Welcome to the Breakdown to Breakthrough Podcast.
My name is Lisa A.
Romano.
I am a life coach,
Bestselling author,
YouTube vlogger,
Meditation teacher,
And expert in the field of codependency and narcissistic abuse.
I am a believer in the power of an organized mind.
My aim is to help people learn what it means to live above the veil of consciousness rather than living a reactive life.
May your heart feel blessed,
Your mind feel expanded,
And your spirit find hope as you spend time with me here at the Breakdown to Breakthrough Podcast.
Today we're going to be talking about the spiritual way to handle a smear campaign.
So a smear campaign is an attack on your person.
It's an attack on your character.
And it's about gossip.
It's about twisting of your words.
It's about twisting of facts.
It's about a false narrative.
It's about vindictiveness.
It's about being the brunt of someone else's anger.
It's about being the brunt of someone's fight attack system being alerted and triggered.
It's about unfairness,
Right?
So a smear campaign is designed to annihilate you.
And if the person who has made you a target is unsatisfied in being able to elicit a particular response from you,
And for instance,
You go no contact,
You don't respond to texts,
You don't get pulled into arguments,
And you're just like,
Okay,
I accept how you feel and you're entitled to your feelings,
Then this person will resort to online attacks.
They will resort to finding out where you work,
Writing the employer about you.
They will,
If you have a business,
They will smear your business name and they will write negative Google reviews.
They will get their friends to write negative reviews about your business.
They will create and open up false Facebook accounts,
Instagram accounts,
And they will do whatever they can to infiltrate your mental space,
Your psychic space.
And it's really important that we recognize that that is their goal.
Once you recognize that someone else's anger is about their uncomfortableness within themselves,
It's their inability to regulate their anger and their feelings of discomfort.
And when someone outside of them triggers them,
And most often it's the trigger is abandonment,
The trigger is feeling rejected.
The trigger might be that the person no longer feels special,
That you have not satisfied their desire to feel important enough.
They may have made you their God,
Put you on a pedestal,
Which is very common with people with high narcissistic traits because they think in black and white.
So when they meet you in their head,
You're amazing,
Right?
And they want you to mirror back to them that you think they're amazing too.
And so you're on the pedestal for a little while,
But over time,
What ends up happening is you begin to,
You're human and it is impossible to continue to stroke the ego of someone who is insatiable,
Someone who is so wounded that they need you to consistently make them important.
And so you go about your life and you don't answer a text or you don't answer an email or not immediately,
Or there's something that you miss.
There's something that you drop the ball somewhere in the eyes of this other person who doesn't see things rationally and fairly and logically because of their own trauma.
And because they have made you their God,
They put you on a pedestal.
When you fail to meet their needs,
They go into the dark side.
So you were full of love and they had love for you,
But now you've triggered this sense of abandonment or this rejection in them.
And now they are unable to deal with this conflict.
They go into black and white thinking and all of the love that they ever had for you,
All of the things that you've ever done for them,
The relationships that you had,
The conversations that you had,
All of that dissolves.
And the person who struggles with black and white thinking will be unable to put into perspective the situation.
So there's a trigger and there's this inability to put things into context.
You know,
When you are at the brunt of that person's personality or that person's conflict,
Then the smear campaign usually ensues.
And the best way,
In my opinion,
You know,
And there are various ways.
I've had clients who have actually said,
Okay,
You're going to attack me this way.
Well now I'm going to hire an attorney and we're going for it.
And they've been successful because harassment is harassment.
In some cases,
People need to put some serious court appointed stipulations in place like borders of protection.
Cyber harassment is real and you can charge someone with cyber harassment.
It really does matter what your situation is.
But in most cases,
Or many of the cases,
Let's be realistic.
In many of the cases,
A smear campaign can be handled with looking at it from the emotional level,
Understanding that people who are involved in smear campaigns,
It's almost like they're under a psychic attack.
Like they're angry.
Something has happened in their experience that is so unsettling and it's not resolved.
And when something triggers them the outside and there's this crack,
Emits this pain,
You know,
Unless they're able to resolve the initial trauma,
Then in the physical world,
In the 3D world or in the ego world,
They're going to need to attack.
And unfortunately,
If you're at the end of that,
They'll try to drag you into that.
And so the best thing that you can do in my humble opinion is to really recognize where this is coming from and to understand that logically and reasonably that not everyone's going to like you,
Right?
So if you have a product,
Not everyone's going to like your product.
If you sell flowers,
Not everyone's going to like your delivery person.
If you're a writer,
Not everyone is going to agree with your point of view.
If you're an author and you put books out there,
Expect that there are going to be people who perceive your book in a way that is opposite to what you intended.
Because everything is related to someone else's point of view,
Their POV or their perception.
