Secrets and Shame

One of my “real life” friends has gotten a diary here! Her diary name
is Moody Blue. She has the cutest little girl who is good friends with
my granddaughter. For her diary she has dubbed her daughter “Little
Queenie” and I giggle every time I think of it because it is such an
apt name. “Little Queenie” is quite the diva. She’s about as cute as
she could possibly be with a little turned up nose, and curly brown
hair (well, not quite as curly as it used to be as she just got a more
mature fashionable cut.. after all she is now quite the kindergartner…
that toddler stuff is behind her.) Honestly, her little girl just makes
me smile and always has. A very precocious baby with a mind of her own,
to say the least! When she and my granddaughter get together the cute
quotient goes up so much you could almost broadcast it and have a hit
show. Anyway, it’s fun to have another friend here. I had given her my
diary name some time ago, when I was separating from my old church and
just didn’t have the stomach to try to explain everything to anyone or
maybe I even gave it to her before then, I don’t remember exactly. I
guess I just don’t have many secrets these days. In my life secrets
have often equaled shame.

When you grow up in an incest ridden
home, full of dysfunction, the only way to shed that baggage is to
force yourself to pour out everything bravely and rise above the varied
levels of shame you feel whether they be deserved feelings of shame or
undeserved. OD is a wonderful tool for testing the waters but there are
still things that are so hard for me to share, some of which seem so
trivial but feel so shameful anyway. I force myself to share stuff,
even the stuff that seems scary, and I try not to allow my self to feel
shame over it because shame is a non-productive, almost evil, emotion.
Repentance, on the other hand can be quite productive and positive, but
shame is NEVER productive. Anyway, there is still stuff that makes me
flinch to share, yet I try to share it without betraying the flinch
because I want others to feel okay about the same stuff when it happens
to them. It’s ad enough to have to deal with some things let alone deal
with an extra layer of shame too. For instance, my daughters caught
lice when they were in elementary school, not once, but several times
in a row. Oh my gosh, I thought I was going to die when that happened.
I can’t even tell you what that did to me. I went nuts! It didn’t
matter that like 70% of the kids caught it. I felt like a leper, and
that was what made me start the cutting back when I did it… this was
many years ago. I cut because I felt so ashamed. I thought I was such a
terrible mother because my daughters had caught lice. I remember
scrubbing and cleaning and getting obsessed about this. I did all of
our hair with the lice shampoo and I scrubbed every inch of the house.
I incinerated most of their stuffed animals and I cut their hair. I
went a little nuts. At one point I got in the tub and scrubbed my skin
with Comet and a scrub brush because I felt so unclean. Of course I’m
sure this all somehow was rooted back in the incest issues, but I
didn’t realize it then. After awhile I did realize, however, that
something was wrong with my reaction to the lice issue and that I
needed therapy.

That presented another opportunity for shame.
I was ashamed of needing therapy. I remember sneaking into empty
offices at work to call the clinic to make appointments to see the
therapist, but it all worked out in the end because ultimately I got
hooked up with the therapist that I still see on and off even up to
this day. He was not my personal therapist originally. My first
therapist was an odd little guy who actually didn’t do me much good but
he hooked me up with my current therapist when I requested some family
therapy for me and my girls. The guy I see now was our family therapist
for about a year or so. We all got along so well that I knew I could
talk to him about anything. Our family therapy went beautifully and all
was well so we didn’t really need to continue after a time. We left it
open ended in case we felt we needed to see him again, but things were
good. Some time after that, however, I had sudden memories of the abuse
by my brother. Somehow I had forgotten… repressed I guess, what had
transpired between my brother and myself. I freaked out when the
memories came back and so I called John, my therapist, and asked to see
him. I went in and told him I had these memories. He asked if I wanted
to talk about it. I told him, “no,” and we proceeded to talk about a
million other things for several years before we even came back to
that, but we’ve had to come back to that and also the abuse by my
father on a number of occasions. Even now we seem to have to revisit
this over and over again. But maybe that’s the way it’ll always be. Who
knows. One thing is for sure, though, he’s kept me from making a LOT of
mistakes in my life and his ministry to me has had the single most
positive impact on the quality of my life of anything. I truly don’t
believe I would even have been able to recommit my life to Christ if I
had not had the emotional stability and health that was facilitated by
my sessions with John. On the other hand, I am convinced that he has
been a gift to me from God. I also pray before I go into sessions with
him and I am convinced that God works through him (even though he is
not a practicing Christian ((I pray about that too))).

So, after
all these years of therapy, I raise up my head and refuse to feel
shame… I just refuse it. If people want to laugh at me, make fun of me,
look down on me, look down on my beliefs, belittle me, gossip about me,
whatever… sure it may hurt, but I will not bend under it… I refuse to
think less of myself and one of the main reasons I refuse to bend is
because I don’t want the next “me” to have to bear the burden of shame.
How can I expect the next person to feel strong and courageous and okay
about her own faults and weaknesses if I can’t display tolerance
towards mine? Consequently, I bare my secrets and let the chips fall as
they may. UNLESS those secrets will cause unnecessary pain or unless
there are things that I am working through and haven’t yet resolved
(ie: some of the marriage things I had in favorites only not too long
ago). But I didn’t do it out of shame!