We Never Get All Our Shame Healed

I have been catching some of the "Neuroscience Training Summit - How to Change Your Brain for Better Relationships, Accelerated Learning, and Increased Happiness."

Here is a "free for a limited-time" link for this online summit, if you are interested:

http://www.soundstrue.com/store/neuroscience-summit/free-access

Today, Louis Cozolino, PhD, (a writer, professor and practicing psychologist in Los Angeles, California,) spoke about information from his book:  "Why Therapy Works - Using Our Minds to Change Our Brains, (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology.)

As I listened to Dr. Cozolino speak today, I was THRILLED to hear him say that, in all the years he has been doing his own personal psychotherapy and working with clients for their healing, as well, neither he, nor any of his clients have ever been able to completely eradicate Shame from themselves!

This is Good News to me--because I have been working on healing this stuff in me for 35 years, and I was beginning to fear that maybe I was just too maimed to be able to heal all my personal Shame!

Whew!  What a relief to discover that NO one is able to do this!  I would not have believed anyone that said they were completely Shame-healed, anyway!  My own personal experience just doesn't bear that out!

I think we carry Shame in our DNA--in our genetics!  I think we are hard-wired for Shame!  And then, there are so many places and experiences in our lives where we can gather up more Shame to shower upon ourselves!  I do not know how, exactly.  Perhaps it is through, among other things, that issue called "Original Sin," about which I was taught, (and felt scared about,) in Catechism as a child?

Cozolino says evolution sets us up for mental distress.  This comes out of our primitive instincts.  It also comes from our social connections and interactions.  And there's that issue of our survival being very important to us!  Yup--we are wired for Shame, in my opinion!

Hearing about Shame in this light feels much less about a personal issue or downfall than it is a human one, and therefore, some Shame just automatically feels removed from me!!

At any rate, as much healing as I attain, even being a good deal better at personal healing work than I was when I was 25 years old, I seem to be able to lapse back into Shame from time to time.

The best news of all is that I don't stay there as long as I once did; and I feel so much more compassion for myself when I discover I am in that Shame Pile, yet again, that it feels much less earth-shattering and it passes quickly!

This is progress!

What a relief!!  Otherwise I would not know whether to run stark raving mad into the sunset, certain of my complete, unrecoverable brokenness, or, pat myself nicely on the back for having attained healthy integration of all my previous, not-so-positive life experiences with all the good ones!

Thank you, Dr. Cozolino!  I most certainly enjoyed listening to what you had to share, today!

Love, Hugs and Blessings,
Barbara

© Copyright 2009-2016, Transformation Of A Mystic | Barbara F. Manning. 

All Rights Reserved

      Thank you to ME for my cool photos of flowers from my garden!

"What Is Shame?"

What are the tears of Shame?

For me, tears of Shame are about a feeling of disgrace, an embarrassment to others, and to myself. It is about humiliation and dishonor on some deep level of my heart where there is nothing left but a need for separation and severance, to hide out from myself and from others, so that I do not have to feel it…or risk annihilation—either self-annihilation, or being murdered by another for being so hopelessly flawed and unacceptable.

When Shame hits for me, it makes me want to turn inside out of myself, get beside myself so that I do not have to be present to feel it, let alone, to know about it. The pain of Shame is so great that it sucks the breath from my lungs and sends me to the depths of hell.

Shame feels like riding a bucking bronco—one that I often cannot even allow myself to know that I’m riding before I begin the dance of hiding, of defending myself from it, so that I do not have to experience it consciously. 

Shame automatically goes underground in me.

Chocolate—and a lot of it, is usually my go-to drug to help me keep Shame out of my awareness.

What is the texture of Shame? 
Shame is prickly, heavy, hot, overwhelmingly scratchy and rough. It feels bad. It feels wrong. It cuts me until I bleed at my very core.

What does Shame smell like? 
It smells acrid. It smells like burning flesh. It smells like death.

What is the shape of Shame? 
The very first shape I see when I go into my inner-sight is that of a very heavy anvil, plummeting from on high, over a cliff and directly onto Wile E. Coyote’s head! The next shape I see is that of a beautiful spiral galaxy, with a huge black hole in the center, sucking up everything in its path into the vortex of a hell like no other.

How does Shame taste? 
It tastes bitter, brackish, sour, toxic, down-right poisonous, ultimately fatal.

It brings with it a landslide of other emotions and feelings: Fear, Distrust, Judgment, and Pain.

What color is Shame? 
The first flash of color I see is yellow—the yellow of cowardice. Perhaps this is because Shame brings me to a place of spinelessness, of fearfulness, of great weakness and despair. Ultimately, when I hang on for the Shame ride, there is blackness…darkness so pervasive that I cannot see anything beyond it. I do not want to see anything beyond it because the fear of it is so big. I only want it to go away.

Shame sucks the breath out of me, makes my skin crawl, my teeth grit and my jaws ache from the clenching and the bracing of myself against it.

But…

If I can stay present in the feeling of Shame, allowing it and embracing it, (which often doesn’t happen because I usually have already shored myself up against it, defended myself out of feeling it, somehow gone unconscious at the first hint of it in my energy field,)…but…if I can stay present with it, beyond the darkness is Light. 

The Light is tiny and far off at first, and then, ever growing in depth and girth and brightness until it is all there is! In it comes deep compassion, love, acceptance, healing…and great gratitude for being brought through it--IF I can stay on that bucking bronco long enough to find the Light in it! 
 

--Thank you Looney Tunes for my borrowing of Wile’s Photo.

Copyright 2012. Transformation of a Mystic. Barbara F. Manning