Landy Peek (00:35)
Welcome back to the Landy Peak podcast. This is your friend and host, Landy Peak, and I am really excited for the conversation today. So let me ask you something. Have you ever said, I'm fine, I'm just tired, when what was really going on was you felt like you were unraveling? What you really wanted to say was, I'm just done. I can't do this anymore. But I don't know how to say it without sounding ungrateful.
for the life that I do have. Have you ever looked at your life, your home, your job, your people and whispered, I have so much to be thankful for? While some quiet part of you feels completely numb or is silently screaming.
Have you ever caught yourself minimizing what you feel just because other people have it worse? If so, You're not dramatic and you're definitely not the only one. You've been praised for being grateful while quietly turning down what's going on inside of you. And today,
We're calling it out in a space of love. This episode is about the subtle but soul-splitting ways high-functioning women and humans confuse gratitude with guilt, with goodness, with being the strong one, and how that slowly becomes self-gaslighting. This isn't one more thing to fix. This is a mirror.
a reckoning, a return. So today, we're gonna dive into talking about guilt, gratitude, and gaslighting. We're gonna talk about how we got here and how you can come back to yourself.
You were never taught to honor your own system, your own enoughness. I mean, how often as humans, as women, as girls, as children, do we turn down our own physical symptoms of things going on? Basic biological functionings like I have to pee, I'm hungry.
I'm tired. Just think about going back to when you were in school. How many times did you hold it because it might not be the right time to go? Or the teacher said no one can ask to go to the bathroom? Or you felt uncomfortable or afraid to raise your hand and say, have to go.
How many times as an adult have you held it because it wasn't a good time to go? It might inconvenience someone else. It might draw attention to yourself because can't stand up in the middle of the meeting and walk out. How many times have you worked through your lunch hour or forgotten to eat breakfast because you just didn't have enough time?
So you turned down the hunger and went on about your day. How many times have you felt so exhausted that you can barely function, but you still show up and function with a smile on your face?
You were taught that we had to earn basic bodily rights. You had to earn the right to go pee, earn the right to go out and play, earn the right to eat. We had to work hard to do things. We had to be nice. We had to be quiet. We had to be helpful. And all with gratitude, that was this constant underlying current.
and it started to feel like or sound like a disclaimer before every sentence.
where we might say something like, I'm lucky. I know, but I shouldn't complain. mean, at least.
I want to say that's not gratitude.
Gratitude is incredibly powerful. And it is something that I truly believe is important in our lives. But somewhere along the line, our gratitude practice became a self gaslighting practice.
When we say things like, they have it worse, I should be grateful. I'm lucky, I know, I shouldn't complain, but that's emotional disassociation dressed up as grace. The world has taught us to be grateful, but it didn't teach us how to be honest. I've seen this in a really, really big way in the last couple of weeks.
My husband was in a car accident. And the amount of times that I have caught both of us.
downplaying our experience because it could have been worse.
where I had a really bad migraine and I found myself downplaying my own pain because it was a migraine. It wasn't the headaches that my husband was experiencing due to the car accident.
He has downplayed his own experience with pain and struggle because of a car accident because he walked away from the accident.
He's still here in this world. I had a client recently who was really struggling and I heard her gaslight her own experience because she knew someone who had died. And so she should be grateful that she was still alive. Our gratitude has turned into a weapon that we're using on ourselves. And I know this is a big statement.
So tune in to your own system.
Gratitude gives us a sense of moral high ground while we're quietly gaslighting ourselves into silence. But what makes this so complex is the rule of guilt Because we don't just suppress our truth, we feel guilty for even having it. We feel guilt for being exhausted.
for wanting space, for having desires that don't match what we're supposed to want, for the experiences that we're having, and that guilt becomes the fuel for our self-gaslighting. Guilt says, you're too much for asking this. So we say, I'll just be grateful. Here's what happens. You feel a desire, you feel guilt for having that desire, you use gratitude to overwrite it,
and then you gaslight yourself into silence. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Let me give you an example. So we talked about my migraines, right? So I say I have a headache. my gosh, my head hurts so bad. Right? This is something I typically would say in my marriage. Well, typically my husband's not recovering from a car accident. So when I say, ⁓ my gosh, my head hurts so bad, I instantly went to
my gosh, I'm so sorry I said that. I felt guilty for owning what I was experiencing. And so then I apologized. I wanted to override my own experience, meaning don't talk about my own headache because my husband has been experiencing chronic headaches.
