Leaving shame behind

There were a lot of things that I felt some concern about in the last two posts, and this is a clean up post to address that and move forward.

One is a concern that I was too repetitive. I may have been, but that came from a concern that my words wouldn't make it come through how big this was. None of the parts were wholly new, but the way they fit together this time was, and it was big.

All of the little steps have been written about before. I have been a lot worse. One result of that core shame years ago was that every now and then this sick feeling of disgust would wash over me. I didn't know where it came from or what it meant, or even that anyone else had similar issues until I read Sartre's Nausea.

That had been gone for a while, but there were other aspects of feeling inadequate and inferior and wrong, and I've been carrying them around for a long time. While I have at times been healed by pure grace, my most common progress comes when I can make sense of something. A missing piece fell into place, and I feel lighter. That's big.

A random question helped get me there, but it helped because of the work I have already done, including some things that confused me at the time. Looking at chakras and creating a vision board did not initially seem likely to be helpful, but I have to acknowledge that they were now. That feels like a confirmation that I am on the right track, so even though this process feels very long, I can believe that it has merit and will continue to be worthwhile. That is a big deal.

The other thing that I worry can be taken wrong is the conclusion that the shame came from my father, even though I tried to make it clear that emotionally it doesn't feel like that. (I just needed to know that there wasn't actually something essential wrong with me.)

I have heard many times that you can't keep blaming your parents for everything, especially after a certain age. I agree with that, but it feels like sometimes that is used as a reason to shut someone down.

I have recently had some thoughts about how taboos in talking about sex enforce sexism, and taboos for talking about money enforce income inequality and economic exploitation. Many people try and derail anti-racism by calling any mention of racism racist. I may get to some of those later, but I think the lesson we should take right now is that it's important to be able to talk about things. That's how we get at the truth.

For me it was important to understand where the primary emotional wound came from. It was a breakthrough. It isn't the only thing that affected my life, but I needed to name it to take away it's power.

This is especially important to me because the next thing that went wrong was the crying thing. There are a lot of reasons to want to stop a child from crying; I took them personally because I believed there was something wrong with me and so everything was personal judgment against me. It made it hard to share my thoughts and feelings, because who would want to know? That was a barrier between me and other people, and it meant that the darkest thoughts didn't get chances for contradiction.

To some extent I already knew that, and that's why I try to be a good listener. The next step is getting over my concerns about whether I am worth being heard. The blog has been progress, difficult conversations have been progress, but I should be ready to advance to a new level.

Fortunately, some upcoming items on my task list involve making my voice heard.