00:00 

Hey there, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 139, "Being a Martyr." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:20 

Alright, hello there, my friends. How you doing today? So happy to be with you as always. I enjoy this time that we get to spend together and I enjoy the time that I have to prepare this material for you, to think about things that are happening in my life, to think about things that could help you and bless you hopefully in your lives as well, and figure out a way to share it in a way that will help it to hit home with you. And help it to make sense of how you can incorporate these kinds of concepts and ideas into your own life and move into a better space and start having more of the experience that you want to have in life. 

01:01 

Alright, so today's topic being a martyr. Okay, I have to tell you, this is one of my favorites because I have seen martyrdom behavior in myself many times over the years and the reason why this came up for me is today is two days after the Super Bowl. So I'm a couple weeks out on these and I remembered an experience that I had in the Super Bowl several years ago when I was still married and it was in those last couple years when things were pretty pretty tough. But I wanted to share this experience because I think it shows how easy it is to put ourselves in a place of being a martyr to become that victim, right? And I want you to see it from my point of view and I have a couple of other experiences that that I want to share as well. 

02:01 

But let's talk first about the definition of martyr. So I look this up and this says "victim or a great or constant sufferer." Someone who, I'm gonna give this my own definition, like "a professional sufferer. Someone who loves to be in the role of victim, who loves to feel that." Now I'm gonna tell you being a victim doesn't feel good, but it kind of does. There is a place of being a victim that makes us feel very satisfied. Like, "see how horrible my life is. Everybody should look at me." And it's easy to get in the space where we think that that feels good. Alright? But there are other times that it feels like crap. Like being that victim or just like what is going on. "I hate this," right? And it's really tricky because sometimes it does feel really good. I think we're more in the middle of it. We feel very justified. We feel very vindicated. We feel like, "look at this," when we're being this martyr. And then when it's over, we oftentimes feel like we just ate three Thanksgiving dinners back to back, right? We feel sick to our stomach. We just feel like, "what did I just do?" And I wanna share one other thing with you. So at the thesaurus, these are other words that go along with being a martyr. We agonize, anguish, hurt, pain, stab, sting, ring. Okay, oh, very much painful, more negative kind of words. Words that would fit on the more difficult side of life. Okay, so here we go. 

03:47 

So this is what reminded me of this topic and that I wanted to do a podcast on it. So several years ago, Super Bowl. Alright, so my birthday is the first week of February. I just had it. Turned 53 and feeling better than ever, by the way. Okay, so in my family, we always celebrated birthdays on the Sunday closest to the birthday because weekdays, especially when your kids get older and my former husband was in the military and so he was gone a lot and worked late nights. And so we always just celebrated our birthdays on Sunday. Well, having a first-week-of-February birthday, my birthday has fallen four years on Super Bowl Sunday. So this is what happened this particular year. 

04:46 

Now, I had my former husband loved to watch football and loved to watch the Super Bowl. If you're even a partial football fan, you always watch the Super Bowl, right? And I used to when I was younger and more newly married. I hit a point where I started to get a really bad attitude toward football because it seemed to take over our lives. And so by this point, I just had a really bad attitude toward football, but it was my birthday. So usually on our birthday, we make everybody's favorite dinner, we would make them their favorite dessert, and nobody had asked me what my favorite dinner was, what my favorite dessert was, my kids were still young enough that they weren't really aware that mom has feelings and ideas and thoughts  and desires. 

05:36 

So anyway, we get home from church and my former husband and my two older boys, who were older teenagers at the time, went downstairs and started watching the Super Bowl. And of course, I was hungry and had a bad attitude against football, so I wasn't going to go down and watch it and spend time with them. So I start to play the martyr. I start to step into this, "oh my gosh, it's my birthday. It's the day that we're supposed to celebrate and all they want to do is watch football." So I started feeling sorry for myself. I started creating all of this drama in my mind. Well, one of the things that I decided to do with this drama was to make my own birthday dinner. So, I made me a great dinner. I made me a great dessert. And at the time I would have told you I wasn't doing this, but looking back I know definitely what I was doing. I was doing all of this on purpose. 

