Shame…

Happy Wednesday,

How is everyone doing this fine Wednesday afternoon? I do hope everyone is well and hanging in there, staying safe. What’s your new normal look like? It’s been almost a year that we have been dealing with Covid crazy. For me, it’s been taking some getting used to being home so much of the time. I’ve always been out and about. Driving was my way to relax. I enjoyed just getting in the car, grabbing a coke and turning on whatever music fit the mood for the day. Now, it’s finding a new kind of normal. I write more, I listen to a lot more motivational speeches and I still zone out with my music. Keep those texts, emails, messages and comments coming, I love hearing from you all.

Today I thought I’d talk a little bit about shame. In one of my motivational speeches it was touched on and a friend of mine, after talking with her yesterday about something that triggered a negative feeling within me, said she thought I felt guilt and shame. She was right. Therefore, it is my topic for today. Shame is triggered by different things in our lives. Basically shame is stirred up within us when we look at our inner self with our very own critical eye. When we do this, we evaluate ourselves in one of the harshest ways possible. The thing is, most of the time, we have little to no control over the things that cause those feelings of shame. When we look at our inner self in a harsh manner, generally it’s because of messages we’ve received about ourselves from others, especially during our formative years of childhood. I know from personal experience, I was taught from an early age that I had to be perfect. I never did anything good enough in my mothers eyes. If I voiced an opinion or questioned anything, it was nothing for her to haul off and slap me. I remember one time, she picked up me and a friend of mine from school. This “friend” was considered by mother as worldly associate. Christy was her name. She had missed her bus and so I asked my mother if she could give her a ride home. Reluctantly, mother said yes and I knew it wasn’t going to be a good thing. Mother was very short with her words during the drive and while I don’t remember the conversation we were having, I apparently said something she didn’t like and she hauled off and slapped me across the face as hard as she could. I was so embarrassed and that embarrassment turned to shame. I was a freshman in high school. Christy never said anything about it to me, but the humiliation of having to face her the next day at school was so hard to deal with. You see, as a teenager and being slapped like that, the seed of shame had long before been planted within me. I thought I deserved that slap. My choice to have a “worldly” friend was considered in my mothers eyes as a poor decision on my part. I identified having my own thoughts of wanting to seek a higher education, a career in medicine or as a journalist as poor choices based upon the way my mother thought. I’d tell her sometimes what I dreamed of and one of her famous replies to me was, “you don’t want to do that,” or “you no better then that,” or “why would you think that’s okay.” My thoughts, in her eyes were wrong, based upon a teaching of a cult. Being a girl raised in a cult, I was taught my place in a man dominated religion. I was taught to not think, want or feel anything that wasn’t acceptable to my parents (mother and step-dad), and if I should marry, then I had to be in total and complete submission to my husband. My very identity in life was centered around shame. I was not only taught my place and that my desires were wrong, I was told from my step dad on a regular basis how fat I was. I remember sitting on the couch one afternoon during summer break and he came home and looked at me with disgust. All he could say was, “no wonder you’re so fat.” My mother allowed me to be shamed by him, after all, he was the man. To this day, I still have a hard time with body image. Mind you, I wasn’t fat. I wasn’t even over weight. I was average. The next day I joined the gym. I became obsessed. I was maybe 14 at the time. The gym was about 5 miles from the house. I’d get up super early and ride my bike for a jazzercise class, then ride my bike home. I’d then go back in the evening for another class. I began to eat less and less. Basically, I destroyed my metabolism from an early age. If I ate anything, I’d go and make myself throw up. That became a viscous cycle of shame. When I was 17 years old and getting married, I weighed 95 pounds and still felt fat and overweight. My husband then took over the roll of shaming me. I remember my weight went up to 98 pounds and he went and bought me diet pills. This toxic shame is now what, in my mind became my identity. I couldn’t challenge this mind set, because from an early age, it was engrained in me. I was never thin enough, never pretty enough, never spiritual enough. I became an over achiever and developed the mind set of needing to be perfect. Sadly, I never measured up. I felt worthless because I felt shame about who I was. I felt shame about how I looked. I felt self-disgust every time I ate anything then had to go and throw it up. This whole mind set that I had and that was continually developed by those in my life, it filtered into my inner dialogue. Like a poison, slowly and steadily entering my entire self. It’s who I became. A shadow of shame and guilt. Looking back, negative self talk was a way of life. The harder I tried, the harder I worked, never was good enough. Sadly, the one person that was supposed to protect me and cherish me, added to my negative self talk. Diet pills for an already underweight girl? Didn’t help my self image. Telling me it was hard to have sex with me after having a baby because he looked at me with disgust, because all he could see was the blood and birthing stuff. Not wanting to touch me because a baby, our baby, our son, came out of my body, yeah, that took along time for him to even want to “be” with me, and even then, I think it was more to satisfy his need. I don’t fault him for that. I mean, he married an already broken and damaged person, and he was pretty damaged too from having extremely negative parents and a mother that never expressed or showed him love. We were toxic right from the start.

