Voicelessness and Emotional Survival Message Board

Voicelessness and Emotional Survival => Voicelessness and Emotional Survival Message Board => Topic started by: Gaining Strength on April 07, 2008, 12:05:29 PM

Title: More work on shame
Post by: Gaining Strength on April 07, 2008, 12:05:29 PM
I am consumed by my work to overcome shame.  There is no point in doing anything else.  Everything else is just a continuation of "driving with my brakes on."

I found this today.  The first paragraph is a good description.  The second paragraph is a hopelessness to me.  I have NEVER found anyone who REALLY understands how intrenched and all consuming shame is.  I have not found anyone who really understands how to help someone get free of it.  I am beginning to see that shame is like a magnetic force, attracting other people's shame onto me and as that happens the shamed person also gets rejected and isolated.

This is one of the problems I have run into.  I find very good descriptions of shame but I have yet to find a decent description of how to heal from it.

http://www.forhealing.org/shame.html

Paralysis--the inability to do or say anything--is a result of excessive shame and also intensifies it. Another result is diminished energy: shame leaves us feeling smaller, weaker, and less potent. Shamed people build defenses to protect themselves from feeling completely overwhelmed all the time. One defense is escape, a pattern of seeking out private, secure places where one can be alone and unseen. Withdrawal is another defense which includes actually running away as well as emotional withdrawal by developing elaborate masks--like smiling, always pleasing others, trying to appear self-confident and comfortable--that cover the real self. The shamed person sometimes thinks there will be nothing to feel ashamed about if he never makes a mistake, and so defends against shame by becoming a perfectionist who can't allow himself to fall short in anything. Additionally, people who are always criticizing others are usually trying to give the shame away----the critic defends herself against the bad feelings by believing herself to be better than others. The critic may need to feel superior to avoid being submerged in feelings of inferiority. Rage disguises shame too. One way to fight against humiliation is to attack the perceived attacker. Shame and rage in combination can often result in verbal or physical abuse.

If you are caught in the shame trap, get help. Find a psychotherapist, a minister, priest or rabbi, or a support or therapy group. Challenging shame is very difficult, but you don't have to do it alone. Healing shame is a slow process. The first step is awareness. Because shame exists at the very core of one's being and because the shamed person believes his or her worthlessness is an incontrovertible fact, the shamed person doesn't recognize shame as the reason he or she feels worthless.
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Gaining Strength on April 07, 2008, 12:10:25 PM
Healing Shame  http://www.psychsight.com/ar-shame.html
Understanding How Shame Binds Us and How to Begin to Free Ourselves
Robert D. Caldwell, M.Div.


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.

{This is what I have been living - a real and powerful sense that I do not fit and am not fit to live in my own community.  I can not tell you how horrible it is to live and feel that way.  It creates a desparation to fit in and desparation only leads to more shaming.}

The Controlling Family

This is the family which is ruled by decree. It is the authoritarian, or the rigid, or the meddlesome family. The controlling family is one wherein any threat of deviation from the "way-it's-supposed-to-be" is rapidly squashed. This is the family of "piano lessons, whatever," of "you'll do every vestige of your homework before you can talk to your friends," of "don't speak unless you are spoken to." This is the family that is portrayed with clarity and passion in Dead Poet's Society: the blindly ambitious father "knew" what was "best" for his son, imposed his paternal vision, never seeing his son's true interests, resulting in catastrophic consequences for his son's sense of worth and for his will to live. This is example of how the shame engendered by the parent's domineering control can cause the child to believe he has no "self" worth preserving: as it becomes impossible to live according to his own desires, and as he cannot give his parent what he wants, he has no choice but to kill himself.

The controlling family carries deep shame. It's "solution" is to make the exterior "perfect", thus, hopefully obscuring and forgetting about the rot within. The parents in this family cannot tolerate any variation on their crystallized ideas and styles, hence they give little credence to the self-aware wishes of the individual to mobilize for self-fulfillment.

{This is about The Controlling Family but I find that this applies very clearly to my family.  I don't know if others with N FOOs will find that their families were controlling but this  definitely speaks to me.}

THE BURDENS OF SHAME

 For a person who has been shamed has no way out, his is the feeling of there being nothing he can do to set things right.
...
the despair of impotence and participation in the continuing of the cycle of shame. The shame of the parents becomes the shame of the children, and so on...
...
Depression often possesses the shame-bound person. Depression is the stuck place between anger and grief.
...
The shame bound person is numb and/or spaced-out.  She lives anesthetized, and feeling as little pain as possible.

HEALING SHAME
Four Steps

Let yourself learn, through and through, that your shame is not your fault.
Believing that making you ashamed would motivate you to behave as they wished (... 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. But, being children, you could not grasp that your parents were the dysfunctional persons in the family; you knew of no one's failures but those attributed to you by the grown-ups.

Face shame, experience it, incorporate it.
Replace shame with mature guilt.
Make new parents.


{This is one of the best descriptions I have found.  This author adds some new, keenly accurate stuff to descriptions of shame and shaming parents that I have ever read.  BUT once again the offerings for healing a just a wash.  They are empty (except parts of the first but this is merely more description.)  The problems with the last three is that a person who is terribly deeply shamed cannot do these things for themselves.
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Ami on April 07, 2008, 12:28:04 PM
Dear GS,
 I think that if a person can let love in, it can "burn" away shame. If a person can let another person "see" them(their shame) and the other person STILL loves them and accepts them, then the shame can be "questioned".
 Shame is resistant to change b/c we are so afraid to show it.That must be a big reason we try to be perfect. We don't want any flaws to come out and then we will feel shame.
 I feel very down, today,but *I* think it is "good . I think I SEE why I feel badly all the time. It is b/c I have impossible standards and I am  ALWAYS failing, so I always feel badly.
 I feel really down, but it has  a quality of "happiness" to it b/c I am seeing the connection between things ,rather than just being burdened down ,with no understanding, no reason why.  Do you know what I mean, GS?           Love   Ami
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Gaining Strength on April 07, 2008, 12:44:18 PM
http://www.michaelteachings.com/shep_chat_09-02-07.html
Channeled Telechat with Shepherd Hoodwin
Healing Shame

Shame is pervasive in the world, and no one likes feeling shame, so blame is an attempt to put the shame onto something or someone else.

Eventually, most people absorb the imprinting because children need to be accepted by their elders or they will not survive. So the young mind finally decides that, yes, this is a shameful thing, whatever it is, and, ultimately, that belief becomes "My body is shameful."

Again, a paradox: when a person totally accepts his faults, he has much more leverage to change.

Shame is a way for keeping people in line when they are not conscious.

Therefore, we suggest to all of you who wish to become free of this that you start to photograph shame as it hides in the background of your life, because, until you can see it, you cannot heal it. Then, you can begin to replace it with a kinder attitude towards self.

Be aware that the way you view and treat your body is your biggest clue to these deep beliefs. Can you be kind to your body? Can you stop criticizing it for its shape, size, features and so forth? Yes, maybe, once you find greater acceptance for yourself, you may choose to exercise your body more, give it a different diet, and so forth, out of kindness and love, not because you're ashamed but because you love your body.

The first step is to learn to dissociate less, not to step outside of yourself, not to comment so much in a judgmental way, but instead be at the core of your own experience. Feel your feelings; animate your own life rather than simply judge it, and try to see what is without an overlay of judgmentalness. If you sometimes act like a jerk, then just observe that as a fact, and look for what's behind it without wasting energy on saying what a terrible person you are. The shame can be healed. You will probably not heal all of it in this lifetime, but you can make a lot of progress in a short period. Simply realizing that you no longer need to be stuck in shame is an excellent place to begin.
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Gaining Strength on April 07, 2008, 12:58:29 PM


http://www.hope4survivors.com/ShameHidingPlaces.html
Projection

Bradshaw says that projection is one of our most primitive defense mechanisms.   "Once we are shame-based, projection is inevitable."  Even if we disown our true, legitimate feelings, wishes, needs and desires, they still clamor for expression.  These are parts of our true self and cannot totally be ignored.  "One way to handle them is to attribute them to others."  Projection is most often used when, for whatever reason, repression fails to numb our feelings of shame. 


You may have heard that people often complain about "faults" they themselves are most guilty of.  This is a form of projection.  If a man is "cheating" on his wife, he will often suspect her of committing adultery herself, when this is the farthest thing from the truth.   If I have disowned my legitimate feelings of anger, I might ask you what you're so pissed off about.

{This description really helps me understand what many Ns do to those around them.  They are unable to repress their shame. This facinates me.  I NEVER saw any signs of shame in either of my parents.  That's why it took me so long to figure out that they were projecting.  I never saw that they had any to project.}
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Gaining Strength on April 07, 2008, 01:12:50 PM
http://www.thenext45years.com/2007/12/from-shame-to-grace-an-interview-with-dr-paul-fitzgerald.html
How can we begin to heal from the wounds shame has caused?

Internalized shame can discount anyone’s affirmation as a lie they are telling us. We may seek to manage everyone’s impression or give up by resigning from life;

Information about shame can help us connect the dots between our life experiences and the symptoms of our life struggles to experience the quality of life we want but it is rarely enough to break the power of shame at a deep level.
{Ding, ding, ding, ding.}

Having a spiritual community (using the term more broadly than a church) where taking risks to talk, express our deepest feelings, and where people celebrate our beginnings of change (rather than waiting to see if we get it right) are all key to the process.
{Everybody says this but this is a real problem for me.  How in the world do you find a group of people who understand shame and yet who are not shaming.  I have never found or known of such a group.}

At a deep level refusing to forgive ourselves is a way to defend something painful from happening again. Letting go of it can seem too vulnerable but holding on to it is to continue to give power to the old source of the wound and to have our future defined by what happened in our past.
{Now here is something different.}
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Gaining Strength on April 07, 2008, 02:13:49 PM
I think this concept my last post gives me a new tool to use to battle the shame.  I really need an arsenal.  I must fight it each and evey moment.  I am determined to no longer hide from it but the pain of it can really take its toll.  It definitely helps to read this stuff that does get it.  I have never before thought of forgiving myself my past mistakes.  That could really help me tremendously.

Today I have been remembering how when I was a teenager I used to go up to my bathroom and begin picking at the breakouts.  I would do it compulsively until my face was sore and read and wretched.  I never understood that this was out of such powerful internal shame.  Then I would be called downstairs and my mother would shame me about my face.

At other times I would sit watching TV and pick at my split ends.  She would shame me and I would do it more and more and more compulsively - never understanding why I couldn't stop.  Well Now I'm doing the same thing only with different stuff.  I am shaming myself, over and over and over waiting for someone to intervene and to help me out.  I am an infant waiting for my loving parent to pull me out of the mire.  Unable and unwilling to do it for myself.  Time to stop.

I am going to try out this forgiving and see if it can free me.  Something has to.
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Gaining Strength on April 07, 2008, 02:19:26 PM
Ami, you write:

I think that if a person can let love in, it can "burn" away shame. If a person can let another person "see" them(their shame) and the other person STILL loves them and accepts them, then the shame can be "questioned".
I agree with you.  Love can really overcome the shame.  The search or desire for that love can send us in the wrong direction though.  It did me and now I am trying to get out of this shame w/o finding love.  Wonder if it is possible?

Shame is resistant to change b/c we are so afraid to show it.That must be a big reason we try to be perfect. We don't want any flaws to come out and then we will feel shame.
I agree with this too.  Part of the problem is that many of us have shared our shame with others in the past only to be shamed for doing so.  Boy that is a wounding experience.

 I feel very down, today,but *I* think it is "good . I think I SEE why I feel badly all the time. It is b/c I have impossible standards and I am  ALWAYS failing, so I always feel badly.
I am amazed at your ability to see strengths out of pain.  That is a remarkable attribute of yours.

Phoenix Rising - you wrote:

for me, "express our deepest feelings, and where people celebrate our beginnings of change", happens here first.
for me too.  That's why I often express my gratitude for this place.

