Beyond Shame

Jean, Age Seven

If you read my last post, “Of Shame and Snowballs,” you know that I recently turned an important corner in my therapy.  All my old feelings of Shame suddenly seemed to melt away, and along with the Shame, went a part of the “old me.”  Now, I know the truth of the statement “Nature abhors a vacuum.”  Every time I have had an important insight into myself, and every time I have abandoned a dysfunctional part of myself, I have been in a state of discomfort until I have filled the empty space.  So what am I doing now to replace Shame?  What will I find to fill that empty space?

If you have been in therapy, you understand the problem I am having.  For one thing, the rest of my psyche has not heard the news that Shame is no longer with me.  In my experience, there is always a lag between insight and emotional response to the insight.  It seems to take a while for the news to trickle down through all the layers of wiring in the right side of my brain and for that part of my brain to realize that the old emotional responses are no longer functional or appropriate. 

It’s as if the responses related to my feeling of Shame are now sitting in my right brain waiting to kick into action, but they no longer are wired into a live circuit.  They wait for the old switch to activate them, and they don’t know that the wiring has been cut.  What will happen to all those Shame responses?  I hope they just wither and die from disuse. 

Now I am in the process of finding a replacement for Shame, a tenant/tenet to inhabit the space that Shame occupied in my psyche.  While I am doing this, I feel a sense of imbalance.  My paradigm is shifting, but as it shifts, I feel somewhat off kilter.  Having gone through this process in the past, however, I know that the feeling of being off kilter is temporary.  All I can do is endure until the world rights itself.  That will happen.  And what then?  A beautiful rainbow?  We’ll see.  I’ll let you know.

Update:  Since writing this a few months ago, I have become much more aware of shame's influence on my life, how shame has held me back and has kept me from realizing my potential.  Shame is all-pervasive, and it must, like weeds in a garden, be identified, uprooted, and destroyed so that the beautiful flowers of the mind can thrive.  Once one has begun the process of eradicating shame, then the pace of the journey through therapy for C-PTSD may move faster. This has been my experience.  Hang in there!