Who Told You That? | Solo Episode with Lisa Lacy

Notes from the Edge

In this solo episode of 'Notes from the Edge,' trauma educator Lisa Lacy explores how external labels—such as being too sensitive, difficult, or selfish—can become

Key takeaways

• Labels like 'too sensitive' or 'difficult' can stop investigations into actual events, replacing truth with self-doubt.
• Competence often becomes armor when survival strategies are mistaken for inherent personality traits.

Main topics

• Internalized labels and their impact on self-identity
• Survival adaptations vs. personality traits

Notable quotes

Who told you that you were too much, too sensitive, difficult, dramatic, selfish, unstable, crazy?

Instead of asking whether somebody actually hurt you, you investigate whether you had the right to be hurt at all.

Conclusion

Lisa Lacy invites listeners to reflect on one belief about themselves that causes pain and ask, 'Who told me that?' By

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:04) Welcome to Notes from the Edge, where we have the conversations we should have been having all along. We talk about the things that we're not talking about. I'm your host, Lisa Lacey, writer, trauma educator, executive advisor, and author of the upcoming memoir, Notes from a Certified Madwoman. Welcome to the Edge. Who told you that? Seriously, who told you that you were too much, too sensitive, difficult, dramatic, selfish, ungrateful, unstable, crazy, that you talked too much, felt too much, needed too much, wanted too much, expected too much, too much, too much, that you remembered things wrong, couldn't let things go? Who told you that? And here's the question I've become even more interested in. Why did you believe them? Welcome to Notes from the Edge. I am your host, Lisa Lacey, and this is a solo episode, which means there's nobody here for me to drag down 17 rabbit holes except myself. So this should go extremely well. I want to talk about one simple question that keeps following me through my writing, this podcast, my conversations with other people, and the conversations I have with myself. Who told you that? Because what I've started noticing is how many things we call personality that are actually stories, stories that somebody else told us about ourselves, stories repeated enough times that eventually we stopped hearing them as just opinions and we heard them as facts. And then we built identities around them. Maybe somebody told you that you were lazy. So now every time you rest, you feel guilty. Maybe somebody told you you were selfish. So now you say yes when you desperately want to say no. Maybe somebody told you that you were difficult. So now you spend half your life making yourself easier and more palatable for everybody else to deal with. Maybe somebody told you that you were too sensitive. So instead of asking whether somebody actually hurt you, you investigate whether you had the right to be hurt at all and then think it's your fault. Think about that. Something happens to you. You feel something. And instead of your first question being, what just happened to me? Your first question becomes, am I allowed to feel this? And that is a hell of a thing to carry through an entire life. And I know something about building an identity around confidence. I spent nearly three decades in corporate education. I learned how to solve problems, walk into chaos and organize it, perform under pressure and be useful, very useful. And competence is a wonderful thing until it becomes armor. Until becoming capable is no longer something you do, it becomes the price of admission for being worthy. Then people start saying, oh, she's got it. She can