If we ALSO start to dissect each & every shame incident that occurs to us in the present - match it up with ancient examples -
That's a great idea.  Can you give an example? 

being able to simply accept YOU for who you are: someone trying to learn something new: living without shame.
yeah.  I think I may try this self-forgiveness concept to help me accomplish this.
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Ami on April 07, 2008, 04:28:55 PM
Dear GS,
 BY "love", I don't mean a "traditional sort of male/female love. I mean God's love, a friends love, people on the board giving us love and understanding.
 I have been able to let God's love in, more. Yesterday, I was feeling "condemned" by God. It was ME, not God. Maria said that God is your best friend. He wants everything the best for you. You can tell Him anything. I felt it,in the heart.
Then, I started  seeing how I did not have to be so perfectionistic. God does not demand it of me. In fact,it goes against Him.
 I look around at my house and  my untrained dog and say,"So what, I don't have to be perfect. Perfectionism is a LIE.I can never, or no one,can be perfect. The bar always changes. That is WHY it is a lie"
  I think shame and perfectionism are "twins", two  sides of the same coin. That is my 2 cents, for the moment.    Love    Ami
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: towrite on April 07, 2008, 06:34:24 PM
GS, you are such a hard worker. I admire you.

Have you read any of John Bradshaw's books? There is at least one, if not two, which delineate the paths of healing shame. I think one is titled "Homecoming", or something to that effect.

The other one I found enlightening in the same vein is Barnes' "The Betrayal Bonds". I have mentioned this one before, as it is the book which turned my life around.

I have not read all your posts in this thread - I'm pretty exhausted emotionall - but will when I have recovered some.

towrite
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Gaining Strength on April 07, 2008, 08:23:12 PM
Phoenis Rising
 OMG - "self-shaming".  Have you been writing about this very term.  If so, then somehow it went in one eye and out the other.  I have totally missed this concept.  Of Course!!!  That is exactly what I have been doing - FOR YEARS!  Sometimes I actually envision people I have known since childhood talking about me and judging me.  They may be doing this but I don't know it - these thoughts are all ME - self-shaming.

This love issue is clearly critical and it is feeling like a big hurdle for me.  I think that is telling me something about me ability, or lack thereof, to love myself.  But that is certainly something I can develop.

Ami - I do understand what you mean.  I am just realizing that the concept of receiving love that you describe has always been insufficient for me.  The only love I wanted and that I counted was from my parents or husband.  I see how limiting that is.  This is apparently a big issue for me.  One that I need to address but this one will take some time and some comprehension.

ToWrite - I read Bradshaw's book, "Healing the Shame that Binds You" every year for many years.  His is the seminal book on toxic shame without a doubt.  But even his book offers healing suggestions that are basically - get your friends to help and identify the source and other things that ultimately depend on others.  I did not find his suggestions for healing helpful or available to me.  But I have not read Barnes' "The Betrayal Bonds" and I will put that on my list.

I have been through this whole shaming issue many times before and for quite a concentrated period last spring but this time is different.  The level of shame is severe enough to be crippling but not severe enough to be impossible to look at.  That last part is new.  I am now strong enough or it is weak enough for me to look at it.  It does still have a paralyzing sting but only for hours at a time rather than for months.  That is a BIG change.

Thanks to you three for posting.  Your posts and interest are very, very encouraging, especially as all three of you are going through difficult periods right now.  - your friend - GS
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Ami on April 07, 2008, 10:43:33 PM
Dear GS,
  I know that looking for love, as a way to heal can get you in trouble with a capital "T".It is a double edged sword. God would have to engineer the healing, not us.
  I am doing what you are doing, in healing. I am facing my emotions. Right now, I have a "wild" anger, homicidal(lol). I realized that it was getting so much worse b/c I was feeling guilty about it--NOT just letting it ebb and flow and then leave, as it would if I  did not add guilt to it. It wanted to go in to depression, but I watched the depression and realized it was really anger.
  I am watching shame, too. Shame is a really, really hard emotion. I see that one inroad it has is in my trying to be "perfect" , particularly in being "perfect" in my emotions--bleh.
 This is the worst for me, more than being 'perfect" in the actual world.
 My shame is in not being "perfect" in my emotions and thoughts.
 You are doing the right thing, GS. You are facing what "is", in yourself. We have a promise that the truth will MAKE us free, so it will, if we don't give up---Right?     Love Ami
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Iphi on April 07, 2008, 10:51:34 PM
GS
Quote
Sometimes I actually envision people I have known since childhood talking about me and judging me.  They may be doing this but I don't know it - these thoughts are all ME - self-shaming.

omg - I do this too!   I really, really struggle with this because - it is one of the biggest irrational areas and it really is a negative impact on living.   Do you also have dreams where things like this happen?  I do.  Where people upbraid you and take you to task?  Or mock something about your appearance?  

I am following along and add my voice of encouragement to you.  

Something that helps me, though I am by no means free of shame as you know, is where adn when I am able to see shame and shaming actions, as impersonal, nothing to do with me.  Simply a misunderstanding, nothing to do with me.  The thing about shame is how deeply personal it feels, so when I can see something as completely impersonal this is very shame dispelling.  

One example, - being here and understanding that anyone who was in a similar situation to me would have the same struggles, feelings, issues, deficits, negative feelings, concerns  - that actually helps me see how impersonal my own situation was.  I could have been anyone - that loosens the grip of the shame.

(((GS))) and all struggling against the shame!
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Gaining Strength on April 07, 2008, 11:12:30 PM
Ami -
I realized that it was getting so much worse b/c I was feeling guilty about it--NOT just letting it ebb and flow and then leave, as it would if I  did not add guilt to it. It wanted to go in to depression, but I watched the depression and realized it was really anger.

That is just the way to go.  You could see your emotions and name them and not give into them.  That is one of the most difficult yet healing abilities.  I am so glad for you.  It is such a good thing to read.

My shame is in not being "perfect" in my emotions and thoughts.
I can't even imagine how difficult that is.  That is a perfectionism that goes beyond my ability to conceive. 

Iphi
omg - I do this too! 
That's so funny.  I didn't know anyone else would relate to this!

I really, really struggle with this because - it is one of the biggest irrational areas and it really is a negative impact on living.
It is ridiculously negative!  And it is really crazy.  Bad enough when someone else shames us but even worse when we do it for them.

Do you also have dreams where things like this happen?  I do.  Where people upbraid you and take you to task?  
All of the time.  Probably several times a week.

when I am able to see shame and shaming actions, as impersonal, nothing to do with me.
That makes perfect sense to me.  When you take the person (self) out of the shame then it has NO power.  Great point.
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: debkor on April 08, 2008, 12:11:58 AM
I found an article I was reading on Shame.  I know my friend has mega doses of shame passed on from her family as a child.  She has had similar things happen to her like I read on this board.  She is I believe (N) or Nishishihsihssssh and it confuses me how some become offenders and others victims and mix and match within the family itself.  I wonder how come some escape and deal with it and others become N's. 

Here is the article.
 
Understanding How Shame Binds Us and How to Begin to Free Ourselves
Robert D. Caldwell, M.Div.

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.

In this quite imperfect world where we were all nurtured by parents who were themselves, in some sense, shame-bound, we have learned to feel shame--some more than others. There are four kinds of families which are most adept at spawning shame-dominated progeny--abusive, neglecting, controlling, and enmeshing families. To understand something of how shame is created in these family contexts is to begin to be aware of the origins and dynamic of one's own shame, and to begin to take steps toward its undoing.

THE SHAME MAKERS

The Neglecting Family

John came home every afternoon to a mother who was depressed. She languished in bed and stirred only to get something for herself or to complain about her sufferings. John moved on tiptoe, waited on her hand-and-foot, making himself his mother's mother. Martin was told by his parents that they deeply loved him. He excelled in studies, athletics and music, but almost never did his mother or father attend his performances, not even when he was the speaker at the Honor Society banquet. Janet was brought-up by a succession of servants and nannies who assumed almost all of her care. Mother and father were distant beings who always seemed to be more involved in something of "momentous importance" and only stopped-by for what they assured her was "quality" time.

In these households each person had infrequent clues that he or she was valued or even existed. There are few experiences that are more upsetting than attempting to communicate, and then receiving little or no response. We would rather fight than be neglected. Passion, risk, hurt are preferable to neglect--benign or malicious. We are born for contact; we grow and thrive on it. In the neglecting household, this is lost, and we experience neglect as something wrong with us--after all, if "they" don't care to involve themselves with us, it "must be" our fault. The child, having no perspective that would help him see that it is his world that is dysfunctional, not himself, experiences being treated as a non-person as though he has no right-to-exist.

The Controlling Family

This is the family which is ruled by decree. It is the authoritarian, or the rigid, or the meddlesome family. The controlling family is one wherein any threat of deviation from the "way-it's-supposed-to-be" is rapidly squashed. This is the family of "piano lessons, whatever," of "you'll do every vestige of your homework before you can talk to your friends," of "don't speak unless you are spoken to." This is the family that is portrayed with clarity and passion in Dead Poet's Society: the blindly ambitious father "knew" what was "best" for his son, imposed his paternal vision, never seeing his son's true interests, resulting in catastrophic consequences for his son's sense of worth and for his will to live. This is example of how the shame engendered by the parent's domineering control can cause the child to believe he has no "self" worth preserving: as it becomes impossible to live according to his own desires, and as he cannot give his parent what he wants, he has no choice but to kill himself.

The controlling family carries deep shame. It's "solution" is to make the exterior "perfect", thus, hopefully obscuring and forgetting about the rot within. The parents in this family cannot tolerate any variation on their crystallized ideas and styles, hence they give little credence to the self-aware wishes of the individual to mobilize for self-fulfillment.

The Enmeshed Family

This is the family with fuzzy, haphazard, or permeable boundaries. It is the symbiotic family where it is never clear where one person begins and the other ends. It is the family where one borrows clothes from another without permission, for there is the running assumption that what belongs to one belongs to all, and that "If I want it", then my child, or parent or sibling would want to give it to me.

In the enmeshed family everyone shares the other's life-system, like siamese twins. One learns not to look within one's self for awareness of what one is about, but to the other members of the family. The child who is happy when his mother is happy and sad when mother is depressed is enmeshed. The child who is made privy to all the struggles of the parents and invited into them, often made responsible for them and asked to comfort or give advice to his parents is in the enmeshed family. The child who is relied upon as being "father's little helper" or "mama's strong little man" to the point where he begins to define himself as essential to his parents for their happiness is in the enmeshed family.

Enmeshment greatly handicaps one's sense of individual identity, and consequently the sense of individual effectiveness and responsibility. If one is not "separate", how can one make a real decision about her place in the family, and, by extension, in the world. Also, enmeshment is very hard to see if one is in it, for the net becomes a part of the self. One shares in the family shame, the family's inability to be strong in the world, the family's inferiority feelings, simply because one belongs to the family, not specifically because of anything one has done. The enmeshed family has made the choice to attempt to cope with its frailty and shame by fusing with one another in an effort to find strength in numbers, and in emotion-based reciprocal justifications, blame-makings and affirmations. Unfortunately, this results in the loss of a sense of personal power. Shame shared is still shame.

The Abusive Family

This is the aggressive, the attacking family. It can be emotionally, physically, or sexually abusive. It can be implicitly or explicitly abusive. This is the family in which shame goes deepest, for the abused person feels deeply she is a damaged "self" and that her injury has made her unfit to share in this life with others. This 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.

The emotionally abusive family uses ridicule, punishment, putdowns. This is the family where the old and strong intimidate the young and weak. Repeatedly, from her mother, Sarah heard this bedtime story: "You were the ugliest baby the Stork had, so, out of the charity of our hearts and feeling so sorry for you, knowing no one else would take you, we brought you home. You should be forever grateful." In a strange city Rachel had this to cope with: "I can't stand you. Get out of this hotel room right now." And at 12:00 p.m. in a strange city, the teen-age girl is locked out of her parent's room for the night.

The physically abusive family spanks, hits and uses emotional intimidation in threatening further spanking and hitting. It may also withhold meals or send the child to do a physically punishing tasks. Alfred's jaw was broken by his burly father when he said to him in a moment of teen-age bravado, "Dad, I've got a right to stay out late like the other kids." Thomas was made to carry bricks from one side of the yard and back again for a whole afternoon to demonstrate his acknowledgement that his parent was in charge of him. Janice, an eleven year-old, was beaten till welts rose on her buttocks because her "religious" mother could not stand the sound of her daughter blurting out a four-letter-word. Children do not separate their "self" from their body, and the physically abusive family is experienced as attacking and devaluing the core of one's being. We are a violent culture, and the majority of persons in America have felt the shame--for we cannot feel of "worth" to another when we suffer his painful and debasing intrusions in our bodies--of physical abuse at some time in their lives.

