The transcript will be delayed a couple days, as I migrate everything to a new computer.    But if you're wondering what this episode's about, I'm talking about how the God of my Understanding is NOT the God of my Childhood, and what caused that to be true.

Transcript Thanks for joining us again on Like Driving in Fog, an emotional healing podcast. I’m Mary Young, and today’s episode is about shame. That’s a hard one for me. I was thinking the other day about shame, because I was sharing what has been - in my opinion - my deepest secret with a friend of mine whose opinion I really respect. And I was afraid that the secret would change my friend’s opinion of me. The truth of the matter is in the 30 years that I’ve known this woman, I have never seen her be judgmental, but she’s from an older generation and I was afraid that she would judge me. probably because she’s from my parents’ generation, and my mom would have judged me in a heartbeat if I had shared this, and at the same time she would’ve been telling everybody how she wasn’t judging me at all. The thing is, I needed to face my fear that this woman might judge me. I needed to face my fear of sharing the truth about my past. I mentioned this briefly in my episode about acceptance, and how sometimes you have to accept things you don’t want to accept -- things you wish weren’t true. I wish that I had never been seduced by the woman in my past. I wish that I had not been so vulnerable and so needy, and that she had not been such a predator, but I can’t change my past. I can wish that Jack France had not been so happy to be around little girls, but again, I can’t change that past so I had to learn to accept it. And I also had to learn, in both cases, that the shame I was carrying didn’t belong to me. That one was hard. It took a long time to get that about Jack France, and it took a long time to get that about Sally. If you have been abused, or molested, or raped, or otherwise traumatized, you may also be struggling with shame. And I just want you to hear this, if you don’t hear anything else in this episode... You do not need to be ashamed. You have done nothing to be ashamed of. The shame belongs on the perpetrator, on the violator. And one of the great tragedies of sexual abuse - especially incest - is that the violators have managed to twist things around so that the person who was violated carries the shame. That. Is. Wrong. Very, very wrong. And it can take you some time to come to grips with that, and to believe that about yourself, and to accept that about yourself. You can come back and listen to this podcast as many times as you need to while you are working on reinforcing that belief in your own mind. How did I stop carrying that shame?  Therapy.   You know by now that therapy is my number one answer to almost every question. How did you do this, Mary? Therapy. How did you to come to grips with that, Mary? Therapy. But it’s not just going to therapy. People go to therapy for years and don’t get better. What it takes to get better is doing the work. Whatever homework the therapist gives you, whatever journaling you need to do... doing the work is how you get better. Doing the work is how you become emotionally healthy. Yes, I can say therapy as a generic answer, but the reason therapy worked for me is because I had a counselor who said you need to do this, and I was able to talk to the counselor and share with the counselor these experiences that I would have been ashamed to say to anybody.  And my counselor listened, and accepted me. And instead of saying shame on you she said I’m sorry you had to go through that. Both of my counselors stated this -- Tricia in Texas, Tracy here in Georgia -- they listened without judging. They listened with understanding, and they affirmed that there was no shame to me, no reason for shame. And if you hear that enough, then you start to internalize it. But here’s the other part of that. Telling your counselor -- hey, that’s as safe as you can hope to get. If you have a good, ethical, responsible counselor, you’re going to get the same kind of responses I got. No judgment, no shaming, simply acceptance and maybe some sadness about what you’ve gone through. But you can’t spe

Links referenced in this podcast: Lauren Herschel's Twitter Feed Karen Lanser's blog post about Lauren's Twitter Feed----more---- Transcript: Thanks for joining us, and welcome once again to Like Driving in Fog, an Emotional Healing podcast. I’m Mary Young. When I was in high school, we had a college student come and speak to our English class. She had published a book of poetry called Clouds of April or something like that (that’s 40 years ago -- I’m lucky to remember this at all).  