Healing - using compassion

[Gaining Strength]

Boy I have been getting so much help from people here and it is starting to make real, tangible differences in my life. 

I am seeing that my shame and feelings of humiliation are from taking on what my parents could not bear.  It does not belong to me the compassion I gave away does. 

For a year or two I have had, what I refer to as, all the pieces of the puzzle.  But I could not break through anything.  But I see how I took on their stuff and that I lost all compassion for myself.  It took me until two years ago to understand that what "froze"/paralyzed me was shame.  Once I got that I thouht it would be a wiz to heal.  Not so.  I really had to get to the deep power of humiliation.  I thought shame was bad or painful but it doesn't touch humiliation.  Shame is something you just tried to hide or bury and can function around it, albeit not very well.  But humiliation is all encompassing.  That's what I got.

Now I am doing a few small chores and experiencing that profound humiliation.  But I am applying gentle compassion to that little girl who was so profoundly humiliated.  It is working.  It is a very complex task because I was humiliated for things that had nothing to do with me and for my emotional reactions to the humiliation and for trying to protect myself.  So healing actually turns in on itself and causes humiliation.  That is why it has been so all encompassing and so powerful in my life and so isolating. 

This compassion issue is so new to me.  It is almost intoxicating. 


Slowly, step by step I am going to have compassion for that LG (little girl) who gave all of hers away.  I think compassion will build me up. The anger is not right for me.  For too many reasons.  It is too destructive for me and does not give me any power but compassion does.

[sKePTiKal]

Just a quick note - then I'm out for the weekend.

I think self-compassion is absolutely the right track for you. So much so, I'm going to start applying this to my re-integration work, too. See if it gets me past the plateau I've been on this week. Compassion is starting to look very, very powerful and productive.

All your work on shame so far, IS paying off. It's gotten you to this point today. And being able to share that has helped a lot of people here - not not just me. I hope you have a wonderful weekend - playful and fun and FREE of the old feelings...

[Gaining Strength]

Thanks Phoenix Rising - there are no words.

[gratitude28]

SS,
I agree with you and think you are right on - anger is less helpful to us than compassion. Without realizing it, I think I have done/am doing what you said here. I am no longer angry (fearful) of what I was as a young adult. I see that the choices I made are in the past, and, in many cases, the kinds of dumb choices many young adults make. I am very much trying to accept that for myself.

Your ideas are so clear, and you are moving forward like a bullet train

Lots of love,
Beth

[Gaining Strength]

I have to share this - It is all so strange.  I have lived this life in so much agony and after much searching and seeking  I recognize that I am beginning to emerge.  It is wonderful and wondrous but not the way I had imagined.  It is slow and awkward.  Each step I take, each chore I attempt to tackle is nerve-wracking.  Is that habit or warning?  quick - step in.  This is where the self-condemnation swoops in before thought or feeling can act - self-condemnation which is nothing other than their condemnation which I claimed as my own.   But now I must intervene and seize that ah ha instant and insert compassion and encouragement like a sharp needle extruding the life saving elixer.

But how do I order my life.  How do I proceed?  I have no idea and in that way I am in the same place.  Inch by inch I must try my new wings and spurn the fear that it is not real.

I am definitely in recovery - sore and tender and in need of acute care.

[Gaining Strength]

Thanks Gratitude!  I'm glad you are moving ahead as well. 

[gjazz]

I can relate to where you are, SS.  I went through years of anger and I agree with you: compassion feels much stronger.  Perhaps for many people, these are stages.  For me, compassion, as opposed to anger, puts me, not others, in the driver's seat.  Here's a take on the issue of shame/humiliation, for what it's worth: there is appropriate shame, but there is never appropriate humiliation.  Shame can be something we feel in response to something WE did, or WE said, that we wish we had not.  I feel ashamed of the way I treated certain people when I was younger, and I'm glad I feel ashamed of it.  My NF, for instance, has never felt shame, as far as I know.  It goes with his inability to empathize.  Humiliation on the other hand is always an act of aggression--deliberately demeaning someone else, trying to undermine their sense of worth.  My NF used humiliation constantly, so when I was first trying to heal, make sense of what had happened so I could move on, the feeling of being humiliated permeated everything I did.  Relationships with new people were colored by that past dynamic: there were no innocent "insults," ever misstep on someone else's part was a deliberate attempt to hurt me.  That's what being so raw does.  For me, the hardest (and ongoing) stage was moving from the fear of constant humiliation into trust.  Trusting other people, and trusting myself to be able to deal with both the good and the bad in them, peacefully, with patience and kindness.  It's hard.