The sexually abusive family goes deepest into the psyche of the person to evoke shame. (Though sexual abuse is usually carried out by a single person in the family, almost always there is complicity by the other parent or siblings, consciously or consciously, to evade the reality of the behavior.) According to some accounts, at least one in three women and one in seven men have been sexually abused. The sexually abusive family invades the body of the child, this center of one's being: one's sexual self. Sexual abuse takes many forms, from the overt to the subtle. It may be the father making "cute" remarks about his daughter's developing breasts, or the mother bathing her son when he is eight years old. It may be enemas given on a routine basis or sexually explicit "educational material" put in the child's hands before she is ready for it. It may be an older brother repeatedly fondling his sister and threatening her with recriminations should she "tell." And, of course, it may be direct acts when the child is exploited for the sexual pleasure of the adult through genital stimulation and/or intercourse. The child-victim is mortified, loses the sense of her own self, creates a terrified secret with the offending parent, is fearfully anxious that it will happen again. (Indeed, it often does; one researcher reported that once sexual abuse has started with a given child it is repeated on the average of 83 times.) Often the child feels--because she is so young, she has little or no cognitive understanding of "why"--that she is worth nothing to her family, and hence to herself. She experiences the molestation as a violation of her feelings, freedom and the discrete reality of her body. She experiences it as though something is flawed about her. And she becomes, in her own eyes, the object of scorn and guilt. The scaring, the shame-making is acute.


Sorry have to split it.  The rest is on post to follow


Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: debkor on April 08, 2008, 12:17:07 AM
THE BURDENS OF SHAME

Shame-bound persons, believing themselves to be seriously flawed, without worth, and hardly belonging in the world inevitably have the consequences of their shame-consciousness show up very negatively in many areas of their life:

At the core of the shame-bound person is a failure of self-esteem. As one feels dishonored and without belonging, then feeling good about oneself, feeling confident in one's abilities is inevitably lost. With one's boundaries mushy and one's sense of oneself as "flawed," one hardly has a self at all, let alone one to feel high regard for. "Shaming" a person makes him as low as he can go. For a person who has been shamed has no way out, his is the feeling of there being nothing he can do to set things right. Something vague, but decisive, has shrunk his soul.

The shame-bound person may become either an offender or a victim, or, as is most likely, one who vacillates from one mode to the other. If his experiences cause him to access his shame, he may take out his hurt and rage on others weaker than himself in his present community of family and friends. For another person whose defense is less aggressive, if she is re-shamed, she may fall into her accustomed role of victim, as she is naturally adept in this guise, having been an actual victim in her original family. Having learned to make a "virtue" of necessity, she has mastered playing the victim for what consolation rewards there are--some sympathy, some self-righteousness. For the offender there is some momentary sense of revenge and power, for the victim, a brief touch with martyrdom--and beyond these meager compensations, the despair of impotence and participation in the continuing of the cycle of shame. The shame of the parents becomes the shame of the children, and so on...

The shame-bound person has difficulty with intimate relationships.

Feeling so bad about herself, she does not wish another to know her, expecting for sure that he will see what a shameful creature she is. So she puts up a false front, she pretends and postures and does all the things she believes others will be impressed by, but she can never do that which is the essence of intimacy, reveal herself to another in open risk taking.

Depression often possesses the shame-bound person. Depression is the stuck place between anger and grief. The person who feels no sense of self-worth will not know how to get angry, for that would be too much aggression for him who was brought up with such a fragmented sense of being entitled to respect. On the other hand, the shame-possessed person cannot grieve, for it was much too disappointing and painful to dare to believe that he could be genuinely important to another, or vice versa. Depression is marked by alienation and no real opportunity to bring things back together. At the center of depression is the sense of loss, and the shame-bound person carries the greatest loss of all, the loss of a valued self. The loss is made more difficult to emerge from as one recognizes that he is only partially aware of the dimension of his loss, having been deprived of the experience of and the model for respectful caring and nurturing.

The shame-bound person is controlling, rigid, and perfectionistic.

She has had to compensate for having not felt a sense of love. Her experience of "love" is the opposite of the highly touted, idealized concept of "unconditional love". Shame comes from all "love" being conditional. Which, of course means that the love is never complete, never a comment on the person as she is, but as she pleases her parents by satisfying their expectations and demands. So she attempts to put life in "perfect" order to compensate for the chaos in the relationships of her heart. Not feeling the warmth of love, she needs desperately to control the world and is not able to tolerate deviation. In a loveless world, "doing things right" brings the only rewards she can attain. She lives very carefully, for a slip can cause her to lose her fragile hold on things.

The shame-bound person clings to his image, after all it is the most positive thing he has going for him. He believes that within he has no real self, that he is not loved, or respected, or needed, so he must make himself loveable, appear respectable, and create the illusion of being indispensable to others. He works hard at it. He lives by his false-self, often bouncing between an over- and under-inflated presentation of himself. He does not strive for self-fulfillment, only for self-image fulfillment.

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 possible. Of course, neither can she feel passion or pleasure.

HEALING SHAME

Shame is, indeed, pervasive and profound. It doesn't fix easily, for it is a condition of our psyche and our soul. But with courage, attention and plain hard work healing is possible. Here are some thoughts for healing your shame:

Let yourself learn, through and through, that your shame is not your fault. Most of your shame-inducing experiences happened to you early in your life--when you were small and the world of parents and other caretakers loomed very large. Your fundamental feelings of insignificance, the "shame" that goes far back in your mind and soul, appeared long before you had any "choices" in the matter. Shame was your natural organismic response to the burdens and demands that were being visited on you by your family. Believing that making you ashamed would motivate you to behave as they wished (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. But, being children, you could not grasp that your parents were the dysfunctional persons in the family; you knew of no one's failures but those attributed to you by the grown-ups. Your only "guidance" was that which helped you feel awful--shame--about yourself for failing to produce....I repeat, it was not your fault.

Face shame, experience it, incorporate it. As you are your memories, your history, your joys and your talents, you also are your experience of shame. There is no escaping any part of yourself, your shame experiences are in your neurons and your body cells. What you can learn is not to deny or finesse them, but to face them, own them, and incorporate them into yourself. After all, they are only painful memories, not imperious demons. They cannot hurt you again as they did before--though you may believe they can--for you are not vulnerable as you were when you were small. Some things have changed and one of them is the perspective and position you have as adults to confront and not be done-in by the shaming experiences the world offers you.

There is nothing shameful about shame. You have every right to yours. You earned it by surviving in the midst of shaming people. 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, and...it will help you laugh with the Woody Allen's, Roger Dangerfield's and Whoopie Goldberg's of the world as they help you own the universality of your shame and both cry and lighten-up a bit about it. 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.

Replace shame with mature guilt. Guilt has often received bad press, and well it should--if, and only if, you are talking about neurotic guilt--guilt that self-flagellates and changes nothing. If you are talking about mature guilt, then guilt is one of the great inventions of nature. For mature guilt lets you know what is unacceptable, and offers you opportunity to do something about it. Shame, on the other hand comes to you as a feeling so deep and so incapable of your getting a grasp on it that it seems there is nothing you can do. To illustrate: John feels shame that he is not the sort of person who can ever excel at his work. Whatever happens, a demotion, a "blowing-out" by his boss, he senses that this is because he is "basically inadequate," so he hangs his head and lowers his eyes and dampens his energy. Finding the "smarts" and the courage to re-evaluate himself as "guilty" of inertia and poor training, he begins to create and achieve goals that are possible for him. So if he sets certain standards, and then if he doesn't achieve them, he can rightly feel guilty that he is failing and can increase his efforts to succeed, or redefine his goals. He has moved into consciousness that his worth can be defined by realistic possibilities, not by the un-focused and "hidden" demands of shame-making expectations.

Make new parents. You must learn from experience that you are not unworthy of belonging to the human community and that in order to heal your shame you must create a healthy family for yourself. Think of an occasion when you have stood against those who would make you feel bad about yourself. Think of how you counted on the thought of a friend, or lover, or teacher whose opinion you could depend on to back you in your struggle. It made a difference. It made the crucial difference is keeping you going and anchoring the experience as a positive for you.

You must create a new family. Perhaps this sounds strange, but you are already doing it--clubs, churches, professional societies are efforts; lovers, friends, marriages are efforts; even cliques, cults, and gangs are efforts. The success or failure of your journey to heal your shame will be crucially influenced by your ability to surround yourself with those who think you are lovable, who support you, who back you up in the way you lead your life, who can convey to you that they are for you even when they don't like your behavior--and toward whom you can healthily reciprocate.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

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. It causes you to re-examine in your own mind and heart an idea expressed in the "sentimental" motto of Father Flanagan of Boys Town: "There is no such thing as a bad boy." Can you make yourself a claimant of this "truth?" If you can, then you are on your way to discovering the freedom of surrendering your self-definition of having been a "bad", shame-deserving person. 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.


I think my friend has become the offender and the victim. 

Love
Deb
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: debkor on April 08, 2008, 12:45:14 AM
GS,

I'm sorry I did not read all the post and I see you have posted the same thing.  Can you say DUH to me (lol) 

Love
Deb
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Hopalong on April 08, 2008, 02:51:52 AM
Quote
Having a spiritual community (using the term more broadly than a church) where taking risks to talk, express our deepest feelings, and where people celebrate our beginnings of change (rather than waiting to see if we get it right) are all key to the process.
{Everybody says this but this is a real problem for me.  How in the world do you find a group of people who understand shame and yet who are not shaming.  I have never found or known of such a group.}

I have found this several times, GS...

A women's support group I was in for over 2 years. Shame was not always the specific subject, our lives were, but self-esteem was always touched on or addressed overtly...and that's shame's sister.

The UU church has many small groups I can be that honest in.

love
Hops
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Ami on April 08, 2008, 08:13:37 AM
Dear GS,
 An  Al Anon saying is "If s/one calls you a chair, are you a chair?".
 I think that shame exists b/c our parents called us a "chair" and we believed it.
 Unless *I* define myself, I will be asking the outside to define me, by default.
  I will always be in a prison ,even if no one ever hurts me. The fear of being hurt and shamed will imprison me, even if it NEVER happens in real life.
  My life is always replaying the running from shame.
Last night, I had  a revelation about life.People will do and say what they will. It is not up to me to try to control or manage other people. "Normal" people don't do that.
 Normal people control their own ,little sphere of life, which is themselves.
 They don't try to manage other people's emotions and reactions so they can stay safe.
 I want to live life. Life includes all types of people and situations. I need to be able to face all types of situations and people. I have kept myself "safe" b/c I was afraid of shame.
 I was afraid of humiliation.
 Shame and humiliation CAN be controlled by ME, to the extent that I let them in OR shut them out. This is emotional health, I think.
 I can't control one thing that another person will do or say.
               Love   Ami

 
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: towrite on April 08, 2008, 11:27:13 AM
GS, one thing my excellent therapist taught me was not to treat myself the same way my shaming NPs did. It has been very hard to identify my shame, when I was feeling it, etc., b/c they also threatened and belittled me not to remember it or to misremember it. But now I have some clues and, for me, it takes hard work to identify the shame at the time it comes up.

My hat's off to you.