The premise behind the book - the premise behind the title was that spring is a time of growth, and renewing, and renewed optimism, and that 40 years ago April was the month with the most amount of suicides statistically. And you wonder why am bringing that up. I’m not here to talk about suicide today. I talked about that in my Christmas episodes sometimes there are no words and there’s always hope. I do want to talk about grief. Grief is one of those things that will hit you really hard right at the get-go, and you think it’s going to crush your soul. And then time passes, and you get accustomed to the new normal, and the grief isn’t as rough. And then someday just out of the blue, it’ll be as painful as if whatever the incident was had just happened. And it drives people crazy- it drives me crazy - when it’s like that. And it’s easy to think that we’re doing it wrong. If we were grieving “properly,” we would be past this. If we were more emotionally healthy, this wouldn’t bother us. Yeah. That’s not true, you guys. First, let’s go back to my definition of emotional health: feeling your emotions and being able to express them appropriately. Stuffing something down, compartmentalizing, is not feeling your emotions. So when grief rears its head, you need to just go with it. Now, I know that that’s not always an option, okay. Sometimes you have to stuff it down just to be able to function at that particular moment in time.  Let me give you an example. About a month ago, on a Friday lunchtime... I was about to get on a conference call. In my day job, I do computer training over the Internet. I was about to get into a classroom that would’ve lasted 90 minutes to two hours. I was the instructor. It’d been a busy day, and my cell phone is usually on mute while I’m teaching, and I was teaching several classes that day. So I had not even looked at my cell all morning, and I had five minutes to spare, so I grabbed my phone and started looking at messages. There was a message from an unknown number, asking me to call them. It wasn’t totally unknown - it was a number I’d dealt with before. It’s actually friends of mine, but I didn’t have every family person’s number recorded in my phone. So I knew which family it was, but I didn’t know which family member it was. I called them, and she told me that a good friend had passed away the night before. And no sooner had I hung up the phone from that conversation than my student showed up in my classroom, and I had to go from being shocked and stunned and sad, to being a professional facilitator and leading this class.  So I took those feelings, and I stuffed them, because I had to bury them for at least the next two hours. Here’s the problem with stuffing or with burying. It’s really hard to tell your emotions: okay guys, I’m going to bury the sadness and the shock and this grief for two hours, and then it will be okay to feel it.  No, it doesn’t work that way. You bury that grief, that emotion, and it stays buried for a while. My previous experience has always been that it comes back at the most inopportune time.  It’s one of the reasons that I work on feeling the emotions at the time that they’re happening, but sometimes you have to stuff them, like I did last month. I am still coming to terms with John’s loss. I can tell myself he’s not in pain anymore. I can tell myself he’s reunited with his wife (she passed away last July). I can tell myself he lived a full happy life (and oh man, did he!), but th

TranscriptHave you ever been facing something that you just wish wasn’t true? If there is a way you could change history, that’s the history that you would change? That actually is an important milestone in the emotional healing journey. Hi, I’m Mary Young. Thanks for joining us on like driving in fog, an emotional healing podcast. In today’s episode, we are talking about acceptance. For me, accepting my past was one of the hardest things to deal with on my emotional healing journey. And this comes in a couple different directions, just to make life more interesting (that was sarcasm). First off, when I started having flashbacks and body memories about what it happened to me before kindergarten, I didn’t want to believe it was true. I did not want to accept that reality. it was too shameful it was too ugly it was too bad it made me a bad person (no, it didn’t) It was my fault (no, it wasn’t). But no matter how much I didn’t want it to be true, it was true. Now honestly, between me and you, I can’t prove that anything happened. The perpetrator is dead. My parents are dead. My siblings wouldn’t remember because we were all very young, and I’m certain that the family would’ve covered it up. but my first therapist, Tricia in Texas...when we were talking about whether or not these memories were real, gave me the best wisdom for my entire healing journey I think. She told me I could spend every dime I had to hire a private investigator who could go explore, and again because we were looking at something 40 years previously, that private investigator may never be able to get an answer. Or we could look at the reality that I exhibited classic textbook signs of a person who had been molested as a child, and I could focus on healing. I chose the second option, and it has worked out really well for me. But part of that process included accepting the reality that I did not want to admit. The reality that yes, I had been molested as a child by the alcoholic babysitter in the basement that I thought was my best friend and my buddy. That was hard to accept. I don’t have