06:36 

So dinner was ready in the middle of the Super Bowl. Obviously, right? And so I make this this yummy dinner, this great dessert, and in the middle of the Super Bowl I holler downstairs and I say, "hey, dinner's ready." Okay, they love football. They love the Super Bowl, and I make dinner in the middle. Alright. I was doing this subconsciously, but on purpose, to show what a desperate life that I had. Alright, I was trying to be a victim. I was intentionally seeking out to be a victim in this particular instance. I was so desperate to have my voice heard. I was so desperate to be seen and so I started to create my own misery because when I call people up to have dinner in the middle of the Super Bowl, obviously the three of those men did not want to come up and they did not come up. And so my girls and I sat upstairs and we had my birthday dinner with just us and I got more and more resentful. I got more and more angry. I felt more and more the victim, right? Because nobody loves me. It's my birthday. I had to make my own birthday dinner. I had to make my own birthday dessert and then nobody will come up. 

08:06 

Alright, so look what I was doing. Alright, so I found that when I have put myself in these situations of being a martyr, I often revert into some very passive aggressive behavior. And if you look at what I was doing, it was very passive aggressive, right? I was, and definition for that I looked that up, it says "behavior that is characterized by the expression of negative feelings, resentment, and aggression in an unassertive passive way." Alright, so this is what happens. I did not ask for what I wanted and I just expected everybody to know. I expected them to know because that was the pattern we'd had in our family, but it was also the Super Bowl. And I did not take into the considerations of my former husband and my two older teenage boys. I did not take into account the fact that I knew that they were going to watch the Super Bowl, that they would want to. And I was putting myself in this victim place of "nobody loves me." Right? "They love football more than they love me." I was seeking really to one-up myself, to put myself on this moral higher ground and to prove that I was better than, not my boys, better than my ex-husband, my former husband. 

09:31 

So this was just probably three or four years before the divorce happened, but things were already pretty bad. Now, I'm not going to excuse the fact that these men in my life made no plans to help celebrate my birthday, blah, blah, blah. That's all that. Okay? That's a whole other discussion. But what coaching is about is it is about not blaming, but rather taking responsibility for our own behaviors, our own thoughts, our own feelings and figuring out for me what was going on. Okay? So were there other issues at play here having to do with my former husband? I mean, whatever. Yes, for sure, probably. Okay? But coaching is about looking at me, not looking at somebody else and trying to change their behavior, but about 100% taking responsibility for me. 

10:33 

So as I look at this situation, I see that the responsibility that I did not take was one, having clear expectations of what I wanted my birthday to look like. And two, I was not taking into consideration what they would want on a Super Bowl Sunday. And to be honest, I knew what they wanted. They wanted to watch the Super Bowl, and had I prepared dinner for after that they would have come up and celebrated my birthday and it all would have been good, right? But I was putting myself in this victim place. I was choosing and wanting to be the martyr because the martyr made me a victim and that felt really good to be able to say, "see, I'm better than. See, nobody loves me." It created this space for me. 

11:24 

Alright, so here is another example of one of my friends and she has given me permission to share this. So I love this story because I think it's a great example of another example of how we, as women, very often will put ourselves in a martyrdom  position and become the martyr. Martyrship, is that what you call it? We do this often times and I want you to start thinking about your own times that you may or may not have done this now This may not be an issue for you. But I think for a lot of women it kind of is, okay? So here's my friend and she was telling a story that one night she and her husband, who was in a presidency at church, one of one of the organizations they had, the presidency come over to their house and they had a barbecue and they had this this big thing go. 

12:21 

Well, once all of them had left, there was a big mess. There were dishes all over, there was trash all over, chairs needed to be put away, blah blah blah. Okay, so she gets started cleaning and her husband goes in and sits down on the sofa and starts scrolling on his phone and catching up on things there, and my friend is cleaning up. She's gathering all the dishes and she keeps looking at her husband and thinking "what is he doing? Why isn't he helping? What is happening here?" Right, and she's starting to have all of these thoughts that "this isn't fair. He's not doing it," right? And she starts to feel all of this resentment and all of this anger. Here's what's interesting...rather than saying something and saying, you know, "honey, it's important that we get this all cleaned up. Will you please come and help," and she says "had I asked him? He would have gone, 'Oh my gosh. I didn't even realize you were cleaning up. Yes for sure I'm going to come help.' He would have been very willing to help." And yet she did not ask. 

