Maybe you’ve created a story about money, or how you parent, or were parented, or how you showed up in a personal or professional relationship, or how you treated yourself.
Exploring my past choices, and taking others on journeys to explore theirs, I’ve had a unique vantage point in witnessing how powerfully we hold onto our stories. In turn, they affect and impede us in our quest to make healthy present-day choices. If you’re anything like me, you’ve made choices you’re not proud of. You’ve done something you wish you hadn’t, said something you wish you didn’t, hurt someone who didn’t deserve it. You may be sitting with pain around the shame of a bad choice. For your own growth and healing, it’s important to let that pain go. But the question is, how do you let it go?
The simplest truth I’ve learned is: before you can let it go, you must acknowledge what you’re in pain about so you can address it head on. Healing begins with awareness. With awareness, you can look at your pain for what it is, own it, and see how that pain is showing up so you can do the necessary work to heal.
It’s possible you feel shame for things you don’t speak about, or even acknowledge to yourself. Many of us feel shame for how we spend money. We feel shame for how we’ve treated others, and for how we treat ourselves. We feel shame for what we eat. We feel shame for how we lied to others about how we’re living our life. We feel shame for how others have treated us, which causes us to feel bad about ourselves.
We sit with lots of shame.
And, this perilous shame often goes unspoken to our dearest of friends, to our closest of family, to our deepest selves. Some of our shame sits in the forefront of our thoughts. Other shame resides in the deep recesses of our mind, not available for conscious recollection, but insidiously damaging who we have the potential to be