Episode 187 - Overcoming Self-Blame

Exploring the Power of Self-Reflection

Discover the strength in knowing yourself and overcoming challenges.

In this episode of the Trust Factor Podcast, Jessy Revivo delves into the importance of self-awareness and personal growth. He emphasizes that knowing oneself is crucial; without this understanding, one can’t recognize the good, the bad, and the areas that need improvement.

The Journey of Self-Discovery
Jessy shares a personal anecdote about a conversation he had with a fellow congregant who, after a significant life event, began to explore his Jewish roots and identity. This individual’s journey serves as a powerful reminder that introspection can lead to profound transformation. Jessy notes:

"A lot of people... are running around like chickens with their heads cut off. They're blindfolded."

This statement encapsulates the frantic state many find themselves in when lacking self-knowledge.

Embracing the Complexity of Human Nature
The discussion highlights how individuals often focus on their failures rather than their successes, leading to a harsh self-assessment. Jessy mentions:

"We are twice as sensitive to failure and to negativity as we are to positivity."

This imbalance can result in a cycle of negativity, especially when one feels solely responsible for life's challenges. Jessy argues that having a relationship with a higher power can relieve the burden of self-blame, promoting a healthier perspective on personal failures.

Understanding Our Internal Struggles
Jessy elaborates on the concept of the evil inclination, suggesting that it’s an inherent part of being human:

"Without the evil inclination, a person lacks free choice between good and evil."

He stresses that everyone grapples with their inclinations, and acceptance of this struggle is vital. The key lies in recognizing that our core is good, and learning to channel our inclinations positively.

The Role of Torah in Personal Growth
According to Jessy, the Torah provides the tools necessary to navigate life's challenges and develop a strong moral compass. He encourages listeners to:

"Find yourself a rabbi, a qualified rabbi, and you learn by them every day."

This learning process can turn negative traits into positive aspirations, especially in areas of spirituality.

Final Thoughts
In closing, Jessy reminds us to look for the silver linings in our struggles and challenges. Just as he reflects on the events of October 7th, which sparked personal journeys of growth for many, we too can find meaning in our hardships. Embrace the complexity of your journey, and remember that self-knowledge is a powerful tool for transformation.

For more insights and reflections, listen to the full episode of the Trust Factor Podcast!

