Shame, guilt and this doesn’t belong to me

I promised you a therapy update a while back. I needed some time to digest first though.

I had managed to get to the bottom of some of the trauma that was linked to guilt – the unhelpful kind – on my own. Let me quote from a nicabm (National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine) worksheet. It says that unhelpful guilt is “a feeling of psychological discomfort about something we’ve done against our unrealistically high standards”. These can of course be standards imposed by society or our family system that we internalized. This feeling will stick around until we rectify those unhealthy beliefs. Something I’ve been doing successfully for a while now.

There is also healthy guilt – if we’ve done something that’s objectively wrong, we can apologize and hopefully repair the damage caused (paraphrasing from the nicabm worksheet).

Shame comes in for the win in terms of being deep-rooted. We can start feeling guilt between the ages of 3 and six. Shame can be experienced as early as 15 months. No wonder it’s hard wired into our brains, completely internalized and difficult to resolve. And you know what the definition of shame is? “Shame is an intensely painful feeling of being fundamentally flawed”.

Read that again!

And then think about the 15 months. These are things we have no active memory of. These are things that can make us feel like a fundamentally flawed and worthless human being decades later. This hit really hard. It’s not a process we can influence at that time. But … we can learn self-compassion later on (it’s never too late!) and our environment makes a huge difference in how our brain develops and hopefully learns that we are not flawed. We are human.

This is a long way to say that things shifted for me from feeling guilty – for things that were really not my responsibility, I was five! – to an intense feeling of shame for who I was back then. And you know that this feeling doesn’t just go away unless it’s reprocessed. This one will take time. And it’s one that has triggered suicidal thoughts in the past. I finally understand why. It goes to the core of my existence.

This brings me to something else that happened and that I wanted to share.

I experienced some pain on the left side of my stomach. I went with it, but it felt too big and heavy and couldn’t be released or even felt. I asked my therapist if it was okay for me to take that big black pointy rock out of my stomach and put it on the table behind her. The rock looked good back there and suddenly an intensely positive energy started filling my stomach.

I later painted the rock and put it somewhere out in nature. I don’t know what it represents. I just know it was something that had been stuck inside me and that didn’t belong to me. It needed to go.

Nine days later I feel calmer than I’ve ever felt.

A work in progress. Be gentle with yourselves. Hugs all around.