words to describe how hard that was. I had to accept that my parents did not protect me, even though it’s a parent’s job to protect their children. I had to accept along the way that my parents were emotionally absent when I was growing up. They took care of our physical needs, but emotionally -- not so much. Which makes perfect sense for who they were and when they grew up, and I totally understand that. But it does not negate the reality that emotionally they did not give me what I needed. So part of the emotional healing journey is you have to accept what happened to you, whether you want to or not. You don’t have to stay rooted in the past. You don’t have to cling to it and be a victim for the rest of your life. I don’t call myself a victim of childhood abuse. I call myself a survivor. So are you. You survived whatever the trauma was. You are still here. They tried to victimize you, but you are not a victim. You are a survivor. So I came to terms with the reality of my early childhood.  Another part of my emotional healing journey was I had to accept the fact that I had made very bad decisions in the romance department. In retrospect, accepting the reality of what happened to me in my very early childhood was easy compared to the other accepting I had to do. It was easier to accept that I had been molested by the alcoholic babysitter in the basement, because that wasn’t my fault. There was no decision I made, that made that jerk want to go after a little girl. I had no complicity in that at all. But decisions I’ve made as an adult? I want so much to bring up a list of excuses for why those decisions were not my fault. I can tell you that every relationship decision I made as a young adult was directly impacted by the unknown memories of what happened to me as a child, the unknown trauma that I had gone through. And even knowing that, it was still hard for me t

TRANSCRIPT   Thanks for joining us again on Like Driving in Fog: an emotional healing podcast I’m Mary Young, and the topic for this episode is “check your motivation.” You know, we all have reasons for everything we do, but we don’t always know what those reasons are. And sometimes, even though we don’t know it, reasons are buried in our past. So we need to check our motivation. We need to ask ourselves why. Why could be the second most important question you ask yourself. I said in an earlier episode that the most important question is “what does a healthier me look like?” the second most important question is why? Why am I doing this? Why am I feeling this? Why am I acting this way?----more---- Check your motivation. This has been my mantra for my entire healing journey. Why am I behaving the way I am? Why am I reacting the way I am? This ties in perfectly with the last episode when we talked about the chameleon effect. If you remember, the chameleon effect is when you bury yourself and try to be what somebody else wants you to be, so that you can be liked or loved or fit in or whatever. I was talking to somebody this past week and they said that chameleon thing is so confusing, because sometimes you just go along with people because you’re being polite. That’s true. I personally am not a big fan of the TV show Survivor, but I used to watch it with a friend of mine because she liked it and I was being friendly. But the motivation is the important part.  Why was I watching Survivor? To be friendly. On the other hand, why did I say Nicholas Sparks and Pat Conroy were my favorite authors when they really weren’t?  That was the chameleon effect. I wanted to fit in. I wanted to be liked by this other person. If you are staying true to yourself, then you can’t possibly be a chameleon. But if you are surrendering your own identity, then something is wrong. So check your motivation. Now, I’m not saying go be an asshole. I will still go to somebody else’s choice for a dinner restaurant. You know, I’ll offer my suggestions, but if they want someplace else and it’s a place where I like the food, I’ll go. That’s not being a chameleon. That’s being polite. On the other hand, if I started saying “oh no, I hate this restaurant because this other person hated the restaurant, or if I started treating my friends differently because the other person didn’t like my friends, that could be being a chameleon. That’s what you want to watch out for, and that’s why it’s so important to check your motivation. Checking your motivation is so much more than just “are you being a chameleon,” or “are you being polite.” My therapist and I have this particular conversation on a regular basis. She’ll say: “Mary, why are you reacting so strongly to that? Because honestly, it doesn’t warrant the reaction you’re giving it.” And I’m all “but...yeah...yeah, it does!” And she’s like “no, really, it doesn’t.” We have that conversation because there are still times when I will react strongly to something happening right now, that’s actually triggering feelings from my childhood. And so my therapist has taught me to check my motivation. To ask myself why.  When I am reacting really strongly to something, and Tracy doesn’t think it even deserves a reaction, that will be her question. What’s really going on with this? What is it linked to in your childhood or your past? And usually if I take the time to sit down and ponder, I will find a linkage. it hit my hot button of feeling ignored it hit my hot button of you can’t do that because you’re a woman it hit my hot button of we changed the rules midstream it hit my hot button of I never fit in, Or nobody ever listened to anything I had to say. But the only way you will ever be able to find out any of that kind of stuff is if you take the time to know yourself. And I’ve got to tell you...as survivors, it is so much easier not to do that. I was talking to my grandma one time after my grandpa died. I actually as