And here's one day that I'm suffering.
My pain is no less because it's a different form of pain than my husband's experiencing.
but I downplayed it. But I caught myself using I'm so grateful so many times in this experience, guilt for having an experience of pain. And we do this to each other and to ourselves, and we do this to ourselves all of the time.
So let's break it down for our brilliant brains out there. Harvard Medical School confirms that gratitude reduces depression, rewires the brain towards optimism. It improves our mood, supports our resilience, and can even help with better sleep and lower inflammation. And that's real. And that's where we tie and want to bring in gratitude into our lives.
Gratitude does have a regulating effect on the nervous system. But here's the catch. Gratitude is not meant to replace our emotional reality. It's meant to coexist with it. When we use it like a bandage or a silencer, when we layer it over our very real experience of a grief,
of exhaustion, of disconnection, pain, it doesn't regulate the system. It suppresses it.
Peter Levine, the founder of somatic experiencing explains that trauma is what we hold inside when there is no witness, no context and no completion. So when you override a true emotional experience by forcing yourself to be grateful instead, that emotional energy doesn't disappear.
It gets trapped in the body, in our tissues, in our nervous system.
Self-gaslighting is a trauma-adapted behavior. It's the inner child learning to keep herself safe in a world where her bigness or her sadness or her anger felt unsafe. And what happens when we suppress instead of express? We either go numb or we explode, or we stay high-functioning on the outside.
while slowly falling apart on the inside. Sound familiar? This connects directly to the work of Brené Brown, and I love Brené Brown. She teaches that you cannot selectively numb. When you numb the grief, the shame, the disappointment, the pain, you numb the joy too.
You numb the vitality, the possibility, the real experience of aliveness. So gratitude, when forced, doesn't allow us to expand, it actually contracts us. And it's not that gratitude's the problem. The problem is in how we've been using it, how we've been conditioned to weaponize it.
Gratitude is a healing force when it flows from truth, not when it's used to cover it up.
There's nothing wrong with you for doing this. I do this too. I've just really become aware of it in the last little bit.
We're brilliantly conditioned by a culture that has taught us as women to value emotional suppression disguised as maturity. Just think about it.
We are rewarded for being mature, for taking the high road, for being grateful, for being strong.
gratitude is one of the earliest tools that we learned for survival. And honestly, it worked. And it still works. It keeps us safe. It keeps us small. We learned to share when we didn't want to share. We learned to say thank you when we really didn't want to.
We learned to say it's okay when we wanted to scream. That's not fair. Gratitude gave us a sense of moral high ground. We learned that when we were grateful, when we took the high road, that we were seen in a better light. Well, what was really happening?
was we were gaslighting ourselves.
We throw in the role of guilt and it increases the complexity of this conversation. As we look at guilt, gaslighting and gratitude, and they go hand in hand when we really wouldn't have thought so. Because we don't just suppress our truth, we feel guilty for even having it. I felt so guilty when I complained I had a headache.
and even apologize, my gosh, I shouldn't have said that. Because my husband was also struggling with a chronic headache, but his was from a car accident, mine was from hormones. I diminished and felt guilt for my pain because his pain seemed worse.
We feel guilty for being exhausted. We feel guilty for wanting space. We feel guilty for having desires that don't match what we're supposed to want. And that guilt, it becomes fuel for our self gaslighting. Here's the cycle. You have a need or a desire or an experience.
and then we share it or think it. And then we feel guilty for having it. And then we use gratitude to suppress it. And we gaslight ourselves into silence. And then we repeat it until our nervous system feels so burned out. Until your joy
is only on the outside. And our truth feels dangerous to feel. Guilt is not just an emotion. It's a control mechanism. It's the nervous system's way of trying to ensure belonging. Because when we were younger, showing too much need might lead to rejection. God, we don't want to be the clingy kid, and we don't want to have the clingy kid. Too much anger might cause conflict.