(((((GS)))))

towrite
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Ami on April 08, 2008, 04:40:39 PM
 When I was treated so terribly, it showed me how I was treated as a child. It shocked me and took me aback. How many times was I treated like that----thousands, hundreds of thousands?How many times have we ALL been treated like that? My NM  put  her shame on me b/c I was vulnerable.
 I think this must be what we all as LV(little voices) endured.
 I am still running away from shame,now, trying to avoid it.
 I do feel like I am "bad",but is it "bad' or human?
 That is the question that has the potential to set us free. Am I "bad" or  just human with an NM.
  I was convinced that any self care or personal power was "bad". Down deep, I still question,"Am I bad?", so that is why I am still vulnerable to shame attacks.
 *I* still believe I am bad and I will always be vulnerable to others as long as *I* resonate with them. When I don't ,they won't be able to hurt me ,anymore.
 I have been running away from shame, even when it was not "actively" pursuing me.
 I was running and will run until*I* turn off the button in me.        Ami
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Ami on April 08, 2008, 04:54:45 PM
I remember when I was younger, that I couldn't be shamed very much. I knew who I was and wasn't. I knew my bad qualities ,so if s/one pointed them out to me, it was not s/thing "new". I accepted that I had selfish traits.
 I did not feel I was bad, but human.
 Somewhere along the line, I thought I was "bad" and now I am open season for anyone's shame.
 It WILL come to all of us. We can't stop it. That is not the issue. The issue is our OWN shame.We hurt ourselves with our OWN shame, NOT s/one elses.
        Ami
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: seasons on April 09, 2008, 04:46:09 PM
Gaining Strength,

Wow what a wonderful thread. So brutally honest. I need to reread each and every word. I have the chills all over.

((your awesome)) seasons
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Gaining Strength on April 09, 2008, 08:14:32 PM
Wow I have so many people to address in this post.  I actually thought I had posted in response to Debkor.  I wonder what happened to that one?

I really like that whole article Debkor.  He really gets at some stuff in a perspective I have not seen before.  I found it very helpful.

Hops - I know you are right about a spiritual community.  I am very glad that your UU provides that.  The Episcopal chruches where I am tend to overlook single women and there is a judgementalism and social snobbery that is difficult to transcend.  I can look for a different type (non-church) spiritual community maybe.

Ami - that whole concept of self-definition is so important.  I feel as though I am beginning to do that.  Life will turn around when I no longer let others define me - even within or especially within my own mind.  When I can think - "That's not who I am."  Then I will have made it.

Phoenix Rising - I get it.  Caring first.  That is much easier.

ToWrite - my excellent therapist taught me was not to treat myself the same way my shaming NPs did.   OMG.  I am treating myself EXACTLY the way my NF did when I shame myself because it is HIS voice that I am shaming myself with.  OMG.  I need to memorize this line and apply it over and over.

Ami -  I was convinced that any self care or personal power was "bad". Now I get it.  For me "self care or personal power" meant that I was going to get some kind of sabotage and as a very young child that meant I felt threatened.  I wanted to connect to my father (the NPD who sabotaged me (I finally understood/acknowledged this year)) and so I gave up personal power and hope just to connect to him.  But of course I did not connect to him so I just gave up myself - Hello!

Seasons - Thanks.  So good to see you.  How in the world are you.

Today - good breakthrough today.  Was compelled to clean up my bedroom floor.  Compelled.  Been trying to do it for months and months.  Couldn't face it.  Today was compelled.  Saturday got pantry straightened up.  Been wanting to do that for months.  A few more days like this and I could be free.  Also got some work done on my business (frozen for a few weeks). 

In the past when I have gotten some work done I would get frozen out for a significant period.  This week the freeze out period was 4 days.  The shortest ever.  Wonder how long from today?   
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Hopalong on April 10, 2008, 11:08:32 AM
GS,
Oh yes, southern Episcopal churches...I know them well. And their dictates in southern society.

I have friends who love their ritual but not their gentrified assumptions and the snobbery of some members.

I wonder if it is specific theology that keeps you there?

Have you ever been to a Unity church? Feels consistent with your spirituality...as does Friends Meeting.

Anyway, dear, I hope you have Permission to Explore if you would like to.

love
Hops
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Gaining Strength on April 12, 2008, 04:13:56 PM
Still working on this issue.  Switching from authorities to my struggles.

Suddenly - after all this time - today I realized that part of my struggle is that when I start to work on something that has shamed me in the past then the old shame is triggered and it adds onto the old stuff making it bigger and bigger.  Each time I try to tackle something and fail it gets bigger.  And the old stuff resurfaces stronger and stronger than ever. 

I tackled a bunch of stuff today.  Thankful.  More, much, much more.  Keep working at it.
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Gaining Strength on April 12, 2008, 04:20:33 PM
Was having breakfast with my son today.  he asked me to cut up his pancakes.  I had this flash.  I felt trapped - I was being asked to cut up his pancake and no matter how I did it it was not going to be right.  This did not come from him.  It came from me.  It came from my past.  Not sure exactly where it came from but know it came from my past. 

Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Ami on April 12, 2008, 04:56:02 PM
Dear GS,
 I  think looking at the pancake situation(and all our situations) is the way to heal. *I* am hurting, today, too.I am battling an old "issue". I think it is shame.
 GS,I have been really hurting for 4 days.  It  felt hopeless to see how my   NM treated me, over and over . I believed everything she told me.I took it all in and believed it. It is mind boggling to see.
 I saw the pattern and am just sitting on my rear end,  boggled .
 Now, I have an old pattern which returned .I thought I had conquered it,but it feels the same as before.
 My stomach started hurting me with all that was going on, on the board.
 Now, when I feel emotions, it hurts me.
 I am trying to look at it and face it. I am embarrassed to even write about it,but I must(right ,James lol)
  Yesterday, I was talking to my friend and my stomach really started hurting. I am AFRAID to be seen, afraid to be hurt, afraid of anger, afraid of not being liked,on and on.
 My stomach just hurts and hurts.
 Today, I was talking to s/one else and the same thing happened. In fact, it happened twice.
 All my old fears just seem to be expressed through stomach aches.
 I really need to face my problems b/c I got too thin ,from these and I don't want to go there, again.
 I think I feel like I don't want to be SEEN, KNOWN. This must be shame.
 I feel like I can't protect myself. I feel like I have to give myself up to make sure no one gets angry.
 I must be replaying my M ,over and over with everyone and in most situations.
 I feel kind of stuck in a pattern that I thought was better. Now,it is back.
 I am discouraged b/c I am playing my emotions ,in my body.
 Any help would be appreciated.    Love    Ami

 PS  I was so shamed and felt I was so bad that I felt I did not deserve to eat . I feel so stupid saying this but I always tell James to be honest, so I must take my own medicine(lol). Just putting things out there does help. 

Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: ann3 on April 12, 2008, 06:13:19 PM
Hi GS & Ami,

I had similar experiences today and as I think about it, everyday.

When I shame myself for failing to overcome past shame or when I down myself because I feel like I keep revisiting and can't let go of old wounds, I remind myself of the following:

We lived for so long, probably our entire lives,  with these shame(s) and wounds.  Although we are now starting to see them and work on them, it's really unlikely that we will be able to "fix" ourselves right away.  It will probably take years to face the shame(s) and wounds, work through them,process them and hopefully let them go.  

For the last 6 months, I've been working on issues about my father and today, I finally was able to put my feelings into sentences.  The shame he made me feel because I didn't read enough books, implying I was stupid (in reality, I was dyslexic and had trouble reading), the shame he made me feel because I was chubby ("there's no fat people in our family", the implication being that if I am fat, I can't be part of the family). These are just a few things. It's hard.  

I wish I was finished with this stuff, but my reservoir of shame and wounds is deep.  I've got a long way to go before I work through all the negative messages he dumped on me and let it all go.

In the mean time, I'm trying to live in the present as best I can and realize that the shame and wounds were dumped on me and I didn't deserve them.  Even still, I feel angry.  But, I guess whatever I feel is a natural consequence of doing this work.  And I'd rather do this work then not do it, even though at times, it makes me feel so down.
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: ann3 on April 12, 2008, 06:22:20 PM
This did not come from him.  It came from me.  It came from my past.  Not sure exactly where it came from but know it came from my past. 

GS,

As mentioned, I am going through this with my father.  I also feel there's lots of things that come from the past and I'm not sure where they came from, working on pin pointing the source.  Today, I found the source:  my father.  Then I started remembering what it was he said and did that gave me those feelings.  Those feelings of shame and self doubt based on something Dad said to me when I was 10 years old; then the shame and self doubt take on a life of their own and live in our heads (negative tapes) and we don't know where the hell it came from.  Well, I finally tracked down one source:  judgmental stuff my father often said to me over & over.

As far as the pancakes, was it because you were chastised at the dinner table?  If yes, who said what to you?
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Ami on April 12, 2008, 06:27:28 PM
Dear Ann,
 The recent interaction showed us that WE were not bad,just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was enlightening to me, very. It is forcing me to face what is truth and what is lies.
 Am I "bad" or just human?
 Do I need to keep prostrating myself to others so I can be OK?
 Is this my destiny for being so "bad' that I have to live my life in "submission" ?
 Will I ever be able to get rid of the LV(little voice) and get to "right sized voice(lol)?
 Is  what I accepted as true, possibly "not true"? This is a good place to be ,but it does hurt, as you said.
                                   Love to you, Ann. I am so glad you are here.          Ami
 
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: ann3 on April 12, 2008, 06:51:38 PM
Dear Ami,

Yes, I learned so much from it and from you.  It was a painful gift, the kind of gift one hopes one will never need to receive.  But I am glad I learned that lesson and I will keep the knowledge in the forefront of my mind.

Do I need to keep prostrating myself to other so I can be OK?
 Is this my destiny for being so "bad' that I have to live my life in "submission" ?
 Will I ever be able to get rid of the LV(little voice) and get to "right sized voice(lol)?
 Is  what I accepted as true, possibly "not true"?  Yes, yes, yes, I have the same questions.

Years ago, I had a dream that dealt with prostrating myself and living in submission:  I sat at a table in a restaurant and there were other people at the table (don't remember who).  The waitress brought our deserts and then she began to ladle lots of cherry sauce on everyone's desert except mine!  I looked around and wondered why she heaped this delicious cherry sauce on everyone else's desert except mine.  Then she brought me the bill and everyone at the table expected me to pay and didn't offer any money.  I never protested the lack of cherry sauce and I paid the bill.

So, I didn't deserve any cherry sauce, but I had to pay.
The little voice gets the bill and no cherry sauce.

Much love to you too, Ami.  Thank you so much for teaching me very valuable lessons.  I'm so glad you're here too.

love,
annie
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Ami on April 12, 2008, 07:19:30 PM
Wow Ann,
 The cherry sauce. What a metaphor for life. Then, you pay for the meal. We really took on the LV(little voices). I guess that I am questioning the LV stance.
 I really feel "new" after the interaction. I saw my life in a new way. I saw that I was acted upon, through no fault of my own. It is making me question my   reality.
 I feel free to question what I accepted as true. I see that IF s/thing like this could happen to me, WHAT else was a lie? What else is totally not related to who I am, as a person.
 So, I am in a "new" zone.
I am feeling like I can question the whole LV way I looked at life, always being submissive, not asking for 'cherry sauce', believing lies that my M and H threw at me.
 My reality seems different. It feel more fluid and able to be changed.
 I am very grateful for my lesson. This is the second time I have had a life changing lesson, in this way. I am grateful that other people could learn and grow, as well.
 Today, I feel more centered than I have in a long time, I feel like I did when I was much younger and "in my body" as opposed to being 'numb"
                                               Love and Hugs,    Ami
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Gaining Strength on April 13, 2008, 01:13:50 AM
As far as the pancakes, was it because you were chastised at the dinner table?  If yes, who said what to you?

OMG Ann - your are exactly right.  My father had absolutely perfect table manners and he expected as much from my brothers and me.  I worked very, very hard at it.  When I was an adolescent I read and studied Emily Post.  I wanted to learn perfect, perfect table manners.   The better i got at it the more it was completely ignored.  I would go through life expecting people to notice my perfect table manners and expecting to get some kind of reward for it. - never did.

