Healing requires feeling guilt and shame

Strange as it may seem feeling the emotions and feelings of guilt and shame is very much a part of our healing process when we have been wounded by the actions or unconsciousness of another person.  For many of us the person in question is often a parent or caregiver though not always, it may be another significant figure in our early life.

We do in fact feel a degree of guilt when we have been hurt, injured, neglected, betrayed, emotionally abandoned or abused.  It is common to feel that we did something to cause these events, because as youngsters we personalise everything.  We may even have been told we did something to cause the things that happened to us, or in the case of sexual abuse that we will be punished if we do.   Underlying the feeling of guilt is also an often conscious or unconscious feeling of shame, if we were not as defective, weak, vulnerable, helpless we feel that this terrible event or experience would never have happened to us.   “Trouble chose me for a reason.”  This occurs because our true pain has had no validation and often being left alone with it we have internalised it and repressed it.  This guilt occurs despite the fact we played no part in choosing the set of parents that would give birth to us.

According to therapist Tian Dayton :

Healing requires feeling this guilt and this shame.  Experiencing shame is very difficult.  It takes courage, humility and self awareness to sit with shame without denying it or in some way running from the feeling.  If we can hold ourselves in a compassionate light (and find others who will too) and actually tolerate these difficult feelings, the wheels of self love and forgiveness can be set into motion.

Hating ourselves or carrying feelings of self loathing isolates us, undermines our ability to make meaningful connections or to reach out toward others, and can also lead to depression.  The anger may get mixed up with guilt.  Feeling that “it must be my fault in some way” can make us turn anger inward as a way of punishing ourselves.  If we feel responsible and at fault we may generate a vicious circle – the more we feel abused, the more at fault we feel and the more we turn anger inward onto ourselves.  Feelings of self loathing make us feel bad about ourselves, which can cause depression, or we may act abusively towards others in an attempt to get rid of painful emotions.  It is for this reason that we must break the cycle, feel the anger and hurt, and trace it back to its source.  It is giving voice to the silent scream, freeing the self from victimhood or from constant self blame and self flagellation. It empowers the victim to fight back, to stop being the problem.

Abuse or depression can be the consequence of unconsciously felt hurt and anger.  When repressed anger and hurt are brought into consciousness and felt rather than denied, it is less likely  that they will be acted out unconsciously.  We are willing to take responsibility for the hurt and anger we carry, to feel and work them through, the feelings get processed rather than acted in destructive or abusive ways.  This is how to break the cycle of abuse.

We can also learn to send the negativity we absorbed from our parents or abusers back to them instead of internalising it endlessly.  Once we have accepted this stage of our healing we will then be required to feel despair and mourning in the second stage as we begin the difficult process of separating our truaumatic past from the replaying of ol trauma in the present.  Prior to this stage the sadness we have is held deeply inside but not yet fully felt, instead it was sidetracked into neurotic behaviour or other negative or unhelpful coping strategies.

Repressed life energy is freed up through this process which is never the less very difficult and full of fear.  It is at this stage of the process that we experience our feelings of existential aloneness because in many ways we are now actually experiencing how it really was to be emotionally abandoned.  At the same time, we begin to see what happened was not our fault or due to some flaw in us.

At this stage our sense of shame and guilt starts to shift and we see how the past influenced the present.  Part of this process involves revisiting earlier traumas to feel and process what occurred.  We may actually find at this stage we attract to us, those on which we project past pain in order to make peace with it.

The third stage of healing according to Dayton involves acceptance and letting go.  Here we come to terms with what happened or what we so desperately needed but never got.  We see that life is not inherently fair and we only hurt ourselves if we hold onto resentment.

We understand that in abusive situations, ultimately everyone is victimized to a great or lesser extent and that the positions of the victim and the abuser are each opposite end of a sick dynamic  When we accept what happened, it ceases to control our lives.   It loses influence over us when we let go of the need to reenact the trauma incessantly in order to gain mastery over it, or in order to see, feel and understand it.

We must not mix up acceptance with liking or condoning the behaviours that affected us, or feeling it all ‘happened for a reason.’   Collectively I do feel that the inner child movement that is associated with an evolution in consciousness of the ways that our parents inner children were traumatised due to past issues both personal and collective is only really a fairly recent development.  My own parent’s generation were taught to be stoic, unemotional and often had no one much to turn to, most especially if their own parents had issues or lost loved ones or emotional support due to traumas such as war, divorce, alcoholism or other challenges.  When we do our grief work, my feeling is that it is often not only our own grief we process but carried grief that our parents passed on and may never have got an opportunity to process or the grace to confront, heal and bring to consciousness.   Mourning for what we did not get is a huge part of the healing process and will be dealt with in an upcoming post.  We as a society are often not encouraged to mourn losses and so those feelings get trapped inside becoming depression, leading to dissociation and anxiety.