There is a kind of pain that destroys and a kind of pain that gives life. I am not able to describe the difference. I'm not sure I always know the difference, especially when it is my own pain, much like the warrior athlete who sometimes grows from his/her pain and is sometimes destroyed because he/she did not listen. But today I am experiencing pain that brings growth, brings life worth living.
My new book club started by a relatively new friend (whom I'm growing to love) is reading Brene Brown's Daring Greatly. I was not pleased to be reading a self help book. I am drawn to book clubs to read literature. My reading choices lean toward non-fiction. I don't know how to pick fiction or whether to finish it when I don't like the beginning. Plus I am very short on belonging and long in longing for it.
So I stepped into reading Daring Greatly with a chip on my shoulder and resentment in my craw. In the first 20 pages I am scrawling marginalia articulating how she is missing the mark with real human struggle. When she uses an example of resisting vulnerability as her "panic" about being asked to bring her TED talk from her hometown stage to the bigger than life TED stage my pencil went into over-drive. HER vulnerability is about SUCCESS. What a crock! REAL vulnerability is acting when actions lead to SHAME!
But I had not read far enough. Brown does understand shame. Though I handily doubt she has experienced anything like the torment of shame heaped out by N or NPD parents but she does know shame none the less. And she writes about it in a stunning way.
I have only arrived at page 70 and I am already armed with weaponry to vanquish my powerful demons who no longer reside outside of me but only within. There were so many who were external and many are the lawyers and my brothers who made my life a living hell these past few years. They were real and their effects were indescribably destructive to me. But the real damage took place when I internalized them. I had been so weakened by a life of denigration early on that I took the things that happened to me and against me as proof of my undeserving. Even a stronger person would have been hit hard by what I experienced but it lay me low and I allowed it to reflect on my already devastated self. But bit by bit I keep receiving the tools I need to heal and become a functioning member of society, less broken more able to be open to success and failure.
Brown writes about disengagement as the greatest betrayal. "Disengagement triggers shame and our greatest fears--the fears of being abandoned, unworthy, and unloveable." And in that one sentence she explains the source of my fathomless pain from my mother. With this one sentence I know why my mother invoke such rage within my being and yet I could not extricate myself from her. And disengagement is a silent, secret force that destroys in plain sight invisible to others around. Not even my mother's good friends saw her disengagement. Only one person ever let on to me that she saw it. I will ever be thankful.
My mother's disengagement is the source of my greatest pain, my greatest shame. And now that I have this word I finally know why what she did was so much more destructive to me than my father's wretched, soul stealing narcissism.
My parents destroyed my being in front of friends and family and my response to it was all anyone noticed. I was the problem and my shame was self destructive and corrosive and it fuel my resentment and anger which eventually left me outside the world looking in feeling broken, rejected and full of self-pity., unable to see any way forward.
I grasped at straws, coming up with ideas and concepts of projects I could latch onto. But each one was sabotaged by my very own self-recrimination and internalized condemning voices of people who should have loved and encouraged me. And that is the vicious cycle that I have been stuck in for decades.
This past year I have seen earth shaking changes take root for me but ultimately the most critical hurdle, the "paralysis" not only was untouched but it seemed to increase, grow exponentially. I attacked it from every angle I could see but the more I hacked away at it the larger it loomed. Day by day, week by week my mindfulness practice caught shards of light bringing hope. This book brings some more rays.
Bit by bit I continue to find healing and against all odds and all reason and all evidence I gain hope, not finger crossed, "Please, please, please" hope but hope build on a solid foundation. And writing about it here helps me recognize how real it is becoming.
