What Goes On...

…isn’t always easy to get off. Ok, not clothing. Not even grease, grit, or grime. Instead, all that emotional stuff that gets piled onto us from the time we are wee little until… Stuff like heavy expectations and super-hero-sized standards. Gunk like criticism and shame. Sticky yet invisible substances like failure and embarrassment. All manner of sources dish it out: parents, teachers, preachers, friends, physicians, health club employees. Even strangers we randomly encounter who toss a barb in our direction that pierces us to the core. The emotional sludge comes to us and can stay with us unless we work really hard to peel the poison layers off and out of us.

And don’t we wish we had a simple ten-step method for accomplishing that? Or a psychological key that would unlock those hefty prison doors? Or a miraculous magic eraser that we could whip out and apply as needed? How unfortunate we can’t find such things on Amazon or at Walmart! And that begs the question, of course: is it possible to get off of our tender and easily bruised and oh so very precious selves all that threatens to stifle and suffocate us?

There are therapists who can help. And there’s no shortage of self-help books and websites if we prefer to go it alone. Spiritual directors might be an option unless religion is one of the culprits that have crippled us. Many of us may choose to simply learn to walk wounded. Some of us develop crusty thick shells like armor to keep the harm to a minimum. More than a few of us might turn to socially accepted forms of anesthesia such as alcohol or internet trolling. And it’s possible that there are any number of us who relish our fate as a perpetual victim of the opinions of others.

It is widely accepted that there is a distinction between guilt and shame. [Check out Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart for a carefully researched guide]. Guilt is what we experience when we do something destructive to ourselves or another person. Shame is when we feel that we are the harmful, rotten, stinky, “bad” person in the world. Both can be difficult to shed. But it’s likely that shame gets its tentacles deeper into our tender and easily bruised and oh so very precious selves. We may gain familiarity with the complex art of apology to release guilt’s stranglehold on us… but what will it take to root out the shame?

There are no one-size-fits-all answers, of course. Something or someone outside of us, perhaps, to help us shed that nasty stuff that seeks to confine and define us?