When we allow shame to continue in our lives without resolving the issues that caused it, we venture down this spiraling hole of harmful behaviors and thoughts. For me, I didn’t turn to substance abuse, I turned to self harm. I pay the price to this day. I remember, looking back raising my boys, I wouldn’t eat. My mind told me I was fat and even more ugly. Kevin, being my more in-tuned child to me, would always come up and put his arm around me and say, “mommy, why won’t you eat.” I felt shame by his compassion towards me, because I should of been taking care of him, instead he was trying to take care of me. I was so ashamed of gaining weight during pregnancy and through out my marriage, that to this day, food scares me to death. I have stopped the self induced vomiting and the taking of diet pills, but I have screwed up my body so bad when it comes to weight, I can’t lose it.

When we feel shame, it’s generally coming from our own self negative evaluation of ourselves. Mix that with guilt, which comes from a negative evaluation of our behavior, you have a formula of disaster just waiting to blow. Shame and guilt, both render to the mind that “I did something wrong,” according to healthline.com, “Shame is a general feeling of inadequacy, guilt is a specific sense of transgression.” As an ex- JW, I can tell you this, children raised by a religion such as this, especially girls, are raised learning shame and being shamed. We are shamed from early childhood that if we even look at a boy, there is something wrong with us. If we kiss a boy we are becoming stained. Dating is a no-no unless you are looking at that person as a potential marriage mate. You can’t date without a chaperone, after all, we need to be clean virgins on our wedding night. I remember after getting married, I told my husband that I was molested when I was about 5 years old. This religion gave him the mindset that I wasn’t clean. I didn’t give him details of what had happened to me. I planned to and yes, I should of told him before I married him, he did deserve that much, however, being young and stupid at 17, I hid that from him. That molestation I hid from him intentionally, but the second time I was molested, when I was 10 years old, I had blocked that out for years. Anyway, when I told him I was molested, at 5, he became angry. He even told me that he could leave me because I wasn’t really clean when he married me. Shame on me. I tucked that shame and guilt away, right into my already negative self image.

Shame and guilt are two things that are hard to rid the mind of. With this negative self image of ourselves, we generally begin to “trigger unwanted emotions.”-healthline.com. Example of the unwanted emotions are, anger, either towards ourselves or others, maybe we begin to self loath ourselves. We tap more easily into our fears. Ironically though, “shame can also fuel perfectionism.”-healthline.com. Shame might tap into, “the way we see ourselves and the way we imagine our ideal self.”-healthline.com. Riding ourselves of shame and guilt isn’t an easy journey. Believe me when I tell you, it’s hard. It’s a constant uphill battle. I am fortunate enough to be working with someone who is helping rid myself of what the mind is telling me is true. I’m also beyond blessed to have a man that loves me through it all. Being raised to not value myself, or maybe I should say, I wasn’t taught to value myself, then to go into a marriage at such a young age, I never learned or allowed myself to learn self worth. I was so tied up in being perfect. The perfect JW wife, mother, sister, daughter, aunt, and friend. I cared more about what others thought of me and my family that I put that impossible mountain of perfection right in front of me. No wonder I fell. It’s easy for me to sit here and blame my childhood, my marriage, my ex husband, and my religion for my choices, but to really do that, well, it would be saying that there is no free will. My free will was hindered from an early age due to the circumstances, absolutely! Ultimately though, I had free will at any given time to change my thinking. I simply used my circumstances as a crutch. My crutch was fear of man, fear what others thought of me. I do blame the religion for indoctrinating me from infancy and fear mongering me, but I take full accountability for my choices.

I know this is getting super long, so I want to leave you all with this. We all have free choice. With that being said, I want to share this with you. I have put my original book idea aside for now. I have a new book that I have started and it will be one that I hope will help those in toxic families, toxic environments and toxic cults and religions to, if it is there choice to break free. I’m not here to encourage anyone to leave their families, partners, mates, children, friends or religion, I’m simply here to give you my experience so should you chose a different life journey, maybe you can avoid some of the heart ache and emptiness and self loathing I’ve suffered from. After all, life isn’t about the destination, it’s about the journey. Send me your thoughts and comments and don’t forget, Love Life++