Everyone Has a Dave Transcript

Rhea: I actually think everyone's been ghosted. Ghosting is just a pretty new term for something that's been happening since the dawn of fucking time.

Liz: Yes.

Rhea: You know, ghosting is a cowardly rejection. It's that I don't have the balls to tell you I'm done, so I'm going to just be done by disappearing. And that makes you feel really lost as the person on the other side because you don't know where you stand.

Liz: Which I think goes to show you, you obviously never knew where you stood. You thought you did, but clearly that person had some other idea. I got ghosted.

Rhea: I got ghosted.

Liz: So my Dave came when I was not quite 19. It was truly lightning striking and I still remember the moment. I remember where I was standing and I just got this feeling throughout my entire body. I had already had relationships. I'd had boyfriends, I'd had flings so it wasn't that I was convinced that I was already in love with him. Well, he asked me out and I went and it was like, okay, now we get to be together, but whatever it was that we were having became quite short-lived. He just pulled away quite quickly. He wasn't being very communicative and I never saw him again and heard from him and that was it, and I had zero understanding of what was going on and I couldn't stop crying. I had never felt so devastated over the end of a relationship before.

Rhea: Being rejected sucks. What's funny about this whole ghosting thing is yes, it's rejection, but it's kind of like rejection in slow motion, because you don't quite know at the start you're getting rejected. It’s only a couple of days past, you're like, oh, that's what was happening. And I don't know if it softens the blow or makes it more difficult. That's what it feels like. When my Dave ghosted me, for me it wasn't even that I cared about this person, funnily enough. It was like, Oh, this is just fun. You know? So almost when he disappeared I was a bit more like, so why am I so upset now? I genuinely thought, Oh God, something bad happened and it was maybe only after a couple of days, I was like, Oh no, something really bad did happen, but just to me.

Liz: Exactly.

Rhea: From somebody that probably would have taken me 24 hours to get over, it took me like three or four weeks.

Liz: At least.

Rhea: At least. He was just reinforcing the story I had already told myself every other time, which was, you are unlovable. It didn't matter in that moment the guys I could list you that had chosen me. You always forget those.

Liz: You really do. Our ego cares a lot when we get rejected first of all, because it tells us we're not worthy of this person's affection and I think that some of that comes from, there's no sort of saying, well, could you just tell me what I did wrong, or what is going on here so I can then know for the next time or be able to move on without the lingering questions. Because I think the most difficult thing about being ghosted is the not knowing and then you just kind of get a little caught up in your mind and in your feelings that everything you do is wrong because you don't know what that person's issue was.

Rhea: But you're so desperately looking for a reason and in the absence of one, all you've got is the option to blame yourself. And so then it makes you really look inward and ask yourself, what's wrong with me? And most people would prefer not to have to ask themselves those kind of questions.

Liz: Who knows?

Rhea: The honest answer is it's always you and it's always them. That's always going to be the case. Yes, there's timing. Yes, there's circumstances. Yes, there's all these different things, but if two people really want to be together, they're just together.

Liz: They're just going to be together.

Rhea: And unless you're able to look at any rejection when it comes to relationships and go, “Well you know what, like we both just didn't want each other enough,” and that really fucking sucks.

Liz: It does fucking suck. I like being with you. I like the way being with you makes me feel but I don't feel attracted to you on every level. That's a hard one too.

Rhea: Ghosting is a literal manifestation of your fear of rejection, so it forces you to look at your shadow.

Liz: So shadow is fear?

Rhea: Yes. Fear of being rejected, fear of being unloved, fear of not conforming, all the rest of it, right? Because your whole shadow is always going to go back to why am I being rejected or I will be rejected if . . . Once you've created that belief, the ego it needs to be fed and that food it's looking for is the stories to reinforce it.

Liz: Absolutely. However it comes.

Rhea: You know, and then it starts manifesting itself in relationships. It starts manifesting itself in friendships. It starts manifesting in my day-to-day and it's affecting every aspect of my life negatively, because it's not being addressed and it will get bigger and bigger and bigger until I sit down and go, okay, what the fuck is going on? Am I really different? Am I really that unlovable? 

