There’s a complex dynamic between speaking and silence when it comes to the feelings of shame. On the one hand, silence is a key factor in perpetuating and deepening the feelings of shame. On the other hand, it is sometimes speaking that can make shame worse.
So how DO we exit the feelings of shame if we’re faced with a damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario?
Let’s look at each scenario…
(**This article talks about sexual trauma.)
Shame… It is a common byproduct of trauma. And for those who have experienced sexual transgressions of any kind, shame is THE hallmark symptom.
I know that shame all too well. The shame of not wanting anyone to know what happened to me. The shame that my choices might have contributed to it happening at all. The shame that kept me from talking about it for many years because after I told a boyfriend, he shamed me for not telling him sooner and proceeded to break up with me. (He was a narcissist by the way, and was more concerned about how his girlfriend being raped affected him than he was for her wellbeing.)
It’s been many years now, since I released all of the shame I carried. Doing so enabled my healing, and now I’m in a completely different place. I am incredibly proud of the work I’ve done for myself, and how I’ve since been able to help my clients through their healing.
I can’t tell you the COUNTLESS people, mostly women, with whom I’ve had to work on the horrible shame they feel for what happened to them. In his book, The Body Keeps the Score, psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk puts it this way:
“It’s hard enough to face the suffering that has been inflicted (on them) by others, but deep down many traumatized people are even more haunted by the shame they feel about what they did or did not do”.
In sexual abuse, the shame is also compounded by the embarrassment and disgust of the act itself. Victims don’t want anyone to associate them with something like that. I’ve had many clients who keep the secrets of their abuse because they’re afraid that people might see them differently if they knew what had happened to them.
This is why I LOVE what Gisèle Pelicot has done in France.
Have you heard of her and her incredible courage?
If somehow you’ve not heard of her story, last year, her husband and 50 other men were tried and convicted of raping her while she was drugged. When the trial was scheduled, Gisele, as the victim, was offered the choice to have a closed/private trial or an open/public one. She was given this choice in order to protect her privacy and to save her the “embarrassment” of her story being in the press. She categorically refused, and said that the trial of these men should be public because, as she said through her lawyer, “it should be up to these men to feel ashamed, not her.” “Shame must change sides.”
Shame makes us keep secrets, and those secrets harm us. Those secrets torment us. Those secrets prevent our healing from happening.
However, this is not a calling for a continued “Me Too” wave of “calling people out” publicly and shaming abusers. I have seen too many victims of sexual trauma name and publicly shame their abusers only to find that bringing them down doesn’t equate to healing.
This is something that one of my neighbors, a former prosecutor confirmed. She said the toughest part of her job was to see the victims of crime discover that the conviction —of the person who committed a crime against them— didn’t bring them the peace and resolution they had hoped it would.
What I want is to issue an invitation for every person who’s experienced a sexual transgression to feel welcomed in the community of those of us who have released (or are releasing) the shame about what happened to us.
In my book, even more important than “accountability” is HEALING.
I’m more interested in YOUR healing than in what happens to the person who violated your boundaries. And the beautiful thing about healing is that once you are on the other side of this story, you find yourself in a much more empowered place from which to discern with clarity, what exactly you want to do or say with regards to the person to transgressed against you.
If you’d like to learn about one way in which you can do that, I would love for you to check out the group I will be facilitating later this winter. Perhaps it’s perfect for you. I’ve been doing this for many years now, and I am passionate about helping people who are carrying this shame.
The group is called Reclaiming Wholeness. Check it out to see if it feels right, and let me know if you have any questions.
It has been four and a half years since I last wrote a blog post. And in recent months, I have felt the call to return to writing. Today feels like a good day to start.
A lot of people are feeling despair today. Those whose candidates lost last night are feeling numb, nauseous, dismayed… and so many other things. But here’s the thing: we already knew that no matter who won the election, the next day, half of our country would be feeling like doom had befallen the nation.
