Day Sixteen

I keep going to these meetings and talking about the shame. This has produced good results. People nod and make compassionate, affirmative noises. They agree that shame is based on internal lies, while humility is about the truth. They tell me that if I keep coming back, it will get better. I am given warm fuzzies, most of which do not entail unwelcome physical contact from old guys. (Though that happened again tonight, gack.)

And now, a leap to a parallel track.

During my late teenage years, I was a devout Catholic with a more than passing interest in becoming a nun. (A worse fate than alcoholism? Hmm. Hmm...) When I try to remember my feelings about God at that time, the clearest is--no drumroll needed--shame. I felt I could never be good enough to pay back God for forgiving all the shit I'd done. The fact that a central tenet of my religion was that I didn't HAVE to be good enough because Christ had done the payback already only made things worse in my confused brain. I could really, really never be good enough to justify that sacrifice.

When I rejected that belief system early in college, I was trying to reject the sense of shame along with it. I was able to connect the two consciously and to discern that my religious practice was doing me far more harm than good. By then I'd stopped believing as well, so the decision became clear. But the shame didn't heal; although I made progress in small ways with regard to self esteem and confidence, for the most part I smushed the worst of my emotions down far below the surface, just as most of us do. I lost track of them in any conscious sense in my eagerness to grow up and embark on a so-called normal life.

Crap, I no longer remember where I was going with this. Stupid cognitive deficits.

Oh, right. Unhealed shame ---> subsequent acting out via emotion-numbing behaviors. I believe I have mentioned these in a few recent posts.

Paradoxically, I am now more ashamed on a conscious level than I've been my entire life, yet I'm also more certain than ever that the shame is the poisonous, manufactured byproduct of a deeply confused brain. I don't mean that I haven't done things I consider very wrong. I have. But to borrow from E, healthy guilt is "I made a mistake," whereas unhealthy shame is "I AM a mistake." The difference is critical; right now I am flooded with both.

What's changing is that while I feel like a mistake a lot of the time right now, there's a small corner of my heart that sometimes knows--actually knows, holy shit--that I'm not. This part of me has also begun to believe the promises of recovery. It's the same part that is open to the possibility of Gentle Spirit. All this has come about during the past 16 days.

I have a lot more to say about shame, specifically pertaining to my relationship with my dad, but the laptop is overheating in a somewhat painful way. More to come.