Would you be interested in exploring ways of healing shame? I have found a number of excellent descriptions of how shame attaches and how it destroys. These descriptions have been so wonderfully affirming to me. But I am ready, desparately ready for the next step - to move beyond the shame into a fulfilling life. I would so love it if anyone here would be interested in working on this with me.
Here is a descriptive paragraph that I found today. It nails the problem quite effectively.
Shame is the inner experience of being "not wanted." It is feeling worthless, rejected, cast-out. Guilt is believing that one has done something bad; shame is believing that one is bad. Shame is believing that one is not loved because one is not lovable. Shame always carries with it the sense that there is nothing one can do to purge its burdensome and toxic presence. Shame cannot be remedied, it must be somehow endured, absorbed, gilded, minimized or denied. Shame is so painful, so debilitating that persons develop a thousand coping strategies, conscious and unconscious, numbing and destructive, to avoid its tortures. Shame is the worst possible thing that can happen, because shame, in its profoundest meaning, conveys that one is not fit to live in one's own community.http://www.psychsight.com/ar-shame.htmlI have found that the two most debilitating reactions to shame for me are shutting down and raging. I have moved past the rage (with some residual flares) and am determined to move out of the paralysis into real life.
Here is a description from this same page that fits me to a Tee:
[The Abusive Family] is the family which may abuse the child when she is very small, thus establishing a sense of worthlessness in her which, in her adult life, she can give no cognitive content to. She simply feels worthless and that there is no recourse but to re-experience it whenever she experiences a failing, a dismissal, or an aggressive act.and this:
The shame-bound person is controlling, rigid, and perfectionistic.
She has had to compensate for having not felt a sense of love.Izzy, I wondered if you can relate to this:
The shame bound person is numb and/or spaced-out. Life is so painful as-it-is that she takes the way of self hypnosis, or enters a self-induced trance-state in order to make her experience bearable. She lives anesthetized, and feeling as little pain as possibleThis goes to the very issue I began working on with my T yesterday.
(The demands of a dysfunctional shame-bound family are irrational and inconsistent, for the family only knows it is unhappy and does not know what would make things better. The child becomes the scapegoat for the family's incompetency in solving its problems-in-living.), your parents intended you to feel shame about yourself for your "bad" behavior. Sometimes, they even rationalized that shaming you was "for your own good." However, what actually happened was that they only succeeded in making you feel bad about being yourself, for you did not possess what they were demanding as you had neither the power nor the talent to change yourself in order to enter into their good graces.In the past 9 months, I have identified a number of issues for me that fall under the umbrella of shame, some of them are rejection, unworthiness, inadequacy and a variation on inadequacy - not having the resources for what is being demanded. This last one is perhaps the most demeaning of my entire life. I have tried to accomplish that which was impossible given my resources and felt worthless because of it. In my life the resouce was always specifically or directly tied to money. That was the controll that has been and continues to be used over me.
HEALING
While I was driving my son to school this morning I was thinking about the technique that I have been practising this past year. It is a 4 step technique that I learned from
The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force by Jeffrey M. Schwartz. Essentially it requires identifying the thought and labeling it as a false brain pattern and then replacing it with a more functional thought.
I have been able to do this quite effectively with jealousy and resentment. As I dropped my child off someone I've known from childhood who was behind me pulled out before me and cut me off. There was no intent and nothing other than doing an appropriate act. This person was driving a beautiful mercedes. My sense of injustice flared and I immediately recognized it as jealousy rather than an inappropriate, injust, unkind act. I acknowledged that I was jealous and immediately moved to be thankful for them that their material life from all appearances was going well and that I too would like to have material success as they have. In this process I was able to take a wretched emotion that was self-deprecating and turn it into something that felt positive. I want to learn to do this with shame and it's various forms that have so wounded and destroyed me in my life to this point.
One step towards healing:
There is a great community of the shamed waiting to dare to trust others enough to be open and vulnerable. Sharing your shame with them will be a way of forming a strong and rejuvenating ties with others. Your sense of shame can be your channel of empathy and pathos to the hearts of others.... There is no more powerful bond than that of shared shame transformed into a bond of understanding and mutual support for one another's healing. In Conclusion:
So the work of healing your shame is as profound as are the potentials of your soul. It reaches down into the heart of your concept of yourself and of your belief in the possibilities of life, alone, and in the company of others. Perhaps you have been mistaken, insensitive, unethical, self-critical, scared, negligent, stupid, masochistic, depressed--behaviors and states of mind you can do something about. But never have you been "bad," never not belonging; always, you have been just an ordinary struggling person and, now with an expanding awareness, joining with others to make your inner and outer life work better, striving to extract from the day its possible satisfactions and nursing a lively curiosity about what's next.