In total honesty, I’m not entirely sure whether I’d be writing this blog post if the result had been different. But because I live in Vermont (a state that has voted blue since Bill Clinton), I have many friends, clients and colleagues who are grief-stricken. So I have found myself today trying to bring solace to the despair.
At moments like this, when we have no power over the circumstances that surround us, we can draw inspiration from those who have lived the worst of adversities and have found an empowering message to share.
So today I want to invite you to join me in connecting with a man who inspired me and millions of others during the 20th century: Viktor Frankl.
If you’re not familiar with him, Viktor Frankl was an Austrian, Jewish doctor and psychologist who survived the Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War. Immediately following the war, he returned to Vienna where he resumed teaching and wrote his famous book, Man’s Search for Meaning, about his experiences and insights in the camps. He also developed a style of psychotherapy called Logotherapy.
If anyone was ever in a position to despair, it was Viktor Frankl. He was stripped of all of his human rights. His whole family was murdered at the camps. His career and all of his possessions were taken from him. And yet, he is famously quoted as saying:
“Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.” – Viktor Frankl
Everything else can be out of our control — the result of elections, what will happen next, what will unfold is out of our control. But we always have the freedom to choose how we will engage with the events that are taking place.
There’s a story Viktor Frankl tells in his book, of being forced to walk for miles in the middle of a brutal winter night. He is reduced to skin and bone. His prisoner clothes are tattered. His shoes have holes and he has no socks, so his feet are wet from the snow. He collapses into the snow in the middle of the road, and for a moment he contemplates how much easier it would be to just stay there. He has no strength… And then he thinks of all the things he will be able to teach his students when perhaps one day he is no longer in a camp. So he picks himself up and keeps walking.
Here are some ways to perhaps invite yourself to pick yourself up and keep walking:
Hug the ones you love a little tighter, and count the blessings you have so that you can give yourself strength to keep going.
Focus on the things inside of your control: your body, your job, your relationships. We can keep on keeping on.
Pay a little extra attention to your self-care. Now is the time to dig down into yoga, meditation and anything that helps you feel centered.
Get yourself a copy of Man’s Search for Meaning. You will be moved and inspired.
Join me on Monday nights in the meditation group I host (it’s usually a paid membership, but I will be welcoming any and all who wish to come in the coming weeks at no cost).
And finally, in light of the privilege that we all enjoy for the mere fact that we are blessedly not in a war-torn country, or facing famine, or imminent collapse, I’ll leave us all with another quote by another inspiring human:
Someone asked me, aren’t you afraid about the state of the world? I allowed myself to breathe and then I said, ‘What is most important is not to allow your anxiety about what happens in the world fill your heart. If your heart is filled with anxiety, you will get sick, and you will not be able to help.’ There are wars – big and small – in many places, and that can cause us to lose our peace, anxiety is the illness of our age. We worry about ourselves, our family, our friends, our work, and the state of the world. If we allow worry to fill our hearts, sooner or later we will get sick. – Thich Nhat Hanh
Life in the times of this pandemic is churning all of our fears and scary beliefs.
What's coming up for you? Is it anxiety over getting sick? Is it the financial uncertainty? Is it the concerns about what is being done/not being done?
The truth is that we are in a MASSIVE transition point both at the individual and collective level. This IS ABSOLUTELY an opportunity to transform ourselves... BUT in order to achieve that, we must confront the junk that's still lurking in the backs of our minds…
There was a moment in my life that changed me forever. I was going through a really difficult situation that I felt was out of my control. In the midst of feeling a mix of despair, anger and anxiety, I stopped and asked myself a question that shifted my perspective (and my reality) in an instant.
These are hard times we're going through. There is little we can control and it's easy to feel angry at what is being done or not done. It's reasonable to be extremely anxious about all of the ways in which things can get really bad. And it's easy to feel despair at our inability to change the trajectory of things.
I want to share this question with you, so you can explore the possibility that asking this question for yourself might help you as it always helps me.
