What if claiming your victimhood was the first step toward real empowerment?
In this episode, I’m sharing a personal coaching moment that completely changed the way I relate to anxiety, trauma, and the fawn response. I’ll explore how naming your pain isn’t weakness—it’s wisdom. And how what looks like self-sabotage is often your body’s most intelligent form of self-protection.
I dive into:
🔹 Why victimhood doesn’t mean powerlessness
🔹 How self-compassion rewires your coping patterns
🔹 The difference between self-protection and self-sabotage
🔹 How reframing your story can unlock deep healing
If you’ve ever felt stuck in anxiety or shame, this one’s a reframe you need to hear.
🌀 Check out my Somatic Life Coaching Certification before doors close => https://www.brettlarkin.com/somatic-yoga-training-certification/
💫 Come to the FREE Somatic Coaching Info Session on July 29th: https://www.brettlarkin.com/live-eylc/
FREE Practice: Extra Gentle Trauma-Informed Somatic Exercises | How to do Somatic Yoga | Somatic Yoga Flow
Relevant Blog: Somatic Yoga for Trauma: Techniques to Reclaim Your Body
Relevant to Today’s Episode:
🌀 Somatic Yoga Life Coaching
🎧 Also Listen to:
#324 – The Importance of Emotional Processing and Regulation: DENT Model Trauma
#366 – Is Trauma Actually In Your Hips? The Impact of Stress on Hip & Pelvic Health with Dr. Brianne Grogan
#369 – Nervous System Masterclass with Kristin Leal
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Transcript:
Brett:
It’s time for you to walk through the world with the confidence and serenity of someone who’s deeply tethered to their inner wisdom. If you have this insatiable hunger to uplift your personal life and make a bigger impact in your wellness career, leveraging yoga’s ancient wisdom, welcome. I’ve certified thousands of yoga instructors online, I teach to over half a million subscribers on YouTube, but I still haven’t remotely quenched my thirst for more yogic knowledge.
I’m Brett Larkin, founder of Uplifted Yoga, and this is the Uplifted Yoga Podcast, where yoga enthusiasts and teachers transform their lives for the better. Let’s get started. What if claiming your victimhood was the first step towards real empowerment? I know that sounds very counterintuitive, but in this episode, I’m sharing a personal coaching moment that completely changed the way I relate to anxiety and trauma, and in particular, the FON response.
I’m going to explore how naming your pain potentially isn’t weakness, but there’s actually wisdom there if you’re willing to look at it and explore it deeply. I think this episode really makes it clear with practical examples how self-sabotage can actually be your body’s most intelligent form of self-protection. So maybe what you think or are calling self-sabotage is actually a protection mechanism that your genius body has designed to try and keep you as safe or regulated as possible in a difficult situation.
If what you hear in today’s podcast resonates with you, explore my Somatic Yoga Life Coaching Certification before the doors close. This is a dual-track certification in both somatic yoga, so you’re going to learn the movement piece of teaching somatic yoga to privates and in groups, and it’s a life coaching certification as well. We’re going to learn six different frameworks rooted in yogic philosophy and also very much pulling from modern neuroscience, the vagus nerve, polyvagal theory, and the last third of the program is also a business mastermind where we’ll be talking about what it actually takes to set up the systems, the sales pipeline, and funnels to create a business that you love, not just by following cookie-cutter rules, but by also looking at your energy and where your strengths lie.
We’ll personalize your business strategy based on your nervous system and energy type, integrate all your different tools and certifications, because most people coming into this program have a lot of certifications already, but they don’t have them in a single clear offer, and that’s what being a coach can really help you be able to do. Integrate all your wisdom into a single proprietary method in which you help other people. This is a somatic education that deeply nourishes you, so you’ll be receiving coaching and lots of practices while also preparing you to help others, and the best part is you’re not doing it alone.
This is a six-month journey with a small, intimate group of women who are just like you, smart, trained, so ready to unravel their patterns, step into their magnetism, and really develop a proprietary method of business that plays to their strengths that’s completely unique to them. Start an application at the link in the show notes, and if anything I’ve talked about has sounded interesting or you’re on the fence, you’re just not sure, come to the info session with me live on July 29th, and I’ll put that link in the show notes as well. So many of the results that people are seeing from this methodology are completely blowing my mind, so I’m so excited for our fall cohort to kick off.
