One of the things I love talking about with my clients is how sometimes there are two totally different realities going on where we feel a disconnect.
You can read a thousand self-help books. You can take a million courses, but unless you do the work and have the experience of the healing, nothing will change.
What really started clicking with me… (about eight years ago now was when I really started and you’ll see this in all my videos) was to get real about how I feel so I can heal. And one of the biggest sort of blocks to that work is shame. I myself had a lot of shame.
Shame says… there’s something wrong with me. It’s the excuse we give ourselves. If I change or I’m different, maybe I’ll get this to work out for me and it makes us feel powerless. It’s a false power, but we still feel powerless because we’re powerless to get our needs met and so we think… I’ll have this false power to control and then maybe I can control things into getting my needs met. And when we get older and we still have this coping mechanism, things don’t go so well, because we’re constantly being controlled by that shame.
So, shame is scary, because it wants you to think it’s so scary. It doesn’t want you to look into it, but what I learned is by looking into shame – looking into that emotion, that pain that said, “I’m still not getting my needs met” and sit in the reality of what’s happening now. If you can do that right now, this is an amazing step, this is an amazing place to start. Look at what is happening right now, not in the past, not in your childhood, not ten years ago, but what is happening right now that doesn’t feel good and look at it.
When we were kids and we felt what we felt and then we still did not get our needs met, we felt there’s something wrong with how we felt… That we shouldn’t feel what we feel. I had a client earlier today and she was saying, “Yeah… I’m feeling this pain.” Something triggered her that happened that she was very much in shock about why it would bother her so much, and the way she dealt with it is she said, “I shouldn’t be feeling this right now. That was six years ago.” I said, that’s the first problem you do feel like this right now and let’s talk about why that makes sense.
When we feel something, we usually judge it or tell ourselves I shouldn’t feel this, because I’m over it or I get it or it’s nothing to do with me anymore, but that’s your mind. Your inner child, your heart, your wounded child still has something that needs to be acknowledged and when we say I shouldn’t feel this way, we are again not acknowledging ourselves, that part of ourselves, that couldn’t get her needs met or his needs met.
So, the first step in really starting to heal this is by saying, “I feel this, this is interesting. I don’t think I should feel this way because this thing was so long ago or this thing I thought I was over with. The truth is I do, I’m getting real about how I feel. I feel freaked out right now and who cares why. Right now, I feel freaked out and I’m acknowledging that freaked out feeling.”
So, it’s not what happened, it’s the meaning we’ve attached has not changed until we become conscious about what we feel. But we can’t become conscious of what we feel if we’re telling ourselves, “I shouldn’t be feeling this right now,” right?
So, get real about how you feel… right now, I’m feeling nuts, it feels scary, it feels awful. And I don’t think that I should, but I do, so I’m gonna honor this part of me that feels what she feels and doesn’t need to be any different.
Shame is the false protector that we created when we were children to keep us out of harm’s way. To not be so shiny, because then people will see us and they can criticize us or not be or beyond enough or whatever it is… and so what happens is that we get into this reality where… I’m afraid to shine and I’m also afraid to not exist, because what shame tells you is you don’t matter. What shame tells you is you don’t want to really matter, there might be something wrong with you. What shame tells you is don’t be vulnerable, because that’s weak and that’s scary and that’s where you get hurt, because when we’re children and we’re nothing but loving and we don’t get our needs met, we think we’re not enough because or love didn’t get where we need it.
So shame says, there might be something wrong with you because you just being loved but didn’t get your needs met. So, I’m gonna protect you from ever finding out who we really truly ever are. And what I want to tell you is by me sitting in my own version of shame is when I found who I really was, because I realized that it was just shame – it wasn’t truth and it wasn’t me. It was a part that was trying to protect me from ever finding out who I really was and… guess what, it’s not a protection, it’s actually a block. And when we can look at that wall we can go through it and we look at that feeling, we look at that pain, we look at that shame and not as if it’s us, but look at it as it’s a child.
How would you treat a child? It’s time to upgrade that child. The way I like to do it is look at the pain and observe it like, oh my gosh you’re the part of me, you’re that inner child – that child that never got acknowledged. You’re the part of me that just wants to be acknowledged.
Sometimes that’s why it’s really loud and scary and says… excuse me and you’re like, please stop I’m gonna ignore you, it gets bigger like a kid. (I did this in my other videos.) It’s like a kid who wants candy. It’s like… I want candy… and it gets louder and louder and when you just say, “I see that you want candy, but right now, we have to do this.” You’re at least getting acknowledged and I’ll deal with you tomorrow – structured healing or let’s talk in five minutes or let’s talk four or five minutes and then I have some work to do.
Every time we give acknowledgement to that pain and create structure around it and say, “You are a part of me – you are not me, you’re not going to control me”… because we don’t let eight-year-olds control our lives, right? We help structure the eight-year-old to have a voice, but also have boundaries.
We were parenting that “shame”, that pain, so that it can integrate and feel one. It can feel seen, it can feel heard, and it can learn from the more conscious part of us. The point is when we look at the shame and don’t let it control us or keep us from what we truly want… It tells us you don’t deserve to belong, it tells us you don’t deserve to fit in, it tells us you don’t deserve what you truly want. The reality is shame is just an idea that’s trying to keep you safe and what it really is doing is keeping you away from what you truly want.
So, we look at it. We put it in its place. We heal back to oneness.
Namaste.
