Lisa Fields: Hello. Welcome to the Jew three Project podcast. I’m your host, Lisa Fields. I’m the founder of the Jew three Project. Well, thank you for watching another episode of the Jude three Project podcast. As always, I’m your host, Lisa Fields, the founder of the Jude three Project. And today, I have a very special guest, doctor Stacy Otey
Dr. Stacie Otey Scott: Scott. Did I say it right? You did. Okay. You nailed it.
Lisa Fields: Doctor Stacy, tell us a little bit about who you are.
Dr. Stacie Otey Scott: Absolutely. I am a licensed clinical psychologist in the state of Virginia, and I’ve been practicing for about twenty years. My special areas of interest are mind, body, spirit. So I enjoy looking at the whole person. And, a lot of times when we’re, when we’re working that way way we’re dealing with issues like identity and relationships and so that that’s my jam. Yes. Mhmm. And for those who don’t know,
Lisa Fields: for the our audience, Doctor. Stacy has been my therapist for three it’s like three years now. I think yeah. June where June will be three years. Wow. Yes. You’ve been my therapist for three years. So she is referenced in the book, when you see doctor Stacy, this is doctor Stacy. So I’m honored to have you. This is not gonna be a virtual therapy session for those who are wondering if that was happening. No. We save that for private conversations. Later. But, we’re gonna talk about some things that arose in the book, When Heroes Fall because this is a part of our special, podcast series on the book, When Heroes Fall. So make sure you get that. Whoever books that’s out. But doctor Stacy, there’s so many themes that arise in the book that talk about trauma and how to navigate a hero’s failure. Why does a hero’s failure impact us so greatly?
Dr. Stacie Otey Scott: I think, you know, for the most part when we consider heroes we place them on a pedestal. And so I I remember hearing when I was a child, you know, the higher the pedestal, the harder the fall. And so I think that that tends to be the way many of us operate in the world. You know, we tend to separate people as good or bad, and not recognize that, you know, we’re all some combination therein. So when people disappoint us that we placed on this pedestal, it hits us in a lot of different ways, the relationship between that person but then it also can make us question our own identity. So it’s, it’s a pretty comprehensive kind of blow to ego and self
Lisa Fields: when our heroes disappoint us. Yeah. And that I think what what I’ve had to grapple with within myself as I’ve navigated my own hero failure is, like, trying to figure out what I wanted them to be for me. Mhmm. That is trying to discover, like, who do I want this person to be in my life? Right. And it leaving a hole for what you wanted them to be. Can you can you dive into that? Like what what we project onto people in our admiration of them? Absolutely.
Dr. Stacie Otey Scott: I think that a lot of it is about, seeing something in someone else that maybe we see lacking in ourselves or something that we desire. For example, and a lot of times that can be based on trauma and that could be big trauma with a big t or little trauma with a small t, but I remember when I was younger, with some of my own history and not knowing my biological father, males, you know, African American males particularly, I looked up to a lot of them almost immediately searching for that void, that was there. And I have an amazing dad, he’s my stepdad, but he’s been my dad since I was two. So he’s an amazing dad. It doesn’t take anything away from him. But there’s a part of us that wants to know your biology. And so I remember identifying people, whether it was leadership at church, or sometimes it would be a professor, but people who were authority figures and men and African American, I almost always went in with this lens of, idealizing, you know, and kind of looking at them and looking for, what I wanted, who I wanted the meeting.
Lisa Fields: Yeah. And I think that leads to like that projection creates the disappointment because it’s not like I talked about in the book when they fall if you have a space that is not healed Yes. All that pain gets put on or projected onto that person. Absolutely. So like you talked about in the aspect of your father you admiring men at church Yes. If they disappointed you Oh, yeah. It might bleed over Yes. Into
Dr. Stacie Otey Scott: that disappointment. Talk about how, like, when trauma gets merged together in our past and present collide. Sure. I think that it’s not if they disappoint, it’s when. Mhmm. Because we’ve idealized this person to make them into someone that that was impossible to be. Mhmm. You know, they we we have placed them in a position where in our subconscious there is this perfect being and we’ve been seeking that and so we take these qualities and we literally place them on this person and when they inevitably disappoint us, it sends our well, first of all, part of it triggers, the the old trauma and gets that stirred up. And it also impacts the narrative that we’ve been telling ourselves about ourselves and about this other person, and it intermingles, like it gets jumbled up in there together. And for many of us that ends up looking like an emotional mess, an emotional wreck. And the beauty of it is, if you’re able to reconcile, if you’re able to pull out what’s yours, what’s theirs, and kind of separate that, that moment can be a real healing opportunity for you. But many of us get lost in the pain of it or we attempt to avoid the pain of it. So we just don’t deal with what actually happened. We keep looking for what we want to happen.