It wasn't well received at home. And when we have the kid that's throwing a tantrum, definitely don't want that. So we learned to feel guilty instead. We learned to self-regulate in a way that kept others comfortable, but made us disconnect from ourselves even more. Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, show that women are more likely than men to experience guilt
Especially in interpersonal relationships. This socialized tendency towards guilt correlates with higher rates of anxiety and internalized stress, which means the more we carry guilt, the more likely we are to silence our own needs. This is how self-gaslighting is born. Gaslighting?
Traditionally is a form of psychological manipulation where someone makes you question your own reality. But when you've internalized that manipulation, when you've been doing it to yourself, You become both the manipulator and the manipulated. High functioning women are masterful at self gaslighting.
because we've been praised for it. We say, shouldn't feel this way. It's not that bad. I'm being dramatic. Other people have it worse.
I can't tell you how many times since my husband's car accident I've said this.
Ugh, my migraine that literally took me out and made me throw up. Ugh, I feel like I'm just being overly dramatic. I don't have it that bad. My husband has it worse. He walked away from the car accident, which is incredible. We're so grateful. That's truth. We are.
but it could have been worse. And so we downplay the struggle because it could have been worse. Other people have it worse. And when we do that, we're really disconnecting from our own truth. We're overriding our experiences, our instincts. We shut down our nervous system's natural signals for help, for connection, for rest.
Self gaslighting is trauma logic. It's what happens when your system decides that safety depends on you fitting in. Depends more on your silence than your truth. It's the kind of gaslighting that earns you praise while your body quietly breaks down.
You learned to pair gratitude with silence because it made you easier to be around, The body doesn't forget what the mind suppresses. As Dr. Peter Levine teaches, trauma is what happens in the absence of an empathetic witness.
I'm gonna let that sit for a minute. Trauma is what happens in the absence of an empathetic witness. How many times in your life have you sat with someone when you're struggling who is an empathetic witness?
When you gaslight yourself, You abandon the parts of you that need to be seen the most.
Psychologists at the University of Michigan have shown that repeated self-invalidation, which is a form of self-gaslighting, leads to cognitive dissonance, increased cortisol levels, and long-term emotional dysregulation.
So when we're using our gratitude practice against ourselves to turn down our own experience, it just becomes another mask that we're wearing. And when it's integrated, it becomes a bridge, a resource, a way back into the body. So this is where I wanna pull it apart. Because when we're saying,
and turning down our own experiences. I should be so grateful. Somebody has it worse. It could have been worse.
We are turning down and tuning out from our own experience. But when we can actually integrate gratitude in the way that it is supposed to be used, intended to be used, used in a way that can help us heal and feel more expansive, then gratitude becomes that bridge. It is a resource. It is a way back into our own body. But we have to relearn how we're using it.
So one way to soften this is to acknowledge the part of you that is shut down was trying to protect you, right? If you go back to that little girl who didn't want to raise her hand to say she had to pee.
And she turned down the signals of, have to go to the bathroom in her own body. She was doing it to protect herself from something that felt even more uncomfortable. Maybe that was getting in trouble by the teacher. Maybe that was having all eyes on her as she had to raise her hand.
This is a very concrete example of what we do to ourselves all the time. She was trying to protect herself. It's not failure, it's wisdom. It's her body's signal saying, you know what? This is going to be the bigger pain. So I can turn down and hold my pee.
And we do that now in our day-to-day experiences. With my headache. ⁓ don't complain, because he has it worse. No, my head fricking hurt. So it's being able to acknowledge that there was a part of me that had learned to be more palatable by turning down my own experience.
That's survival intelligence, doing what it had to do.
So now gratitude has become a mask.
and guilt that we often have as soon as I said my head hurt, ⁓ the guilt, I shouldn't complain, that guilt and gratitude activate different systems in our brain. Gratitude stimulates the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with joy, regulation, executive functioning. It calms the amygdala,
It creates safety. And a Harvard Medical School study confirmed that regular gratitude practice improves our long-term emotional health. It increases our dopamine and our serotonin levels and even reduces symptoms of depression. But guilt. Guilt lights up the threat response. It's tied to higher cortisol, the fight-flight-freeze-fawn system. If you are constantly living from guilt,
If you feel guilty for resting, for needing, for wanting, for complaining about pain, you're not in a regulated state. You're in survival mode. And if survival is your baseline, everything, especially your own truth, feels unsafe, even dangerous. Gratitude cannot regulate a dysregulated system if it's layered on top of guilt.
