What is the answer? Maybe we should ask, “What is the battle plan for the Shame War?” As I always say, I don’t know what your plan should be. What I know is what has worked for me, what has worked for other people around me, and what my mentors tell me might work for people. That being said, it is your choice if you want to try any strategies I mention. If they don’t work for you, that only means they don’t work for you. It is not a statement of your personal skills or abilities. It is not something to feel shame about, in other words. Keep looking. You will find your answers somewhere. If they do work for you, excellent! I am glad I was able to provide support to you on your journey. The second thing I will mention is that I believe we each already know what we need in order to navigate our lives. We have just forgotten the details of the plan through the birth process. So, my goal is to support you to find the answers you already know somewhere inside of you, not to provide an outside source of healing. You have the healing in you. It will not be from me.
Strategies for the battles ahead
If you did the work from Shame Wars – Part 4, you have a list of things that created your shame in the first place. You have a list of historical events, people, situations, perceptions, reactions, thoughts and feelings that make up your shame spiral. You hopefully also have a list of present events that can start the spiral if they happen now. If you don’t have that either written down or in your mind, take a moment to get those lists together. You are going to need them.
Starting with history. You can’t change it. It happened. You reacted, thought, created etc. in response to it, and now you have a shame trigger and spiral. You have two options here. You can let it go or you can work on changing the perceptions or meanings that you gave that situation in your brain. The problem with our history is sometimes we carry it forward with us. We don’t leave it where it belongs in the past. We bring it forward and it continues to affect our present. We start living in the past instead of the presentJDEQV6-EUW98K-5DN4H2-2NRYLY-VP7RMH-T73279 So, with our past, we either need to let it go and allow it to be where it belongs in the past, or we need to change our perception and meaning we gave it so that it can stop impacting us in a negative way.
We are sometimes asked, “Why can’t you just let that go?” We are sometimes told, “You need to just let that stuff go.” When someone says that to us, and we can’t, just, “Let it go,” that can actually trigger more shame. This is because now we are being told we should just let it go, and we can’t, so what is wrong with us? There is NOTHING wrong with us. Some types of trauma that trigger the birth and rebirth of shame over and over again are not easy to let go of. So, we’ll start with some letting go strategies. Also note that in the Journey to Maturity series under the Coaching Update page, there is a lesson on Letting Shit Go, here: Journey to Maturity – LTSG – Souls in Training. Follow link for more details.
The basic idea of letting go is see what you’re holding onto for what it is. WE give meaning to things, events, people, thoughts, feelings etc. They do not have meaning without that which we give them. So, if we see something as having profound meaning in our lives and something to hold onto to create the life we want to live, AND it is working, then by all means, hold onto it. On the other hand, if something you are holding onto is interfering with the life you want to live, do some exploring. Ask questions. Where did it come from? Why is it there? What does it bring to me? Do I still need it? Why? And finally, what would my life be like if I no longer held it so tightly? That is the bottom line in letting go. Everything can have a purpose, but not everything has lasting meaning in our lives. I’m not saying everything happens for a reason. I am saying, that we can create or give purpose to everything that happens. Maybe to protect us, maybe to help us avoid a situation again, maybe to just have the experience. If you can find the purpose, then use it, but once you use it, let it go.
Letting go is like breathing. We need air, but if we take in the air and never let it out, we will either die or pass out. Experiences are like that. We need them. We need to take them in, but if we never let them go, they can kill us or stop us from being totally conscious to the present moment. We are taken out of the present because we are living in the past. If something is in the past, see it for what it was, an experience. Give yourself credit for getting through it, use it for what it can do for you, and then let it go. Take it in, allow it to have a purpose, then breathe it out and away. This will take practice. Don’t expect to breathe it away in the first attempt. Keep trying and practicing breathing in the experience, allowing the purpose to happen, then breathing it out again, until when you breathe it out, it stays out. This does not mean we forget. We don’t forget the experience. We don’t forget the purpose. If it is impacting our present, though, we can let it go back to the past where it belongs. We don’t need to keep holding it in our present moment.
Part of the exercise now is to look at the history list you created. Pick one at a time, and check in to see what happened, and what meaning and purpose it had in that moment. Fully explore those questions on what the purpose of that experience was in that moment. Try to stick with it being in that moment. Try not to find a purpose that is for anything other than within that moment. Learn if you are to learn, appreciate the experience if that was what it was for, congratulate yourself on solving something, remind yourself of how resilient, strong, and capable you are. Those are descriptions of what most experiences are FOR you. That is for you in the moment they occur, not forever. Dig in and find the purpose for the experience, breathe it in, then breathe it out, and imagine it flying away on a balloon. You don’t need to forget it, just let go of the HOLD it has on your present. Let it move into the past where it belongs. Like water traveling by in a beautiful stream. The water stays cool and clean because it keeps moving on. Let the experiences float by and create a clean space in the present moment. Just keep practicing. Do this for any historical experience that you came up with for the exercise. Work only with the historical items right now. We’ll look at the triggers later.
If you are having trouble letting go of an experience in your past, there is still hope for moving forward. It doesn’t matter if the experience was last week or 30 years ago, sometimes we struggle to let it go. We can’t seem to stop thinking about it, experiencing it, and the pain it caused. We can’t seem to stop assigning lasting meaning to it. We have decided that it’s not just something that happened, that it is an overarching theme for our life, and it continues to be true in every moment moving forward. What do we do then? In this case, we have come to believe that something about the experience is “true”. We learned a truth about the world, ourselves, others etc. and created what we now consider a fact. It is very hard to let go of what we think is a fact about something or someone. We can become unwavering in our beliefs about what something meant, about what is a fact. As we have new experiences in life, we compare them to our “Truths or Facts” and are usually able to find evidence that the truth we believe is indeed a fact in our lives, and that makes it hard to just let it go. In Part 6, I’ll talk about those “truths” we like to hold onto and the nature of them. Because, challenging those facts is how we eventually let the experience and the pain it brought go, so we can move on in our life to something better. It is a key point to winning the battle over shame and learning to be present, rather than overly attached to the past.
Until then, keep up the good fight and breathe in and breathe out.
-Namaste