13:29 

And it's fascinating that as we were talking about this experience and processing it one morning, that she realized at the time that she was not asking on purpose. Alright, so she was trying to be the martyr. In fact, not only was she not asking...she said that she actually started to do the dishes very quietly. She wasn't banging stuff around. She was trying to make it so that her husband did not notice that she was doing the dishes and getting things cleaned up because if he didn't notice she could play this "better than" card. She could play this martyrdom card of "look at me. I'm the victim. My life is so hard and you're just sitting there on your phone." Right, so we've got this place of wanting to be a martyr on purpose, like it gives us this false sense of importance, this false sense of "I'm better than," which is never a good place to get into, right? But she wanted to prove that she was better than her husband. 

14:43 

Alright, so this is something that's pretty fascinating about how our primitive brain works. Our primitive brain wants to prove that we are right. It will seek to succumb to our insecurities and it wants to seek validation. So in both my friend's experience and my experience, we were both seeking validation in being a victim. "I am better than," that's the kind of validation that we were seeking. So remember that our primitive brain works off of a motivational triad. So that means that one, our primitive brain seeks to avoid pain. Second, it seeks to seek pleasure. And third, it seeks to conserve energy. And it will do this even with false ideas. So we really have to start learning to pay attention to our brain and really try and figure out what's going on with our brain here, okay? 

15:39 

In this particular instance, in my situation and in my friend's situation, our primitive brain was trying to seek pleasure, the false pleasure of feeling like a victim, of feeling like we are "better than," okay? And these create some very unhealthy patterns and processes, especially as we tend to do it over and over and over. And it's so easy to fall prey to this idea of wanting to prove that we are "better than," especially once we start feeling anger or resentment or frustration, it's so easy to fall into this place, okay? 

16:19 

Now, another reason why I think it's so easy is because we have seen examples of women all around us doing this. I think of movies that I've watched, where the woman becomes the martyr. I think of TV shows and possibly even your own mother. I don't think my mother did that very much. In fact, I can't even remember my mother engaging in that kind of behavior. She was pretty loving and pretty low-key, but I know that I saw friends' mothers do that or my friends would talk about their mother and what their mother was doing or I've seen other women do it. So I know that I'm not alone in being a martyr. And I will tell you, my friend is one of the most Christlike, loving people that I know, and yet she catches herself sometimes wanting to move into this space of being a martyr. 

17:08 

And what does that achieve for us? Does it create the result that we want in life? If we want healthier, happier relationships, the answer to that question is "absolutely not!" That type of passive aggressive behavior, that moving into this space of  being a victim, all it does is break down our relationships because it destroys communication. It does not create connection. In fact, it creates a divide. So a lot of times what we are trying, what we want so desperately, is to have a better relationship. And yet we're approaching it from a place of fear. And because we're approaching it from a place of fear, we end up doing all the things that actually do the opposite of what we want to create. Right? I know that for me, when I was doing my Super Bowl Sunday birthday dinner fiasco, I was wanting so desperately to be seen. I was wanting so desperately to be heard. I was wanting so desperately to have a connection. And yet I was creating anger in my heart. I was creating resentment. I was creating frustration and all of those things break down connection. They destroy connection. They are not communicating. They're breaking down my relationship. So what I wanted going into it because of how I went into it, I created the exact opposite. I destroyed relationships instead. So it's fascinating that we're seeking to be seen and to be heard, but our behavior creates exactly the opposite. 

18:55 

Okay, I'm going to share one more example. Now, this is an example that I found on Facebook in a Facebook group. And I do not know this person. And I want to put this out here as an example. Now, I'm not judging this person. I mean, obviously, you just heard my really great story about myself. So you know that I know that we do this. This is what we do. But what I'm trying to give you are different examples so that you might be able to see if you are engaging in this behavior in your life. And if so, you can stand back and take a look at it. Okay, so this is a post that somebody put on and I just want to share this with you quick. So this particular woman wrote, "How do you handle picky eaters? Every time I cook, me and my husband end up in a fight (like he leaves mad at me) because he doesn't like anything I cook. Today, I made chili, and he made me pick the tomatoes out, and was very ugly about it. I don't want to feed my family fast food every night, but that seems to be the only way to keep them happy. I can't handle fighting about onions, tomatoes, broccoli, or whatever vegetable it is at odds with him that night." 