This is the time to apply, and I would love for you to be a part of it. Hello, my friends. Today, I wanted to talk a little bit about an interesting experience that I had recently when I was being coached, and I really want to applaud my coach because what happened in this session is she actually helped me own my role as a victim, and I found it very empowering, and I bet your brain is exploding right now being like, what? Why would being a victim be empowering? But I kind of want to walk you through what happened to me in this session because I think it’s helpful, I hope.
I think there’s healing here that maybe you need to hear too, and our society really treats a victim, even if it doesn’t mean to, like that word victim has this kind of weak, passive label. But what I want to point out today is that in fact, naming what happened is the beginning of reclaiming power. But a lot of times, we don’t even want to acknowledge or see or know what happened, or what happened might feel small, but potentially it’s chronic.
So there’s a lot of different words in this space, right? Like we have the word victimhood, which is different than victim consciousness, which is different from victimization. These words all kind of, for me, got jumbled together to the fact that I didn’t really see how seeing myself as a victim could be empowering. But what happened in this coaching session is exactly that.
So to go into the full story, because I think stories are always the most fun, is I came into this coaching session with, of course, a somatic coach, which I also train people in and this coach was wonderful at holding space and really helping me refine my desire. She didn’t call it a desire, but she was asking me what I wanted, what I wanted from the session. But in my framework, I really try to coach on desire because this is the key to everything.
And kudos to my coach, because she really didn’t let us move forward with the coaching until the desire was really super clear and she kept reframing it and reframing it and reframing it. And that’s how we kind of got to the place that we did, which is where what needed to emerge from that coaching session, from that conversation, did. And so what I came into the session with was that I had an upcoming meeting that I wanted her help to prepare for.
And I was saying to her how in these meetings, I was noticing certain patterns where I would kind of go into this people-pleasing or fawn-type tendency because these meetings are stressful for me. There’s a lot of volatility in, you know, all of this has to do with a complex situation. But essentially, I could observe the parts of myself that would show up in these kinds of meetings that I didn’t like.
And I was describing it as like this little girl energy, this people-pleasing energy, this miss-fix-it energy, which ties to the Internal Parts Framework in Embodied Yoga Life Coaching Framework 4. Gotta love our internal parts. And so I was telling her, I want to show up to this meeting differently. Or actually, I think, and this is what a great coach does, like I came in being like, I want your help in how to handle this meeting because I have a lot of anxiety about it.
I don’t like the way I normally show up. And in continuing to talk, it became clear to her, she was like, okay, so it sounds like you could change the way that you show up, but that that could potentially create more volatility in your relationship with this person because it’s not how they’re used to you showing up. Or you could stay, you know, miss-fix-it, people-pleasing, stay with what’s worked.
But that feels kind of like abandoning yourself because you don’t want to do that pattern anymore. And I was like, yes, yes, that’s exactly right. And as we kept talking, it became clear that doing the meeting in the new way or breaking this pattern, she had used the word level up.
Like do you want to level up and do this meeting differently? Or is it like safer for you to just handle this stressful situation the same way you’ve always handled it? Because this is like a relationship that’s kind of ending, like I’m not going to have to keep doing these meetings much longer, a couple more months, and it’s already a very destabilizing situation for me. So it was like, is it really even worth rocking the boat? And something we did right away was kind of like pivot away from doing the meeting a different way as leveling up, in quotes. Because of course, when she said that, I was like, I want to level up, right? I want to be better.
I want to do more, especially with like personal development work. I want to level up. But what she then pointed out is that A, level up is like totally the wrong word.
And B, it’s like what would be safest for me? Like how could I feel the safest, the most embodied, the most cared for in going into this meeting without trying to get it right or without trying to level up? And when we explored that option, I was kind of like, well, you know, kind of maybe just doing what I’ve always been doing would be safest. But that also feels like I’m not progressing. And I have awareness of this pattern and going into this kind of people-pleasing, misfix it thing.
And that’s how I cope with the anxiety. And I would like to expand. And I’m sure many of you here are familiar with the Fawn response.
We often just hear about like fight, flight, freeze. But if you listen to my past podcast that I have here on the show about the Dent model of trauma, you can look up that episode if you haven’t listened to it. I highly recommend.