TRANSCRIPTI still remember a time in college when I told a friend that I was sad or depressed, and her answer was “I’m sorry,” or “I wish you weren’t sad or depressed.” to which I responded “I’m sorry. how do you want me to be?”Her reply was: "I just want you to feel what you’re really feeling, or be who you really are.” And I had absolutely no idea how to do that, because all I knew how to do was be a chameleon. I’m Mary Young. Thanks for joining us on another episode of the Like Driving in Fog podcast. Today’s episode is talking about what I like to call the Chameleon Effect. So what is the chameleon effect, and what does that have to do with emotional healing or emotional health? Well, the  chameleon effect is the tendency that some of us have to be whatever the people around us want us to be; to feel whatever the people around us, or however the people around us want us to feel, instead of acknowledging our own feelings. We paste on a smile, or instead of being happy we pretend to be sad. Whatever we have to do to fit in with the people that we’re with. To be loved by the people that we want to be loved by; to be accepted by the people from whom we need acceptance. It could be feelings or it could be behavior. Either way. But any time that you are not being your own authentic, true self, then you’re being a chameleon. That explains what a chameleon is, but why are we chameleons? What brought us to this point of wanting to be anything other than who we truly are? There are probably as many answers as there are people listening to this podcast, because each one of us is unique and therefore each one of us has our own unique reasons for doing things; reasons for behaving certain ways. For me it goes back to childhood. I didn’t know it growing up, but one entire side of my family was alcoholic. And sometimes when I ponder it, I think that I became a chameleon just trying to survive life with that half of the family. Then again, growing up I never felt like I fit in with the neighborhood kids, with the school kids, with my classmates, so maybe I became a chameleon to try to fit in with them. I remember never feeling like I knew what I was supposed to be doing, or how I was supposed to be behaving, and so I would take my cues from the people around me and act like they did or behave like they did. But along the way, trying so hard to fit in, I lost me. And then we get to that point in college where I’m 20 years old and my friend says “I just want you to be yourself,” and the only answer I had was “I don’t know who that is. I don’t know how to do that.” it’s not something I had ever done before, and saying that makes me sad. There are so many different emotions inside me right now as I’m thinking about that conversation with my friend, and that reality about me as a college student, and it’s just sad. I’m sad for the younger me that had never been encouraged to find out who I was, what I thought, what I believed. Instead I had been encouraged to think like the family did, behave like the family did, do what they told me to do. And I had never been encouraged just to take time to figure out who I was, and what did I really want, or how did I really feel, or what really mattered to me. And I lived my life like that for decades. I don’t want you to do that. I don’t want anybody to be a chameleon because they think they have to fit in order to be loved. I want people to be free to figure out who they are, and what they think, and what they believe, and how they really feel about something, instead of being told by somebody else how they should behave, or what they should think, or how they should feel. And I gotta tell you... sometimes it’s hard figuring that stuff out, but I will take the real me over the chameleon any day the week. I remember back in my freshman year in college, I did a lot of writing back then. That was how I processed things. And a lot of what I wrote was poetry, and I remember writing a free-form p