Lisa Fields: Yeah. And I think that’s really where we are as a culture today like Oh yeah. That bleeds over to how we how we discuss things on social media, how we like emote, and look for things to validate our feelings. Absolutely. There is an overuse of therapy language on social media. Without expertise you can name somebody a narcissist or you know I know I’ve been guilty of it in our sessions when I’m angry over diagnosing people and you have to like pull me back like okay what is really happening? What why is that so dangerous?
Dr. Stacie Otey Scott: I think for obvious reasons like we’re walking around pathologizing everybody, saying everybody and everything that they do is related to some kind of sickness as opposed to understanding the continuum of the range of human emotion and human behavior. Mhmm. Not everything is about somebody being completely and totally selfish and self absorbed and having this huge ego. You know, sometimes I know when I was when I was, in school and grad school, and just starting to learn some of the therapeutic skills and language, I I remember one of my professors saying, you know, sometimes a duck is really just a duck. Mhmm. You know, a horse is really just a horse. It’s not the zebra. It is actually just a horse. And I think that in today’s culture, especially when we have so much focus placed on self, and we really do probably now more than ever, And, you know, I know that we human beings are generally selfish by nature, but then when you add things like social media and, these kind of quick platforms where somebody can show this perfect life and then they turn the lights off, they turn the camera off, and it is their real life. I think that all of that does is puts us in this, these little silos where we’re now expecting ourselves to be perfect. We have to project this perfect image. And I think that it makes it harder to then kind of relate to other people on a human level, because we’re positioning ourselves and everything we see is perfect. So then when you’re having this interaction and somebody doesn’t respond in a way that’s consistent with this perfect worldview, immediately it’s something is wrong with you, not me, her problem, not mine. And and it’s your pathological and you just said like two things and they’ve taken from that these little bits and pieces that are on the internet and made that into a full on diagnosis without fully understanding the scope and what that means when you position that person that way. You’ve kind of positioned them as other, you’ve othered them, and you position them as needing all the help and them needing all of the the support, and you’ve now exalted yourself because they’re sick, I’m not. And you put yourself in a position where you can’t even you wouldn’t even know to seek the help Mhmm. Because we can’t fix what we won’t admit. So if I’m always saying, well, this is you. You know, Lisa has this problem, you know, Lisa I mean, I mean, you know, she just comes in a room, she wants to take control of me, that’s just Lisa. Then I don’t have the opportunity to become inquisitive or curious about me so that I can try to grow into the person that I feel like I was called to be. Yes. Yeah. And that self reflection is hard and it’s a process
Lisa Fields: of which, you know, in therapy, you can you may let the client, you’ve let me vent, but then you’ll say, okay, that person isn’t my client. You’re my client. So what do we need to fix in you? Right. Which is always, you know, a challenging thing to get from them to what I need to work on.
Dr. Stacie Otey Scott: Why why are you nicely saying how I check you? So basically, you check me.
Lisa Fields: Yes. So I think, you know, one of the things that is hard in that process is that we have been legitimately harmed. Mhmm. And so you can kind of take on the role of a victim and then you don’t realize when you’re being a villain. And one of the things that I talk about in the book is if we don’t heal from past traumas we can literally turn into villains. So I give a story of a woman, was talking about how she was abused by her her mother as a child and because of that she vowed never to abuse any of her kids. But then because she hadn’t forgiven her mom she found herself one day about to abuse her son. It was beyond just discipline or Right. You know normal like spanking or whatever. It was like going to get really physical and she realized in that moment she had become what she hated. Yes. And that’s forced her to forgive. Mhmm. Can you talk about how we can move if we’re not healed? Yes, that person harmed us. Yes, that person did legitimate things cause harm and abuse. Mhmm. How can that become a part of our patterns if we don’t heal? Right. It’s,
Dr. Stacie Otey Scott: when you think about trauma, it’s really interesting to me because trauma is complex. Like, it’s this wieldy, unwieldy kind of thing that shows up and impacts probably every area of our lives without us even realizing it. Mhmm. And the way we’ve been socialized to deal with trauma, particularly when I was coming up, was don’t. You just don’t. You avoid it. You don’t really acknowledge it. And so I think that even being willing to approach trauma, it’s painful. I used to my husband and I do couples therapy and when we talk to couples a lot of times it’s about parenting stuff. And so one of the things that we talk about is how children do what they see, not what we say. And when I was involved in, working with women who had experienced military sexual trauma, I think that I saw this, this kind of dichotomy that happens when you’ve had a traumatic experience and it’s one way or the other when it comes to trauma. Either you’re going to mindfully approach it or you’re or you’re going to mindlessly avoid it. And when we mindfully approach it, I use my mom, I talk to my mom a lot about what her experiences were. She had some traumatic experiences growing up, and she has six other siblings. And when I look at her, there are some very distinct differences in how she navigates the world and how she sees the world versus some of my aunts and uncles. You can just see some of the differences there. So when I was young, I was always interested like, what? Why? Y’all grew up in the same house, same parents. But what I realized is my mom is the oldest of seven and my grandfather died when she was 18. So every kid behind her had less and less time with my grandfather who brought a different worldview than my grandmother. And his was much more balanced. So in essence, she became much more balanced, which I, you know, thank God she was my mom, but I could see from my aunts and uncles that they didn’t realize, you know, how there was this dichotomy, almost like self broke in half, and they avoided as a matter of fact, my grandmother was a Pentecostal minister, and so they didn’t just avoid, they spiritualized. They everything was religion, religion. And they made some of the behaviors that were actually pretty traumatic and abusive, they made that okay to themselves by how they framed it. So instead of mindfully approaching it and saying, okay, something wasn’t right here and I do not wanna do what I saw. Mhmm. They mindlessly avoided it And so then you can see some of those same behavioral patterns showing up in their lives. So when you don’t deal with it, it ends up dealing with you. Mhmm. That that’s essentially how trauma works. And you don’t even know it until you’re standing over your kid. You know, as the 10 year old, you were saying, I will never treat my kid like this when somebody’s standing over you getting ready to harm you. Now you’re 35. You look in the mirror and actually see, oh, wow. I just became my dad. I just well, that’s my that mindlessly happened with you living life and not being mindful and going about seeking healing. Yeah. Yeah. Intentional.