And so you could have the most well-intended intentions,
But it really does depend on the receiver and their perception of you.
And so it's really important to remember that.
Think about someone who's intoxicated,
Right?
So you could have a great relationship with your best friend,
But when she drinks,
She sees you as the enemy.
What happened?
Her point of view changed.
Her perception changed.
And so you have to understand that how people perceive you is very much tied to their internal perception or their trauma lens,
The way they view the world.
And when people have trauma in their background and it's unresolved,
This stuff is going to show up.
So when we understand that that is par for the course in humanity,
That we're all wounded and people with the most pain,
Unresolved pain,
And who have felt like,
Oh my gosh,
I have to eat or be eaten.
Or if their trauma personality is fight,
They're aggressive,
They're confrontational,
They are a little paranoid,
They don't trust people.
Then when you become involved with this person,
If things go awry,
You can see how easily you can get pulled into a smear campaign and you could be the brunt of this person's trauma and an avenue or a way for this person to disperse or deal with their trauma.
It's unfortunate,
But it is what it is.
And so what we want to remember in this situation is that behind the smear campaign,
Below the veil is a lot of trauma because people who don't have this type of trauma don't behave this way.
And so they're fair and they're logical in their analysis of you.
They're not all black and white.
They don't have the need to smear you or the need to destroy you.
The need to destroy someone comes from pain.
It comes from fear.
It comes from lack.
So when you see it from that spiritual perspective,
It becomes less personal because smear campaigns can be very personal and the person or the persons articulating the smear campaign have convinced themselves that you deserve this,
That you deserve to be taken down.
In so many cases of the people that I've coached who are divorcing people with high narcissistic traits,
The person with the high narcissistic traits is unable to see the dissolving of this marriage fairly and in an amicable way.
And what they do is they react and they punish the person who no longer puts them on a pedestal or who's no longer allowing them to be abused.
And so there's this vindictiveness to it.
And so when we understand from the spiritual perspective that there is anger and there's fear and there's lack,
And I'm not saying this is easy because when you are the target of an attack,
It is personal.
You can have people attack your children,
Attack your spouse,
Attack your race,
Attack the color of your skin,
Attack your religion.
I mean,
It's an abyss when you're dealing with somebody whose mind is working to rationalize their behavior.
And you're not going to win.
And what is winning anyway?
Winning would be resolution with this person who feels the need to smear you,
Right,
And launch this smear campaign.
But that's not going to happen.
And what I teach is really control what you can,
Accept what you can't,
And figure out what baseline emotion do you want to live in.
And so for me,
What I want to live in is I want to live in equanimity.
I want to live in a state of peace,
Regardless of what's happening around me,
Regardless of how people perceive me,
Regardless of my inability to make everybody happy.
Would I like to make everybody happy?
Sure.
Is that possible?
No.
Is it probable?
No.
It really is improbable to believe that as human beings,
It's going to be easy for us to make people happy all the time.
It is not easy to ground yourself and to understand that smear campaigns are about the other person and that they have a difficult time dealing with feeling uncomfortable with you or being disappointed in you.
They have a difficult time seeing things rationally and logically and fairly.
They have a difficult time living in the gray zone.
It's so hard.
And what we want to do is we want to make sure that we're living in a higher state of awareness and that we're lifting ourselves up out of ego because what will get triggered is ego.
You feel attacked and your natural instinct is to attack back or to defend yourself.
And that is what a personality such as this who feels fit to smear your name wants you to do.
They want you to engage,
Right?
They're comfortable in the engagement zone.
This gives them an opportunity to offload or eject much of their pent up anger and unresolved rage.
And so it's important that you bypass that and sidestep that as often as you can.
So we have to understand that we can't make everybody happy all the time and that it would really be awesome to be able to live in a world where everybody was able to deal with disappointments and it would be awesome to live in a world where people weren't triggered.
But that would mean that we'd have to live in a world that was free of sexual abuse,
Domestic violence,
Child abuse,
Emotional abuse,
Psychological abuse.
Because at the core of someone's smear campaign is a lot of pain.
And so what we want to do from a spiritual place is when we know that we're being unfairly criticized or unfairly attacked,
You have to hold onto yourself and you have to think consciously and logically about certain ideas.
You can't please everybody.
If you put yourself out there,
You become a target for people who are not going to like what you say or not going to appreciate what you have to say.
If you are a creator,
There are going to be people who love what you create and people who don't.
There are going to be people who are able to look at what you do and see it fairly.
And then there are going to be those who judge you harshly.
My experience with that is that people who judge harshly have been judged harshly and judge themselves harshly.
So they're working at a hologram,
They're working at a pattern.
And so understanding that to heal from the abuse and the psychological attack caused by a smear campaign will require us to ground ourselves and for us to stay out of black and white thinking as well.