TRANSCRIPT Hi and thanks for joining us again on Like Driving in Fog: an Emotional Healing Podcast. I’m Mary Young, and I wanted to talk today about my own emotional healing journey. You know, the tagline on the Facebook page says “the emotional healing journey can feel like you’re driving in fog. But you’re not alone.” and so I wanted to use today to talk about the fact that you’re not alone; that I really do know what this journey is like. To be totally honest, I don’t want to have this conversation at all. This conversation is uncomfortable for me, which is exactly why I’m doing it. Why is it uncomfortable? It’s uncomfortable for a variety of reasons.----more---- One is that I’m a private person, and I do not tend to share this with people anymore. Back when it was brand-new, when I was first going through it, I couldn’t stop talking about it. I would tell anybody and their brother exactly what I was going through. Now? I keep quiet about it for the most part.  But if I keep quiet about it, you won’t know that you’re not alone. I didn’t always know that I needed an emotional healing journey. I didn’t even know that’s what I was on when I was on it. What I did know was that I needed people a lot more than they needed me. I was always looking for somebody to validate me; my existence, my ideas. Somebody to be like. I mentioned being a chameleon in episode 27, and that described me. I still remember the time a friend from college asked me how I was, and I said something like I’m a little sad or I’m a little depressed. Her reply -- very caring, very heartfelt -- was I wish you weren’t depressed or something like that. And my only response to that was I’m sorry how do you want me to be? Because that was the way I lived my life. You tell me how you wanted me to be or who you wanted me to be, and that’s what I would do so that I could be your friend. And I never knew why I was like that. I never knew why I never felt like I fit in. I never knew why I was terrified at the thought of dating. I know that I was quick to anger, and that there was a lot of pent-up anger inside me that I didn’t know where it came from but it wouldn’t take very much for it to kick out. I was passive-aggressive. I lived in fear. I walked in fear. I was always afraid that something was going to happen. I didn’t trust people because they weren’t trustworthy, but I didn’t know why I thought that. I knew how to cope. I knew that I could push stuff away and not think about it, because that’s how I was taught to do. And I learned the hard way that eventually that would come back out and insist that you look at it. But it was years later that I looked at it. Another strong memory from college is we watched a film in a class, and the film showed the life of an alcoholic family from the perspective of the kindergartner. And I sat in this class, and I watched my life on the screen. Memories that I had totally forgotten were being played out in front of the classroom for people to see. When the film was over, I lasted maybe five more minutes in the classroom, clenching my jaw, gritting my teeth, trying to breathe. And then I bolted for the door. Happily, the restroom was right across the hallway. I locked myself in a stall, and I cried uncontrollably. I called my mom that weekend, and said I watched this film in class and it brought back memories. And I told her what the film was about, and her immediate response, in very harsh tones: are you saying we were alcoholic? And being a good little chameleon, I said no, I am saying maybe we might have had some problems with drinking. Because keeping the peace in the family was most important thing. I am here to tell you keeping the peace in the family is not the most important thing. Healing yourself...being healed...being healthy is the most important thing. And if that means that you have to tell the family the truth, then you tell the family the truth. Now, I say that and I sound really passionate when I say

TRANSCRIPT   Thanks for joining us today on Like Driving in Fog: an emotional healing podcast. I’m Mary Young, and today were talking about who are you really. Or as I was thinking this morning, going back to an old, old quiz show from the 50s and early 60s: will the real you please stand up? We are born with a personality. You can ask any parent of babies or small children, and they will tell: you this baby was different from that baby from the get-go. That essence of who we are stays with us for entire life, but life circumstances, family upbringing, other people’s expectations can impact how much of that inner essence we actually share. This feels really complicated the way that I’m saying it, but it’s really not. I’m just not finding the right words so let me try a different way. There’s a Facebook meme going around that has a picture of a coffee cup, and the meme talks about if you’re holding a cup of coffee and somebody bumps into you and you spill it, what do you spill? Well, you spill coffee because that’s what’s in the cup. So turning that into human beings instead of cups of coffee...when something happens to you and you react, you react based on what you have inside you. And the reason I’m thinking about all this today is because yesterday I went to a service described as a Celebration of Life for a 15-year-old young man who lost his life right before Christmas. I talked about that in my Christmas episodes actually: Sometimes There Are No Answers, and There’s Always Hope. At the same time that I was preparing to go to Reed’s Celebration of Life, my Facebook memories popped up a meme from a couple