Lisa Fields: Yeah. And we don’t wanna become what we hate. Correct. But if we don’t forgive Oh, yeah. We become that. Talk about how forgiveness is the key to escaping that cycle. Mhmm.
Dr. Stacie Otey Scott: Well, you know, forgiveness is my thing. And I remember when I was younger, my, mom telling me as a little kid, she was like, you know, you’re like a bucket with a hole in it. You know, you and your brother are distinctly different. So if I spank you and you’ve done something, a few minutes later you’re coming back, you’re on my leg, and you’re like, mommy, I’m so sorry, and I didn’t mean to do it. You’re looking at how I am upset, and, so you can’t hold anger and and there is some good in that, but too much of anything is not good for us, so there needs to be balance. And my brother was on the other end, like, she would fuss at him and he’s not talking to her for four days. And I’m just like, woah. So I think that I learned very early on without really knowing that’s what I was learning, that forgiveness operates in this space where it can bring people closer together. It’s not, in lieu of you acknowledging the pain. Mhmm. It is you saying I’m not going to absorb all of that pain and make that pain my identity. Mhmm. So that’s what to me that that’s kind of the lane that forgiveness operates in. And I find that a lot of that is based on the narratives, the story we’re telling ourselves about ourselves and everybody else around us. Yeah. Yeah. Forgiveness to many people feels like you’re letting people Right. Off the hook. Off the hook. And I talk about in the book, forgiveness is not letting
Lisa Fields: them necessarily off the hook. It’s making sure you’re not on the hook with them. Correct. Can you talk about why forgiveness because people think forgiveness is weakness. You know, religion teaches us to be forgiving. Right. That’s for weak people. Right. We need to get, you know, get revenge. Mhmm. And I think there’s this thing where people think forgiveness is the opposite of justice. Right. That you if you forgive, you’re you’re not. Right. But talk about, like, how forgiveness actually is strength and why it’s not, like a
Dr. Stacie Otey Scott: a thing where we’re just, like, brushing over a fence. Right. Right. Letting people walk all over us. Mhmm. That’s what I’ve heard before as well. It’s interesting that you talk about it in the context of justice because when we now look at restorative justice, that’s all about forgiving. And I think that most people think that you’re forgiving someone for the sake of the other person, and you’re not. Forgiveness is all about self, and it goes back to exactly what you said. We’re like, you know, I’m not gonna let him off the hook. He said and did, and I know what he meant, and dah dah dah dah. And nope, I I’m gonna hold him accountable. Well, that’s holding someone accountable looks very different than punishing them. Mhmm. And so with the the role of forgiveness, it’s not not holding this person accountable. It’s saying that I can go in, I can have this conversation or not because to forgive doesn’t require that you actually speak to the other person. It doesn’t require that the other person apologize. It doesn’t require that you reconcile. It just means that you take yourself out of the context of being the the the not only the juror, but the judge, and then, you know, the the the guard who has the prison key. You take yourself out of that position because you recognize that if I’m all of those things, then the person that’s gonna get locked up in the jail cell is not gonna be the person who victimized me. It’s gonna be me. I’m gonna be the one that’s sitting in that jail cell with all this anger, all this frustration, all this hate. It’s gonna impact every other relationship in my life for the rest of my life because I’m mad at this person who may have gone on, lived their lives, haven’t thought about you since the day that thing happened. And when I was growing through my own trauma, I know that we’ve talked about this in some of our discussions, went through a very abusive situation when I was younger, a dating situation, and for years, that was probably the hardest thing for me to forgive. I mean, every way a person could be abused, I was abused in that relationship. And for years, it was like, no, if I see him, I will run over him with my car, I will put it in reverse, I will back up. I’ve grown a lot since then, just so we know. But it wasn’t until I realized I had a thought about him one day years later, and my thought went to, I wonder how he’s doing. I actually hope he’s okay. And over time, I was working through some of the forgiveness process that I didn’t realize would show up with my now husband when we were dating, that unforgiveness showed up in our relationship. And so it’s not something that you do for somebody else. You really are doing it for yourselves. These this person has gone on and you’re still hanging on to this anger that now when you look at this new person in your life, you’re responding like you’re in that old situation and they don’t know what happened. And that’s a that’s that’s a book for me and my husband to write something.
