Hey guys, how are you? I am excited to talk to you today and. I gotta tell you, my oldest daughter is going to college this week.

She’s going to college really close to us, but she’s moving out and it’s kind of crazy. And if you’re wondering how I have an 18 year old, I. Got married when I was just 10 days from turning 21, and we had her just after I turned 22. So I am 40 and I’ve got one going off to college and I think she’s ready.

I’m pretty excited for her. She’s been through a lot of ups and downs and it’s just been a gift to be able to watch her grow. So that’s my big news for the week. But the other thing I’m really excited about now that school is back in, is that I am taking new clients. I have spots on Mondays and Wednesdays available, if that works for you, and also a few on Thursday evening.

I know some people just can’t make it work during the day. So if you are interested in any of those spots, I want you, you can just email me, amy@smoothstonescoaching.com, or you can go to my website, smooth Stones Coaching and sign up for a consult call. On the consult call. We just gonna see where you are and if coaching is a good fit for you.

And there’s no pressure, and I’ll just tell you all about my program, the Path to True Joy. It’s, it’s a lot of fun. Honestly. I love doing consult calls. I love meeting you. I love hearing your stories. So if you’ve been thinking about coaching, now is the time. If you start now, By the holidays, you’ll be like a new woman.

Go ahead and do that, or email me with any questions. I wanna jump into today’s topic, which is what to do if someone steals your baby name. Now some of you out there might be thinking, well, this doesn’t really apply to me. That didn’t happen to me. But I saw this on social media. There was another account that was talking about it, and I know that it’s something that comes up a lot in the Lost World where we had these names and either someone we know uses them or.

Or someone famous uses them, or we have names that we never really got to use or we wanted to use in the future, and we’re not sure if we’re going to, and it can just be emotional. So even if you haven’t had this specific circumstance, I want you to listen to this episode anyways and just apply it to anything that kind of bugs you or you feel like hurts you, that you maybe wanna let go of some of that hurt.

The thing with coaching is what I do is called causal coaching, so we’re gonna look at the root of why you’re upset. And we’re gonna fix that. And that’s what’s so powerful because a lot of times what people will do is they’ll vent and complain and hold onto their story that someone stole their baby name and they just have to keep repeating those emotions.

They just have to stay mad because there’s really nothing you can do If someone used a name that you liked or that you had. You can’t go back and change it. You can’t force them to go down to the county offices or wherever and legally change the name, right? But that’s not the way to feel better. The way to feel better is to manage your mind and to recognize where the pain and the frustration and the heart is coming from, and that pain.

Is always coming from our thoughts. So when we can look at our thoughts and maybe change them if we want to, we’re gonna feel better. So that is what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna talk about how every problem is a thought problem, and we’re gonna talk it about it in specific when we’re talking about seal of baby names.

Okay. So a, a story I’ve heard quite often is, Well, there’s two versions of the same kind of story. One is that you had an angel baby who passed away and you named it a name, and then. Someone, usually someone close to you that you think should not do this, uses that name again, so they steal your baby’s name.

And why this is hurtful for a lot of people is because they think that person shouldn’t do that. Like how dare they? How could they take that? They would know how much it would hurt me. Another way that, that I see this show up is maybe you had a name in mind or you told somebody that you really liked it, or you were saving it for your rainbow baby, and then they use the name.

In both of these cases, what happens is we really are upset for two reasons. So the first part is the loss of the name. Okay? So we feel like they took it. Or they took the identity of our baby, right? If, if your angel’s name was used again, you feel like they took that away and they changed how important it was to you.

And the other side is where these are the people closest to you and they should know better. Right. They knew how much it would hurt us to use that name. They don’t care about you, and that’s really, really painful. So when we talk about this, we have these layers. If they used your name, it’s okay to be upset.