[Gaining Strength]

This morning I am back at working to clean.  I am discovering something that began to be clear yesterday.  The shame is bad anc causing sever stomach aches  but the ANTICIPATION is the bigger problem and it is the Catch 22.  I now see that I so fear the shame that is to come.

I know what it comes from now.  The work I have done this week have finally shone a light on it.  The absolute fear comes from the constant criticism and condemnation.  I have lived with this unbelievable pain and fear over minor and major tasks my entire life.  It is still huge but it is finally cracking.  It comes from the horror I experienced as a child and until this week I could not get at it.  I lived with what would amount to hazing but it was too much for a little child and there was no reprieve.  Even as a young adult there is some sense of an end goal but hazing a toddler - that is nothing short of torture.  I lived as a little bitty chid with torture and my paralysis has been a manifestation of that trauma - completely repressed.

[Gaining Strength]

Stuff is just pouring out of me today.  It feels like a purge of a lifetime of pain and agony.

I see in a way that I have never known that my stomach has held all of this pain, all this time.  Suddenly, I see why I used to overeat as a teen, young adult and later why I would stuff carbs late at night.  I needed to match this emotional pain with a physical pain.  Then I would use coffee to match this pain.  I don't really understand that dynamic but think it must be much like what a cutter does, making physical what is from the psyche. 

Today, as I slowly, very, very slowly get things done I see what has happened my entire life - entire life.  My paralysis has gotten worse because the anxiety and fear and shame has built up onto of itself.  For example,  if I planned to get the kitchen clean five years ago and didn't and then someone came into my house and said, "I don't know how you can live like this." And the "knot" in my stomach grows worse and worse.  Then each subsequent time I can't get the kitchen cleaned it is on top of that experience and I hear that voice plus my father's condemnation, plus my own until the voices - completely unconscious had totally paralyzed me.  But the real topper is that even if I finished something when I was a child then either or both my parents would be critical about the results.  If I had done a good job then they would be critical about how I did it or how long it took or that it had ever needed doing, or where I put things away or the direction the handle was pointing.

When I was young, I liked to bake but my mother would be so angry about the mess - not just when I finished but in the middle.  She would scream and tell me how I ruined her life and always made such a mess.  (My mother had 2 not just one, full time, 5 days a week maids.)  But the mess part is what stayed in my being and became me.

AS I was cleaning this morning I dropped and broke a pyrex bowl with a snug plastic cover.  I really love that bowl.  AS soon as it happened I felt the warm flush of shame slide down my body from head to belly and get stuck like a 10 lb. stone.  I could not move and then the recriminations began - but this time I could shut them off.  I had to battle them for some time.  then I had to face cleaning it up - I cannot describe the pain of it.  Then I had to deal with the top.  In the past I would keep the top because of the shame of what I had done - broken a bowl.  I looked in my cabinet and saw several plactic tops to cheap plastic containers that I had not used in YEARS.  Today I put them in the recycle bag and took it out.  These things cause me indescribable pain and have completely stopped me cold in the past.  These outrageous simplistic things have kept me a prisoner in shame and filth for years. 

But bit by bit over the past two years I have found one technique after another to battle through each layer, each new revelation about the origins of this pain.  And each level has brought me closer and closer to freedom.  Today I am closer still though there is still fear there -  no doubt. 

People have always told me to push through the fear.  I would have if I could have.  A few of you here understand that. 

I know this is a real and tranforming break this time but I must be slow and deliberate because the fear is still there though now it has a name which allows me to talk back to it.  I am sure there is more underneath and that is OK because I have the strength to face it when I have made some head way with this. 

It is so lonely to deal with this all by myself.  I cannot tell you how lonely it is.  That is the thing that shame does - it completely alienates.  But I could not have done this without this place because in moments like this I feel connected to humans even though there is noone here right now and noone to (figuratively) hold my hand or to encourage me outloud.  Though things would be nice.  I actually gave up on those a long time ago.  But I found this and this is a very close 2nd.  Wish you were here but thanks for listening.

Fearful but defeating fear.  Shamed by slaying it.  Gaining strength, gaining healing.  Now I see that I really was a victim of cruel and compassionless empty beings - unable to love or protect a defenseless child.  That breaks my heart.