20:16 

Okay, and I will tell you that there were 162 comments here, and all of them, like my first response to this was, "oh my gosh." Right? He was making her pick out the tomatoes, and she did it, and so I got really, really in a place where I just thought, "her husband's a jerk. Like, what is his problem," right? And I'm going to say that obviously, that's all I know. I know none of the specifics. But looking at the patterns, my first response was very much to think her husband was a horrible person. So ornery. And then about 15 minutes later, I was thinking about it still and I went, "oh my gosh, there's a whole other side to this." And I started to look at how this woman was playing the victim by stepping in to martyrdom. And I can tell you, just like I was probably very unaware of what's going on, there might be a level, I don't know...I know that for me there was a small little blurb at the bottom that was saying, "oh, martyr, martyr," but not enough that I was really paying attention to it. 

21:29 

So look, I just wanted to help you see how this woman was creating her own drama. What was she doing to create this issue? First of all, she was making food that she knows that her husband hates and then being angry that he didn't like it or wouldn't eat it. Okay. Now, are there other issues at play? Obviously. Does there seem to be some relationship communication, like general respect, blah, blah, blah. Yes, yes, yes. Okay. But again, what coaching is about is not looking at other people and blaming them or looking at what other people are doing. The whole point of why we do this coaching is to look at ourselves and to control what we can control, which is us. Alright. So this woman here, she cannot control her husband. Guess what? He's an adult. He doesn't want to eat vegetables. He doesn't have to eat vegetables. Right? She keeps making this food that she knows that he doesn't like and even hates. And then she's angry when he doesn't jump up and down and say, "oh dear, thank you for this lovely meal." 

22:46 

So, what could she learn to see about herself? What could she learn to see about her thoughts and about her behaviors? Maybe she could see that maybe intentionally or unintentionally, she is choosing foods that she knows her husband is not going to eat. Or what if she has an option to make just enough for her and not enough for him? She doesn't really talk about kids here, but she does say picky eaters. So, that make you think that, maybe, and then she says she doesn't want to feed her family. So, she could have kids, although I don't know that for sure, right? But here she is making food that she knows nobody's going to like and then she gets angry when nobody likes it. Have I done that one? Yes, I have. Okay. When I was younger, I used to make meatloaf and nobody liked it and then I would get angry that nobody would eat the meatloaf, right? And I knew nobody liked it. Why do we do this? Like, what's going on? 

23:53 

This is what we get to figure out when we coach. Coaching ourselves or working with a coach is all about trying to figure out "why did I do that? I wonder why I made food that I knew everybody hated and then got angry when nobody ate it." Like, what are we trying to see? This is what is so fascinating about coaching to me, is it puts us in this place of really trying to discover who we are, what we're motivated by, why we do the things that we do. And the more we understand this, the more we can take responsibility, the more we can step into control in our own lives and the more we can choose to have a different experience if we want to. Right? 

24:47 

Okay, so what about you? As we've talked about this, I'm wondering if there are experiences in your own life that have come up for you that you've gone, "oh, oh, look, I can see that I've done the same thing." Alright, have you had anything come up in your head? I think it's a pretty natural man kind of response to want to do this. So I would be surprised if you had never done anything like this just because I think that it's people, but maybe it's just because it's me and I've done it enough that I can see this behavior being pretty normal for me. Maybe you don't see it in you at all. If so, kudos my friend. Good for you. But I think that probably a larger percent of us have seen this kind of behavior. So ask yourself, what's going on here? Take a good, hard look at yourself. 

25:40 

Can I tell you what? It's difficult. It's scary. It can be painful to start looking at these things. I know the first time that I stood back, and this was a couple of years after my divorce, when I was looking at something along these lines and I remembered that experience from my birthday in the Super Bowl and I was like, "Oh, oh, like look what I just created. Look what I was doing there." I don't know that at the time I was consciously aware of doing that at a high level anyway, but I could look back and I could see that I did it. So it really gave me a chance to look at why I was doing it. 