Shadow is a psychology term as well as a spiritual one. It's one of the few terms that actually mean the same thing in both. I think shadow is the dark side of yourself. It's the side you just don't want to know. You don't want to acknowledge. It's literally if your light is the best parts of you, your shadow is the worst. The parts that make you feel small. There's a really easy way to test where some of your shadows are.

Liz: Really, there's a test like in a magazine, like in Cosmo?

Rhea: Kind of, but real life, yeah. If you meet someone or you know someone and they do something that really makes you annoyed and angry and you're judging that person for it, you're judging your own shadow.

Liz: Pretty much.

Rhea: So the more chilled you are about everyone else doing stuff you don't like, the more you've integrated your shadow.

Liz: For a lot of people, shadow presents itself as the inner critic.

Rhea: Yeah.

Liz: I think for some of us, it goes even deeper where it's shame. I had had a really difficult time in high school and I was very all over the place because I wasn't able to live honestly and truthfully. I remember the principal saying to me, “You are amoral”. Anyway, fast forward to my Dave, the ghosting and rejection and feeling that I was back in the principal's office being called “amora”l, and reliving the pain of that experience and that hurt and to be told that you're not worthy. I don't want you. That's when I entered into some very self-destructive relationships. I had to really look at my shadow because I was becoming so self-destructive. I was allowing it to take over because it was becoming sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy because I was trying to avoid it so much, and the more I kept wanting to suppress it or deny it, the more it kept creeping up and creeping up and the more space you give your shadow, the more you realize, well, really is that all? Are you just born from this fear that I have or because this person had said that I was bad?

Rhea: Read all about shadow or this stuff and integrating shadow and I was like, what the fuck is integrating shadow? How the hell do you do it?

Liz: What is it?

Rhea: And then I read this example and I thought, God, that's fucking smart.

Liz: Aside just loving yourself.

Rhea: That's a way of doing it, because there's a path to getting there because the thing is, I think it's really easy for people to say, Oh, just love yourself. Shadow integrated. Poof! Magic! But actually no. You need a roadmap sometimes or something. And for me, this is what I found really interesting is that let's say one of my shadows, I have no filter. I say exactly what comes into my mind, and I've always been really scared after I say something that one day I'll say the wrong thing enough that that person might want to be my friend or won't want to love me anymore. Or I would've hurt them so much by just saying something without thinking that I'd lose them.

Liz: Right.

Rhea: So that's my shadow. So you could ask yourself, all right, I can see in a lot of ways why this would be a shitty thing to have. You know this lack of filter and yes, I could train myself to shut it off completely and pretend it doesn't exist, but instead of doing it that way, why don't we look at it a different way? In what situations do me not having a filter serve me? In any relationship, being able to say how you feel serves you.

Liz: Or on a podcast.

Rhea: Yes. Literally on a podcast serves me so it can't be so bad, and in doing that and finding this, not the silver lining, but the place for that aspect of yourself that you don't like, but that can serve you, that actually helps you.

Liz: Oh, okay. I see.

Rhea: Yeah. That's how you integrate it in a way that for me feels right. When you can see that what you don't like about yourself can also be integrated in a way that can make you like it, it's not scary anymore. You just own it. You're like, yeah, sometimes I can say the wrong thing and it can get me trouble, but thank God for that because now I'm on a podcast and I get to say what the fuck I want to when I want to do it. So there's always good and bad.

Liz: I think shadow runs deeper. It's not easy to integrate shadow. I mean, the only way to do it is to love it. 

Rhea: Well, maybe what I said was a way of loving it, right?

Liz: It's a way to find it approachable enough to get to a point where maybe you can develop a relationship to that so that you can then love it.

Rhea: Step by step, Liz.

Liz: It's step by step. Yes.

Rhea: So you said shadow goes deeper than that?

Liz: It does, and it can only be integrated through love and what keeps it distant and what keeps it shadow, it's all the labels we give it.

Rhea: Okay.

Liz: And all the judgment we give it. It was only shadow when we reached separation, and that's when you started to apply judgment labels.