When ever I got good at anything my father would either sabotage me or ignore my accomplishment.  Never good enough - nothing was ever good enough.  Shame, shame, shame.
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Ami on April 13, 2008, 08:24:17 AM
Dear GS,
 Wouldn't it be nice if we could get "magic erasers" and erase all these messages(lol)
 They are so "dumb", when you really think about them.
 I think a really big thing that I need to be is  'selfish", which is really  "nurturing myself". I think that this is a big key ,for me. This is the root of my problems.
 I colluded with my M, NOT to nurture myself and I am still doing it.
I know that I found God by pure desperation .Now, I am there, so it is time to go forward.
A long time ago, I was sitting on the sofa with my oldest son, now 22. I" heard',inside me,  the Bible verse,"I will restore what the locusts have eaten."
 I knew, without a doubt, that it was God. It felt audible, but was not.
 God promised me that He could restore what "evil", in the form of my NM, stole.
 Evil forces WANT to steal, kill and destroy us. That is their purpose.
I have to have faith for all these good things to manifest. That is how it works. I forgot about that part(lol)
 It is funny how you can forget the  most important part, sometimes.
 Thanks for your wisdom, GS.         Love    Ami
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Gaining Strength on April 13, 2008, 12:06:19 PM
I am erasing each and every day.  I am erasing today - all morning.  The voices and messages keep popping up and I keep erasing just like a whack-a-mole, I just keep bopping and bopping.  I am going back to bopping right now.
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: debkor on April 13, 2008, 12:59:04 PM
GS,

Just keep putting it back where it belongs.  It's not your shame.  It's a shame that they did that to you (their shame) not yours.
Keep on bopping.

Love
Deb
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Gaining Strength on April 13, 2008, 01:36:24 PM
That's right Deb.  Thanks for the reminder.  I welcome your reinforcement.  Each time I put it deeper and deeper into my being.
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Hopalong on April 13, 2008, 10:06:07 PM
WHACK-AN-N!

WHACKA-SHAME!

WHACKA-DOUBT!

WHACK-A-FEAR!


ATTA GIRL, GS!!

hugs,
Hops


Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Gaining Strength on April 14, 2008, 12:03:54 PM
Cleaning franticly.  Someone is coming over today to interview my son for Big Brother/Big Sisters.

I have been working to feel nurturing instead of shame.  I have an image of nurturing adults who are encouraging me.  Wish me luck.
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Ami on April 14, 2008, 01:12:37 PM
Dear GS,
 I am looking forward to hearing about your day.    Love   Ami
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Gaining Strength on April 14, 2008, 05:54:13 PM
I did it.  I worked all day - from 8 - 2 and cleaned up the main room, moving toys upstairs and cleaned two bathrooms and the kitchen.  There is certainly more to do but the key thing is that I did it steadily and without shame.  I just kept setting time limits and goals and kept going. 

I am very thankful.  I really cut through the shame.  This is one of the first times I have had a goal to meet and done it without ramping up into frantic, anxiety.  In the past the only way to get throught something like this was to fall into a frenetic panic state which just gets more and more frantic as time goes on and leaves me feeling wretched in the end and destroys any sense of accomplishment.  This time I feel a real sense of accomplishment and I do not feel worn out - not in the least.  In the past the state of anxiety would leave me completely worn out.

The real accomplishment today is not so much getting the organizing and cleaning done - it is doing this WITHOUT anxiety, WITHOUT shame.  That's a first.  I feel free, truly free for the first time - real hope. 

Oddly enough I still have a way to go but now I have had the experience of working on a shamed project without the shame.  Now I can do it again.

Thanks for all the support.
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Hopalong on April 14, 2008, 06:50:25 PM
Holy moly.

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH GS????


 :D :D :D :D :D

Joy for you, I GET it (mammoth, awesome, amazing growth), and ATTA GIRL!

love
Hops
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Certain Hope on April 14, 2008, 09:37:30 PM
Dear GS... Yay!!  :D  :D  :D   Such blessed freedom!!  :D  :D  :D   ... and those walls come tumbling down!

I so much relate to that tormenting anxiety... and it still comes back, from time to time, and tries to wash away all progress... but it's nothing like the tidal wave it used to be, more like a little annoying ripple. Nobody can take away your many successes, GS... they're replacing all that's gone before and forming such a wonderfully solid foundation for you to build upon... Yay, again!!  :)   I'm just thrilled for you.

Love,
Carolyn
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Ami on April 14, 2008, 10:39:17 PM
Dear GS,
 I am so happy to hear of your progress. You are an inspiration to me, dear friend.    Love, Ami

(((((((((GS)))))))))))
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: debkor on April 14, 2008, 11:02:19 PM
GS,


Isn't it great.  You just know there is a job to do and you do it.  I'm so happy you don't feel shame.  You really are there GS

P.S.

Also when you really don't feel like doing something and you decide not to for the day or so, there is still no shame, you just don't feel like it.  You can leave wait what can (without shame). 

I still have a 2nd coat of paint I need to do in my living room and my attitude is, I don't feel like it right now, and that's it.  No shame and then we laugh. 

You need to go to the store and look for those hand held kid games.  They have one called whack a mole and little moles come up and taunt you, you can't get me, ha ha, hey that's not fair, No fair every time you whack them. 
They are so much fun (and addictive) my kids and friends bought one and we had group  marathons going on at one point.  My dogs went nuts all those moles yelling out at the same time.  WHACK! 

Love
Deb
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: axa on April 15, 2008, 03:32:35 AM
Have not been reading or posting much but hit on this topic this morning.  I am full of shame at is as if I am a vessel waiting to hold others shame for them. 

This morning I planned to get up early and go to the gym.  I keep putting it off.  I know when I go there I feel great, physically and emotionally and yet I avoid it all the time.  It's not like i don't wake up - I do.  I have my bag packed but then I stop myself going.  It is so active this stopping, I find it hard to explain.  Reading this thread this morning has set something in place.  I know my avoidance of doing what is healthy for me is linked with shame.  I do not understand the link but now that I have made some connection I believe it will come.  I have so much shame, it weighs me down and I know it is not mine yet I continue to carry it. 

Struggling axa
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Gaining Strength on April 15, 2008, 10:49:02 AM
axa - I am stopped from going to the gym by shame as well.  I believe you are correct about that link.  Perhaps you can address the shame without even knowing the root of it.  Call it by name, call it false and say it doesn't belong to you. Claim the opposite of shame - whatever that is for you - love, confidence, belonging. 

Rejection and shame are so closely linked for me.

I am going to write about something more in a minute.  I want to leave this post for now.
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: LilyCat on April 15, 2008, 11:12:26 AM
GS,

I am new here to the board; I saw your posting just now and it really touched me. So, while I registered I read just a littlie of your story on the other venue.

I so hear and understand your story, and I just wanted to tell you that anything, most especially healing, is possible. The key is to have the immense amount of courage it takes to let yourself fully feel your feelings -- of shame, of anger, of whatever. It can be a long, long journey to get there, but you and anyone can do it. It is the greatest gift you can give to yourself.

The power to heal lies not in substituting other behaviors, or running away from our feelings or denying them; or in over-analyzing our families and significant others. Rather, it lies in giving ourselves permission to go to those dark places. You can only discover the light by walking, sometimes fearlessly, sometimes most fearfully, into the dark. Just make sure you walk with someone fully able to grasp your hand firmly while you do so -- i.e., a really good therapist.

How do I know? I know all about voicelessness. I have battled it all my life; I never heard it called such until I stumbled onto Dr. Goodman's site, while trying to heal from an unfathomable hurt someone had cast upon me.

This is not the moment to tell you my story, so I'll just tell you that my therapist, who is as practical and reliable and expert as they come, tells me that my family background puts me at the far end of the bell curve ... nearly off the charts. I have worked my whole adult life -- some 25 years -- to overcome the abuse and neglect and lack of caring, and lack of empathy. (Along with some other bad, bad things that happened.) It has been a long journey, and sometimes in the last few years it has felt not a little embarrassing to know that I have been in therapy this long -- yet I know with all that is in me that it has been necessary, and that I have wasted very little time. However my therapist said "jump", I asked how high -- and did my best to reach that height.

It took me a long time to understand my mother's neglect; in the early years of my group therapy, my fellow members said my life was just like a real-life Cinderella -- one of the things that I identified with in your post. It took me quite a few years to measure the hole that my mother left me in -- but I did, centimeter by centimeter, until I knew, and felt, the full and exact dimensions of that hole. I know exactly how wide and how deep and how long it is; and if you can understand this, I consciously carry those dimensions, and that image around with me, so I never forget ... but I also worked very hard to climb out of it, and I have. But the remembrance is important not for clinging's sake, but so that I always know why it is I need to be patient and kind with myself, and a good parent to myself.

My father's abuse was always the most visible and certainly not to be underestimated, but it was my mother's lack of caring that did by far the most damage. It was a real one-two punch.

Like everyone else here (I guess?) I never developed a voice, except through music (classical) and writing and poetry and other forms of artistic expression. Much of my dad's abuse involved tyrannical storms of verbal abuse in which I was not allowed to say a word; to speak up or defend myself before he was ready would have been suicide in  my household. Finally, when his verbal reign of terror was over, he would say "Say!" and then I was magically supposed to come up with the perfect explanation for my "crime" (I never did much wrong -- I was too afraid to). Of course, by that time he had completely ground me into nothing, so aside from the fact that there was no perfect answer (except that I was a child), even if there had been, I wouldn't have been able to give it. I was completely shut down.

This, of course, was the obvious hammer that pounded me into silence, in addition to the very real factors that Dr. Goodman talks about -- all so very, very true for me. All my life I wondered why I never could answer questions about what I wanted, or why I seem to have so little conversation within me (except for artistic things) ... when I found Dr Goodman's article on Little Voices, it was the overlay I needed to understand at the next level. It was wonderful.

And here's where I begin to get to my point: underneath all those layers, and all those feelings, and all the many years of earnest work I did in therapy, I felt a deep shame. Shame because of the neglect and abuse -- why wasn't I good enough to be cared for? -- shame because of the neglectful (literally messy) way my family lived, and many other external factors. I had a brother who was injured in a horrible accident and left highly brained damaged and incapacitated; I even felt deep shame when out in public with him, as if there were something wrong with me/us for having a brother in that condition. (And I guess the case could be made that there was, given the circumstances of his accident.) Being ashamed of him, of course, made me feel even more ashamed. (I did feel great compassion and love and all what you might expect, but the shame was there.)

...on some distant level I felt the shame and knew about it, but it was so deep and pervasive and troubling that it remained in the background for all those years.

Then finally, for whatever reason, I got in touch with it some time last year. I had let myself travel the road to my complete emptiness, and allowed myself to feel that emptiness (and boy, was it/is it empty). It is a hard, hard, HARD thing to do, and very scary. But I'm glad I did, even if it's painful and certainly not resolved yet.

Somehow in that process is where my consciousness of shame arose. Here, this thing at the core of my being that had been at the foundation of my soul for as long as I have been alive, was alive and breathing and letting itself be made known. I allowed myself to admit how shameful I felt, and I named it in group the next time I went.

And you know what? As soon as I named it, it went away. It was that fast. I no longer feel it. All I had to do was acknowledge it, name a few reasons why, and name it for myself. Poof! Gone.

I'm sure that was only possible because of all the previous work, but boy, what a joy to have it gone and how freeingI I no longer feel shame.

A great deal of what I have gotten in touch with this past year, especially the past few months, arose from this very, very hurtful thing that someone did to me (long story); actually, he did it twice. After the first time, in the midst of feeling my feelings about what he'd done, and in that awful state of confusion, the word "offend" came flashing into my head. It happened to be Lent (last year). I had been thinking about how I had offended him (not really, it was the other way around) ... and those thoughts lead me to the question, What could I have done that was so awful, how could I have so offended my parents as a little child, that they ignored me and neglected me and abused me and did anything but nurture and affirm me?

The answer, of course, is that I could have done nothing. All this (the neglect, the abuse) was set in place and going on long before I even reached the age of 3 or 4. The deal was well cemented by then.

I was a child. There was nothing I could have done as a little child that would have offended them, or justified any of their behavior.

In an instant it was so clear that it was them, not me. I was just a little, innocent, helpless, vulnerable child. I could have done nothing. I needed them, and they chose not to understand and support that normal childhood need, but to foist their own values and needs upon me. I was to exist for them, not for myself.

It was so incredibly freeing to realize that. Two very important guideposts: understanding finally that I had committed no offense; there was nothing in me that brought this on; and naming the shame.

All that said, I want you to know that people are complex. My parents were actually two of the best people on earth. Yes, they were very freaky to me (the only word that came to mind just now), but I know, because I saw it, that they had hearts of gold and were truly good people. Sometimes I have had a glimpse of how empty my mother must have been, to neglect me so and use her own child to fill her needs; and although I'll never know what, I know that there was something within my dad that caused him to rage at me so, and bully me. But eventually we became very close; the man I once wished dead became, for the last 10 years of his life, my best friend and one of the greatest joys of my life. He changed, we both changed.

