I was a bully. It was a source of deep shame for me. It existed inside in a place I kept apart from the rest of my life. It was a part I couldn’t make sense of. It was monstrous. I remember doing it. I remember liking it. It took me decades to acknowledge these things to myself. It started with Step Work. That’s where a lot of my healing began. In a 12-Step program for friends and family members of alcoholics. There was finally a place for me to put everything. Everything that I had been ashamed of and had no way to explain. Before I found help I had just been running from myself; trying to escape my insides.
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I’ve been not journaling for most of my life. But with firm conviction at age 27.
My first sponsor, Lori, was this vision. She was a strawberry blonde Stevie Nicks type in a 12-Step meeting. A former model and actress. She was a devotee of the Goddess. A documentary filmmaker. She owned a home in The Highlands neighborhood of Denver with a fairy garden out back. She helped bring the magic back into my life. She was very dedicated to her spiritual life and would wake up every morning and journal, meditate, and do yoga. I wanted to want to do that really badly. I wanted to be like her in many ways. She gave me permission to start being who I really was, which is what I admire in her. She was really good at being herself. The shame from trauma hides itself in many sophisticated ways. The shame hides itself because it flourishes in secret. We all develop defensive strategies to cope with this unresolved shame. The one I will talk about today is: protecting our parents.
First I will say this isn’t really about our parents. This is just one of the many strategies we use to unconsciously block ourselves from healing. But in this strategy we say things like: "My parents didn’t do anything wrong. This was my choice. They’re good people, I love them. This isn’t their fault." True on the surface I’m sure. But for many people this is hiding something. |
Emily EbyA therapist in Northern California offering free resources that help you heal your inner child and restore intuition. Archives
November 2020
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