Lisa Fields: I think as as we talk about like past and present colliding Mhmm. In conversation, if we’re not healed and we’re called to restore people who’ve fallen, right, we won’t be able to restore them. We won’t have the tools if we’re Yeah. If their failure triggers past if their if their failure triggers your father Right. Mother wounds. Right. Right. You won’t be able to have the spiritual maturity to restore someone. Right.
Dr. Stacie Otey Scott: Yeah. I agree with that. I think that because I believe God can can use a rock, use the bush with Moses, I think all of us can be used in that way. What happens is, as you’re saying, like, we’re not able to take them the full measure, the full way, and we may not even be called to take them the full way. A lot of people I work with, it’s a start with wherever they came to me. But to me, the unforgiveness gets in the way of me being the benefactor of the blessings in going and doing this kind of work and helping to heal others. So I can tell people how to do like, I can pick up a book. Right? And I can take you through the steps of how to do x, y, and z without me actually having gone through the steps. So I can do that. I can pass that knowledge on. I think there was a saying that, you know, we teach what we have most to learn. So it’s kind of that thing where I’m I can teach you that. But on the other side of it, I in operating from a place of unforgiveness, I don’t get to be the benefactor of the lessons that I’ve now just taught you because I refuse to go through that process for myself. And I think that that’s a crucial key. Forgiveness is a process. Healing is a process. It doesn’t happen overnight. And I think that kind of work, a lot of us are like, look, I you know, give me a pill for that or, you know, let me not even deal with that because it it can it’s about self exposure and it can be painful. Mhmm. Yeah.
Lisa Fields: In that self exposure process and trying to help other people grow and heal, I think one of the things that arises is this thing of like feeling like to restore people or to help people get restored Mhmm. Is diminishing the impact of what they’ve done. So they wanna keep them in a prison Right. Of their own failures. Mhmm. And everything is marked by that. Mhmm. And I understand that because we have a misunderstanding of what it means to restore people. Right. So I talk about in the book restoration isn’t necessarily restoring people to a position, it’s restoring them to a path. So they might not they may never need to be a pastor again because they just don’t have their they have real weaknesses that would cause harm right or they have done so much harm that they need to go to prison Like you know? Right. Right. You know prison is a actual place that they need to go and sit and serve their time Right. For justice. So it doesn’t if if we see restoration only as getting a position or a platform back Mhmm. We will often resist it because we’re thinking about it in the wrong way. Right. Restoration is about getting them right in their relationship with God. Right. Them family, those who they’ve harmed. Mhmm. Kind of talk about what is what what are some signs we should look for to know a person is like ready for to be on that restoration journey? Oh my goodness.
Dr. Stacie Otey Scott: It’s that this is a really, heavy, interesting, you know, I love having these conversations, but heavy kind of space to be in to try to help people, navigate their woundedness and not just how they see themselves, so we talk about, you know, kind of seeing yourself as the victim, but also how they’re seeing the perpetrator. And when somebody has harmed us deeply, personally and intimately, it’s hard to reconcile that there is some good in this person. Mhmm. And through this opportunity to restore, right, we miss the point of us being restored as well when you think about it the way you just said it, putting them on a path as opposed to placing them in a position. I think the human nature, we want people to pay. I know that’s human nature, you know, and that’s why we have some of our faith beliefs to try to balance that out. But it can be really difficult to position yourself in a space where you’re, you know, straddling this fine line of holding someone accountable without punishing them and recognizing that forgiveness is about me. And then where does restoration fit in all of this? So it’s it’s difficult for us to navigate because of how we view it as society and how we use it as, a weapon. We use, like, forgiveness as I’m not going to forgive you as a weapon to hold somebody else in this place and to be restored. A lot of times we think exactly what you said, we need to put they’re expecting us to put them back, you know, to make them whole, so to speak. You know, they they’ve lost all this money, now we’re gonna make them whole. No, that’s not what we’re doing. But we are humanizing them. And that’s what restoration is about. It’s about not looking at someone as being the other and taking these opposite extremes like you’re either all good or all bad and we’re looking at them being a mix of self and the easiest way for me to do that and to teach that is to first acknowledge that I am a mix of those things within myself. Mhmm.
