of the negative dialogue that has happened to your brain as a result of what happened you deserve to heal and I'm going to take you on a little journey of how to manage this chaos how to manage the negative things that you say to yourself I'm Doctor B I'm a psychiatric nurse practitioner but more importantly I have been through unimaginable pain I have lost three children and my husband and believe me I have been in that place where I think it's my fault and we're gonna talk about that if you're ready to go on that journey I want you to click the link below and learn more about me and and the things that I can help in your journey how I can be your guide today we're gonna be talking about how to organize the negative things that are happening the negative things that you're saying to yourself the dialogue the story that you're telling yourself I teach something that I call the mentally strong method and I have created that over the course of 20 years of raising my children losing children going through lots of little traumatic events throughout that whole thing and when I talk about the mentally strong method it is not just about grit like pushing through and I am mentally strong I want you to say I am mentally strong I do but I want you to mean it I want you to to change that narrative that that you're saying to yourself right now that it's your fault that it's that you deserve the pain that you are feeling the first thing I want you to do is is learn to kind of separate grief and everything else okay and and get rid of this 5 stages of grief that does not apply and I I have video other videos talking about that grief is is pain that you will cherish if everyone in life will go through grief but not everyone will go through the kind of grief that makes you feel like it's your fault or creates this negative dialogue that you don't deserve to feel good again so when I talk about the mentally strong method I have 10+ categories I'm gonna go over a few of them here but the first thing is is the pain of your grief it's all meshed with your negative dialogue probably with trauma with the injustices of what happened your anxiety maybe there are some behaviors and choices that that you made that you feel contribute to the outcome I want you to separate all that from the pain of the grief and and the pain of the grief is is intense and you will likely feel it forever by throwing out the 5 stages of grief one of the best grief theories to look at is grow around grief so I'm not asking you to make the pain of the grief smaller eventually after you've organized things and and gotten through some of the chaos and the negativity going on in your brain you're gonna grow around that grief then I want you to identify the trauma and I did it and almost every person that I talk to says I don't have trauma and they say it with assurance and I can tell you that trauma is anything that changes your perception of reality so at one point you know maybe you felt that you deserved things and now you feel like you don't before you felt like um it wasn't your fault and now something's happened and it's your fault right that is a change in the perception of reality the change in in your belief system and what you how you are perceiving the world I don't like the word trauma either when I think of trauma I think of someone who has been physically or sexually abused and but the reality is is trauma you know clinically sometimes we call it little t trauma big t trauma but it's not about measuring it has something caused an injury to you a moral injury an ego injury you know when I say ego injury that's like the change in the way that you think about yourself that is treated all of the same way that is that is trauma that is injury claim it as injury it has changed you in a negative way likely for the rest of your life it doesn't mean it's your fault can you say it is not my fault well what if you actually feel like it is and I can tell you the stories for me and all of them of losing my children my son Johnny died in a drowning accident and I knew he wasn't a strong swimmer I knew we were on a river in Kentucky I let him go with his friends there was adults going and I said to him wear your life jacket but I didn't tell the adults that we're going to the river with him it's my fault if I would have told the adults that were supervising this that he wasn't a strong swimmer and that he needed to wear a life jacket maybe he wouldn't have died that day so I'm not saying that there is not some truth to what you're saying same thing happened the day that my son Reggie died he was having trouble breathing he was going through what I now know of those end of life breathing and shutting down and I am a nurse and I missed it I thought it was like every other time he was sick I should have taken him to the er 4 hours earlier maybe he would still be alive let that sink in I'm not saying the negative dialogue is not a truth it doesn't make it your fault same with my daughter Maya after losing Reggie I said gosh if Maya is ever even has a cold I'm taking her to the doctor I'm going to the er like I'm I am not going to miss this again right so my anxiety and my Protection kicked in and I was this was not going to happen to me again my daughter died in her sleep I went to find her in the morning and she looked like she was still alive sleeping and I walked away came back an hour later to realize she had been dead for many hours and I'm not telling you these things to put my trauma on you I'm telling you these things that you know what people want to say to you is oh it's not your fault don't worry it's not your fault it's not your fault it would have happened anyway or they'll give some sort of empty answer and and that doesn't resonate with you because part of you knows that that maybe this was your fault but that brings me in to the spiritual context of this like acknowledging a fraction of how you may have contributed to the the end result but look at my life every single one of them I feel like I could have made it my fault but after working through these things working on myself understanding the bigger picture the spiritual growth that is happening in me I know that it's not my fault so what I'm telling you is different than a lot what other people will say they're I'm acknowledging I'm validating those negative thoughts in your mind but they are not serving you they're not serving you they're not serving the person that you have lost they are not part of who you can become and so let's talk about that spiritual conflict for a minute you know in mental health we often avoid spiritual things we say find your teacher find and we we don't talk about those things somebody said to me yesterday when we were in this town hall meeting around grief and experiencing grief is your spiritual journey experiencing the type of grief that I have experienced the pain that in which I have experienced I think all pain can grow you spiritually it's not just grief as a huge thank you for being a listener I wanna give you a free access to my book titled pain and purpose this book shares my personal journey of turning vulnerability into strength and it's about finding hope and resilience discovering purpose even when life felt its darkest get your complimentary copy right now the link is in the description any pain can make you a better person learning how to work through pain we will all experience pain and we all deserve wholeness peace contentment one of the common threads that I hear when someone finally connects with connects with their loved one who has passed they use this word they use the word content my child is content my husband is content this person is content but what when I talk about a spiritual journey what if we could feel a little bit of that contentment here on earth while we go on this human experience one of the things that often comes up if you really believe that this is