Tag Archives: awareness

Shame

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So, guess what?  I’m not perfect.  And I have a heapload of shame stored in here.  Well, not in this lovely old safe, but in myself.  And I have to let it out.  Most of it is not really anything I should feel bad about, anything that was my fault, or anything that is even really, in the truest sense, true.

And yet there it is, locked away–sometimes I think I even forgot the combination.

So recently I did something bad at work.  It wasn’t so bad, but it was bad.  I feel ashamed.  I got busted in a huge and ridiculous clusterbunk  involving lawyers and lots of paperwork and many tears and panic attacks.

FH’s response to my work mess up and resultant bustage was to say, “you never get in trouble.  It’s time you started getting in some trouble.”  By which he meant, stop following the rules all the time!!!

So, here’s the question:  What do we do to get rid of all of that shame that’s left over from childhood–where so much stuff feels shameful and we don’t even know why???

And how do we get to the place where we can make a mistake and go, “oh well, I guess that proves I’m human,” instead of dragging out all of that old, old shame from the hidden places–where the comination was thought to be forgotten?

Okay, so I’m doing some EMDR, which sounds kind of hokey–it’s that eye movement therapy–but I think it’s working.  Anyone have any luck with this?  My brother did something similar, and it seems to have brought him down from the ptsd ledge.  I think it’s called mind stopping.  I guess we just have to keep exploring those hidden bits of our own awareness—the parts just beneath consciousness that know the combination to the safe that hold all of the things I am ashamed of or blame myself for.  Hello, yes you, that little part, just below my day-to-day awareness, yes, you.  Can you help me air out some of that old stuff so I can live a little more freely?  Please, yes you, please, let me dream it out, or draw it out, or talk it out.  Walk it out…anything.  Tell me the combination and let the old wounds fly away from my soul.

Isn’t it weird that safe means a place where things are locked up and safe means feeling like you can’t be hurt, you’re protected?

“more richly human”

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Well, it’s hit again…fibromyalgia.  my skin hurts, my joints hurt. I’m exhausted beyond reason. Did I eat the wrong thing or wear the wrong shoes?  Am I just a bad person by nature…oh wait.  That’s the wrong response.  Time to crawl into bed and take good care of myself.  No blaming.

Reading Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life:  How to Finally, Really Grow Up by James Hollis, Jungian Analyst, I find so much to help me understand myself.  One thing he says is “If our work does not support our soul, then the soul will exact its butcher’s bill elsewhere.”  Okay.  My bill is fibro.  What’s yours?  Maybe your work supports your soul?

Also, pertaining to suffering, and how I maybe shouldn’t wish it away out of hand, or reminding me of its value, he says:

In the midst of these psychological dislocations, we frequently consider ourselves victimized, and cannot imagine that there could be some enlarging purpose arising from our suffering.  Often, much later, we are able to recognize that something was moving us purposefully, initiating a new phase of our journey, though it certainly didn’t feel like it at the time.  We may grudgingly admit that even the suffering enlarged us, and made us more richly human.

So I’m going to crawl into bed and become “more richly human.”