Lisa Fields: Yeah. In the book I talk about it being the halo and horned effect. Yep. So halo effect if you had an encounter with someone that’s positive you assume positivity about them. You assume that they’re a good parent, that they’re a good spouse because they helped you. So that’s what happened with my hero which I call Bruce in the book. My encounter was he helped me navigate a really difficult faith space and not even him personally his messages and his sermons. Right. And then I just assumed man this is a man of God, this is a man that walks in integrity, this is a person that is probably amazing husband and father and and also later that he was an abuser. Mhmm. And having the whole all those things intention that he could be his wife could experience him as an amazing, husband. His children could experience him as an amazing father. He can also be a great communicator and an abuser all at the same time. And trying to hold that intention is hard because the assumption is if you met him as an abuser, you assume that he did he was he was horrible in every area. Right. If you met him in a positive way like I did, you assume. So the negative horn Yep. Or positive halo Mhmm. And then when you encounter, oh, he was an abuser, then you can flip from halo to horn. Yes. All or nothing. And that’s the all or nothing black and white thinking that plagues us when we have encounters with people. And I talk about in the book that I really thought I was good at navigating the gray, and you laughed when I said that out loud in the session. I remember that. And, and you said I was getting better, but I wasn’t. I I had assumed that I was an expert. Mhmm. And, there at least the way you have been experiencing the infractions, that was not your experience. Right. So that was a awakening to me that the strength I thought because it was it was funny I talk about in the book. I was like, man, this person that I’m experiencing, they struggle with with the gray, and I wish they could just get like me Yep. And and see things in the complexity and you’re like no no no they’re not the only person struggling here. You are. Why is that such a tension and that like how do we get to a place
Dr. Stacie Otey Scott: where we delineate between black and white thinking? First of all, I will say we all struggle with the gray. Uh-huh. So, I think that in I mean, part of it is truly neurology. Truly. The brain likes to make these shortcuts. The brain’s sole job is to keep us alive. So when things happen, good or bad, it will make a shortcut so that when we see the start of that thing happening again, we know whether it’s something good that we should go towards or bad that we should run away from. And I think that you and I talked about like the example of the caveman back in the day and you got somebody in the forest picking the berries and, you know, they hear some, you know, crackling of branches behind them and they’re, like, still picking the berries, not really paying a lot of attention. And then they see people run past them and they’re, like, picking the berries, not paying attention. And then they look back and it’s like, oh, and there’s this huge saber tooth tiger coming. Well, the next time that happens, the brain is not gonna need all those signals. The brain is gonna hear the twig crunch out of there. That’s what’s gonna happen. And then, you know, when they’re, like, two miles away, they’re gonna look back and see it was nothing, you know, or it was just a friend of mine who was walking in the forest with me. So part of it is our neurology, and then the other part of it is, of course, how we’re socialized. When you talk about the halo and horn effect, I love it because what you’re getting at are these cognitive biases that we have And as human beings, we have a ton of them. I remember going online. My husband is a middle school teacher and he wanted to talk to his class about some of this. And so I went online and I found like the top 21 cognitive biases. And when you can start looking at that and understanding how we think, so now we’re thinking about our thinking, then you can really start seeing where you’re falling in place with this all or nothing, this black or white, this good or bad. That’s how we’re socialized, and it’s really difficult to hold that tension. To me, again, the easiest way to do that is to first take a look at self, which is what therapy is all about. And then once you start having that understanding of, oh, I’m not all good nor all bad, then we start projecting the same way we do with these other things we desire or think, we start projecting them onto others, which to me puts us all it kind of levels the playing field, and it’s recognizing we’re all human beings and most of us are trying to do our best. But it’s a hard thing to do because when you hurt me, immediately the brain is like, not safe, Don’t talk to her. I’m not a good person. She’s toxic.