Transcript

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We think we failed, not just at a task, but in life, and our personalities and our character traits and our relationships, because maybe I've made some mistakes, some bad choices. So now everything falls on my shoulders. That is what happens when you don't have God in your life. When you take all the credit for everything in your life, then the opposite is true also. You also take the rest of the package, which is the blame for the downside. When things are good, yeah, they're great. Pat yourself on the back. Good job. You did great. Nobody can do what you can do. But when the stuff hits the fan, when you chose wrong, then suddenly who's to blame? You. The trust factor is a ticket to a bad life. The trust factor shows you how to get through the night. Good morning. Welcome to another episode. Thank you for joining. We're getting right into it. We're talking about knowing ourselves, figuring out who we are. If you don't know who you are, then you don't know the good, the bad, and the ugly. You don't know what needs to be fixed. A lot of people, like we said yesterday, are running around like chickens with their heads cut off. They're blindfolded, literally blindfolded. I just had a conversation with somebody about this in shul the other day. Very interesting on Shabbat. I had a conversation with a gentleman that I never met before. I was in a new shul, not new, but a shul I've been to before, but not my regular shul. A guy sitting next to me in Shul, who looks like a very religious fellow, very big beard, big keeper. And I thought to myself, wow, this guy looks like Hasset, big deal. Anyway, we strike up a conversation. And he tells me that he's been a religious Jew for three years. Since when? October the 7th. Not an anomaly, my friends, not the exception. If you knew how many people started to become more observant after October the 7th, there is such a massive silver lining. You remember the other day I told you that eventually one day we're going to look back and we're going to understand or have some insight. You'll never understand, but you'll have a little bit of insight into what good came out of October the 7th. People don't understand that. They think that it's all bad. There's no good in it. They don't understand that nothing that Hashem does is bad. It's difficult, it's challenging. Sometimes it doesn't make sense, but who are we to expect that we should know and understand all of the things that he does? You would be terrified to know that you know everything he knows, because that means that he's on the same level as you. And I don't know about you, but I prefer a God who knows a lot more than I do to run this world. So anyway, this guy sitting beside me tells me that it's only been three years. And before that, he was a musician and he was immersed in the opposite world, a world of secularism. No connection back to Judaism. In fact, came from a family that shunned it and wanted nothing to do with it. But something came over him on October the 7th, and he did some introspection and he started to analyze his life. What am I here for? What is this all about? Why does the world hate me so much? Why is everybody ganging up on the Jews? And he started to do his homework. And it irked him on the inside. It shook him up a little bit. And he woke up as a result. And he reached out and he started to learn. And now he's enjoying life. He's made a complete reversal on his life, 180 degrees, and he's on high. He's doing really, really well. That's what happens when you do the assessment. So that's what we're talking about. Now, we said that there is a strong possibility that this happens with a lot of people, that you're going to end up being very hard on yourself, like the story with Raf Shalom Arush, who talked about an individual who was just so hard on themselves that he thought negatively of himself. He couldn't do any good. He's not good. He's all bad. All of this ridiculousness that we repeat to ourselves when we quote unquote fail. We think we failed, not just at a task, but in life, in the personalities and our character traits and our relationships, because they may not be going well, because maybe I've made some mistakes, some bad choices. So now everything falls on my shoulders. That is what happens when you don't have God in your life. When you take all the credit for everything in your life, then the opposite is true also. You also take the rest of the package, which is the blame for the downside. When things are good, yeah, they're great. Pat yourself on the back. Good job. You did great. Nobody can do what you can do. But when the stuff hits the fan, when you chose wrong, then suddenly who's to blame? You. And the problem is that the way that we're designed is that we are twice as sensitive to failure and to negativity as we are to positivity in winning. And I told you this before in the finance industry. If I lost somebody $100,000 in managing their investment portfolio, they would be so upset with me that I would have to earn them back $200,000 just to be even, just to come back to par to where we were before I lost that $100,000. Why? Science has shown us many times over that we are doubly sensitive to the downside as we are to the upside. The upside we tend to take for granted. The downside nobody wants. So it hurts us that much more. That means that if you're in charge and you failed or you did something wrong, or you behave badly in a way that you later on reflect on, you're going to reflect twice as harshly on that situation and on your failure than you would for all the other successes that you've had in your life. In other words, you've stacked the odds against yourself. So what does he say? He says you need to remember that you're good and that your internal dimension is all good. You have to remind yourself, because there is a risk that you will get caught in this spiral of negativity, which we see often. We see people, there's no wonder people are pumping themselves full of anti-anxiety and anti-depression meds. Why? Because of what I just went through with you. They take on everything in this world. They don't have God in their lives. And so it starts and stops with them. And when it goes bad, it's really bad. So they're really hard on themselves. You