It’s okay to be sad. It’s okay to feel disappointed in these people in your life. That’s normal. That’s natural. That’s part of being a human. Especially if they use the name that your Angel baby had. But the extra dirty pain that we put on top of it is all of these thoughts we have about how they shouldn’t have done it, how they did it on purpose to hurt us, how they knew it would hurt us and they did it anyways.

Right. That’s really, really painful. And not only does it hurt you, But it really distances you from your support system, from the people around you, from the people that you want to be able to go to, and the people you wanna be able to trust, and you feel like they broke that trust. It’s almost a secondary loss, but that secondary loss is caused by the way we’re thinking, the way we’re thinking about them, the way we are putting thoughts into their mind.

The way we have what I call a manual for them, like how people should act. So we think people should not use names that we like or people should not use. Names that we used for our baby. Yeah, it’s as simple as that. We think they shouldn’t, and if they do, we think that it means that they don’t care or that they hurt us on purpose.

So I wanna take a step back really quickly and just look at that way of thinking. Now this is what our brain offers to us, and that’s okay. Our brain is gonna offer to us that they did this on purpose. I. There may be a few people out there who did do it on purpose, who took your angel’s baby name, and they stole it, and they used it just to hurt you.

If they tell you that that’s a fact, and you can put that in your circumstance line, but I think for the vast majority of people, what happens is they probably weren’t thinking about you at all. In their mind, they didn’t think, oh, that’s. Her angel’s name and I’m going to choose it and I’m going to use it on purpose to harm her.

We have to take a step back and think, is that really realistic? And I know the first reaction is gonna be, well, yeah, but they should have known. They should have at least taken me into consideration. And I know that that seems like a nice thing. But you know what isn’t nice is when you do this to yourself, when you tell yourself.

That they should be kind. They should not use a name that you had. You’re just hurting yourself. That isn’t a useful thought, even though it sounds reasonable. And like I said, it sounds kind. It sounds like that’s a rule people should live by. They shouldn’t take other people’s baby names. But if that thought is causing you pain and causing problems in your relationship, then why would you wanna think that way?

Why would you wanna do that to yourself? ’cause that’s what you’re doing. People cannot hurt you. The names that they use for their babies or maybe even their pet, who knows what they have used that name for, that can’t hurt you. That’s just a fact in your life. It’s all those thoughts that you’re thinking that are causing you pain.

To be honest, they probably didn’t even think about you and again, You’re gonna say they should have, but they shouldn’t have. When people are naming their own children, they should be able to name them whatever they want. That’s what I think. They should be able to name them anything they want. That’s their choice.

Just like you got to name your baby what you wanted and you probably just thought about you, your family and your child, and that’s what they did. And that’s not hurtful. That’s just life. How we operate as humans, we’re self-centered. We care about our own things. We don’t always think about other people, and that’s okay.

You don’t know what’s going on in someone else’s head, so you gotta stay out of it and just get right back into your own mind and notice what is happening. And for a lot of people, what’s happening is you are creating a very painful story for yourself, and it’s no fun. It’s no fun at all. It’s no fun to be upset and mad and feel like they should apologize.

They’re not gonna apologize. They didn’t do anything wrong. They don’t need to apologize to you so that you can feel better. You can feel better once you change the story you’re telling yourself. Now, let’s talk about. If someone uses a name that you wanted to use in the future, maybe a rainbow baby name, maybe just a dream name.

This is another one where we need to look at our story. Do you own that name? Is it yours? Is that true? A great question to always ask yourself is, is that really true? And in most cases, no. You don’t own that name. Even if you told them, even if they’ve known for years that you loved that baby name and that you were saving it for your rainbow baby and then they used it, you still don’t own that name.

And the other side of it is just because they used it doesn’t mean you can’t now. This is something that we have made up, right? And a lot of times we don’t. I mean, we don’t wanna have cousins with the exact same name or our next door neighbor child with the last same name or whatever that is. But I want you to remember that that is just a rule that you have made up.