Rhea: We live in a world where there's justice. There's black and white and you're either wrong or you're right. So there are parts of you that are wrong or they're right, and we'll use other peoples' or our projections of other peoples' definitions of what wrong and right is to define ourselves. It's crazy because you could meet two people who, one could love something about you and someone could hate something about you, so you've given away all your agency to other people to define whether or not you know parts of you are acceptable in society or parts of you are not acceptable in society.

Liz: Right.

Rhea: But the shadow is basically the parts of you that you think makes you unlovable, get rejected, that you've been told and have continued to tell yourself are wrong, and until you can get to a point where you just accept that there is no right and wrong in me. In different scenarios, the worst part about me could end up being the best.

Liz: And it was never the worst part to begin with.

Rhea: Exactly. It's just a part because it's not about black and white. It's not about trying to convince someone to love you enough to see past these aspects of yourself that you think are negative.

Liz: Or that you were told were negative.

Rhea: Because they might not be.

Liz: I never believed that there was something wrong with me. It really wasn't until the final straw with Dave where I thought, Oh my gosh, then maybe everyone is right.

Rhea: Well that's exactly what I was going to say is that for me initially, I remember feeling like everything's perfect. I'm perfect. We all do as kids, you know, as babies, we're brought into this world. We're told what's right and wrong about us. We're told how to be and what to be and what not to be. Here is the list of reasons that I already have in my subconscious why I am unlovable and no one wants to be with me, and imagine that you get to a point in your life where you're able to go, here's a list of reasons that some people might not like about me. Some people might love about me. Luckily I just accept that it's me. So this person doesn't want to be with me. They just don't want to be with me, the full package of me because I am these things and I am other things. Yeah.

Liz:  Whatever you're thinking, whatever you're doing, however you're living is always an expression of your consciousness in that very moment. Perhaps it's a place of pain, perhaps it's place of joy. It just is. I think that the more of your trauma you've healed, the less of your shadow you will see as shadow as opposed to just that part of you.

Rhea: Well, it's all well and good to say accept what is. Accept you’re all these things.

Liz: Love yourself.

Rhea: And we've spoken a bit about the steps to get there in some ways, but for me, and we promised this in the first episode, we said we will help you understand how to integrate your shadow.

Liz: Yeah. First it's recognizing that core fear that created the shadow. Well, the core fear is rejection.

Rhea: Okay, core fear is always rejection.

Liz: Yes. When it comes to ghosting, but then there's a basis for that rejection. We can quite simply sort of put shadow in that context of it’s trauma. That trauma is where we forget our divinity, that we are greater and bigger than we realize that we are, especially in that moment.

Rhea: What you are saying is shadow comes from rejection, which comes from trauma, which is what we were talking about in the first episode. We think our shadow is going to make us get hurt again.

Liz: That it's out to hurt us.

Rhea: So by squashing down the shadow, we won't get hurt.

Liz: No, we'll be good.

Rhea: So the best way to embrace your shadow is to see where it goes if you do get hurt, because once you see that actually it's nowhere near as bad as you thought it could be, then that helps dissolve the shadow. It helps integrate the shadow.

Liz: Precisely. For me, it was, “I will never be who I am meant to be”.

Rhea: And mine was, “I will never get what I meant to have”.

Liz: Because before you were just told, as you said, when we were younger, there's good and bad and so we start labelling, we start judging. There's good behavior, there's bad behavior. We're taught to conform. This is the type of behavior that will elicit praise, so I'm going to do this. This is going to make me feel valuable and valued and validated and loved and accepted.

Rhea: And if I act the other way . . .

Liz: Or if I think the other way, or if I allow this little bit of desire to seep out because there's this part of me that kind of enjoys this idea, then what if they know, then what?

Rhea: And then they won’t love me anymore.

Liz: My entire life will fall apart. As it was for me, I think I cared less about being loved or accepted than it was just, there goes my future.

Rhea: Yeah. So shadow is the self-destruct button. You think if you haven't even engaged with your shadow at all, you think if people know this, my life would self-destruct. So I have to do everything at all costs to avoid them from finding out. By rejecting the shadow, by pushing it down, by making it into a demon, the demon that can come into your life and ruin everything, wreck it all, you're giving it so much more power, so much bigger and the effects of it being unleashed become more and more unknown, and more and more detrimental.