your fault and that you deserve this and that you are really really sad maybe even clinically depressed you might be thinking about hurting yourself please get professional help that is the line that it's not about figuring this out yourself that is the line actually probably before that line even if you're considering it that you bring in professionals maybe even medication to help with the clinical pieces of depression right the the whatever you have just gone through is heavier than you can manage if you are feeling like that I heard someone say recently he hates the term when people say um God only gives you what you can handle and there's and he said there's plenty of people in jail in mental health hospitals or in the grave who got more than they could handle so that is that is not a truth of your spiritual walk but I I do encourage you with all of my heart to make a spiritual journey a part of this journey of pain that you are experiencing it has been the most healing for me one of the first things that I heard from my son Reggie after he passed was Mama you think you're so smart you have no idea and and filling that in is like no idea of how content and good he is I stand here understanding the pain in which you are going through but I'm not sitting in it right and so it's hard for you because your your walls are up you are like no you don't understand cause my situation is different someone said to me very recently they said yeah but your kids were innocent you know you know where they went you you know you know that it wasn't your fault and I've shared how I did think it was my fault but you're right there's nothing that I can say to convince you that I understand but I have been through some very difficult pain and you are going through very difficult pain it's not the same pain and it's your pain I can't take your pain away from you I have had to go through a huge journey to be able to say I'm managing that pain I'm growing around that pain and although I could you know teach you the mentally strong method which is this great foundation I can teach you about how to release trauma how to go on your spiritual journey I can teach you those things and if you're interested click the link below start your journey today but I can't go on the journey with you I can't take your pain away and I can't make it go fast but I can tell you that if you start there is light at the end of the tunnel that there there is things that we can grow around that you do deserve and it's I can I could say it till I'm blue in the face until you say it and believe it and so when I talk about negative thoughts I have people put them in a a a range of 0 to 10 10 like I 100% believe that this thought is true and zero I don't believe this at all and if you were to ask me shortly after Reggie or Maya's death if I thought it was my fault where I would um go on the scale because I I understand psychiatry I've been working on myself for a long time I would have said seven or eight but I completely understand if you're like it's an 11 or it's a ten I ask you to at least make it a 9.9 give yourself something to work with and begin to bring that down mine is almost at zero now if I if I think from a very worldly perspective yes I I still think ugh like I could have done something differently like they could still be with me but I actually know that no matter what I would have done the end result would have been the same and that I am grateful grateful for the time that I had and and that is grief when when I can get to a point where I'm like I am grateful for the time that I had with my children and I cherish it and yes I will cry I'm not saying you're not crying I'm I'm crying and I'm feeling the sadness and the pain of missing them but I'm not beating myself up I'm not reminding myself of what I did wrong and I am talking about how I deserve contentment peace and happiness in this life I'm gonna go into some questions and these are really hard questions um the first one was a phone call that I got from someone who whose son completed suicide and this whole video is actually for her and she really was saying to me but what if it really was my fault and to give some context she did not notice the depression she did not take him to a counselor and so therefore she feels like she doesn't deserve to see a counselor to try to work through and this was a very very recent suicide completion and so right now it is not about what you should be doing it is about finding even an ounce of self love her her son just completed suicide less than a month ago just an ounce of self love like you are still in shock your reality has changed forever and just try not to say those words that you don't deserve to get help that's all I want you to do right now I do not want you to try to learn the mentally strong method and try to organize things your body your brain everything is in shock and chaos let the nervous system calm down and just try not to say those negative things and let's reconnect in a month or two and kind of talk about how we can gently begin organizing those things like I talked about in this video um another question came recently can you just tell me how to get over it and we were kind of sitting in in a room full of people it was after a documentary showing and um someone who had lost a child can you just tell me how to get over it sorry the answer is no this is your journey and I I can be here to be your guide and I do have some practical tools the Mental Strong method is this great foundation in the grief intensives we go through how to release trauma how to connect spiritually and those are part of your healing journey but it is a journey and it's not an easy thing and as I answer that question for her she's like yeah but can I just if I do this one thing you know meditate and do the mentally strong method for 20 minutes every night I think that would be part of the journey I think that could totally be part of the journey but I can't oversimplify this process and how uniquely intimately individual this is I have been put in front of you because I I've done it and I know a lot of the elements and I can teach those elements but the hope the drive the want the want to deserve I want you to find it in you I can't give that to you last question what if this was God's plan and I'm just supposed to accept it okay what if what if that is true part of my story and and when I go into meditation and I um am trying to figure out the why some of that was pre planned right it it was there there's not a worldly why there is possibly a spiritual why but that doesn't mean you can just accept it it is complicated if you've gotten this far in this video it is also complicated with trauma and negative dialogue and maybe injustices and anxiety and it's it's chaos in your brain and so it's not just about accepting it and and acceptance is a trigger word is why I I say throw that five stages of grief out the window right like I have to accept that my children are gone but you know accepting that it's you know this God's plan and he's orchestrating these horrible things in my life that is not a a beautiful loving vision of god and as you walk on that spiritual journey of spiritual conflict acknowledging naming the spiritual conflict is part of that journey so yes there there could be some truth to that statement but it doesn't take away from the the journey of getting there in its purest authentic form with a relationship a spiritual relationship not just a a blockade right oh it's I have to accept it it was God's plan that's too simple and it's not simple I've mentioned a couple times in this video how I don't support the five stages of grief so watch this next video about no more stages continue on your journey binge watch my content to to understand that I'm a real person who have been been through real pain and I can be your guide and get going through this journey you can do this