It can be so tempting for someone who,
For instance,
Has written a book or for someone who opened up a flower shop or for someone who is getting evaluated by a manager.
It could be so easy for someone who receives criticism,
Unfair criticism,
To forget about the other side.
It's so easy to feel like you have failed,
Especially if you yourself have trauma and you've never felt good enough.
Because what will happen is someone who unfairly criticizes you or smears you or looks to tarnish your name in some way,
They're triggered and then they trigger you.
And so they trigger your shame,
They trigger your abandonment.
And so it can be very difficult to grab hold of that trauma trigger and say to yourself,
Like,
It's okay,
This is not the end of the world.
Everyone is entitled to their perception.
I can't make everybody happy.
Just because so and so thinks this does not negate the body of my work.
It doesn't mean that I have failed.
Look at all the people who I have served and who receive my flowers and who appreciate my hard work at work.
It's about picking your head up and out of your own trauma trigger so that you can see things clearly.
And from that perspective,
We're able to rise above the trigger and stay in a higher state of awareness and really live in this idea of releasing what you can't control and understanding that if you can release what you can't control and even just allow people the permission,
Give people the permission,
You're entitled to feel that way.
Not everyone's going to like my flowers.
Not everyone's going to like my books.
Not everyone's going to think that I'm an excellent employee.
Not everyone's going to believe that my intentions are X,
Y,
And Z.
And that's okay.
You know,
Continue to move on,
Ground yourself in your intention.
Know that you have the right to live a beautiful life in spite of those who you upset,
In spite of those who are upset by you is probably a better way of saying that.
If you know that you're living with a heart full of good intentions,
That's enough.
From time to time,
You're going to bump up against someone who's struggling and who is not going to be happy with your message or is not going to be happy that you're successful.
Lots of times,
You know,
People who struggle with fear of success,
They're angry at those who are successful and their mind will use backwards rationalization to resolve cognitive dissonance and they will find ways to diminish the works of other people.
Happens all the time,
Especially in business.
If you've achieved any level of success,
I hear this all the time.
I have creators reach out to me,
Girls on Instagram,
Guys on YouTube.
How do you deal with this?
How do you deal with when you start to achieve a certain level of success?
How do you deal with haters?
How do you deal with people who are saying things that aren't true that are twisting the message?
You know,
I had one person reached out to me recently on YouTube who was so upset because she wrote a post for her YouTube story and the post was received in such a negative light by one person and she said this one comment destroyed me and I said,
And how difficult was it for you to recognize the 100 comments,
100 plus comments that were positive?
She said,
It really upset me to think that this person perceived that post that way,
You know,
And I told her,
I said,
Listen,
We have to accept what we can't control and how someone perceives your post or how someone perceives you is very much the result of their trauma lens and she was able to release it and even bless the person and wish them well.
So we can handle smear campaigns spiritually by recognizing these ideas,
By allowing other people to have their perception of us and to not get into the wrestling ring with people who are struggling with these types of trauma triggers,
People with vindictive personalities,
Vengeful personalities that are highly reactive and are rageful and who react to circumstances,
Their first responses,
Rage and anger.
We have to send people like this love and light.
We have to understand that we're not any better than someone that has that trauma trigger.
Maybe our trauma personality is more fawning or maybe we freeze.
We're not any better than anybody who has this trauma trigger because peaceful people don't react this way.
Someone's upset with your delivery driver.
They call you,
They want to work it out,
But to smear your name is an entirely different experience.
So we want to not get into self-righteousness because we don't have a right to be self-righteous.
It's about understanding.
It's about moving into the spirit of love,
The spirit of healing.
And I'm not saying that's easy.
You know,
I've been victimized through smear campaigns seven years.
One went as long as seven years.
Very difficult to shut my phone off,
To delete text messages,
To not answer emails.
Very difficult to accept when people came up to me and said,
Oh,
I heard someone so said this about you.
Very difficult to let it go.
Very difficult,
But it can be done.
And it's when the war stops in our head,
The war stops outside of us.
So don't look.
If you hear that people are writing negative reviews about you or saying negative things about you on Facebook,
Act as if it doesn't exist.
Withdraw your energy completely because the goal of a smear campaign is a psychic attack.
And when you allow people to just do what they have to do,
To stew in their own energy,
You win.
When you bless them and say,
It's okay.
I understand how you feel.
I'm sorry you feel this way.
It was never my intention to hurt you.
I'm sorry things got so out of hand.
I'm sorry this is your perception.
I wish you well.
I met you no harm.
Good luck in life.
I pray for your peace.
I pray for your equanimity.
You win.
So I hope this session about how to deal with a smear campaign in a spiritual way has helped inspire you to reach for love instead of fear.
Namaste everybody.
Until next time.