If your nervous system is bracing, no amount of gratitude, no amount of affirmations will unlock your joy. This is the missing piece. If you've been feeling that disconnect of, I've been doing it all right, I have my gratitude practice,
I'm really tuning in and trying to be as positive as I can.
I'm holding it all together. I'm calm on the outside.
If you say your affirmations daily, but your nervous system doesn't feel safe, it's not gonna work. This is why I created Magnetic Her. This is why I focus so much of my work on nervous system safety. This is why the very first thing that I'm walking women through in Magnetic Her is nervous system.
Safety. This is the missing piece
You don't need more gratitude journals. You don't need more affirmations. What you need is emotional permission slips.
You need to feel. So let's look at what this can look like beyond just my examples. The mom who's touched out overstimulated and exhausted.
but turns off those feelings inside her.
to be a good mom.
My kids need a hug, but I think I'm gonna fricking lose it if they touch me. But guess what? I'm gonna shove it down and I'm gonna hug them. And maybe we even overlay it with, ⁓ I should be grateful that they still wanna snuggle, cause I know this isn't gonna last forever.
It's the high achiever who's killing it at work, but exhausted and tells herself, well, I'll rest when I reach a certain level.
I should be grateful for all of the clients or the job that I have.
It's the woman who is in a good relationship, but emotionally doesn't feel connected.
who says my life is so good. I shouldn't need more. I shouldn't want more.
It's the woman who doesn't name what she longs for because she doesn't deserve to feel like she doesn't have enough.
It's the woman who has all the money that she needs, doesn't have to think about spending.
and tells herself, this relationship should be good enough. I have everything I need and want, even though they're not emotionally connected. It's the over-functioning friend or therapist who holds space for everyone, but never asks for support because other people have it so much worse. This was me.
It was me being there for everyone and everyone else's needs and turning down my own so deeply because I could handle it. I can do hard things. I'm strong.
I can be the ear for someone else. When I was quietly losing it on the inside.
These aren't examples of entitlement. These are actually symptoms of self abandonment. And I'm not saying I have it perfect now. I'm just saying I see it now.
and I have ways that I can support myself better.
than I did. Because gratitude becomes the veil that we hide under. We've been conditioned, especially in spiritual spaces, to see gratitude as the antidote to pain, to discomfort, to the things that we don't want in life.
We focus on the positive, trying to ignore whatever negative is happening to us. But without the space to grieve, grief becomes shame. Without the space for anger, anger becomes anxiety. Without the space for gratitude,
Gratitude cannot replace our emotional truth. It's only there to support it. So when we turn down our own emotional truth,
We use gratitude as a weapon to self-gaslight.
So when we start to acknowledge, okay, I'm gaslighting myself a lot.
We have the opportunity to shift, to change. So how do you use gratitude as a resource instead of a weapon? We start with naming what's real. Instead of, should be so grateful, we can be, I'm grieving, I'm sad, I'm mad, I'm upset. And if it feels aligned, I'm grateful.
But it also can just be, this is what I'm feeling.
because it's so easy to use the gratitude to dismiss the experience. My favorite word is and. We allow the duality. As I've sat with so many women who've experienced trauma and grief, it's allowing the and to come in, because you can feel grateful and happy and joy.
and curious and silly and still want something different.
You can feel on top of the world and still want something different. That's not discontent. That's emotional honesty. I remember sitting with a woman who had had a great loss in her life and the holidays were coming up and she had kiddos. And she was so worried because she wanted to honor the loss, and she wanted to experience the joy of the holidays.
And I asked her, can't you have both? You can honor that loss and have happiness and have joy and experience something really, really good. And it doesn't diminish the loss.
at all to experience the joy. We are that incredible complex of beings that we can hold at all. We can hold both the grief and the gratitude and the joy. So one of the things that I have worked with is practicing bottom-up gratitude. we look at real regulation starts in the body.
our nervous systems have to feel safe. So rather than mentally listing what you should be thankful for, tuning in and feeling gratitude inside your body.