Liz: Absolutely.

Rhea: So when you face it, like anything, when you look at something and you go, wait a second, are you really gonna do all those things? Are you really going to take a wrecking ball to my whole life?

Liz: For me it was just, I had a teacher who just said, you know, the more you try to separate your lives, the more split you become. And that's what was happening. And again, it was just this sort of . . . I was on the path of self-destruction and that Dave just sort of . . . he kind of triggered it. He's the one who sort of pushed that destruct button.

Rhea: Funny enough, the Dave for me did the opposite because if it wasn't for me all of a sudden going, wait a second, why is this person eliciting so many emotional reactions from me where they really didn't previously? I want to look at this. He just happened to come at the exact right time in my journey or whatever we want to call it. Made me go, this is a great opportunity. I feel like shit and I want to feel better and I'm desperate to feel better. If the only way I'm going to feel better is to feel worse for a bit, then let's fucking do it because I don't have a choice. 

                       I was really upset not because I'd been rejected by a specific person. I was really upset because I'd been rejected at all and it hit every single one of my fears, insecurities. They were all wrapped up in this ball of rejection that all of a sudden I was stuck looking at going, all right, these are my choices now. I can hide, I can run, but there's every fucking chance that this is going to keep on happening. Or for once instead of medicating with food, with friends, with men, with any kind of numbing agent you want to use and I know we are going to talk about this a lot in my next podcast so I'm not going to go too much into that, but what I will say is I had to get really low. 

                       There is a point in everyone's emotion when you get a bit sad and you know you can go one of two ways. You can go make yourself feel better or you can keep asking why and it was every layer. I was like, why? Why does this rejection hurt so much? Answer: Because I feel like I'm always rejected. Why do I feel like I am always rejected? You just have to keep asking the whys until you get to a point where there are no more whys, and you've gotten into your core fear and then when you get there, this is what I did anyway. When you get to that place, you go, all right, what happens if everyone found out that this is how I feel, and sometimes the best thing to do is go and tell everyone. That really helps you own it.

Liz: Yeah, communal therapy.

Rhea: Yeah. Just tell them this is how I feel and maybe that's all you need to do is just say it, because the next time it comes around you'll be educated enough and then you can do something about it. But that's why ghosting was so hard for me. Ghosting triggered something in me.

Liz: As it would trigger it in any anyone.

Rhea: That triggered something in you in a different way. 

Liz: Well, ghosting forces growth. When you asked about what does it take to integrate shadow and we said, okay, you have to face your core fear. Face your core fear is number one and your second one, it's acknowledging the wound that created the fear and that's all you have to do, because often that wound is from some kind of childhood place. Yeah.

Rhea: So you just keep asking yourself the whys until you get to a place where you can't ask any more whys.

Liz: And sometimes you may not even be able to ask yourself the why for a while. You might just be sitting feeling like shit and just crying and just sort of feeling very emotional.

Rhea: Side note: don't be afraid of anger. That was one you taught me and how I found my core fear was actually in that anger.

Liz: Yeah, anger is beautiful.

Rhea: Because when I started saying why was I angry, I realized what I was scared of.

Liz: Because anger allows us to confront our fear cause sometimes when we are very afraid, we go into that sort of “fight or flight mode” and our survival instincts kick in. Anger is will. It allows us to direct and sometimes confront. A great antidote at times for some people to help with this is anger completely, and anger burns things out so fast.

Rhea: Yeah, it's all really hard, but you've got to ask yourself this and I kind of done this before. Like you know, I did it in a lot of my writing and I say it a lot is that if you really look at it, we all want to be loved unconditionally. We've said that in every single episode that we've had. Whose soulmate do you want—where you do choose each other or do you want someone else's, where you've manipulated or changed it in some way to be someone else, to be with someone else's soulmate. Surely if you are in a relationship, you want to be loved unconditionally in that relationship too, so being ghosted, being rejected, you're just in the wrong relationship. But it doesn't mean that the right relationship won't come along.

Liz: Most people are afraid it won't.

Rhea: Because of what ghosting and what rejection does, which makes you feel unlovable.

Liz: Come back full circle, doesn't it?

Rhea: Full circle.