Lisa Fields: Yes. The the the language of, the going back to the psychology language. Yep. That person is a narcissist. Yes. That person is a psychopath. Yes. And so Oh, he’s a sociopath for sure. I mean, did you see how he Yeah. Or, you know, diagnosing people with bipolar. Yes. All of things. And so the experience is clouded by the hurt. Mhmm. Like the reason you need a professional is because they’re not hurt by this person. Right. It’s hard to diagnose people when you’ve been when you’ve been actually emotionally traumatized by them. Yeah. Because you’re looking at it through a broken lens. Right. You’re not you’re not unbiased. So you can you can actually be right sometimes about your diagnosis. Maybe. If you’re in pain. Right. You could you could be right but oftentimes you need somebody that’s not actually hurt by this person to actually diagnose them. Absolutely. I mean the way we look at
Dr. Stacie Otey Scott: oh my goodness, the way society is looking at diagnosing now, you see one thing, one behavior or a behavior and you see it multiple times and now it’s, oh, they have this. When, I remember when I was just starting to learn all the different DSM diagnoses and for most of my peers, like anybody who’s in mental health and had to go through that process, it’s interesting when you’re doing it and learning about it versus looking outside. Because when you’re doing it and learning about it, like, you start seeing yourself in every oh, that’s me? Oh, that’s oh, that’s me. I mean, I’m the whole book. The truth of the matter is for all of these diagnoses, we need some of that thing. Again, it goes back to us pathologizing. So they’re a narcissist. Well, if you look at a narcissist, some of that some, again, too much of anything is not good for us, but some of that is required when you’re going to speak to people. You have to present this certain confidence. Some of that is required to be successful. If you think you’re nothing, then that’s not even going to give you the motivation or inspiration to pursue some of these things that are bigger than you and larger than you. The other thing about diagnosing is there are many criteria a person has to reach in order for us to diagnose them, and the last of which is functionality. Like, how is this impacting that person and how they function? So I could have all the narcissistic tendencies in the world, but when I’m out in the world, I’m not operating from a place that’s harmful, that causes me to not be successful in these other areas of my life like socially, emotional, and guess what? I wouldn’t be diagnosed. I wouldn’t be because the whole premise of somebody being diagnosed is based on them not being able to function effectively in a certain area of their lives. So the opposite of narcissism is codependence, right? But when you look at that codependent person, my husband and I have been having this conversation because we, have looked at ourselves and where we fall. And when you look at the person who’s codependent because we’re like all good or bad, the narcissist, they’re selfish, they’re bad. Well, the codependent is usually selfless to a fault. But when we look at them because they’re giving and they’re doing and they’re, oh, they’re good. They’re a good person. And it’s very difficult when you operate from that place where it’s got to be all or nothing and you’re saying this is all good or all bad, not to see the world, but to see yourself. And until we can do that then we can’t really look at anybody else and be in a sort of halfway right frame of mind to be able to see what some of the problematic behaviors are for them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. That’s helpful. I think,
Lisa Fields: one of the last things that I want us to discuss is as we’re navigating this space Mhmm. Of dealing with our heroes Mhmm. Falling and understanding that they’re human. Mhmm. We spoke a little bit about it but people are like where’s the accountability? Mhmm. How should we be thinking about accountability? Because I I talk about in the book the fact that when you admire someone Mhmm. That’s from a distance, you can’t always hold them accountable. Like, it I was in when I was in Washington no. Where was was I? I? I can’t forget Oregon at Bushnell. Mhmm. And someone said, you know, I’m trying to move on but these people are still doing this. And what I had to communicate in a religious space, if somebody is not doing something criminal and they’re in a church that’s autonomous like that doesn’t have like a non denominational church or even Baptist Church you have a lot of autonomy. Like you’re not rude. There’s no pope. You know that can sit you down. So a lot of us will never get the accountability we’re hoping for from some leaders. Mhmm. You know? Right. Because when I’ve come to and I had to learn this from if you all read my first book you know about my experience with the guy I was dating. Yes. When that happened there was no real person that could go in and do something to sit him down or like, you know, so Yeah. If I was waiting on something like that to happen to be healed, I would be still I would still be waiting. You’d still be right there. Yeah. Yeah. So at a certain point in some situations where there’s not criminal activity where people have just mishandled you, there is not you may never get an apology. In my case I eventually got one, But you may never get an apology. You may never have a board come and say this person has to sit down. In some cases, they do and then they just start another thing. Yep. Like, you know else. They just start another and they move on. Yes. And so if you get stuck, like, you’re you’re never gonna move forward. How do you, like, what are some things we could do to wrap our mind around that?
