On guilt and shame and the maturity of being able to tolerate some aloneness

I get myself in such a state at time due to guilt and shame. I seem to have the capacity to guilt and shame myself and look to the bad self that I imagine or project inside so often. Today I got caught up and a bit triggered listening to the first four chapters of Russell Brand’s book on CD on Recovery and the 12 Steps. It’s hard going. It’s years since I went to meetings to be honest. I was a full time participant in AA for over 11 years and then I attended Al Anon to understand the roots of the family affliction. I have worked on my emotional recovery through therapy and lately tried to come to terms with and turn around some of the resentments I held against people from my past. I seemed to have felt wounded by others quite a lot growing up as I didn’t have a strong sense of self or self esteem and then what can happen is that any kind of hurt or attack can be felt as doubly offensive to the soul and it gets internalised. It got to the point about 14 years ago after my marriage ended that I was isolating most of the time and hardly seeing anyone. I felt the entire world as a place of wounding to be honest looking at everything that was happening on the planet, the rampant commercialism and a lot of man and woman’s inhumanity to each other. However, I see now after doing more healing that the refusal to engage often comes out of this wounded place instead of honestly thinking of how I can bring hope and relief and through kind actions take steps to make things better both for myself and others.

These days I see these ideas as not the entire truth of things (that we are al separate and too deeply self involve to truly care : even if it is true for a lot of the population). People are very busy though, more busy and driven any day and less able to actually catch up face to face. Luckily over the past few weeks I have had the opportunity to meet several friends face to face and have enjoyed those catch ups. They have actually made me see I am doing quite well really even though I get down and lonely days, I no longer feel its only me going through this, everyone struggles too. I honestly feel that it is in writing truthfully and reaching out to extend myself that I find more comfort than isolating to the degree that I used to do in the past.

These days I can actually feel sorrow at times for the long years spent in isolation after my marriage ended. I see the wounding that I carried that made me feel (unjustly) set apart from others. I have mostly been rewarded with deeper connections with others due to my capacity to be real, raw and vulnerable in a society where this is not always encouraged, so why is it that the guilting, shaming, persecuting voice can still be so goddam loud at times? It seems to have been triggered again by listening to this Russell Brand stuff today. I felt sad that in it he doesn’t show much compassion for himself as a child Certainly it is not healthy to have our life run by an egocentric inner child who is still avenging itself for wounds and psychic injuries from the past he or she had no control over. In Brand’s case it was his mother’s illness of cancer which drove much of his addiction, it created within him a deep fear of being alone which he eventually had to face through working the 12 Steps in Recovery. I just cried a lot towards the end of the chapter on the 4th Step nevertheless, maybe due to empathy, I am not entirely sure. The strident way he talks about things was actually starting to feel painful to me, I had to turn it off and take rest for a while.

Maybe many addicts internalise a ‘bad self”. I am not sure. This was a subject I was discussing in therapy yesterday and I know a lot of this inner sense of being persecuted and feeling wounded comes out of lack of containment when young, but as adults we need to take responsibility for how we can rewound ourselves or be driven by fears from hurts of the past which are now actually long gone, but still leave shadowy ghosts within. I need to constantly remind myself lately that I am not a bad person who deserves bad things but a good person who deserves the best in life and love. A lot of what happened to me was outside of my control but the poor strategies I used to manage suffering stopped working for me in sobriety and like for Brand, the pain of them had to be faced. My capacity to beat myself up from within now though does me no favours and I hope this isn’t getting too repetitive as I know its formed the content of a lot of recent blogs this week.

What I do feel emerging within me though is a desire to be less self centred and ego centric. I let things hurt and wound me that would be best let go. I am seeing that more and more clearly. In the past by focusing on these instead of taking steps for positivity and to embrace life and love and bring joy into my own life through my own actions, I have looked far too much to others. I got a text from Scott today saying he cant wait to meet and put an end to my loneliness. Something in me just baulked. I thought .. that really isn’t his responsibility at all. Why is he making it? Is this about projection? For as Brand reminds us in his book our fear of loneliness can at times drive us into dark places and even darker relationships to be honest. Surely a mature person has developed the capacity to be alone at times and use any loneliness as a message from the self within when it is time to reach out. But in the end can we really ask other human beings to heal our woundsor fix our broken places? For sure healing relationships bring us so much and without each other we are lost. I am just wary, very wary of seeking to place that onus onto others. True peace for me comes from a loving relationship with a higher power first and foremost.. For only from that place of fullness and inner connection can I really have anything to offer my self or my fellow humans.