What happens inside when you say, I'm safe right now?
What happens when you thank your body for carrying you through the chaos?
Gratitude that lands and you can actually feel the shift in your body, that lands in the body, supports the nervous system. It's not a performance, it's restorative.
So tune in, place a hand on your heart or your belly.
And notice, where are you holding? Where are you bracing?
And maybe try gently saying to yourself, I'm grateful and I'm still allowed to want more.
I'm grateful for all that I have in my life and I'm still allowed to want more. Breathe into that. Let it settle. Let it soften. Instead of saying other people have it worse, try saying their pain is real and so is mine. When I caught myself diminishing my own headache, this is the wording that I used.
My husband's pain is real, and so is mine.
This is grace. This is nuance. This is coming home to yourself. This is what integrated gratitude feels like. It holds space for your humanity, for your experience, not for your performance, for making you easier to take in the world. You don't have to earn rest. You don't need to shrink your truth to stay lovable. You are allowed to want more, even if what you have is already amazing.
Before we go any further, I want to say this is not one more way that you failed. This is not one more reason to shame yourself. This is not something to fix. This is something to witness. Just like I did in myself. I witnessed. I saw. ⁓ I am so dismissing my own pain, my own experience.
It wasn't something I needed to fix, but it was something I needed to honor. It wasn't going back and saying, need to do this different. This was, you know what? My pain is real, just like his. How I got it doesn't change that it still hurts. You've learned to gaslight yourself to survive. You learned to pair gratitude with self-erasure. You've learned to pair gratitude
with turning off your own sensations because it made you easier to be with, more lovable. It made you seem good. It made you safe. But that doesn't have to be your story forever. This gets to be your turning point. This gets to be where you get to be curious about what's going on inside your own head, inside your own body.
Because you're not dramatic. You're not too much. You're waking up from a very, very long, socially approved sleep. It's like Sleeping Beauty or Snow White or whichever princess you wanna tune into that's.
was turned it down.
because she was hard to accept. But you're not hard to accept.
So if this episode stirred something in you, I want to invite you into some gentle integration.
Try a couple of minutes.
hand on your heart or on your belly or anywhere that feels right.
and just tune in.
say I honor my truth. I honor my truth. I honor my voice. I honor my experience. And just notice what happens.
Tune in when you notice that you're using gratitude to override your pain.
And don't criticize yourself for it. Honor it. I'm doing this. Get curious about this. Huh.
I noticed this in myself.
Ask what part of you learned that your needs are not okay.
and maybe get curious about what she needed instead.
And I'm going to really invite you, because I know there is a lot of us high functioning, strong women out there, independent, able to do it all. And we do. But I'm going to invite you to send this episode to that friend that you know, who has it all together, who seems strong, who rarely complains.
Because maybe she needs to hear this. You don't need to be perfect. You don't even need to be palatable. You don't need to shrink your emotions into something easier to digest.
You can be grateful and want more and honor what's going on in your own existence. You can be high functioning and need help. You can be healing and still have hard days. This is what it means to be fully alive. This is what it means to be honest. This is what it means to come home to you.
I want to thank you for being here. I want to thank you for choosing your own truth.
And I really want to honor yourself. And truth, my truth in gratitude, I am extremely grateful that you're here, that you're listening, that you're doing something for yourself.
I want you to hear that you are not dramatic. You are just right. You are strong. And you are soft. You are creative. You are talented. You are fun. You are loving. You are incredible. And I am so, so thankful to be a part of your life.
I love you and I like you. And I wish you all of the grace that you can give yourself, the truth for yourself, and that you can let your gratitude be real and not gaslight yourself.
I wish you all the happiness that today can bring. And I'll talk to you on the next episode.
Landy Peek (40:29)
Hey, before you go, just a little bit of legal. This podcast is designed for educational purposes only. It is not to replace
any expert advice from your doctors, therapists, coaches, or any other professional that you would work with. It's just a chat with a friend, me, where we get curious about ideas, thoughts, and things that are going on in our lives. And as we're talking about friends, if you know someone who would benefit from the conversation today, please share because I think the more that we open up these conversations, the more benefit we all get. So until next time, give yourself a big hug from me and stay curious.
Because that's the fun in this world.
