From Self-Blame to Clarity: A Guided Meditation for Highly Sensitive People

By the end of this episode, you’ll experience a more peaceful way of seeing yourself, after saying something you wish you hadn’t said. Welcome to Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People, a podcast helping HSPs avoid overwhelm, eliminate stress, and find true inner freedom. I’m your host Todd Smith, a certified facilitator of the work of Byron Katie. In this episode, you’ll discover how to do inner work on self criticism, a powerful stress management strategy for working with your inner critic, and how to find the balance between taking responsibility and shame.

This is an edition of Guided Meditation Mondays, where I’ll be guiding you to do the work of Byron Katie as you listen.And Self criticism is something that can easily trip us up as highly sensitive people. It’s something that we are perceptive. We’re perceptive of many things. 

And sometimes we see things that are present and it becomes a bigger and bigger deal for us and can actually draw us into a stressful kind of reaction. So let’s work on a kind of situation where you had some kind of thought that you might have hurt somebody. May have been very minor, but let’s play with this a little bit by doing the work of Byron Katie.

And so, think for a second, before we begin, of a time, specific time, where you felt like you hurt somebody.Maybe not major, let’s just look at a time when you felt like you said something you shouldn’t have said. For example. I recently had an email exchange with my dad and my sisters, and my dad was talking a little bit about his end of his life, and he was, kind of almost looking for support and love, and talking in kind of grand terms, as that often happens at that age, and, we were all being, sharing a lot of love, And I did too, but we were also being honest as well.

And I kind of thought I was a little too honest, because we were talking about One of his faults maybe is to be a little bit, I said he was a little bit gruff and impatient, and later afterwards I started to regret it. I started like, wow, I shouldn’t have said that. He’s just going to focus on that. 

He’s going to feel terrible. So look for a situation where you felt like you, did something, said something, or wrote something, and later you started feeling guilty about it, or started feeling, critical about how you said it. Take a second, see if you can find a specific time and place.

So, finding a specific time is so helpful. When doing this work, when you’re dealing with specifics, then it becomes much more experiential. When you’re dealing with generalities, it becomes much more abstract. So, specifics will hold you in this process. And if you need more time to find a specific situation, just hit the pause button and you can take as much time as you need.

So once you have your situation, then the question is, what is the thought that I’m thinking? You may need to brainstorm a little bit. What were you thinking in this situation? What’s causing you stress in this situation? And for this particular exercise, I’m going to choose one for you, for all of us, which is, I hurt them. I hurt them. See if you can find in your situation where you’re believing this thought that you hurt them.

And now that we have a thought and a situation, let’s begin the process of questioning that thought using the four questions and turnarounds of the work of Byron Katie. So, the first question is, is it true? Is it true that you hurt them in that situation? And let that emotional part of you answer that question, let that part that was feeling self critical, let it answer the question.

See what you find. Is it true that you hurt them? And this is just a yes or a no. If your answer is no, then you can skip the next question. But if your answer was yes, then let’s go to it. Second question is, can you absolutely know it’s true? Just look at that particular situation. You may see a lot of things, just notice them. You’re looking for a yes or no, the closest you can get. It may not be the perfect answer.

Can you absolutely know it’s true? In my case, it’s a no. I can’t absolutely know. I really don’t know. I haven’t talked to my dad. I’m not sure. And I can feel that. That’s honest for me. We’re looking for honest answers when we do this work. 

It doesn’t matter if it’s a yes or no, just that it’s honest.And then we’ll move on to the third question of the work, which is, How do you react? What happens when you believe this thought, that you hurt them, in that situation and afterwards? What are your reactions? In my case, I felt Like my energy went down quite a bit afterwards.

I was folding clothes after that email and I just felt this heaviness in my body. I blushed a little bit to myself. Felt some shame. What happens to you? How do you react when you think you hurt them? I want to take it back. I want to undo that email. Start scrambling, looking for maybe how I could apologize.

And then that feels weird because I’m not sure he really was hurt. Not sure how. Yeah, so it’s confusing.And then how do you treat yourself when you think you heard them? This is also reaction. I treat myself like I’m a terrible person, like I should have known better. I’m impatient with myself. So you may find other reactions as well, and feel free to pause, feel free to write down your answers if you want to. Just pause the recording and write as much as you need. We’re noticing how you react when you’re believing the thought that you heard. 