So, that is my message for you: hope and encouragement. I think, from quickly reading your post, that you are a Christian; or at least very spiritual. so here is my very best bit of encouragement: no matter what, put God first in your life. As it says in Proverbs, "Lean not to thine own understanding, but in all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He will make straight thy paths." (As best as I can remember the exact words.)

I think the source of my strength and healing and endurance is that I love God; God is always first in my heart. My one great gift in this life is that I was born loving God in my heart; I never had to "come" to God; God was always there. If I have one talent, it is submitting myself to God each and every second; always, eternally putting myself before God with every breath. It is not so much that I have relied on God as a source of strength; most times, I confess, I haven't felt so much coming back or that my prayers were answered (oh, if you only knew!), but I've loved God anyway; my "getting" things is not the point (yet at the same time I have a keen awareness of God's presence in my life, even if I don't know exactly how or where or what it is; I think it is in just the very act of loving).

The great story of humankind, and of God's endless love and mercy and understanding, is that transformation and healing are always possible. People sometimes misunderstand, I think, and believe that these things are just to be given to us. Not so. It is our job and indeed our purpose and even our joy, to do the work we need to do to become complete and whole human beings. We must. But God will always be there to guide us in it, and to make straight our pathway ... even if it takes 25 years (and it will be more) of therapy, or a lifetime.

God bless you, and may you always walk in the light of God's peace and understanding. God's light is on you, and on all of us.
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: seasons on April 15, 2008, 11:18:38 AM
GS,
Wow, way to go girl. I'm so happy for you, you continue to inspire. seasons
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Gaining Strength on April 15, 2008, 11:38:51 AM
I haven't read the last three posts.  I was working on this post.  This is the real working out of this dark, gross poison of my soul.  I'm dumping it here - no more welcomed in my being.

Beginning yesterday afternoon I experienced what I have written about in this link - a slip back into shame.  I want to write about this here because it is a strange, baffling experience.  I worked diligently yesterday, accomplishing real reorganization in the room that has been completely overwhelming possibly for years. 

When I picked my 7 year old up from school, he asked about my day.  When I told him what I had done, he said, "I'll believe it when I see it."  I laughed out loud and wondered internally if I had promised too many times that I would straighten up.  When we got home and he walked in he fell out in a feigned faint - (he is very comedicly dramatic.)

Later in the afternoon I felt myself slipping.  Last night I kept slipping, slipping.  The signs are very subtle.  By 7pm I knew I had slipped but could not do the things that help pull me out.  At 8 I remember thinking to myself - "I'm falling into depression - no, it's not depression, what is it?  It's that shame again. I should use those techniques to break out.  I'm too tired, I can't."  But I wasn't tired, I had already slipped into that paralysis.  I could not access the way out.  When I am in this state I slip into a weak, passive place where I do not have the strength to oppose my son's strong will.  I could not battle him to bath him or put him to bed. 

Let me digress for a moment.  Yesterday, before I got up I was using an image to help me overcome that morning paralysis and shame.  (Each morning at dawn, the shame comes in like a thief at night and binds me filling me with anxiety about everything past and future.)  I imagined a man and woman praying for me and loving me.  They immediately transformed into my parents when I was 6.  My father was waking me in the morning.  He picked me up and my clothes and took me downstairs to my mother in the kitchen.  In this image I was struggling as we approached the kitchen because I could see that my mother did not want me with her.  She wanted to be alone to finish her work.  She did not want to include me in her world. (this image within the image was my memory/experience)  But in this image the woman intervened and took over for my mother and welcomed me and loved me and called me into the kitchen where she helped me dress and let me help her cook and prepare breakfast.  It was a transforming little experience - suddenly to imagine what a home filled with love would have been like as a child.  Instead what I experienced was rejection and shaming.

My real life was more like this. Once my father woke me I would go into this shaming place - "knowing" (it was not conscious - only now can I put words to it) that when I got downstairs the criticism and rejection would begin.  So when I was awaken, I wanted to go back to bed, to hide there rather than face getting dressed and going to the breakfast table where the subtle but stomach wrenching stuff would begin.  As a consequence I would do anything but get dressed.  When breakfast was ready my mother would ring a bell.  It was when the bell was rung that I would in agony, finally get dressed so that when I got downstairs my father would rail, about anything, about everything, about how long it took me to get to the table, about how I held the fork, about how I cut the bacon, about how much I ate or whether I used sugar on my cereal.  He had a rule about how much milk we could use in the cereal – only enough to make the cereal rise, he belittled us if we put sugar on the grapefruit, he only allowed us to put 3” of water in the bathtub and on and on and on.  (I never knew this “railing” was abusive because it was done in a manner of “discipline” and it was not “loud” or in “anger” but was very, very controlling. I thought it was love – that is the severe damage – this controlling, demanding attitude was what I experienced as love.)

I wasn’t the only child who hated going downstairs in the morning. My oldest brother would go through a similar process while my middle brother would get up, dress and go get the paper and be at the table before I even got dressed.

 This process that started at such an early age got completely ingrained. Now I must break it.

OK, back to that image of a loving home that I had yesterday morning.  I got an insight into my mother.  She was unconsciously functioning at a level of shame herself.  She would go to the kitchen every morning out of obligation not out of joy or love.  She was under my father’s thumb of criticism and sneering cynicism as were we.  She felt impotent and judged and criticized as did I.  Life was a very, very subtle pressure cooker.  When the pressure is turned up slowly, like the pot of water that the frog is in, it isn’t obvious that the temperature is rising.  As the temperature rises any outside stimulus is agitating.  So the needs of a child, the desire to learn, the desire to help, etc. become not an opportunity for expressing love but simply another demand that cannot be met.

To complete the circle in this understanding – I recognize this shutting down.  I shut down last night when it was time to bath my son and put him to bed.  I started to shut down this morning when he resisted getting up but then I found the place of love to go to to  get him up, dressed and fed and to school.  In order to heal myself and my son, I must go to this place of love rather than this place of shame and anxiety and feeling of being overwrought/overwhelmed.

This is the healing process.  This is the understanding and the unlocking of the prison door.  Where I am today sends me back into my past and unlocks those prison doors.  This is how the shaming gets transformed and the love begins to heal. 

I cannot tell you how difficult this is to write and post.  I fear being jumped and criticized.  I fear condemnation.  I don’t believe these fears are really attached to this post.  I believe they are attached to my childhood experiences.  I am severing my ties to those experiences.  I am finding my way out. 

SHUT OUT
On April 9, 2008 Reply 26, I typed this, “ In the past when I have gotten some work done I would get frozen out for a significant period.  This week the freeze out period was 4 days.  The shortest ever.  Wonder how long from today?”

This was a major breakthrough – to understand that addressing shame and breaking through shame actually brings on a bout of paralysis.  Each bout is actually shaming on top of the deeply encrusted shame already existing.  It is shame on top of shame, burying me deeper and deeper.  Each level I break through gets encrusted or re-encrusted, trapping me yet again.  Now that I know it, now that I call it by name I am breaking that process, breaking that re-encrustation.  Once that gets broken then the whole crust of shame begins to shatter, begins to break up, and finally, once the re-encrustation process is destroyed the real healing begins.

I have not only been trapped by shame.  I have been trapped by a re-encrustation process.  Now I see that each and every time I made process I got re-trapped.  OMG.  This is a painful and freeing realization and understanding.  You see, each and every time I worked on this paralysis – oh it goes back as far a my memory goes, my mind is just flooding with time after time that I “vowed” to overcome some failing only to be trapped in a cycle of “vowing” and striving and failing and “vowing” and striving and failing – digging deeper and deeper – accelerating to get out of the mud – getting deeper and deeper.

This is one of the biggest breakthroughs yet.

The re-encrustation process has worked against me all these years.  I got to a point that even thinking about trying to overcome this stuff was shaming.  Just the very desire to make the changes and overcome the paralysis would trigger the whole shaming process.  That is how insidious shame is.  It is completely binding in on itself.  And this re-encrustation process is a major entrapment part. 

I am suffering today from what I called “frozen out” on April 9th.  I am thankful for this because today I understand this “frozen out” experience and today I name it “re-encrustation” and by naming it I have dominion over it and destroy it.  The cycle is broken today.  And by breaking this cycle true healing will come rushing in.

This has been a slow but important process.  I kept battling this shame with the help and encouragement from this board, from individuals on this board allowed because of the existence of this place.  Bit by bit, step by step I have pushed and crawled and scrambled to get one step farther.  I am so thankful that I have made these steps recently – that I cleaned and organized my pantry 10 days ago, that I made progress in my bedroom a week ago, that I made progress on my business Friday,  that I made great headway in our den yesterday.  That’s a lot of progress and I must claim that progress in order to shatter the re-encrustation that I am in today. 

This is where I chose to go today.  I chose to look at what I have rather than what I don’t have.  I choose to see what I have accomplished rather than what I “feel” today.  I choose to be thankful rather than fearful.  I am changing my thinking and so changing my mind which in turn will alter my brain.  This retraining will lead to a new life.

WHICH ONE DO YOU IDENTIFY WITH?
Two jokes:
A boss sends man to lunch and to get newspaper.  Man is late.  Boss says to secty.  I sent the wrong man to get that newspaper.  I should have known.  Another half hour passes and the man finally comes in.  “Boss, I ran into Mr. Brown while I was at lunch and started talking to him.  Before I left I got him to sign back up with us and he agreed to a $7 million contract.”  The boss sighs and looks at the secretary and says, “See, I told you he would forget the newspaper.”

A wife has a very critical husband.  No matter how she cooks his eggs he complains.  If she poaches his eggs he says he wanted scrambled.  If she scrambled his eggs he says he wanted poached.  One morning she frets and frets about what she can do to get it right.  Eureka!  She has a perfect idea.  She scrambles one egg and poaches the other.  So thrilled with her idea – she eagerly serves her husband expecting a well deserved praise.  He throws his fork down and complains, “Woman, you scrambled the wrong egg!”

When I heard these jokes, I immediately identified with the person being criticized.  It touched that dark, chastised place in my heart.  I felt that crest-fallen, shamed child.  But I was struck because the person who told those jokes focused on the “wrong thinking” of the critical one.

My life causes me to focus on the shame dumped on the “doer” in each case.  I chose to re-focus on the “wrong thinking” of the critical one.  “OMG how sad – you have missed the whole point!  You are losing out on life.”  When I refocus I can dismiss that critical one as a sad and lonely soul not worthy of time, attention, energy. 

When I first heard these jokes, I could not laugh.  They touched that place of shame.  Only be refocusing can I laugh and dismiss those folks as wrong thinking.  Only by dismissing them can I rise above.

Sorry for the ramble.  Working out, working through.  Overcoming.  Healing.  Thanks for your compassion and encouragement.
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Gaining Strength on April 15, 2008, 12:40:57 PM
LilyCat

I had been thinking about how I had offended him (not really, it was the other way around) ... and those thoughts lead me to the question, What could I have done that was so awful, how could I have so offended my parents as a little child, that they ignored me and neglected me and abused me and did anything but nurture and affirm me?

This is what I got out of those two jokes.  My perspective has always been skewed. I wondered what I did  when in your own words the correct perspective is it was not me but them.

The answer, of course, is that I could have done nothing. All this (the neglect, the abuse) was set in place and going on long before I even reached the age of 3 or 4. The deal was well cemented by then.
I was a child. There was nothing I could have done as a little child that would have offended them, or justified any of their behavior.
In an instant it was so clear that it was them, not me.


My father's abuse was always the most visible and certainly not to be underestimated, but it was my mother's lack of caring that did by far the most damage. It was a real one-two punch.

This is my story – exactly!!!!!

no matter what, put God first in your life. As it says in Proverbs, "Lean not to thine own understanding, but in all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He will make straight thy paths."

Thank you.

The great story of humankind, and of God's endless love and mercy and understanding, is that transformation and healing are always possible. People sometimes misunderstand, I think, and believe that these things are just to be given to us. Not so. It is our job and indeed our purpose and even our joy, to do the work we need to do to become complete and whole human beings. We must. But God will always be there to guide us in it, and to make straight our pathway ... even if it takes 25 years (and it will be more) of therapy, or a lifetime.