You’ve made it up. And our society has made it up. Unique names are big, right? Nobody wants to have the same name as someone else. I. You always have a choice. You have a choice. If you want to continue believing that or if you wanna let that belief go and just decide again, focus back on you, your family, your children, what do you want to do?

You can totally name your baby the same as someone else. I think especially if it’s, you know, a friend group or a neighborhood or a church group and someone close to you chooses that baby name, there’s no guarantee that they’re gonna be together for their entire lives or that it’s gonna cause any problem.

The problem is just in our head, just because they use that name doesn’t mean you can’t. And I want you to also recognize that. Sometimes we have this vision in our head, and when someone takes that baby name and uses it, when we were planning on using it, it does feel a little bit like they stole our future, right?

We had this plan, we had this vision. We’re working really hard to believe in it, and it’s almost like they took it away. But again, that is a thought. That is a story that you are telling yourself. And it’s absolutely not true, and it does not serve you. So why would you want to think it? Why would you want to think that they took away your future happiness?

They didn’t. You are taking away your present happiness, and if you want to do that, fine, but just recognize that you are creating pain for yourself now and perpetuating it into the future, and you don’t have to. You absolutely do not have to do that. You always have a choice if you choose not to use a name that someone else has used.

You need to own that decision. It is a hundred percent a choice. It is not something they took away from you. There are millions of names available to you, and if you’ve been on baby naming sites, you know this is true. They just helped you to cross one off the list. And that is, I’m talking about if they used a name that you kind of had your heart set on.

And even listen to that. When I say that out loud, you had your heart set on it and it’s like they pulled it out from under you, like they pulled a rug out from under your heart. But it’s okay. Your heart is gonna be fine, right? They can’t hurt your heart. You can feel a little sadness, you can feel a little clean pain, a little disappointment, and say, yeah, I really love that name and I’m probably not gonna use it ’cause I choose not to.

And that’s okay. But they didn’t take it away from you. They just helped you cross one of the millions of names off the list, and there is so many more that you can use. All right, let’s talk about if like a movie or a famous person steals the name. Now. Growing up I had a friend who was named Ariel, and then the Little Mermaid came out and that was, um, not really fun for her and.

I was thinking about my babies. Now, my, it wasn’t names, but I remember that the royal baby, so Prince William and um, Kate, their baby was born right around when Lauren was born, and there was just such a big deal about this royal baby. And then when we lost River, I feel like there was a Kardashian anyways.

There were famous people having babies at the times that I lost my baby. So usually we will relate to that. And so if someone in the media, the news famous person, um, has that name, it can feel like they stole it. Like that was your idea. You wanted to use it, and now this famous person has used it. Well, what do you wanna do?

Again, does it really matter? I know it feels like it matters. It feels like it hurts. It feels like they took the name away from you. They did not. You absolutely can name your baby whatever you want. Okay. Or if it was your angel’s name and they used it, and now you feel like, well, everyone just equates that name with that famous baby.

Everyone doesn’t, everyone really doesn’t. There are a lot of people in this world who do not care at all what celebrities named their babies, okay? And you can be one of them. It does not have to hurt you. You don’t have to tell the story that they stole your name. You can just let them live their lives, and you live your lives and you manage your mind around it.

And if it bugs you, it’s okay. It bugs you. You gotta know that it is coming from your thoughts. So another one we see is if the name becomes super popular, and there are lots of people named that. I know that after Lauren died, like I would see her name everywhere, right in the credits on movies around in the world.

It’s just that thing where if I say yellow slug bug, you’re gonna see. One somewhere soon, I promise. When you buy a Jeep, you see all the Jeeps. When you have a baby named Lauren, you see all the Laurens. It just seems like it’s everywhere. Or maybe it ends up on, you know, the lists of the most popular names of that year.

That’s okay. It’s okay that the name that you chose for your angel. It’s popular. Again, going back to that belief that you want it to be different, you want it to be unique, you want it to be their name, you want it to be your baby’s name, and it feels like it takes something away from you if other people are using it or if it makes some list or you feel like it’s really common or there’s like three other kids with that name at your church or your school or in your neighborhood.