So when you’re ready, let’s go on to question four, which is, Who would you be without that thought? It’s a very interesting question. Who would you be without the thought that you heard them? Regardless of whether you did or not, who would you be without the thought that you heard?And I notice for myself that I’m just folding clothes. The email’s sent. I’m enjoying the sharing that I did and my sisters did with my dad. It feels light. I feel connected. How would you be in your situation without the thought that you hurt them, regardless of what you did? So notice, does the, just notice how the thought changes everything.

When I believe I hurt him, I feel stressed. I feel ashamed. If I’m not dwelling on that, if it’s not coming up for me, there’s a lighter feeling. Now this is not to say that I didn’t hurt him or them, it’s just who would you be without that thought?If that, if you’re not holding on to that thought, and we already saw when you hold on to it, it’s like that’s when you start to beat yourself up. So who would you be without it? A little lighter. So then, turn the thought around. I hurt them. What would an opposite be? I hurt myself. 

So this is the new theory, the new hypothesis, and let’s hold it and see if there could be any truth in it. How could it be as true or truer that you hurt yourself as much as you hurt them? This gives perspective.I hurt myself. I took my emotions down. I beat myself up. I was shaming myself, putting myself literally down, like looking down on myself. That’s an actual hurt. It happened spontaneously, I can’t, it’s like, there’s also an innocence there as well. But I, I’m hurting myself, for sure.

And I don’t even know for sure if I hurt my dad, in this case. So look in your situation, how are, how is it possible that you’re hurting yourself as much or more than you hurt the other person? And you can write examples down, you can just think of them, but take your time. And if you need to, pause the recording.I hurt myself. So whatever I did to him, I don’t know. It might not have hurt him at all, or it might have just hurt him for a second, but I hurt, certainly hurt, myself for quite a while. So let’s look at another turnaround. Instead of I hurt them, I didn’t hurt them. How could that be as true, or truer? That you didn’t hurt them, in spite of what you actually did. 

Is it possible you didn’t hurt them? Look for specific examples if you can find them.One is I have no proof. In my case, I don’t know. My dad never said anything. It’s possible he was hurt, but it’s also possible he wasn’t hurt. And knowing my dad, he’s pretty tough. He doesn’t really, he’s kind of different than me. He doesn’t think about what other people think of him as much. So it’s possible I didn’t hurt him. And I didn’t hurt him. That was not my intention. My whole intention of that email was to be as kind and as generous and as loving as I could be, and be honest. So, that’s very different than hurting. Hurting is, there was no intention to hurt, at least, even if I inadvertently did. Look at yours. How is it possible you didn’t hurt them?

Maybe it’s you didn’t hurt them as much as you think you hurt them, even if you did a little, or do you exaggerate? So again, take as much time as you need to find examples, and these examples are there simply to balance the story. We’re not looking to fool ourselves, or change reality, We’re looking for balance. And the original thought that I hurt them was hurting me, and it was an imbalance. Like, oh, what a terrible person I am. And so, turning that around and finding that I didn’t hurt them, or maybe not as much as I thought, or that I was hurting myself, starts to balance that story a little bit. 

And when you balance it, it’s a little less stressful. Stress tells you when there’s something out of balance.And the work is only concerned with my internal balance. Experience that feeling of balance that comes from not going too far in one direction or the other either that I hurt them terrible me or I didn’t hurt them. so that I’m all defensive and thinking that I’m. I can just do whatever I want. neither one of those extremes is very peaceful. So we’re looking for the balance point between these different points of view.

that thought hurts me.Okay, so this is that process called the work of Byron Katie, where you take a stressful thought in a specific situation and you question it, and you look for your own experience throughout that process. So thank you for joining me in this, and feel free to do more work on this, this is just a start, and you can always do this work with a pen and paper, or with a friend to ask you these questions, and we will do this every Monday as a chance to do this together.In this episode, we looked at how to do inner work on self criticism. 

And my favorite way of doing that is using the work of Byron Katie to identify the stressful situation and the particular thought that you’re thinking, and then to question it. And we also looked at a powerful stress management strategy for working with your inner critic. That is really to listen to it, and to invite it to do the work. when we pay attention to these self criticisms and actually listen and then identify them and begin to work with them and invite them to do the work in a way, it can open things.

And finally, we looked at how to find the balance between taking responsibility for something and taking it too far, which would be shame.It’s the balance between these two. I’m guilty and I’m innocent. That’s where the balance lies for me. So thanks for listening, I always enjoy being here with you, and I look forward to next time. Have a great day. Take care. Bye.