have to stop and remind yourself, I'm not bad. What do I have? I have an evil inclination. There's a very big difference. It doesn't mean you're a bad person. It means you have what every other human being on planet Earth has, an evil inclination. And maybe you haven't found the tools to be able to win at that battle, the battle with your evil inclination. So let's learn. How do we do that? He says, be strong and remember that the real you and your innermost desires are really all good. It doesn't matter how corrupt you are on the inside. You remember yesterday we said you could be the biggest criminal on earth. At the end of the day, never forget that when God created man, he blew into his nostrils a spirit. That spirit, that soul, was part of God. That's what brought human beings into the world. That's what created the first person. Before that, it was just a bag of bones and flesh. There was nothing inside, hollow, empty. All of a sudden comes Hashem and puts a part of him into human beings, into man, and now you have an individual, a thinking, breathing, rationalizing human being. How can you be bad at your core if inside of you you have a godly component? It's impossible. It doesn't go together. Now, you have an evil inclination, and let me tell you something. I had this conversation with my cousin the other day. He called me out of the blue and he asks me, somehow we got to this discussion where he says, Do you think that man is all negative or are we positive? Which one is it? Because he was confused. He's looking at the world and he's seeing how it's seemingly falling apart at the seams, and how people are so corrupt and how things are every day. You turn on the news, and it seems like there's one more thing that was worse than what was yesterday. And he says, How is it that human beings are good? They must all be bad. And so I gave him the Torah answer. And the Torah answer is that we know that when we're born, we have an evil inclination. Like I said a minute ago, though, we all have that part of God inside of us. But God gives us the evil inclination without the positive, the good inclination. He withholds the good inclination until when? Until you're bar mitzvah. So what does that mean? That means from the day of birth until you're 12 or 13 years old, depending on if you're a man or a woman, you only have an evil inclination. That evil inclination is what keeps you alive. That evil inclination is the one that makes you cry for everything and gets the attention from your parents and makes sure that people are focusing on you so that you have the necessities of life. That's what the evil inclination is there for when you're in your young years, when you can't fend for yourself. So Hashem keeps out the good inclination for 12 or 13 years. Also, the reason that he does that is because the good inclination is so much more powerful than the negative inclination, that the negative, the evil inclination needs a head start. It needs a head start, not just at some certain point in your life, but in your early young years where you're starting to develop your character traits, when you're starting to learn about the world, where you're most impressionable. Foundation is being built with an evil inclination. So now you understand what happens later on in life is a lot of people aren't able to make that transition. Their evil inclination has taken such a deep root in them, like all of us, but they've never studied, they've never learned Torah. They were never given the antidote to their evil inclination. And so the evil inclination remains and overpowers the good inclination. When does the good inclination overcome the evil? When you sit and learn, when you're given Torah, when you're given godly insight into how he runs the world, how the back office works, and how to utilize that to your advantage. Now that you know that your essence and your desires are all good because you have that God component inside of you, you can be aware of the fact that the creator created you with an evil inclination. And you could be okay with that. Even though we may not like it, we must accept the fact that we have an evil inclination. Just like we have two arms and two legs and two eyes and two ears, you were born with an evil inclination. He says it came factory supplied from your divine manufacturer. It's not a coincidence that you have an evil inclination, and it's not that you have one and other people don't. The same way you have two arms and two legs, you also have an evil inclination. It's just the reality of life. Without the evil inclination, a person lacks free choice between good and evil. We are people, not angels. That's the distinction between human beings and angels. Angels are driven by tasks. They only have tasks. That's it. They don't have personalities to be able to change their tasks or their desires. They are programmed to do whatever job it is that they do. There's a Gemara that talks about when Moses went up to Kisel Kavot, to God's throne, and he was there to advocate on why it is that humanity deserved to receive the Torah. Why? Because the angels didn't want us to receive it. The angels wanted it for themselves. It was too good for human beings. And Moses was charged with making that argument for having that debate. And God encouraged him to have that debate. And one of the things that he discussed was the fact that they don't have an evil inclination. They don't have parents. They don't eat food. They don't have to make the blessings. They don't have to honor their parents. They don't have to do the battle that we need to do with our evil inclinations. We're not angels. We're human beings. That's why we have the Torah, because the Torah is the antidote. It is the instruction manual on how to get through all of those challenges in your life. And if you don't have it, you're simply lacking. That's why we have inside of us negative character traits and bad habits. It makes sense now. It's not for you to beat yourself up and think I'm broken. It's not for you to think I'm worse than everybody else. It's not for you to think I can never get over these things. No. Everybody is dealing with their evil inclination in one way or another. Some worse, some not as bad. Some have been working on it and others haven't. The key is that everybody needs to