No comment needed.

God bless you, and may you always walk in the light of God's peace and understanding. God's light is on you, and on all of us.
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Iphi on April 15, 2008, 12:50:27 PM
(((((Gaining Strength))))  Once again I am blown away by your powerful and inspiring work on shame and overcoming shame.  What particularly blows me away is that as you felt the shutting down/paralysis happening last night and found yourself unable to move toward solutions you had been using - you were aware the whole entire time.  You were aware it was happening, aware of your solutions, aware of the inability to reach toward them.  To me, that is a tremendous difference - between unaware and aware.  It is a powerful difference.  Just to be aware, conscious, observing, focusing.  Your consciousness was not swept completely away into its role of shamed one - you had a detached awareness watching the experience. 

(((((GS))))) thank you for sharing this with us, with me. 
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: ann3 on April 15, 2008, 12:59:52 PM
Lily & GS,

What fantastic work!!  So inspiring.  Thank you for sharing.

Lily, welcome to the board.  Hope you will keep posting.  You have amazing insight into your self.I admire your courage & your work.  I really relate to the dual nature of your parents:  destructive to their child, but hearts of gold.  How did your father change?

GS,
Wowser!  
 At 8 I remember thinking to myself - "I'm falling into depression - no, it's not depression, what is it?  It's that shame again To complete the circle in this understanding – I recognize this shutting down. 
so good you recognized this.  You're becoming conscious of your patterns.  Fabulous

(I never knew this “railing” was abusive because it was done in a manner of “discipline” and it was not “loud” or in “anger” but was very, very controlling. I thought it was love – that is the severe damage – this controlling, demanding attitude was what I experienced as love.)   [/color]
 
I thought it was love   ME TOO   

I also had thought this was love, but my Therapist told me/showed me that this was my parent's way to control me.  So among all the damage that this type of parental control does is that we, as both children & adults, think that control is love and love is control.  I think brainwashing kids into thinking love is control and vice verse is perhaps the worst, biggest and deepest injury that they caused us, even if our parents were unaware of the damage that they did to us via harsh control.

I don’t believe these fears are really attached to this post.  I believe they are attached to my childhood experiences.  I am severing my ties to those experiences.  I am finding my way out.    
Again, you are conscious of your patterns, conscious of how your mind works, connecting your present daily life to past emotions and past memories.  Fantastic

GS, I'm very happy for you.  Sounds like you are going to have a new life very soon, if not now.

Love to you both,
ann

Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Gaining Strength on April 15, 2008, 01:58:11 PM
We need to talk, soon.... waiting for your next installment.

Is this what you were referring to?

Withdrawal is how I've always self-soothed... reading the paper, munching, all those repetitive comfort habits. I didn't completely retreat; I wasn't completely knocked sideways by dealing with other people's problems - or "frozen out", as you call it.

And this morning, I wake up feeling like I'm different. Somehow. Someway...   like something scratchy is GONE; not in my way anymore


OMG Phoenix Rising - What a victory!!!

How did you get there?  Was it something you did or was it something that happened AFTER all the other work laid the ground?  That is what I am aiming for.  So glad you are there!!! So glad you shared!!! As if you have paved the way!!! I am so, so close.  So close I can taste it.  so close, it feels as though I could type or post my way there - but then some of my typing or posting is a self-soothing thing - not all but some of it.  So close, so close.
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: LilyCat on April 15, 2008, 02:25:32 PM
GS and Ann,

Thank you for the welcome.

GS, I told you you and I are very similar! I haven't had time to read the whole thread, but from what I've seen and the encouragement to you I've read from others (briefly), you're doing a great job. Kudos!! I will try to get caught up as the week progresses.  (Liked the jokes, and feel great sympathy for you that you at first identified with the criticized person.)

Ann, my dad changed because my mom died. After one crisis, one night when I thought he actually might cross that line and become physically violent and kill me (he'd never been physically abusive), plus a few months when I had no contact, gradually our relationship changed. In our confrontation that night I finally spewed out that I'd never thought he loved me (both my parents did love me, it just didn't feel that way, ever, and they certainly missed doing a lot of things that would back that up, but they did do other things, such as teach me to be responsible, give me consistency, etc.) I think it must have hurt him very deeply; that was the first movement of change i saw in him. Things changed very slowly ... but really not so much until my mom died in a car accident. I think it just brought him to his knees and between that and my brother's accident and death 20 years later (6 mos before my mom), he just had the stuffing knocked out of him. Once left on his own, his true sweetness and humanity came to the fore. They'd always been there ... I don't know why he couldn't let them out at home before then. Control, I guess, and probably some kind of fear. Instead of being the brute he appeared, I think he was actually a very frightened man. Whatever, he became known in his town as the sweetest little old man, which he truly was. ...I think my mother also very much controlled my relationship with my dad, and quite probably steered it in the wrong direction and/or mislead me. When she died, her absence seemed to help a more direct connection. Sad, isn't it? But when i say they were good people, one of the reasons is that for 20 years they selflessly and unerringly devoted themselves to the care of my paraplegic, incapacitated brother (although he liived a nursing home). What they did for him is beyond the measure you can imagine. I don't know how you do that when you "lose" a child, but they did. They are genuine heroes, believe me. And one day not too long before my brother died, I realized that if they'd done that for him, they would have done the same for me, and that is when I finally knew and understood that they really did love me ... they just frequently didn't express it very well. Ramble, ramble, ramble....!   

I wanted to add, also, that the one area where I know God positively, absolutely directed me was in finding my therapist. He is not only a great, great therapist, but he understood the issues so well, and the issue of entitlement specifically, that he personally extended himself to me financially in an extrardinary way (not for free, at all, but let's just say most of it has been deferred... and will be paid back, for sure.  I needed to get to a place where I could do that).

I found this article last year, which I thought was very helpful; perhaps you will as well. Enttitlement to feelings is the core of how my therapist works, but I've never seen it written about or discussed anywhere else but in this article. (Which is not to say the material isn't out there; I just haven't searched for it ad nauseum.)

http://bapfelbaumphd.com/Entitlement_to_Feelings.html

Hope you enjoy.

LilyCat
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: axa on April 15, 2008, 06:02:18 PM
GS

Just a quick acknowledgement of your wonderful post.  I have struggled most of my life with getting out of bed, not wanting to face the day, if at all possible staying asleep so that I could not feel.  As a teenager I could sleep for 24 hours solid, I would wake and will myself back to sleep.  I have used my bed as the only safe place for a very long time.  I will address your posts later but wanted to thank you for all of this..... and no I did not go to the gym, sadly, and do not feel the better for it.  My association with the gym, or should I say leaving the gym is of happiness, at the moment I choose shame over happiness.

hugs,

axa
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Ami on April 15, 2008, 06:38:09 PM
Just checking in, GS ,and sending you  thoughts of peace and joy.    Love    Ami
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Gaining Strength on April 15, 2008, 10:13:41 PM
What a day!  Difficult but good.  yesterday I accomplished things externally, today, internally.  Both necessary and both valuable.
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Leah on April 17, 2008, 07:16:58 PM

GS,

I am new here to the board; I saw your posting just now and it really touched me. So, while I registered I read just a littlie of your story on the other venue.

I so hear and understand your story, and I just wanted to tell you that anything, most especially healing, is possible. The key is to have the immense amount of courage it takes to let yourself fully feel your feelings -- of shame, of anger, of whatever. It can be a long, long journey to get there, but you and anyone can do it. It is the greatest gift you can give to yourself.

The power to heal lies not in substituting other behaviors, or running away from our feelings or denying them; or in over-analyzing our families and significant others. Rather, it lies in giving ourselves permission to go to those dark places. You can only discover the light by walking, sometimes fearlessly, sometimes most fearfully, into the dark. Just make sure you walk with someone fully able to grasp your hand firmly while you do so -- i.e., a really good therapist.

How do I know? I know all about voicelessness. I have battled it all my life; I never heard it called such until I stumbled onto Dr. Goodman's site, while trying to heal from an unfathomable hurt someone had cast upon me.

This is not the moment to tell you my story, so I'll just tell you that my therapist, who is as practical and reliable and expert as they come, tells me that my family background puts me at the far end of the bell curve ... nearly off the charts. I have worked my whole adult life -- some 25 years -- to overcome the abuse and neglect and lack of caring, and lack of empathy. (Along with some other bad, bad things that happened.) It has been a long journey, and sometimes in the last few years it has felt not a little embarrassing to know that I have been in therapy this long -- yet I know with all that is in me that it has been necessary, and that I have wasted very little time. However my therapist said "jump", I asked how high -- and did my best to reach that height.

It took me a long time to understand my mother's neglect; in the early years of my group therapy, my fellow members said my life was just like a real-life Cinderella -- one of the things that I identified with in your post. It took me quite a few years to measure the hole that my mother left me in -- but I did, centimeter by centimeter, until I knew, and felt, the full and exact dimensions of that hole. I know exactly how wide and how deep and how long it is; and if you can understand this, I consciously carry those dimensions, and that image around with me, so I never forget ... but I also worked very hard to climb out of it, and I have. But the remembrance is important not for clinging's sake, but so that I always know why it is I need to be patient and kind with myself, and a good parent to myself.

My father's abuse was always the most visible and certainly not to be underestimated, but it was my mother's lack of caring that did by far the most damage. It was a real one-two punch.

Like everyone else here (I guess?) I never developed a voice, except through music (classical) and writing and poetry and other forms of artistic expression. Much of my dad's abuse involved tyrannical storms of verbal abuse in which I was not allowed to say a word; to speak up or defend myself before he was ready would have been suicide in  my household. Finally, when his verbal reign of terror was over, he would say "Say!" and then I was magically supposed to come up with the perfect explanation for my "crime" (I never did much wrong -- I was too afraid to). Of course, by that time he had completely ground me into nothing, so aside from the fact that there was no perfect answer (except that I was a child), even if there had been, I wouldn't have been able to give it. I was completely shut down.

This, of course, was the obvious hammer that pounded me into silence, in addition to the very real factors that Dr. Goodman talks about -- all so very, very true for me. All my life I wondered why I never could answer questions about what I wanted, or why I seem to have so little conversation within me (except for artistic things) ... when I found Dr Goodman's article on Little Voices, it was the overlay I needed to understand at the next level. It was wonderful.

And here's where I begin to get to my point: underneath all those layers, and all those feelings, and all the many years of earnest work I did in therapy, I felt a deep shame. Shame because of the neglect and abuse -- why wasn't I good enough to be cared for? -- shame because of the neglectful (literally messy) way my family lived, and many other external factors. I had a brother who was injured in a horrible accident and left highly brained damaged and incapacitated; I even felt deep shame when out in public with him, as if there were something wrong with me/us for having a brother in that condition. (And I guess the case could be made that there was, given the circumstances of his accident.) Being ashamed of him, of course, made me feel even more ashamed. (I did feel great compassion and love and all what you might expect, but the shame was there.)

...on some distant level I felt the shame and knew about it, but it was so deep and pervasive and troubling that it remained in the background for all those years.

Then finally, for whatever reason, I got in touch with it some time last year. I had let myself travel the road to my complete emptiness, and allowed myself to feel that emptiness (and boy, was it/is it empty). It is a hard, hard, HARD thing to do, and very scary. But I'm glad I did, even if it's painful and certainly not resolved yet.

Somehow in that process is where my consciousness of shame arose. Here, this thing at the core of my being that had been at the foundation of my soul for as long as I have been alive, was alive and breathing and letting itself be made known. I allowed myself to admit how shameful I felt, and I named it in group the next time I went.

And you know what? As soon as I named it, it went away. It was that fast. I no longer feel it. All I had to do was acknowledge it, name a few reasons why, and name it for myself. Poof! Gone.

I'm sure that was only possible because of all the previous work, but boy, what a joy to have it gone and how freeingI I no longer feel shame.

A great deal of what I have gotten in touch with this past year, especially the past few months, arose from this very, very hurtful thing that someone did to me (long story); actually, he did it twice. After the first time, in the midst of feeling my feelings about what he'd done, and in that awful state of confusion, the word "offend" came flashing into my head. It happened to be Lent (last year). I had been thinking about how I had offended him (not really, it was the other way around) ... and those thoughts lead me to the question, What could I have done that was so awful, how could I have so offended my parents as a little child, that they ignored me and neglected me and abused me and did anything but nurture and affirm me?