I will put the blog post for you below as well. But it’s the Dent, D-E-N-T model of trauma. And it actually adds two more responses being Fawn and fatigue.
So we have fight, flight, freeze, Fawn, and fatigue. And Fawn is a brilliant nervous system strategy, which would basically be like people-pleasing, appeasing, over-functioning, maybe even flirting. It’s often invisible because many people just expect women to be this way all the time.
It’s often praised, right? Like, you’re so helpful. You’re so nice. But it is exhausting and disembodying over time.
And I had basically recognized that when I’m anxious, especially with this particular person’s I would lean on this response heavily in order to manage myself in these meetings. And I came into this coaching session like wanting to do better, wanting to do better, wanting to do different. And what my coach kind of helped me see or what she and I together partnered and really brought to the surface was she was saying, maybe instead of trying to like fix you or fix your attitude or fix your strategy for this meeting, we should really look at, you know, how challenging these meetings and this relationship and the situation has been for you over time.
And instead of trying to show up right or different or better for this upcoming meeting, can you give yourself permission and essentially trust your body or what I call in a lot of my writing, like your animal body, right, to adopt the survival strategies it needs in the moment to get you through the meeting without you judging it. Like if you find yourself fawning and you need to fawn, just be okay with that. Have acceptance of that because this has been a difficult situation that’s been gone on for a long time that, yes, is ending, but it’s, you know, it’s not over yet.
And it was almost like instead of just being like, okay, we need to get through this or I need to get through it better. It was like, can we just like, can I love myself through this? And if I end up fawning and that pattern that I’m totally aware of comes out, but that’s serving me to get through a stressful moment, can that be okay, right? Or if I freeze or if I get combative, right, because that’s another pattern that I noticed particularly in this, you know, certain situations are just really hard for a variety of reasons. And I’m sure you all have this in your own life, like this relationship with this one particular person or this one vendor or these one types of meetings like they, or one particular child or family member, right? It’s just kind of like this perfect storm where you, if you’re listening to this podcast, you probably have a lot of self-awareness.
Like you notice that you default to these behaviors that you know you should have evolved out of because you have awareness of them. But I think why I wanted to talk about this coaching session and talk about this is because when she and I reframed this as not weakness, but wisdom, right? This is how the body protects us when we can’t escape. And these, this particular situation for me is a situation that I can’t escape, at least not for another couple of months.
And it’s why I wanted to record this podcast episode because I think we hear, right, you know, something’s traumatic, something’s bad, something’s unhealthy. There’s an unhealthy dynamic. There’s something that’s triggering.
I know some people don’t like that word, but there’s something and then you should get out of it. Right. But that’s so simplistic.
There’s a lot of times you can’t get out of it. I mean, if the person who that’s with is the father of your children and you’re trying to accept, like that’s, it’s unrealistic to be like, Oh, I’m just never going to see that person again. Or for me, it’s like unrealistic that I could just never do these meetings again.
Like it’s not possible. Now I am not going to have to do them eventually. And you know, maybe eventually you, you would not have to, you know, speak to your ex-husband or something long-term.
But for most of us, there’s a, this prolonged period before we can get out of something that’s unhealthy or get out of something that’s kind of traumatizing for us. That is a prolonged period of time where we have an awareness of all the unhealthy dynamics at play, including our own patterns. And we can start beating ourselves up for not doing better or changing the pattern.
But when something’s really, truly, truly difficult, it’s like, how can you forgive yourself? Or I think what was really powerful for me is like, how can I do this meeting? And if I end up fawning a little bit, like letting that be okay, because that’s just the coping mechanism that my body needs right now, or that’s gotten me through. It’s a survival strategy to get me through what is a very like anxious walking on eggshells type of situation that’s been going on for a long time that I know is ending, but I don’t need to be like superhero and change the script and change the dance and do everything right away. Like what’s healthiest and safest for me.
Can I trust my body to do what’s healthiest and safest for me? By showing up to this meeting as grounded and regulated as I possibly can be, but also with heaps of compassion for myself. And I think that’s when she and I kind of ended up like calling me a little bit a victim, a victim of this kind of unhealthy dynamic that’s been going on in this longer relationship, in these meetings, whatever. And it’s not something I chose.