start working with their good inclination to overcome their evil inclination. We're given them in order to overcome them. Why be upset about them? It doesn't make any sense. Is a champion athlete upset that he needs to compete against an opponent? No. Without an opponent on the court or on the field, there's no victory. Nobody would go to watch a basketball game where there's only one team. Why would it go and watch that? Why would I pay any money to go and watch? I wouldn't go for free. To watch one team play against itself doesn't make any sense. When do I pay big bucks? When are the tickets the most expensive? When it's the playoffs. Why? Because not only now is there an opponent, but that opponent is the most formidable. It is the best in the league. It's two giants going against each other. It's a powerful inclination versus another powerful inclination. That's a battle worth watching. That's a battle worth learning from. That's why people will spend top dollar to go and watch one of these games. The worst evil inclination, listen to this, this is important, is complaining that one has an evil inclination. Accept it. Accept it with love. Don't fight it. If you fight your evil inclination, you will lose all day long. Why? Because he's older and wiser than you are. He's been around a lot longer and he's dealt with people much bigger and stronger than you and I. So why fight him? You're never going to win. You have to utilize the secrets of the Torah. You have to utilize the antidote. Take that injection of the antidote that'll allow you the tools and the abilities, the internal abilities to overcome him. Use him. Take advantage of his powers and use them against him. How? By turning the evil desires into good. How do you turn the evil desires into good? Let's just take one example and we'll leave with this. One of the evil inclinations that we have that the Torah actually says removes a person from this world is jealousy. Jealousy is not a good inclination. To look at somebody else and say, this individual has something that I want, or even worse, maybe I don't want it, but I don't want them to have it out of jealousy. Very, very negative trait. Why does it say, by the way, that that trait removes a person from the world? Rashi tells us, I believe, that it's because that trait has no limits to it. There's no boundaries on it. In other words, once you're jealous, that jealousy can carry you through your rest of your life and it can continue to get stronger and stronger. There's no limit to jealousy. So how do you overcome jealousy in a way that's positive? How do you use your good inclination to overcome the negative element of jealousy? And the answer is you figure out where you should be jealous. It doesn't make sense to be jealous of anybody's material, because that material is a means to an end and it is custom crafted for each individual with their own challenges in this life. But there is a place where you're allowed to be jealous. Do you know where? In your spirituality, in your learning, in your closeness to your creator, in your understanding of how this world works and how to overcome that evil inclination. If you see somebody who's achieved greatness in those areas, who's learned Torah to a point where he's now become a version of a sephi Torah himself, which is what the big righteous people are, the Tamideka Khamim are really a walking sefer Torah. It's good, not just okay, to be jealous of somebody like that. Why? Because you can aspire to that. You want to aspire to having somebody else's millions, it doesn't make any sense. First of all, you can't control that. The only thing you can control is how much you learn and how much you grow and how much you come closer to your creator. But you cannot control the material. Hashem decides how much you're going to get and when you're going to get it. So to sit and think, I wish I had that and be miserable and upset about it all day long is not going to help you. It's not going to change your reality. But to be excited about the fact that now I can achieve what this person has achieved in his spirituality and his Torah observance and growth, that is something to aspire to. And that, my friends, is how you take your evil inclination and you point him in the right direction. To try and crush him, to try and destroy him is not going to happen. So what do you do? You put mechanisms in place to point him in the right direction and let him loose. Let me be jealous about people who have Torah. There's no sense in me being jealous about what somebody else has in the material world. His wife, his house, his children, his cars. It makes no sense. That, my friends, is a secret to dealing with your evil inclination. But how do you know that? Aside from me telling you that, how do you learn that? And the answer is you sit and learn Torah. You find yourself a rabbi, a qualified rabbi, an orthodox rabbi, and you learn by them every day. And they will give you these nuggets of wisdom that will be what propels you in this life forward so that you can make good decisions, so that you could instead of feeling negative and down about the fact that you have negative character traits and things that you need to change, you could see the positive, the silver lining in them. Just like we started this conversation about October the 7th, there's always a silver lining. You look, and on its surface, it seems negative. Such a tragedy. And you look and you think it's negative that I have this inclination, all these bad character traits, it's wrong. There's a silver lining in there. Look for the silver lining and you will understand exactly why you were brought into this world of an amazing day, my friends. We'll chat again tomorrow. Thank you for spending time with us on the Trust Factor Podcast. If you've heard something today that moved you, save this episode and share it with someone who might need to hear it. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss upcoming conversations that challenge, empower, and uplift. And if you're on social media, connect with us. Leave your thoughts, drop a quote that resonated with you. Hashtag the TrustFactor Podcast. Until next time, keep growing in your trust and keep living with purpose. I'm Jesse Revivo, and this has been the Trust Factor Podcast. Thanks for listening.