Has It Been Six Weeks Already?

My e-course on shame, love, and worthiness is almost over and I haven't reported in to to you folks at all! The time just flew by and I'm behind in my reading of the teacher's book, but I'm finally caught up with everything else.

There is a lot to learn about how to become shame resilient, and the most important lesson is the last, of course: your healing can depend on your telling someone what you feel and what you need, but not on whether or not they give it to you or what their response is. And that is so true!

My life has been full of shame from various sources and for various reasons, from the mild shame my mom used to try to get me to stop biting my nails ("boys won't want to hold hands with you") to the major shame of having been sexually molested for most of my early and young childhood. (Not by anyone in my nuclear family.) The baseball story I told several posts back is a story of my teammates shaming me and my coach and my parents allowing it. I have lots of such stories.

And now I have some tools for dealing with any shame in the present and future. I have tools for looking at past shames and letting them go (I think).

One of the big points for me was that shame is normal and it happens to everyone every day. There is always someone around who tries to control you using shame. While I have taken on the badge that being normal isn't attractive, that I liked being "different", "weird", "unique", etc., I think it has been shame that has left me feeling isolated and like I wasn't lovable or likable and that I didn't belong. It's one thing to belong to a group (nerds, geeks, jocks, etc.), but to feel that I don't belong to any group is too isolating. It's not healthy. 

Now I'm feeling a lot more like everyone else. When I start to think "Only I could do such and such", where "such and such" is something silly or foolish or even something I'm a little bit ashamed of, I stop and think that there are at least a few other people who would do or say or think the same thing and that I am not an alien. It's okay to be original, an individual, but I'm glad I'm feeling less alien now. 

I strongly recommend Brené Brown's book "I Thought It Was Just Me" for anyone. I think that everyone can learn from it. Hell, between the book and the class, I have a whole new understanding of empathy and how poorly I've been doing it! Now I can work on getting better at it. I have things to practice and to do.

The one downfall I see about this book is that it is entirely written about women because Brené thought that men and women would have very different responses to and aspects of shame, but she found she was wrong. Her next book, which comes out in September, will deal equally with men and women and she has put a lot of research into studying men's shame and shame resilience. They may have a few different triggers than women, but they share a lot of them, too.

I'm glad I took this class. While I couldn't have said I was making progress as I went through it, now that it is almost over, I can see and feel progress that I have made. Plus, all the lessons and activities and all text from the class were sent out as emails as well as placed on the class site, and all audios were downloadable, so I can keep going back and learning and relearning more and more as I need to.

If any of you have specific questions about the class or what I got out of taking it, feel free to ask in the comments or by emailing me directly (go to View Profile and there's a place where you can email me).

I feel different. I hope it lasts. 

One last thing: there is still one last day to the class, but yesterday's activity was to make three wishes from the heart. I wrote them down today. I think, and hope, they are achievable, because they haven't been for quite awhile.

My wishes are:

1. To be my full, authentic self: wise, strong, courageous, vulnerable, creative, loving, serene, and confident; someone about whom people would say "wow, she's terrific, and look at all she's had to overcome, too!"


2. To know and make the life I want.


3. To have loving, close, dependable, fun friends where I live, people I can count on to give me what I need emotionally and to help me when I need help, and who will let me give to and support them as well.