It’s not something I wanted, the dynamic that’s emerged and my body’s adapting brilliantly and doing the best that it can. And compassion for my body, compassion for myself, as I’m in the in-between of not being out of it yet, but having awareness that it’s unhealthy, released all this anxiety. Because the anxiety I was having was like about how do I show up to the meeting better? Or for some of you, it might be like, how do I interact with my ex-husband better or make him understand more or not revert to doing this again? We just start a little bit beating ourselves up.
And this is where reclaiming victim was empowering for me, where I was like, I’m a victim here. And that’s empowering for me because that means that the survival responses that need to come out to just get me through this next couple months and these last couple meetings can come out. And it doesn’t mean anything bad.
It doesn’t mean that I’m not a great coach. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have awareness. And I love in my own coaching, really working with visuals and frequencies of energy.
And so she didn’t bring this into the space, but I brought this into the space. And I was like, I’m literally visualizing like a deer, like a little fawn who’s innocent and who isn’t that strong and just needs to get through something. And this visual of the fawn really reminded me of the energy that I wanted to be in, of compassion and not trying to get this meeting right, get it right, do it well, or to have it go well.
It’s just like, I’m just going to be present to myself, have these responses, maybe some patterns that I recognize and don’t love about myself, be there, emerge, and not have that be a problem. The fawn response in particular is just one that I love to talk about and love to coach on because I think for so many women, we can beat ourselves up about like, well, why didn’t we report the sexual harassment? Or why didn’t we say something? Or why didn’t we do something? Why were we kind of flirting with that person and just kind of letting this all scoot under the radar so that we could just, yeah, then get out and apply for another job a year later? And it can feel like a cop-out, but ultimately, that is a brilliant survival response that was the best, or not even the best you could do at the time. That was a legitimate way that your animal body handled a situation for you that was never a situation that you should have been in in the first place.
And in order for that to really ring true, you do need to see yourself as a victim, even though I don’t love that word. So let’s talk about like vocabulary expansion. What words can we use beyond victim? Like with my coach, we kind of talked about the word survivor, which isn’t, I don’t love it, but just to give you an idea of some alternative words that you might want to try on or share like witness, an endurer, the adaptive self, I really liked that one, right? So like, this isn’t real me because I think that was in a different coaching session.
I was like, I feel like I abandoned myself in these meetings. Like I’m not me, I’m abandoning my truth, but my adaptive self actually gets me through these meetings brilliantly. And your like adaptive self may get you through like your boss who’s sexually harassing you or your ex-husband in that difficulty, like brilliantly.
And can we have compassion and love the adaptive self? Because sometimes you need an adaptive self, especially when you’re dealing with a unstable or unpredictable third party. So witness, survivor, endurer, adaptive self, inner child. I think that’s another interesting one, right? Because I was saying, you know, I feel like I’m a little girl in these meetings or I’m a people pleaser, I’m a Mrs. Fix-It, which really related very much to childhood for me.
But, you know, my inner child is playing in this space. She’s alive in this space because it’s a really difficult, challenging space. And the whole child thing is like a child doesn’t have power.
Okay, I’m not saying like all children are victims, but to a certain extent, like that’s very much part of the child archetype. You are at the whim of your caregivers. So, yeah, that little child is playing again or those patterns are there again because you’re in a power imbalance state or you’re in a place where you feel victimized.
And again, that could just be someone who shows up very unpredictably or who’s doing things that are very subtle that no one else notices, but you know that it’s manipulation. Another term you might want to think about is part of me that, right? The part of me that or the one who protected me. So instead of survivor, the one who protected me, the appeaser, the caretaker, right? Like the caretaker of me acts this certain way in these meetings because we’re just trying to get through it in a situation that’s volatile with someone who’s unpredictable in a situation that’s very, very complex.
The performer, the chameleon. So, you know, I would invite you to, if this is resonating, you say each of these ones aloud and notice how it lands in your body. That would be the somatic approach.
If you don’t want to use the word victim, which I think most of us don’t, and you don’t love survivor, which I don’t because it implies it’s over because you might still be surviving right now. So, you know, try on some of these words, inner child, the part of me that, the one who protected me, the adaptive self. I really liked that one when I was saying it to you all in my own body.