Dr. Stacie Otey Scott: It’s interesting that we think about all these things external to us. So when we talk about forgiveness, we make that about the other person. Talking about accountability, we do the same. And I think we miss out on some of what accountability means and what it looks like. So I wanna first look at, you know, the difference between punishment and discipline because I think that this also speaks to when you’re talking about holding someone accountable. So I remember telling, my children when they were younger, I recognize how I was raised, my parents did an amazing job, my, family at large, lots of history of trauma and abuse and all those things. And so for me, I almost lived in two different worlds. When I was a little girl, I was at home most of the school year and then in the summer I would go to my grandmother’s house and I would see all of this other way of being. And I think that recognizing that there can be an action that’s done that can come from two different places and that that then holds some of the perception because everything we’re talking about is perception. Mhmm. Everything. That helped me to kind of put in place this worldview that made more space for others and others making errors. So I remember telling my kids there’s a difference between discipline and punishment. Mhmm. When we’re punishing someone, we’re doing that from a place of anger and a place of frustration. When we’re disciplining someone, we’re doing that from a place of love. And if we think about it in a spiritual context, you know, we’re called to be disciples. And there was much discipline that was required in order to become a disciple. Whereas if you look, and I’m thinking about like the Old Testament versus the New, you look at some of the Old Testament and it’s like eye for an eye, you know, it’s very much this kind of punishing, response. When we’re talking about accountability today, I think that we’re talking about punishing people. I don’t think that we’re talking about holding people accountable. And when we talk about it in the justice system, yeah, we can look and see, well, this person should go to jail because they did this heinous thing and that measure of hurt, anger, harm, hate, whatever it was, deserves a disciplinary measure, not punishment, disciplinary measure that’s going to ensure that this person can’t do that to anyone else again. So jail. When we’re talking about in the context of relationship, I think most of us forget that being in relationship is a gift. It’s not a requirement. So in the situation you talked about in the first book, the only way to hold this person accountable and then also be able to walk in a perspective of of forgiveness and grace and hold all of that at the same time was to take the action that only you had the power to take, which was walk away from the relationship. You took the gift away from this person who mishandled the gift. That was the accountability piece. And I remember if I remember correctly, by the time you got the apology, you had already forgiven and grown through that space. So we keep trying to make these things about other people. You know, I need to hold him accountable and this needs to happen to him when all we control is ourselves. And everything that we are framing and reframing is based from a singular lens, ours, and our perspective, which influences our perception. Sometimes it’s easier to hold someone accountable or forgive when you can get up from that spot in the table, that chair you were in, that you were just looking at it this way and come around to the other side and see it from this angle and you see something a little bit differently, it then changes your perception so you can say, oh, okay. He still was very wrong for doing that. And that doesn’t make him 100% a bad person. What that makes him, for me, is somebody unsafe that I shouldn’t engage in the gift of relationship with, or I need to put some kind of distance between it. Because again, it’s not all or nothing. I see a lot of the stuff going on now with these toxic parents and how you should leave these toxic family members. And in reality, that’s again trying to go back to black or white as opposed to holding the gray. How do I sit here with this gray and make sure I do no harm, but also that I walk away unharmed?
Lisa Fields: Yeah. I think I mean, that’s so helpful, I think, for where we are today as a culture because the the tension is we over we overreact or overcorrect as I say. As I was researching for the book most accidents happen when you when when you overcorrect in the wheel. Like if you if you lose control and then you try to go all the way to the other side you actually cause the x. You think okay that I need to pull it over like the wheel all the way over and you over correct and you actually caused the accident Yep. Through over correction and I think we’re trying to over correct. Mhmm. We saw like people do something and we got to go to the other extreme. Yes. And it’s like no the the the when you over correct you still miss the destination. Like you still Absolutely. You still cause an accident. Like living in detention helps you not overcorrect. Mhmm.
Dr. Stacie Otey Scott: I agree with that wholeheartedly. I love that you’ve used this concept of a a vehicle. And, you know, I I know that, you know, when you see an accident on the side of the road, many of us, and this goes back to mindfully versus mindlessly, many of us will start looking at the accident. And before you know it, you’re steering because your everything is going to now shift to where you are focused. And so you’re focused over here, and so your steering can go in in that direction. And then you realize, oh, I’m about to cause an accident. And so then you do exactly what you said, and you overcorrect. And now it’s an accident on this side of the highway and that side of the highway. But I love the fact that you use that as an example because when I I think this falls in that same category of, embracing versus bracing against. And so, years ago, I had a friend who, lived in Germany and he had recently gotten married, recently had a baby. They were dry he was driving and he had his whole family in the car. And there was a car accident. A car accident happened directly to them, and as he was telling me what happened because his wife ended up passing away, he talked about, you know, how he started focusing on this car that was coming in the wrong lane in their lane going the wrong way, and his wife was asleep at the time and the baby was in the back, you know, being a baby, very loose, probably about two or three months old. When he recognized what was happening, he started trying to do the correction And he’s thinking about, you know, in that split second, how do I avoid this, all the things. Well, when his wife realized it was happening, it was because she heard the the tires and felt the movement, and she woke up to this thing in process and she pushed her hands up against the dash to kind of brace for impact because she realized they’re gonna hit. Whereas my friend, he was still trying to correct the car, try to see how they could avoid it. And even if you think about the baby, the baby doesn’t know anything is going on. So when they hit, because she was bracing against her seat belt tightened to the point that it cracked a rib, the rib punctured her lung. She died there in the car. And so I thought about what’s the difference between him and her and what was going on and even the baby? Because they walked away with no issue at all, not a scratch. Well, my friend, he was not focused on bracing for impact. He was focused on maneuvering. So he didn’t tense his body up. He didn’t try to avoid the the the impact and push it away, and the baby’s in the back chilling. So I could see in my mind’s eye that when the impact happened, especially from the context of the baby, the baby was so relaxed and so unbothered that when his seat belt did everything it was supposed to do, his body just kind of went with it and relaxed back down. And so did my friends. Like, he’s so focused on the maneuver, he’s not tensing up everything in his body. He has to stay loose to hit the gas, hit the brake, do all those things. So when his seat belt pulled, his body gave in to it. Well, his wife, when her seat belt pulled because she was bracing against, it forcefully caused this action that ended up killing her. That again goes back to these concepts that we’re talking about as opposed to trying to avoid the pain or punish someone because of the pain. Accepting, acknowledging, and then doing what is within your power is how you grow through it and you end up in a place of healing. But it sounds counterintuitive. Like, of course, if you see somebody coming in, you need to get yourself to it. It sounds counterintuitive, and it is counterintuitive to everything we’ve been taught, but I found it to be the only way to actually grow through trauma and intense hurt, and abuse. And I’ve watched that play out with my mom and some of my aunts and uncles, that same kind of thing. So we’re using a lot of different ways to describe it, but again, it always goes back to self. And even in the situation with you and your ex, you didn’t get to the place of forgiveness until you stop trying to avoid your own, like, pain of what he did and covering that up with anger, because anger, we say that’s okay. Mhmm. But hurt, oh, that’s weak. When you finally got to the hurt, then you could embrace, acknowledge this thing happened, embrace your own pain, and then deal with your healing internally. Mhmm. And you totally, like, left, like, forgot about him in the context of what’s going to happen to him. And no, it became about self. And the minute you did that, it wasn’t very long after that that you saw him and he actually apologized. I remember I remember you telling me that.
