When Shame Overwhelms us
Good day beautiful people,
How are you? I like to write about what’s happening in my life because when I share what’s happening for me it’s almost always something that other people can relate to.
This week I have been experiencing some previously unseen layers of shame. I have been working with some of this ancient emotion that has appeared in my life creating some unpleasant shockwaves.
I say ancient because most of the emotions we experience are old. Very very old. They were laid when we were little by experiences we had that we didn’t have enough emotional understanding or support that would have allowed us to work through and integrate them.
Instead, most of us are carrying around a heavy emotional load that is made up of old emotions that are eagerly looking for integration.
They are yearning to be tenderly seen, held, validated and felt.
Shame is at the core for many of us of our emotions, and it creates patterns of behaviour that are unhelpful and stop us from thriving.
Until I started doing this work I had never sat with anyone or myself, and felt loving and tender support for the shame that I carried.
When we can learn to sit with our emotions, to hold ourselves so gently and tenderly, to wrap ourselves in empathy and understanding, this creates the unravelling that we need to release the pressure of these emotions.
When shame would activate in the past I would run away! Hide! Stay in my house, or locked up in my body. I would feel shy, stop speaking, or start falling over myself to try and say the right thing.
Now as a default I take incredible care of myself when shame activates. I am so allowing of myself, and so supportive of myself – because I know that a previously toxic level of shame has been in my body, and it’s not something I installed or consciously allowed to bloom out of control.
So when shame activates, I see it as an opportunity to reduce the amount of it I am carrying.
Here’s what happened the other day…
It’s early morning and I’m sitting in bed. I can feel an unease in my chest. I want to either put my head under the covers and stay there all day, or jump up and just attack what I need to do today. Go go go or collapse seems to be my body’s desires.
There is a deep unease within me, a familiar uncomfortableness that is settling on my chest. A feeling that feels disturbing, but I could ignore it if I needed to. How so many emotions show up in our lives.
I know not to ignore these sensations because they are emotions looking for my attention. And when I work on supporting myself so that I feel them (because emotions want to to be seen, heard and felt) then I get access to freedom, joy and natural abundant energy.
So I turn to this sensation and I say:
Hey love, what’s up?
And all of these images pop into my mind, things I’ve done wrong, stupid things I’ve said, a sense of my deep and general awfulness. Things I’ve messed up in my life, things I am terrible at. It’s basically a general inventory of ‘all sins committed by Diana’.
And I understand immediately what emotion has activated.
Oh shame! I recognise you. Shame you’ve shown up today. OK.
Saying the word shame feels a small comfort, because it stops me veering down the route that I used to go down of patiently going through the inventory of all the bad things I am/have done, and feeling more and more waves of shame until I become incapacitated.
When I stop following my thoughts, and instead recognise the emotion and the sensations it creates in my body, I know I have the chance to move through this.
Understanding that shame has activated opens up the possibility in my mind that I am not actually a terrible person, I am simply experiencing an emotion.
I start to pay attention to the noises in my room.
I start to bring my attention to a broader space around me so that it’s not just me locked in my mind and my body.
I listen to the sounds of the room, the birds in the tree outside, the gentle lap of waves of the ocean, the small mumbles of conversation from different parts of my apartment.
I breathe.
I offer myself a hand on my heart.
I offer myself some empathic loving words, this is tough for me. I don’t like this feeling of shame, but I am going to stay with myself. I am going to hold myself while I feel this.
I stay with the sensations.
I hug myself.
And breathe.
I want to cry but it feels like I am a little frozen. So I start to move my body a little, and rub my arms.
I ask myself what I need. And the word courage appears in my mind.
And it occurs to me that it’s not so much courage that I need to be with this feeling, but an acknowledgement of how hard it is to be a human in this world. To be alive, to feel, to experience, to navigate relationships, to be attempting to be a good human, to raise other humans, to feel tiredness and exhaustion, to be trying, always trying….
And it makes sense to me. Yes, at times it can feel hard to be a human.
And that makes me sigh, a deep satisfying sign. Knowing that I am working on healing hard things.
Yes, love, yes love, things can be tough. I say to myself, rubbing my heart.
And I see too that I don’t want to be controlled by shame any more. Shame wants me to stay small and hidden. It wants me not to be too loud or silly, it doesn’t want me to be my true authentic self because it’s scared I’ll be rejected. It’s trying to keep me small and hidden because it thinks I might suffer if I am my full expressed self.
Oh you’re scared shame?
Yes, I am scared. I am trying to keep you safe. I just want you to be ok.
It says to me.
Oh I get that, I get that. I say to the shame.
And as I start to see the positive qualities of this shame, that it’s just trying to slow me down, to keep me small, because for many years being small, quiet and unseen was the most safe option for me. And for many of us.
To not be fully seen, to not ask for what we need, to not be difficult or demanding etc.
So I lay in bed and I stay with myself and these sensations.
I offer myself lots of support, lots of regulating exercises, lots of loving guidance.
I spend some time writing. Sharing with myself and witnessing myself how I feel.
And gradually this discomfort starts to lift.
The pain feels like it’s been seen.
The shame starts to fall away. And all of sudden I feel like I go from a flat 2D figure to suddenly filling out and becoming a whole person again.
And this unpleasant feeling of self-disgust evaporates, and a sense of lightness and joy washes over me.
For me the incentive for working with my emotions is that I know that at the root of the things I’ve found so difficult in life are emotions I’ve never had support to work with and integrate.
My incentive is knowing that I don’t have to be held in a vice-like grip by my emotions anymore.
Shame told me for decades I was a shoddy awful person.
By seeing and holding my shame – I see I am not.
Fear told me life was terrifying and I needed to be very afraid.
By working with my fear – I am no longer always afraid.
Grief told me I would never experience love and joy in my heart again.
I learnt I can hold grief and lovingly tenderly – so that it doesn’t take over my life.
I decided I was done feeling disappointment, judgment and self-hatred. I was done with punishing myself.
And knowing that the pathway to self-love, joy and freedom is through emotions feels unbelievably empowering to me.
Next time you feel stuck in a loop of judgment or unease, ask yourself – what am I feeling?
And you will start to see that what feels like a bundle of different problems is in fact a bundle of different emotions calling out for your love, attention and support.
Emotions are yearning for empathy, validation and support. When we can learn to see them, feel them and hear them, our lives open up in new, radical and beautiful ways.
Sending you all so much love on this day,
Diana