26:23 

Now our primitive brain doesn't want to look at it because our primitive brain is always trying to protect us from pain. It's trying to avoid pain, right? And in trying to avoid pain, it doesn't want to look at these things. And this is where we really have to engage our prefrontal cortex. We have to say, "listen, I want to see it. I want to see what's not working." Remember we did the podcast a couple of months ago on exploring our darkness, right? This is what we're doing here. We're exploring the dark parts that our primitive brain wants to go, "No, no, no, no, no I don't see you. I don't see you. La la la la la," right? Our primitive brain doesn't want to look at it, It doesn't want to see it, but the only way that we can progress and move forward is to engage our prefrontal cortex and choose on purpose to see it. We have to choose to see what we don't want to see. We have to intentionally choose to see our faults, our weaknesses, and our hurtful behaviors. 

27:24 

This, my friends, is the work of coaching. And when we engage in this coaching, again, whether it be with me as your coach or somebody else as your coach or whether you're just doing the self-coaching thought models, that kind of stuff that I talked to you a lot about and really being self-reflective. What this does, this work of coaching, prepares us for a more honest life, a life filled with more integrity and more peace of mind. It is a life that helps us to experience what we want to experience here. It is preparing us to have the kind of life we want to have, to be the kind of person that we really want to be, a person that creates healthier relationships, a person who is more in love with ourselves because we're so grateful for the progress we're making. We're so grateful for the place that we're moving into. 

28:27 

I know that for me, the more I do this work, the more I desperately love myself and not any better than anybody else's way, but I really just have so much gratitude and so much appreciation for the difficult work that I am doing to understand myself better, to see my faults and my weaknesses better, to see my hurtful behaviors and patterns better so that I can make adjustments. I've learned to be so much more compassionate with myself and my love for myself has truly increased. Coaching has the ability to give you that gift: the gift of more self-love, the gift of more self-compassion, the gift of more gratitude for who you are. And this is what we get to do when we do this work. For me, this has been a huge piece of growing up and this is why I love growing up so much. Because I'm moving more into the person that I really want to be and I'm starting to experience life at a level that I always dreamed of experiencing life at but I had no idea how to do it. The difference is learning to look at my dark side, learning to see the things that are keeping me from showing up how I want to show up. 

30:03 

Okay, this is a process. Some of you can do this on your own and some of you are far along the path. Kudos. Good for you. If you are someone who's just like "whoa, whoa, whoa, that's a little overwhelming. I don't even know where to start. I'm too scared to look at those dark places. I don't want to go there," let's talk. Please, please, please. You do not have to spend your whole life fighting through this on your own. You invest the time, the energy, the money right now. You are looking at 20, 30, 40 good years ahead of you of being in a healthier space, a happier space, a space with more peace and more integrity and more honesty. We don't have to live our lives with this disconnect. We don't have to live our lives in hurtful, angry relationships. We don't have to feel disconnected to everybody around us. We can move into these better spaces. 

31:09 

If you need some help, please, please, please go to tanyahale.com. Find the "contact me" button. Get on my calendar. I would love to see you on my calendar so that I can see you then on Zoom. I would love to talk to you about how coaching can help you move into this better space and have more of the experience in life that you want to have. I know that I can help you. This is what I do. I am trained to do this. I have practiced doing this. I am a professional life coach. This is what I do. I help you get to a better space. So contact me if you need some help. Alright. If you have not yet subscribed, subscribe to this podcast. You never miss an excellent episode like this, right? Leave me a review and share this with your friends. There's so much good stuff here. Share, share, share away. Alright. Let's get this information out to people so that we can all, friends and family, start moving into these better places together. Because if we're all doing this work, can you imagine if more people in your life were doing this work, how your world would change? How much healthier and happier things could be. So share this information. My friends, that is going to do it for me. Thank you for being here today. Love you being here. Love you spending this time with me. and I wish you all the best and I will see you next week. Bye. 

32:46 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.