Descending Into The Shadows
*WARNING* - This post talks about sexual abuse. Though I do not go into detail I do mention it a couple of times. Just wanted to give you a heads up before you started reading.
It’s time for me to turn my attention towards shame. As soon as I started writing this I could feel tension in my body and the emotional desire to avoid this topic. So that lets me know that this is where I need to be. This corner of my shadow work feels the most frightening. Shame is the name of the voice that stops me from advancing and keep s me stuck in a loop. It continually asks the question Who do you think you are? in a myriad of self-sabotaging ways and behaviors. A core part of me feels morally and inherently wrong. I feel dirty, unlovable and unworthy. These are feelings that stem all the way back to early childhood.
I’ve been carrying this weight of shame with me most of my life.
But where did it come from? If this has been with me for as long as I can remember, was this he result of just trauma or was it in my blood?
I did experience sexual abuse at a young age and it has shaped my identity, how I view my body, how I view relationships AND power among many other things. I’ve been doing the healing work around that abuse for years. Here is the breakdown:
I had to acknowledge that it happened rather than ignore.
Then I had to recognize that I had flashbacks, so awareness of my nervous system became key.
Then I had to be present with the myriad of emotions as the many memories would resurface after years of disassociation.
THEN I had learn to not take anyone’s responses to my story personally.
THEN I had to do EMDR so that I could heal the sexual trauma without my nervous system shutting down.
THEN I had to connect with the truth and not the narrative.
THEN I had to write affirmations that aligned with the truth and repeat them multiple times a day, every day till those words become my core belief.
That’s where I’m at now. Each of those stages of healing have been challenging but the hardest one was slowing down and being aware. I had to listen to the inner dialogue. I had to notice my nervous system and connect with my body which housed the narrative that pleasure is harm and harm is pleasurable.
It doesn’t help that I live in a world of Judeo-Christian, puritan, anti-black, misogynistic, homophobic ideals that are steeped into all aspects of my life.
I recently heard something from Brené Brown.
“Shame focuses on self while guilt focuses on behavior”
Guilt says: I did something bad Shame says: I am bad
Guilt says: I made a mistake Shame says: I am a mistake
Making this distinction has cracked me and now I feel that the practice of forgiveness is actually possible. I’ve struggled in forgiving myself. I tried to “hack the system” and hurry up or skip past forgiveness. But I’m now seeing that this is where I can truly apply this practice. I’m good at forgiving others, sometimes too quickly. I am able to understand that the person didn’t intend to hurt me. Unless they did and then that’s a whole other conversation. However to take a step back and tell myself that not only can I not understand that I did not intend to hurt myself, but that there may be a huge possibility that I DID intend to hurt myself. In which case, WHAT THA FUCK!? And the fact that it’s easier for me to give that grace to other people when I can barely give a morsel of that to myself is amazing to me.
I will say this.
Pray for me.
Any time there is a new level to the work then that means that there will be new challenges, almost like tests to see if I am putting these words into embodied practice. This particular piece of the shadow work feels intense so I know that the breakthrough will be great. It’ll just take me having to go through some uncomfortable interactions, facing into some deep rooted parts of myself that I wasn’t aware of or thought I healed; all while having to remain rooted in my relationships with the Divine, my higher self, my ancestors, spirit guides and angels. Yeah, easy peasy.