years ago with a quote from Buddha. And the quote said the trouble is we think we have time. We don’t have time. We are not promised anything other than the moment that we are currently living in. we don’t know that we will be here tomorrow, or an hour from now. And yet, we spend a large part of our life trying to be what somebody else wants us to be, or what somebody else has dictated we should be. This works in a lot of different areas...think about people who go to college. Mom and dad are paying for the education, so they get a degree that mom and dad want them to have, even if it’s not what they want to do with their life. We need to stop letting other people define us. We need to define ourselves. It’s not easy, because we have been conditioned to let other people define us. We have been conditioned to believe that that’s who we are. I’m the youngest. I’m scatterbrained. I’m lazy. I suck at math. I don’t have street smarts, I only have book smarts. Most of what I just said to you is stuff that has been said to me over the course of my life, especially over my childhood. Some of this is not a big deal, but some of this is huge. My question for you is who are you really? Will the real you please stand up? What does the real you look like? Who are you? What matters to you? What are your likes and dislikes? What are your strengths and weaknesses? How much of your current description of yourself was given to you by somebody else? Does it actually fit your reality today? Part of the reason that this is on my mind is because at Reed’s service yesterday, his family was sharing memories. And for only being 15 years old, they had a lot of memories to share. But what came through over and over and over again was his absolute zest for life; his joy in living; his bigger than his face smile. And I couldn’t help thinking what a wonderful way to be remembered. When his family thinks about him for the next 30 years, they’re going to remember that he was always smiling, he was always helping, he was always joyful, that he loved life and he loved people, and he loved making a difference in people’s lives. Guys, this is a great way to be remembered, I don’t care how old you are. years ago, I asked myself how do I want to be remembered, and once I had that answer, then the next question was what do I have to do to make sure

TRANSCRIPT Happy New Year, and thanks for joining us on the very first-ever episode of Like Driving in Fog. This is an emotional healing podcast, related to all things dealing with emotional healing, and the emotional healing journey that you might be on. my name’s Mary Young and I am so glad you came to listen today, while this is episode number one of Like Driving in Fog, it is actually episode number 26 of my podcast. The podcast has been around since last August, originally called Lessons from Life.----more----  I figured the new year was a great time to have a new name since, I had decided to change the name. And I wanted to take this off cycle episode to talk a little bit about why I was changing the name; what you can expect from this podcast; and why you might be interested in listening to this podcast. It seemed to me that the best way to do that would be to simply bring up what I thought were the pertinent questions that other people might have, and tackle those questions. So we’ll start with the obvious one: why change the name? What was wrong with Lessons from Life? To begin with, the purpose of the podcast has changed since I started it last August. When I started Lessons from Life podcast, it was to be just a hodgepodge of topics; things that I’ve experienced over the years, lessons I’ve learned from that. but as I worked on it, and as I created episodes, I found the episodes that I cared most about -- the episodes where I had the most passion, were the ones where I talked about things I had learned on my emotional healing journey. So roundabout October, I repurposed the podcast to be an emotional healing podcast, and let that be the primary focus rather than just a hodgepodge. Once I had done that, and as I started looking at other podcast names out there, Lessons from Life was too hard for people to find. There are so many other podcasts and blogs and Facebook pages out there that have life and lessons in the name. On top of which, I have said for years that the best description for me, the best allegory of an emotional healing journey, is driving in fog. You can’t see where you’re going, you’re not sure where the road’s going, if you’re even on the road. You don’t even know if anybody else is on the road with you. No choice looks good. I can choose to stop, but I might get hit by somebody else who’s driving in fog. I can choose to continue; it’s not gonna be a very fun trip, but I gotta make some kind of choice. I can just sit there behind the wheel going I don’t know what to do. So to me, the emotional healing journey is a lot Like Driving in Fog. when I was running podcast names by other friends, trying to decide should I change the name, and what should I change the name to, somebody said: why don’t you just call it the emotional healing