Lisa Fields: I think that process of healing knowing I I love that you brought up the anger because what it what I’ve discovered through process therapy and healing with the Lord Mhmm. Is that once you have once the anger you have anger there because you have love. Right. But once the anger is done Right. Once you stop masking the pain with anger, then there’s a hard work of dealing with the pain, like, allowing yourself to feel the pain Mhmm. And then not coming out as rage. Mhmm. And then letting that pain sit and not trying to get it to go away. Right. Like, I think that’s the the avoidance part. Yeah. We talk about that a lot. Like, being like, oh, I’m not mad anymore. Right. Now now I’m actually feeling the hurt. Right. But I’m feeling the hurt because of love and pain, avoidance is not the goal. Right. It’s a part of the process.
Dr. Stacie Otey Scott: Yep. And that’s the hardest thing. That’s the hardest thing for us to kind of reconcile that this is gonna hurt like hell and it’s for my good. So I think there’s a specific form of therapy called dialectical behavioral therapy that helps us to kind of put that concept in, put it in focus so it can be used. The author, creator of the, theoretical orientation, her name is Doctor. Marsha Linehan and she talks about the difference between pain and suffering. And I’ve been doing some interesting reading across, you know, different forms of religion and so I think the Buddhist probably, has this kind this concept right. I see it in our bible. You know, I see it show up all the time, but not necessarily how do we do this, because we know the word tells us we’re gonna be in pain, we’re gonna have some suffering. But with Doctor. Marsha Linehan, she talks about the difference between pain and suffering being acceptance. We’re gonna have pain. Pain is a part of life. We try to avoid it. When we try to avoid it and it’s already happened, well, that makes the pain grow from pain to now suffering. Because the very thing that you’re trying not to think about is what you’re now consumed with. It’s like being on a diet and you say to yourself, I can’t have a piece of chocolate cake. I can’t eat the cake. You didn’t even want the cake when you weren’t on a diet. But now that you’re on this diet, you’re like, I can’t have the cake. And all you think about all day is that cake, Lord, if I could have a piece of cake, it’s that kind of thing. We want to run away from it. We want to brace against it. We want to avoid it when everything in human nature and how we’ve been designed by the creator says no, you have to go to that, you have to embrace that, you have to accept it because you can’t fix what you won’t admit, And once you accept it, then you have the power to do something with it that puts you on the other side of it. So the pain is par for the course. It’s par for the course and it’s, as you said, it’s the requirement for healing. We say things like there’s purpose in the pain, but then we forget all about that when we’re the one in pain. We forget that there’s purpose in this and the purpose of it is to help grow us. So
Lisa Fields: it’s difficult stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that’s a good place to to put a pin in it. Thank you so much, Doctor. Stacy, for for joining us, for being on the podcast for this special series around When Heroes Fall. Tell our audience how they could get connected with you.
Dr. Stacie Otey Scott: Absolutely. You can go to my website livewellbydrsos and you can just type that in and you’ll see an image of me there welcoming you. And I’m also on Facebook and all the social media things. And it’s Doctor SOS at Doctor SOS, LiveWell now. So I think that, what I really want people to know about getting in touch with me is that you don’t have to get in touch with me for me to be your therapist.
Lisa Fields: That’s not what I’m looking for. I’m looking to make sure the person gets on the path, as you said earlier, to their healing because I believe all of us deserve it. We’re worth it. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Doctor. Stacy. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of the G3 Project Podcast. You can catch all our past episodes on our website, on our YouTube channel, or wherever you stream, or listen to your favorite podcast. We cannot do what we do without generous support from people like you, so consider being a monthly partner or a one time giver at g3project.org by hitting that donate tab. And remember, here at the g three project, we’re helping you know what you believe and why you believe it. Until next time, grace and peace and God bless.