The answer, of course, is that I could have done nothing. All this (the neglect, the abuse) was set in place and going on long before I even reached the age of 3 or 4. The deal was well cemented by then.

I was a child. There was nothing I could have done as a little child that would have offended them, or justified any of their behavior.

In an instant it was so clear that it was them, not me. I was just a little, innocent, helpless, vulnerable child. I could have done nothing. I needed them, and they chose not to understand and support that normal childhood need, but to foist their own values and needs upon me. I was to exist for them, not for myself.

It was so incredibly freeing to realize that. Two very important guideposts: understanding finally that I had committed no offense; there was nothing in me that brought this on; and naming the shame.

All that said, I want you to know that people are complex. My parents were actually two of the best people on earth. Yes, they were very freaky to me (the only word that came to mind just now), but I know, because I saw it, that they had hearts of gold and were truly good people. Sometimes I have had a glimpse of how empty my mother must have been, to neglect me so and use her own child to fill her needs; and although I'll never know what, I know that there was something within my dad that caused him to rage at me so, and bully me. But eventually we became very close; the man I once wished dead became, for the last 10 years of his life, my best friend and one of the greatest joys of my life. He changed, we both changed.

So, that is my message for you: hope and encouragement. I think, from quickly reading your post, that you are a Christian; or at least very spiritual. so here is my very best bit of encouragement: no matter what, put God first in your life. As it says in Proverbs, "Lean not to thine own understanding, but in all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He will make straight thy paths." (As best as I can remember the exact words.)

I think the source of my strength and healing and endurance is that I love God; God is always first in my heart. My one great gift in this life is that I was born loving God in my heart; I never had to "come" to God; God was always there. If I have one talent, it is submitting myself to God each and every second; always, eternally putting myself before God with every breath. It is not so much that I have relied on God as a source of strength; most times, I confess, I haven't felt so much coming back or that my prayers were answered (oh, if you only knew!), but I've loved God anyway; my "getting" things is not the point (yet at the same time I have a keen awareness of God's presence in my life, even if I don't know exactly how or where or what it is; I think it is in just the very act of loving).

The great story of humankind, and of God's endless love and mercy and understanding, is that transformation and healing are always possible. People sometimes misunderstand, I think, and believe that these things are just to be given to us. Not so. It is our job and indeed our purpose and even our joy, to do the work we need to do to become complete and whole human beings. We must. But God will always be there to guide us in it, and to make straight our pathway ... even if it takes 25 years (and it will be more) of therapy, or a lifetime.

God bless you, and may you always walk in the light of God's peace and understanding. God's light is on you, and on all of us.



God Bless you   ((((( LilyCat)))))
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Gaining Strength on April 18, 2008, 12:17:51 PM
I want to share where I am today. 

The feelings of shame are pouring out of me on every thought and sight and experience.  I am using God's love to reject this stuff.  I chose to believe that I am healed and that these "feelings" will diminish and fade away.  Each time I face one of the rushes of smae feelings with this positive affirmation I find that tight chest and slooped shoulders break open and I am restored to comfortable breathing and sitting upright and the parallysis is broken - if only for a moment. 

Then the shame thoughts and feelings rush in again.  It is attached to litterally everything.  The only hope I have is by overcoming it.  Soon I want to work on this board on my attachment or my frozenness by my parents via money.  This issue is THE issue for me but I see that I am not alone.  It is a taboo subject with lots and lots of emotion attached. 

LilyCat's aticle really gets at it without ever mentioning it. 

I want to share what I am going through here because it is here that someone will understand and I need that understanding to propel me forward.  I need the compassion and encouragement that I get here.  That good stuff that should be available in 3d world but is not.  But that article on entitlement helped me understand how I have been stuck trying to get that empathy and falling short and how that cylce actually kept me stuck.

I chose not to enter that cycle any more and don't have to.  I have this board where people can offer me what I need.  And I am very, very thankful.

Peace to all of you and deep, heartfelt thanks to Dr. Grossman and members alike.

Love,
Gaining Strength

You all are my positive parents who mirror back to me the good things which I can then replace the toxic stuff that my birth parents mirrored to me.  So glad to have the good stuff.  So glad to bleed out the toxic stuff.
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Ami on April 18, 2008, 04:58:24 PM
Dear GS,
 I was feeling the urge to "give up". I see you going forward, against odds, keeping on with faith, as your tool. I can't give up, either.
 Today, getting past my childhood messages seems hard.
  I feel like I will be "here' and no matter how hard I try to climb out, I will still be here.You told me this, today and you were right. How did you know-lol?
  I am going to write a thread and pour my heart out. That usually helps.   
 I am thinking of you and praying for you, always.    Love   Ami
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Gaining Strength on April 26, 2008, 05:47:07 PM
Whew Bean.  That is alot of stuff.  I am so thankful that you have posted here.  This is an incredibly difficult topic. Difficult to talk about and difficult to experience and very difficult to heal from.

Of all that you wrote I am most drawn to this:

Also, a longing to get in touch with the friends and "fix" whatever it is that has been broken.  Is it just the childhood friendship, now gone and (I fear?) forgotten that I feel ashamed about?  Or is it because I wasn't the ideal friend I should have been?  Or is this merely a transference, of the unresolved feelings of guilt and shame I know i have from being the scapegoated child, the least favorite daughter and sister, the "bossy" oldest girl.  I don't know.

I cannot know answers to your profound and important questions but I can share my own experience.  Most of this shame for me is a (not merely at all) transference of the shame developed when scapegoated.  All of the shame was dumped on me from my mother and my father.  That was alot of shame to carry.  Shame grows and infects everything it touches.  Where memories intersect one memory that contains shame can creep over into the other memory and infect it.  I was shamed for making mistakes and for being excluded so every time I make a mistake and everytime I am left out - shame washes over me like a shower of warm honey - everything I touch becomes stuck with the shame.

My therapist is pushing me to start writing about shame.  I would like to but I don't think I have enough order to it yet.  I sent a PM today saying that I am so tired of thinking/writing about shame.  I am sure everyone it tired of reading about it and yet - that is my battle.  I am winning but I am still battling.  I will not give up.
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Gaining Strength on April 27, 2008, 10:00:26 AM
Here is some material I found on the internet thanks to Teartracks. 

They are by Donal Nathanson.  This first line is one that I hope I can put to work for myself.  The next paragraphs I think have much to tell us about ourselves.  I see this action at work here on the board.  It helps me understand so much of what is going on. 

Firstly, shame and love are mutually incompatible.


http://www.tomkins.org/pressroom/conversation.aspx
Finally, there are all those moments when by our own hand we can do nothing to increase our own self-esteem, periods in our life when everything that happens serves only to prove that we are inferior. You've had them, I've had them, and they are awful moments. It is at such a time that we act according to the Chinese proverb "He who lands the first blow was the first to run out of arguments." We use Attack Other scripts when we can feel better only by reducing the self-worth of another person, and we accomplish this reduction by put downs, banter, physical abuse, contempt, character assassination, calumny, blackmail, and sexual sadism. Any time we define a shaming remark as an insult or an example of disrespect, and respond by attacking with words or harmful actions, we are involved in an attack other script.
In fact, everything we have earlier called sadistic behavior is only action undertaken to reduce shame---a fact that makes treatment much more approachable. It will, of course, be obvious to this readership that people with attack self and attack other scripts hang together because they need each other;
Even the most cursory study of social and political history must suggest to a psychotherapist that in our civilization, over the past 40-50 years, the dominant, culturally expected, normative response to shame has shifted from Withdrawal and Attack Self to Avoidance and Attack Other. We have gone from a culture of politeness and deference to a culture of narcissism and violence, all of which must be understood as alterations in scripted reactions to shame affect.
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Leah on April 27, 2008, 10:05:49 AM
Here is some material I found on the internet thanks to Teartracks. 

They are by Donal Nathanson.  This first line is one that I hope I can put to work for myself.  The next paragraphs I think have much to tell us about ourselves.  I see this action at work here on the board.  It helps me understand so much of what is going on. 

Firstly, shame and love are mutually incompatible.


http://www.tomkins.org/pressroom/conversation.aspx
Finally, there are all those moments when by our own hand we can do nothing to increase our own self-esteem, periods in our life when everything that happens serves only to prove that we are inferior. You've had them, I've had them, and they are awful moments. It is at such a time that we act according to the Chinese proverb "He who lands the first blow was the first to run out of arguments." We use Attack Other scripts when we can feel better only by reducing the self-worth of another person, and we accomplish this reduction by put downs, banter, physical abuse, contempt, character assassination, calumny, blackmail, and sexual sadism. Any time we define a shaming remark as an insult or an example of disrespect, and respond by attacking with words or harmful actions, we are involved in an attack other script.
In fact, everything we have earlier called sadistic behavior is only action undertaken to reduce shame---a fact that makes treatment much more approachable. It will, of course, be obvious to this readership that people with attack self and attack other scripts hang together because they need each other;
Even the most cursory study of social and political history must suggest to a psychotherapist that in our civilization, over the past 40-50 years, the dominant, culturally expected, normative response to shame has shifted from Withdrawal and Attack Self to Avoidance and Attack Other. We have gone from a culture of politeness and deference to a culture of narcissism and violence, all of which must be understood as alterations in scripted reactions to shame affect.


Dear Gaining Strength,

Thank you for sharing this resource, and insightful information, of which, I shall sit awhile, to read and digest, this enlightenment, all of which is new to me, and so therefore, I am grateful.

Love, Leah
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Gaining Strength on April 27, 2008, 10:13:01 AM
it makes sense to me.  In a brief paragraph it gives a glimpse of what is going on between us on this board.  Our Shame gets triggered and we lash out. 

I have lived a life of lashing out and then I fell into withdrawal.  Today I will begin work on converting my feelings from shame to love.  Just this week a friend told me of a neuroscientist who said the brain cannot process shame and love at the same time and then today I find another Dr. who says that shame and love cannot coexist.  So if I am paralyzed by shame then the answer is to feel and express love.  Having a little child will make it easy to shift into love.  I think of all the shaming I have felt with him but that had nothing to do with him.  I believe that moving into love will help me with a finality of profound healing.
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Leah on April 27, 2008, 10:23:10 AM

Gaining Strength,

I hear what you are saying, and you express, explain it, so clearly.  The issue of "shame" versus "love" - explains much, indeed.

I see love shining through you, truly, I have seen it, you are close to the finality of healing, is my sincere discernment.

Love, Leah
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Leah on April 27, 2008, 10:32:02 AM
.
Actually, I have had a "lightbulb" moment.  It truly makes so much sense to me too.  Personally.

As I could not for the life of me understand why I was verbally "attacked" here, for always posting on the board - "with love"

I say "with love" because, that is me, it flows from within, and so, I freely "love" and give "love"

So, therefore, with this enlightenment and awareness, today, I feel immensely liberated, and validated, as this demonstrates and affirms ...

... that I am healed of "shame"

because, I have "love" working, residing, living, within me, and flowing from within -- as that is why I do so freely give "love"

unconditionally!


((((( Gaining Strength ))))  "thank you" so much for sharing this today, I feel truly blessed, and liberated -- from any assumptions,

and or, projections, onto me, from any other person, who is not where I am right now, but, I see no reason why they too cannot

join with me and all others, who are where I am right now.

I am rambling, this I know, purely because of the inner release of pure joy and happiness.

Knowing and understanding - the reason why - with an answer to the puzzle - is truly liberating.

Love to you, and everyone here on board,

Leah x


I feel set free -- to continue expressing my love!

How wonderful is that!

God Bless You (((( all ))))
Title: Re: More work on shame
Post by: Gaining Strength on April 27, 2008, 10:45:52 AM
when I was reading Dance with Anger earlier I almost posted the stuff about shame there.  I hope OC reads it.  I think it explains so much.  But I know that it depends on the perspective each individual takes.  But we know that Ns are shamed to a poitn that they scapegoat shame onto others.  As a Highly Sensitive person I took it on.  But i'm not alone and I think many of us here took on alot of shame and spew it out on others.