In recovery circles of all kinds, there’s a sentiment that
goes, “You’re as sick as your secrets.”
And, for many of us recovering, shame is the common issue
impacting our lives, complicating our health, relationships, sobriety, and our sense
of individual purpose.
Many of us eventually discover that therapy is the imperfect,
yet healthier, antidote to that shame. I say eventually, because often,
many of us are confronted by interventions and life circumstances that, in some
way or another, dictate that, yeah, it’d maybe be a good idea to get some help.
We’re not doing so hot, as we kick, scream, assert ourselves, and try to
imitate an unaffected person. Here’s a clue: we are not unaffected. It’d
be great if we were. That’s not our story or our preference. Therefore…
SHAME!
And the consequences that we often learned, a little too late.
Learning. Education. Being taught and running with that until
we run into a wall. It all comes down to learning shame, why we’ve learned it,
and then, in response, learning how telling on that shame frees
us.
Shame Teaches…
One of the fundamental things that shame
teaches us is that we are wrong, defective, unwanted, and unworthy.
Being shamed is a great way for an abuser/toxic
person to establish our identity. We are informed by what others say about us,
especially in our formative years. Some of us have been told we’re the “bad
boy/girl,” the “stupid one,” and “the problem.”
It’s difficult enough to hear those things as
“adults who know better.” How hard is it, then, to be a child, without armor,
to absorb those harsh decrees about our identities?
Most of us, who have come away from those
realities, simply accept shame as who we are.
We believe it’s our fault; we believe it’s the
truth that cannot- and should not- ever be challenged.
Bumping along
in life with those wrong identity messages only gets us so far before a big
crisis point gets our attention. Getting arrested, drunk driving, domestic
violence, divorce, illness, and financial problems are a few possible
attention-getting flashpoints that can prompt us to accept the fact that, yes,
indeed, therapy might be a good idea here. Some of us even got out of some
severe jail time because we opted for counseling instead.
(Let’s hear it
for proper motivation, huh?)
Anyway, many of
us, within a therapy context, often, for the first time, hear, confront,
explore, and start to, perhaps, accept that the things we were told and taught
as gospel are inaccurate, untrue, and abusive. We hash out how “they” were
wrong for instructing us on such messages and labels. We learn, perhaps, that
we are “not that.”
“Telling,” on
our part, is powerful because it is now our actions and words that have
power, instead of the abuser’s harsh dictates. We couldn’t control our
lives when we were under their influence.
But now
it is about our influence on ourselves, shame issues included.
Shame Silences…
When we are assigned a certain identity and
believe a harmful message, often, it comes with the mandate of silence. We hear
“shut up” literally, sometimes, daily. The emphasis is on secrecy, on deceit,
on keeping an image. The silence often gets tied to us somehow, some way, being
shameful. The shame, like that of identity, is often assigned to us by others.
We may not be a planned pregnancy, the right gender, or attractive enough.
Therefore, we deserve to be ashamed of ourselves by “other.”
And while we are living this reality, we had
better not disclose or complain about it. “Put up” with being shameful…and
“shut up” about it.
Sounds like a happy life, doesn’t it?
Telling Decides…
Within the bounds of professional therapy, telling
illuminates what happened. Perspective, therefore, from an outside
source, can then weigh in.
And that is what the abusive influencer does
not want to occur. They want abnormal to be normalized. “Everyone is like
this.”
Oh, really?
Every home and family employ vicious roles,
name calling, and messages attached to its members? That’s normal?
When we are in therapy, we often encounter, for
the first time, how untrue and harmful our homelives have, indeed, been.
There is power and freedom in our “telling.”
We blow the whistle; we blow the abusive cover.
Aghast reactions, head nods, and validation
from therapeutic people reinforces how we are not what’s wrong, the
abusive system is.
Shame Controls…
Another fun manipulative tactic of shame? It controls
us. Anyone who has been abused has encountered how freedom to be ourselves and
make our own choices was FORBIDDEN! When shame is intertwined with silence and
secrecy, we feel restricted, constricted, and strangled. We learn we need to be
ashamed of ourselves, for the environments, actions, experiences, and people
beyond our control; we learn that we had better keep a lid on that. It is
shameful; we are shameful. Our only hope is to keep the secret, shut up, and
deny that whatever happened to us didn’t happen, or, if it did, it “wasn’t that
bad.”
Nah, just a little evisceration to our sense of
self, our health, and our safety. It’s fine. Just walk it off like a
Charley horse.
Get back in the game and be quiet about
it!
Telling Decides…
When we make the decision to tell that first
person, especially that first therapist, it’s a signal that we recognize our
lost voice and make it a priority to reclaim it. It may not be articulate; it
may not be pretty. It doesn’t need to be that. It just needs to be noise, our
noise. Our voice, doing the speaking. It’s not easy. We often tend to
swivel our heads around asking, “Is the coast clear? Is it safe?”
Telling, ideally in a healthy, safe therapy
environment, asserts that, yes, indeed, we are safe, or at least, “safe
enough.” It’s a start. And all healing has a start. We do ourselves well to
never minimize our start. Or any trek down the healing road.
Telling is a declaration of independence, of
noise, of us being who we are, freed up of condemnation.
We are who we are… and this is what that looked,
sounded, felt, and tasted like. That was the shame, being
imprisoned by that horror and pain was the shame, not us.
And not us speaking about it.
Shame Decides…
When we have been exposed to shame, via an
abuser, we wrongly absorb the message that there is a hopeless finality to us,
to our circumstances, and to our entire lives.
Shame is the tool used by an abuser to convince
us we are relegated to narrow definitions of who we are and what function we
serve. And, concerning that definition and function, it’s fairly clearcut. We are to be a slave to the abuser.
Shame has decided so. It has dictated those
terms.
Telling Decides…
Our decision “to tell,” within the framework of
therapy, challenges that false truth.
Yes, it’s scary, filled with insecurity and
unpredictability to do so, but…
“… the
day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk
it took to blossom.”
Anais Nin
When we decide to tell our traumatic
experiences, we force not only ears to open, but eyes, as well. We choose to
recount and share the ugly, the uncomfortable, the painful, the inconvenient,
because carrying the shame alone and silently becomes too burdensome. We reach
a saturation point in our healing when we realize we no longer should be
saddled with that toxic shame from someone else’s making. It is not
right, fair, healthy, or doable to continually decide that we, alone, must
endure this toxicity.
We finally make the decision to unburden
ourselves, release the truth, and let some chips fall where they may.
It's brave. It’s scary. It’s freeing. It’s
redeeming. And redemption dissolves shame.
Redemption through such revelations as…
“It’s not my fault.”
“That should never have happened to me.”
“That did happen to me. I didn’t imagine
it.”
“I am not alone. Others witness my experiences.”
“Other people have gone through what I have
endured. They get it.”
A Matter of Life and Death:
“Shame dies when stories are told in safe places.”
Ann Voscamp
Shame not only kills, but its tentacles also create a life
that’s harsh, harmful, and one that we do not deserve. Shame can create a life
that only makes us want to die.
Telling, specifically, our storytelling, of that shame, can
resuscitate the dying parts of who we are, while giving birth to new senses of
ourselves and our wonderful, true identities.
Let’s start telling!
Copyright © 2022 by Sheryle Cruse
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