Just notice number one, always be compassionate with yourself when you’re grieving. I think that that is all heightened when we’re grieving. Just like I said, you, I really, you know, you have a lot of time when you’re grieving to think about your baby and to notice their name everywhere, and you get to choose how you react to that.

For a lot of people, they can feel like it’s a little message from their baby. And it’s really comforting to them when they see their baby’s name somewhere. Right? And that is an option that I would offer to you if your baby’s name is really common or there’s kids nearby, even like I’ve heard my baby’s name called out at the park or, or whatever.

That’s okay. That doesn’t have to hurt you. You don’t have to feel like something’s been taken from you. You can believe that. That’s just. A beautiful little coincidence, and I don’t believe in coincidences. I think that if you’re hearing your baby’s name a lot, it’s okay. It can be a way to connect you to your baby, not a way that hurts you.

So I would really encourage you to try that on. Think about it. Think about the story you’re telling and decide if it’s serving you and if you wanna keep it. I talk a lot about emotional energy, and I want to ask you, how much emotional energy do you want to spend being upset that someone named their child a certain name?

Honestly and truly, how much energy do you want to spend on that? It’s okay to spend a little bit to say, yeah, I wanna be sad about that for a minute, and then I’m gonna move on. But I would really encourage you to question and just look. I know there’s some of you listening who have this burning like in the back of your mind a lot, and it’s painful and it just drains you.

Being upset with people for the baby name they chose and feeling just betrayed and hurt and all of these things. Do you want to continue doing that or do you want to let it go? You can always let it go. That is always an option. Now, you don’t have to, I’m not gonna force you if you do have some. Strong feelings around this topic.

I’d really encourage you to come and work with me right now. I have some single sessions still available and we could just work on this for 45 minutes. We’ll just talk about whoever stole your baby name, what’re thinking about it. How you wanna feel about it moving forward. You would be amazed what you can do in even one session.

So I would truly encourage you to do that. Know most of my clients need a little bit longer than that, but you know, try it and see. See what happens. Even one session is super powerful. I just want you to really recognize that you are creating the feelings you have with your thoughts, and that is okay. We don’t judge.

We just observe, but it just is something that isn’t very useful to stay mad about. Honestly, I just wouldn’t spend a lot more time on it. I would observe yourself, do some journaling, write down what happened, and recognize that it’s okay to let this pain go. And to know that the pain is truly coming from the way you are thinking about baby names.

It is not coming from what anybody else did, whether it’s a famous person or whether it’s your sibling or your best friend who used the name that was your angels or that you wanted to use in the future. Whether or not they did it on purpose, it doesn’t matter. It’s irrelevant whether or not you wanted that name irrelevant.

Whether or not you wrote it in your journal when you were 10 years old and your best friend knew that that was a name that was important to you, it doesn’t matter. What matters is what you want to do now, how you want to feel now and what you want to think now and moving forward. No one can steal your baby name.

You don’t own it, and if you named your baby a name, it’s theirs. It’s totally theirs. It’s special to you and that cannot change. No matter how many other people use that name. You gotta bring it back to yourself. Be confident and know your child is not forgotten, your child has not been replaced. They are your child.

They are special, they are an individual, and you are their parent, and you get to love them. And keep them in your heart always. And that name is special to you. Nobody can touch that unless you let them. So I really encourage you not to let them. You can do this. You can let go of this pain. I promise.

Something that seems really, really big can get better. It truly can. All you have to do is manage your mind, recognize how you’re thinking. Look at the story you’re telling and move forward. You are amazing. If you’ve had some major frustration over this, I wanna send you my love. You haven’t done anything wrong.

You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be, but I just wanna offer you these tools to let go of your story and move forward. ’cause you’ve got a lot of big things to do, mama. I know you do. I love you. Have a great week.