Big Emotions Pt. 2: Shame

 

When I first began this journey, it began with a dream in which I appeared unclothed before a crowd.  I walked without any embarrassment or sense of shame, quite at home in my own skin.

But the most often experienced emotion I've felt over the past few years has been shame.  I've written about it both in my journal and here.  I've examined it until I have felt I was going to go mad.  I've ignored it only to have it rear up and strike at me hard.   

In Week Three of The Artist's Way, two of the emotions we examine more closely are anger and shame.  Today I want to delve into the emotion of shame as I have experienced it.

For me, shame began at about age six.  I was told what an embarrassment I was.  I was often criticized over my appearance, things over which I had no control.  I had straight fine hair.  Curly hair was considered the ideal.  I was plump.  I experienced my first fat shaming at home and then it was taken up at school.  I was just beginning to understand that I was not the ideal, that I was considered less than others at a very young age.

Most frequently the source of the criticism was my immediate family.  I was fat, ugly, stupid, overly dramatic, too loud, too everything and too nothing.  My hair was too straight and my face too full of pimples.  Nothing I did was quite right.  If I made all A's then I was told I should have made A+.  If I made a B or C or failed a class, then there was nothing that could redeem me.  Not even straining hard to produce a much higher grade the next semester would take away the stigma of the one failure.  I had already proven myself to be a failure and therefore I could never overcome that fact.

I compensated by retreating into myself and making myself as little noticed as possible.  I was the quiet one.  The peacemaker when things needed to be smoothed over at home. The responsible one who did whatever I was told to do in a conscientious manner, trying to excel.  I studied grooming books  and struggled to make myself presentable and therefore acceptable.  I willingly followed every diet I was ever put on (my earliest in third grade).  

I was never allowed to choose my own clothing.  I was told I had no taste.  If something failed to look nice on me, I was blamed for how it looked.  It was never the color or the cut that didn't suit me.  I didn't suit the clothing, therefore I was at fault.  I endured countless permanents in my hair and often as not looked like a badly shorn standard poodle.  I wore a girdle from elementary school through junior high because I was told I needed to in order to look thinner.  Do you have any idea how embarrassing it is to dress out at PE and be seen removing a girdle at 12?  

I became the shrinking violet, the wall flower, the girl at the back of the room who hid behind everyone else and read library books at school all day long   I was ignored and unknown, except on the rare occasion when a boy wanted to insult another and then my name would be put into play as the example of what not to be, who not to like.  

At home and at school, I was the least wanted.

I was shy, unsure, anxious, and depressed.  Rather than ask for anything, I accepted the crumbs tossed to the ground, fully aware that at any moment someone would deem even those an excess and remove them out of my reach.  

Years passed.  I remained largely alone even after being married.  Eventually I began that year of the 'great makeover' in which I forced my way out of my shell and became a dynamo volunteer, went out and met people in the community, gained friends and generally pretended to be outgoing and confident and not at all shy and reserved and anxious.  

Among my family, my volunteer activities were criticized as being neglectful of my children.  I went back to school and got a job shortly thereafter.  I was applauded at work and at home I was criticized.  Accusations of other natures, baser natures, were then applied to my character.  I continued on with the confident charade but inside I retreated still further into myself carrying a sense of never truly belonging anywhere, of always being on the outside of the glass peering in at life.  I knew that above all else, I was a fake, a liar.  This was all a pretense, not real.  One day I would be found out.  I would be exposed. I would be as unloved as I'd felt my entire life.

That feeling that I shall never be good enough at anything I try is something I carry with me daily.  Never mind that I've had a successful happy marriage for the past 33 years.  Never mind that I have raised four children who are good and decent people who are doing as I did and raising their children to be good and decent people.  Never mind that I have spent years writing a loved online blog with faithful followers.  Never mind that I've been complimented and applauded and loved by others.  Never mind all that.  

In the eyes of those into whose care I was given at first, I am a failure.  If family cannot love you, or give you credit of any kind then you mustn't be deserving of it.  Only they know the 'real' you... And they believe, are all too willing to say that I am a failure.  Therefore, I must be.  There's no way your own family can fail to see your merit, is there?  Only they can really know you, right?

And therein lies the real source of my shame.  My birth family does not love me.  

I've had to walk away from my toxic and painful relationship with my mother and brother almost entirely.  Mind you, no one even knows I am my brother's sister.  He's never once revealed that he has a sister to anyone.  

I see Mama aging and feel guilty for my lack of relationship with her in her elder years. I believe that I have failed as a Christian, even more than I have failed as a daughter and a sister.  Guilt is kinswoman to shame.

So, I carry a world of shame within that I am constantly battling with.  

I have learned something in this month.  I carry what my family thinks of me too deeply. I carry their thoughts as my own.  The shame they made/make me feel has deep roots that go very far back and they are wound around my ego, my conscience, my faith, my relationships with others, my thoughts about myself: physically, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally.   There are times I feel absolutely hopeless and helpless at the depth of that entanglement.  I can't pretend those roots don't exist, because they do.  Ignoring them isn't the answer. 

I say, "Shame on me" right now and rightfully so.  Shame on me for not realizing sooner that this was a bigger issue than I'd been willing to acknowledge.  Shame on me for not recognizing that it was affecting me on such a deep level.  Shame on me if I allow it to continue without addressing it.  Shame on me if I allow it to halt me from doing something I enjoy doing, like writing.  Shame on me if I continue to let it affect all of my other far better relationships than those my family bonds gave me.

And so, I have had to look deep, back into the past, at the moments when I first felt shame growing within at age six. This morning, I wrote it out in my journal, wrote out each incident and sorted out how each affected me and on what level.  The truth is that at six, not later in life as I'd originally supposed, I was already walking wounded.  I was already aware that I, myself, would never achieve the standard set before me, that I was tolerated, critiqued and found lacking.  

This is not where I wanted to go on this journey.  I did not want to go digging through a messy, smelly, painful wound.   Fact is at 67, I'm just about sick to death of excavating my life and sorting through the muck.  

But I am also aware that unless I do this now, unless I fight my way through the roots that entangle me, I will forever be bound by their opinions.  I will forever be walking wounded.  And the one thing I desire, above all else is to be whole and healthy and to move forward in life happily and joyfully.

Sometimes the only way to move forward, especially when we're stuck, is to back up and do some digging in the stuff that holds us stuck in place.

This morning, I wept as I wrote.  The tears not so much for me, as for that six-year-old who so desperately needs to hear that she's loved, she's wanted, she's smart and kind and helpful.   She is ENOUGH just as she is.

As I tell her those things, I hear it echoing through the years to my heart.  I am all of those things, too.