[Ami]

Dear SS
 I am overwhelmed by your post. I feel  grateful to you for your honesty. It is  a gift to others  who are suffering. It is such a gift to me, today. You are making a big, big breakthrough, seeing the truth of your parents. I have been doing the same. The pain is so,so,so bad but under the pain is the real you, NOT the insane you, who had to believe all the lies.
 The insane you is shattering.
 Last night, I had a profound experience. *I* saw how my H was my abuser and how *I* am still abusing myself by not honoring myself. I saw my parents and the emptiness you describe. It took my Aunt to shame them in to treating me with the simplest of respect. It took my beating them down with clubs for them to give me the simplest of human respect. My H is beaten down with a club and treats me  respectfully.
I know that the club is the reason.
It hurts terribly,SS.
However, I don't feel as insane . I would suffer most  pain NOT to feel  insane and numb. I hate that so badly.
 You are doing so,so,so well, Trust me that you are getting stronger and more authentic. You are beautiful under all the layers of distortions ,which were NEVER yours to begin with.        Love   Ami

[Gaining Strength]

Thanks so much Ami.  This is so lonely. The lonliness is some of the worst part.  I see how the shame has so isolated me - in so many ways.  Because so few people have any understanding what what it is to live in shame - they say, "Just get up and do what you have to do.  Stop being so lazy.  Stop making excuses."  It is isolating because I have been so angry and resentful.  Who wants to be around someone angry and resentful.  It is isolating because I live like a slob.  Who wants to be around a slob.  It is isolating because I cannot follow through on anything.  Who wants to be around someone who is not dependable? 

All this is crashing to the earth.  The shame, the paralysis, the fear, the condemnation. - All is crashing to the earth. The loneliness.  Soon I will be out in the world without forcing myself.  Soon I will be able to function without the adrenaline rush of shame or fear of ruin.  Soon I will deside that I want to achieve a goal and not be sent to bed in depression and anxiety.  Soon, very soon.

[Ami]

Dear SS
 JUST be with the feelings. That is the current "work". When the feelings subside, you will have insights, effortlessly,IME. You will see and know things that will set you free.
 That is how I see it. Just be where you are, SS and try to endure the feelings. They are like childbirth. At the end , the baby is born. The pain is the shattering of the distortions so the real you can be born.    Love   Ami

[Gaining Strength]

Each task I complete makes it clearer and clearer that the fear is not so much associated with the task at hand but the consequences to come and that has to do with the condemning voice.  The double bind about the voice is that it is condemning for past, present and future.  I am cleaning up - all my past failures come pouring up, condemnation for the present situation comes up, criticism about not completing the task and about the task itself not being enough, about the task not being accomplished in the right way or done to satisfaction which all leads to consequences about the future and about being so far behind and about not being able to overcome the past and the thing snowballs and snowballs and snowballs until the pain grinds my being to a halt.

Now understand that this goes to every single daily task - getting out of bed - never early enough, never quick enough, then there is the set up about what should be accomplished before the day gets started - walk the dog, read, exercise, meditate, pray, bath, fix hair and makeup, fix a nutritious breakfast that R will eat, get R up, get him dressed and medicine taken and homework in backpack and ................ Until I can't get out of bed until just enough time to get R up dressed, fed and out the door.  Multiply this by each and every task - planning dinner, grocery shopping, fixing dinner, cleaning up.  Each and every one of these tasks send me through this horrendous self-shaming, self-condemning, gut-wrenching process.  Until I put R to bed and just sit, numb, numbing to television, reaching out here, to pained to sleep because it all comes bubbling up into my dreams - the pain, the shame.

Now I know.  NOw I know why Ihave been such a failure at life.  I had a disease - a condition that was put on me as an infant and that I needed other human beings to liberate me from.  But until I could find other humans in as much pain who also had compassion (and the two don't often go together) I could not climb out. 

The world is a very, very judgmental place and I have radar for judgement like the Big Array.  It does not matter where that judgment is directed - I take it in and apply it to myself.  Well for the first time in my life - I think that spell is broken.  And now I must deal with the fear - the fear that all that whirlwind will kick in.  If that cycle of past, present, and future condemnation is broken then I am free.  Thank God almighty.  It is a prison that I have lived in my entire life.  But like anyone set free from decades in a prison after false imprisonment, I am tentative and not certain how to proceed.  That will take time. 

I do not know how to live shame free.  That will take time.  Strangely, it is scary. Now I have another task at hand.  And then another and then another.  But now I am free to do them - one at a time, one at a time.

[gjazz]

It sounds like you are moving into a new phase, SS.  I so relate to doing what you describe in response to the constant put-downs.  I went the opposite way: did not eat.  Deprived myself as unworthy of anything, even food.  But if you weren't getting stronger, would you have the ability to let all this flow through you?  Take care.  Hang in there.

[Gaining Strength]

Thank you gjazz.  It is so amazing.  I have been moving things down into the basement.  What is different is that I have not been able to even walk into the basement without feeling indescribable pain and shame.  Today it is simply a chore to be done.  This is life changing.  I just can't tell you. 

I am so interested to see what happens day after day to see what this change will be.  How different will it be from the softening of my personal attitudes that allowed people into my life and activities.  I wonder and will be interested to see.