podcast, since that’s what it’s about. And I thought about it. There’s pros and cons to both names. Logically speaking, the emotional healing podcast makes all kinds of sense, because people will immediately know what I’m talking about when they’re searching. Even if they don’t know exactly what kind of podcast it is, they can find it with no problem. But emotionally speaking, that name does nothing for me. Whereas Like Driving in Fog puts a picture in my brain as soon as I hear it, and reminds me of all the times I’ve driven on foggy roads. You know, sometimes the fog was light just a bare haze. Other times, it was so dense that I wasn’t even sure I was on the road. That then reminded me of the immense relief that I felt when I got out of the fog, or when the fog lifted. On top of that, I love the concept of fog as a metaphor or an allegory. Because when you are on an emotional healing journey, as I’ve been on for over 20 years now, it is so easy to beat yourself up. Oh my gosh! I just did something codependent again. I thought I was done being codependent. Oh my gosh! I just made another bad decision. Oh darn, that bad decision I made five years ago is still h

TRANSCRIPT   It’s New Year’s Eve here on the Lessons From Life podcast, which means this is the absolute last episode of the Lessons From Life podcast. I’m Mary Young. Thanks for joining us. as we move from the old year to the new year, from the end of one month to a new month, I’m thinking about transitions, and I’m thinking about change, and I’m thinking about how many times I’ve reinvented myself in my life. I’m also thinking about how this podcast has been reinvented. When I started this in late August, I was just going to be talking about whatever came to mind, but as I worked on it I found that the episodes where I had the most passion were the episodes where I talked about emotional healing and my personal healing journey. That is why effective tomorrow, January 1, the name is changing to Like Driving in Fog: an Emotional Healing Podcast. Some people would say “Mary, you should’ve thought of that before you started creating the podcast. Now you’re changing the name four months into it.”  I say that just proves that we can change any time. I started on what I thought was the right road. It was the right road for me at the time. I made the best decision I could at the time, with the information that I had. As I travel down that road in this case, the podcasting road, I realized that I wanted to go a different direction. And that’s okay. I think back to when I started college. I went to college in 1978 to become an English teacher and eventually a guidance counselor, and by my second year in college I realized I did not want to be an English teacher. I still wanted to be involved in counseling somehow, but I did not want to be an English teacher and so I dropped that major. I’ve lost track of how many majors I had while I was in college...there were 4 or 5, and the thing is there’s nothing wrong with that. We do not have to pick one path when we are 18 and stay there for the rest of our life. We just don’t have to do that. We live in a world of possibilities, and we can take advantage of all those possibilities. We do not have to stay in the same town that we grew up in. we do not have to stay in our parents’ house our entire lives. We are not trapped by our present or past. One of the best quotes I ever came across during my healing journey says you may not be able to change your past but you can always change your future. What’s gone behind us is behind us. Some people never look back. I look back periodically just so I can see how far I’ve come. You can reinvent yourself. You can evolve. You can change. You can change your hairstyle, you can change your college major, you can change your career choice, your location... most importantly you can change your attitude. This is big stuff you guys, and we don’t realize sometimes how important that freedom to change really is, and what a difference it can make in our lives. I would encourage everybody to spend time this holiday season just sitting and thinking about who you are, where you are, what you’re doing with your life. Is this really what you want to do? Do you like the person that you are? If you don’t, what would it take for you to become a person that you like? And this is not just a one-time thing you guys. I had this conversation with myself... I tend to do it every year, but I’m trying to think back. Probably the first one for me was when I had just gotten out of the military, so I was 30-ish and had no job. One of my college friends had just been named woman of the year for her community. I looked at her accomplishment and I looked at my not having a job and I had a choice. I could sit there and cry, or I could sit there and figure out what being successful meant to me. And I decided that I didn’t care if I was ever named woman of the year. That was not my personal definition of success. My definition of success is the people around me -- how I interact with the people around me, being able to look myself in the mirror and like who I am, being able t