120) From Shitty-ness to Well-ness, Part 9: Healing, and the Doctrine of Original Awesomeness
As far as I’m concerned, healing is dramatically NOT about self-improvement. It’s NOT the positivity movement. It’s not changing yourself, fixing yourself, or achieving anything, really. It’s not goals. It’s not a vision board. It’s not “believe until you achieve.” It’s just BEING, yourSelf. It’s learning/remembering to be who you already are. Who you were born as. Who you have always been.
119) From Shitty-ness to Well-ness, Part 8: Oops, I fucked up
Once we are the center of someone’s world, or at least are manipulated into believing that we are, we become like putty in their hands. And once they started being unhappy with us, finding faults, being displeased, criticizing, criticizing, criticizing, we’ll knot ourselves into a pretzel trying to make things right again.
118) From Shitty-ness to Well-ness, Part 7: Resistance, the sneaky bastard
Society’s general response to this, ubiquitously shared from the well-meaning friend to the well-meaning internet commenter, from the self-help speaker to the solutions-oriented therapist, is, in essence, just do it. Just change. Just stop thinking the bad thoughts and holding on to the negative beliefs. Just stop focusing on yourself and your problems and look at how you can be of service to others. Just stop feeling sorry for yourself for all the things that haven’t been perfect, and practice gratitude for all the blessings in your life. Not uncommonly nowadays, I hear echoes of Jordan Peterson, sternly telling Bucko to sort himself out.
97) Dear Abuser,
I once believed you were the Wizard, but behind the curtain, you are starving, sadly trying to subsist on mere illusions. As with all tyrants, I now see that you are a prisoner.
But long before I saw this, long before I had the intellectual scaffolding, the emotional distance, or the social validation to see that we both lived in a prison of your making, your words bathed me, held, soothed, formed, judged and condemned me.
96) Abuse, Trauma, Shame, and Healing
In an upcoming series of posts, I am going to explore the dynamics of the inner monster that seems to doom so many people to suffer lives of loneliness and limitation — Shame.
As we go through these posts, we’ll explore where Shame comes from, what it feels like, how it works, and how to heal and be transformed by it in a “positive” way.
Some of the posts will be experientially-written, poetic, descriptive or metaphoric. Some will be analytical and theoretical. Some will be practical, like a Wikihow article.
My goals/hopes are to touch your heart, sharpen your understanding, and help you build a skillset to heal from shame and free yourself.