So that’s maybe something that I’ll move forward with. The adaptive self is here because this is an unhealthy situation and in an unhealthy situation, the adaptive self not just has to come out, it’s really needed. It’s needed to come out.
And I can’t like take off self-development points for myself for that. So the key thing that I was hoping this episode might do, and as we come to the end, you can let me know if it did, but it’s to really speak to like the guilt and shame spiral that happens for so many of us when we see old patterns replay, or we have an awareness of a pattern, but the pattern’s not gone yet. And sometimes it’s not self-sabotage, it’s self-protection.
I’m gonna say that again. It’s not self-sabotage when those things are happening, it’s self-protection. And I think that’s the message that I really wanted to share with all of you today, like when there’s no exit, the body does the wisest thing it can to survive.
And for a lot of us, there isn’t an exit or there isn’t an exit yet. Like if this is, if you have something like this going on with a parent or a spouse, there’s like ways you could try to exit that, but let’s be real. Like some things are very, very hard to exit from.
I’m very lucky that my situation I can exit from. It’s just going to take a couple more months. But what this really brought alive for me is that how in coaching, you know, the permission to name yourself as a victim, even just once, even if it’s the wrong word, for me in this particular situation was very, very healing.
And while this somatic coach was, was great, you know, this is why I created and love embodied yoga life coaching. Cause we did, we did process this a little bit through my physical system, but I would have loved it if we could have added, you know, more, more breath, more movement, more actual like big movement. And that’s what we do.
And embodied yoga life coaching, it’s like we do the coaching, but then we mirror it, we support what’s happening with, with actual movement. And sometimes it’s still this. It’s not always movement, but there’s like a physical component that’s bigger than just body awareness as part of the healing.
It’s really like the best of somatic yoga and the best of somatic coaching, like woven braided together in a session. So I’m curious for you listening, like, is there a label that you’ve resisted claiming because it felt. Too loaded or too heavy.
And would you be willing to sit with that label just long enough to honor what happened or to join on it? I don’t think if I, by myself, I wouldn’t have come here. This is why coaching is so powerful because my coach really was able to hold that mirror for me and say the V word, right? Say the victim word. And it really invited this beautiful softening, which I know would not be the case for everyone, but in this situation was deeply healing.
And before we close, I invite you to obviously not close your eyes if you’re driving, but just slow down your breath, get your hands on your body somehow, like one hand on your chest, one hand on your belly and say to yourself, or just listen to me, whatever resonates for you. I see the part of me who was just trying to stay safe. You did such a good job.
I don’t blame you. You’re allowed to soften now and take a couple of deep breaths and see what comes up for you around owning how your nervous system responded or maybe is still responding and giving compassion to the parts of yourself that adapt brilliantly. And I think sometimes we can think that, you know, if I say I was a victim, it’s going to feel like a collapse or it’s going to trigger this whole meltdown, but it can also feel like a completion.
It can feel very freeing. We talk so much about nervous system repair and fixing the nervous system and making it better, you know, like the fix, fix, fix. And for most of us, it’s like your nervous system wasn’t being dramatic.
It wasn’t weak. It was wise, so wise. So looking at some of these patterns in yourself that you want to change in certain situations, you know, it might not be self-sabotage.
It might be self-protection. And if the word victim has like scary or really loaded, explore some of the other words, but also just know you don’t have to wear that label forever. It’s not, it’s not, it’s not a branded tattoo, you know, just wearing it for a moment or one coaching session.
Like I did, it can be this bridge that really lets your body feel seen. And if anything in this episode landed, you know, come, come let me know on Instagram, find me at Larkin Yoga TV, or better yet, you know, send this to a friend who’s stuck in a shame spiral about how they should be or how they should be acting better or should be over it or should change, you know, sometimes, sometimes we can’t, or we can’t yet. And if you want to go deeper into this kind of somatic work, you already know my 75 hour somatic yoga course is a home study, totally self-paced.
I ship you a beautiful manual. You can work through it from the comfort and safety of your own home. It’s a great place to begin.
It’s a trauma informed body first way to feel safe again from the inside out. The link to that is in the show notes. And of course, if you want to train to be a coach with me this fall, I would love that and we’ll put a link to the application below as well.
I want you to know I’m sending you love. I see you and we’ll connect in the next episode. Thank you so much for being here and listening all the way to the very end.
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