{"id":36666,"date":"2022-06-15T21:27:57","date_gmt":"2022-06-16T02:27:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/?p=36666"},"modified":"2022-06-15T21:40:26","modified_gmt":"2022-06-16T02:40:26","slug":"deep-seated-shame-makes-it-hard-for-me-to-take-my-needs-seriously","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/?p=36666","title":{"rendered":"Deep-seated shame makes it hard for me to take my needs seriously"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When shame comes over me, I often don\u2019t recognize it. Not at first, anyway.<\/p>\n

I often find myself feeling angry and hurt over some small thing. Someone might have insulted me. Someone might have simply disagreed with me. A person might have been rude or belittled me in some way. Maybe some tiny way.<\/p>\n

And something in me feels ready to explode. I\u2019m furious. I\u2019m hurt. I feel the need to strike out and hurt whoever is hurting me. I just want the hurting and humiliation to go away. And that\u2019s about the time \u2014 if I\u2019m lucky \u2014 that I\u2019ll realize I\u2019m dealing with shame.<\/p>\n

Someone has pushed one of my buttons. Maybe it was an intentional slight. Maybe not. Either way, I feel shame. Before long, the shame has morphed into a passive form of self-directed aggression. I\u2019m not good enough. I\u2019ll never be loved or understood.<\/p>\n

Then my harsh and brutal superego \u2014 the imagined channeling of my childhood father\u2019s voice \u2014 tells me to stop whining. To stop feeling anything.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust get over it,\u201d<\/em> the voice screams.<\/p>\n

And then I hate myself for having needs. I hate myself for hurting. I hate myself for feeling anything. As I simmer in this toxic stew of shame and hurt, I realize I\u2019m not as close as I\u2019d thought to the emotional health which I\u2019ve been seeking for decades.<\/p>\n

This seems to happen over and over again.<\/p>\n

Every time I think I\u2019ve done enough psychological healing to deal with the world around me in healthier ways, I seem to find another level of damage which I either didn\u2019t know about or maybe was in denial about. It seems as though the deeper I get, the less able I am to go through the motions of living what everyone else considers a \u201cnormal\u201d life.<\/p>\n

If I had been able to feel all of this when I first started my journey toward emotional health \u2014 15 years ago? 20? 30? \u2014 I don\u2019t think I would have been able to deal with it. I would have been a suicidal basket case. I don’t believe I could have taken the raw force of what it all felt like at the time.<\/p>\n

So I experienced the pain — and the buried trauma — little bits at a time.\u00a0Maybe denial has been a necessary defense mechanism as I worked my way through what I could handle from time to time.<\/p>\n

But as I stumble my way through the effects of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) \u2014 from growing up in a toxic and dysfunctional family \u2014 there\u2019s still this harsh and demanding superego inside that screams, \u201cOh, just get over it.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

My needs and feelings never mattered to anyone when I was a child, so there\u2019s a part of me which still doesn\u2019t believe I deserve to take the complex lingering trauma seriously.<\/p>\n

I sometimes feel as though I\u2019m more easily triggered by this shame now than I was years ago. It seems as though it should be the other way around. But in the distant past, I was almost stoic about what I’d gone through. Even after I consciously accepted the dysfunction through which I had lived, I was still pretty numb.<\/p>\n

As I’ve gotten to deeper and deeper layers of hurt, though, there’s no numbness which remains. From time to time, it feels as though I’ve ripped open a gaping wound — one which was always there, but didn’t feel painful. And I realize that I’m feeling things which my traumatized little heart and mind and body didn’t know how to feel as a child.<\/p>\n

I tell myself that this is progress. I understand that I have to somehow process a lot of things which happened long ago. But there have been times when I’ve felt as though I had logically dealt with everything — that I’d put a nice, neat bow on the box and put it away for good.<\/p>\n

But then the shame comes back and announces that it’s not finished with me yet.<\/p>\n

I don’t like admitting any of this. I don’t like talking about it. I know without doubt that most people have no understanding or empathy for what I’m dealing with, not because they’re bad people, but because they have no context for understanding it.<\/p>\n

Part of me screams that I hate everybody right now. Human beings hurt me, so I need to stay away from everybody. But I realize I have to continue to function in the “normal world,” whether I feel like it or not. Somehow, I have to keep healing myself while I live a functional, normal life. And that’s hard.<\/p>\n

I feel as though I was dumped at the top of the atmosphere with a pile of airplane parts. And as this collection of airplane parts falls toward the ground, I have a choice. I can either give up and wait my fate upon hitting the ground. Or I can build a plane — and learn to fly it — while I’m falling.<\/p>\n

I keep thinking I’m closer to psychological health than I am. Of course, it’s also true that I keep seeing how dysfunctional most other people are — far more than I once realized — so maybe I’m one of the healthier ones now. It’s hard to say.<\/p>\n

For now, I have to be on the lookout for those times when shame takes over and makes me want to lash out at people. I have to keep reminding myself that I deserve to take my psychological needs seriously. I have to quiet that voice that tells me to “just get over it.”<\/em><\/p>\n

I have to have faith — in the face of my fears — that I’m getting closer and closer to where I need to be, at least in the emotional sense.<\/p>\n

I’m still battling shame and hurt — and I’m struggling to become the man I’ve always wanted to be.<\/p>\n

Note:<\/strong> The photo above really is me. It’s a faded and damaged print from my baby book. I wasn’t known as a child who cried, but this seems to represent what I really felt like on the inside back then.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When shame comes over me, I often don\u2019t recognize it. Not at first, anyway. I often find myself feeling angry and hurt over some small thing. Someone might have insulted me. Someone might have simply disagreed with me. A person might have been rude or belittled me in some way. Maybe some tiny way. And Keep Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-36666","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1x9iR-9xo","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36666"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36666\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36675,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36666\/revisions\/36675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}