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In this episode I open up about a story that has had a lot of power in my life. A part of my journey that, because I had not rewritten the narrative, had a powerful pull of shame in my life. I talk a little about the difference between taking responsibility for our actions and tormenting ourselves with shame. How our actions are not where our value lies and I recap a mini version of rewriting our story. I hope you find help and encouragement in this episode. Have a wonderful day!
TRANSCRIPT:
What I want to talk about today is very hard to share. There have been several times when I have wanted to share experiences from a portion of my life, but struggled and I basically have avoided it or left out some facts. I have avoided it because I worried about how others would respond. I worried about how my husband would feel, and how it might change others perceptions. I worried if people would judge me and I realized that I also still had a lot of self-judgment in this area that I wasn’t ready to unpack. This self-judgment has made it sometimes feel unbearable to think about others feeling negatively about the topic and that fear has reinforced those very judgements. This is an area where I have not really been able to accept myself and it has been impacting me emotionally because of the shameful thoughts that I have had around this experience and the people involved, and it has been really hindering growth in my thought work. And thus, Today, I’m going to attempt to share a portion of this with you as I learn to gain more self-acceptance in this area as well, in the hopes that you find some help in my story, as that is always my goal here.
As a young girl, I wanted, more than anything in the world, to be loved and accepted. I wanted a romance that fulfilled all that it seemed to promise by Disney and other fairy-tales, like Sleeping beauty and snow white. I was a hopeless romantic and often daydreamed of what my prince charming would look like and how our great adventure would begin. I felt starved of love in some ways that I believe were due to the absence of a present father, and I literally thirsted for the acceptance and love of a man; and the examples given in the fairy-tale love stories and these types of movies seemed to offer what my heart yearned for so deeply. I began to write loneliness enmeshed romance-smothered poetry from the time I was about nine and I thought of all of the ways I could be rescued from my loneliness by someone seeing me and my heart as beautiful and worthy.
I remember once around this age, I had a dream that a dashing young man, a little older than I was, had happened upon me at an arcade and fallen madly in love with me. He was a strong, virtuous, compassionate boy that was immediately smitten with me, and I him. He saw through the broken parts of me and fell in love with me right away. The dream felt so real that when I woke up, I was devastated; I cried and cried and cried at the realization that it had all been a dream and I was without the love that I had finally found; this love I felt I desperately needed. I told my sister about the dream, I’m not kidding when I say for a long while, maybe even weeks, I tried to force myself to dream about him. I would go to sleep thinking about him and wake up disappointed and in tears. I was a little girl and desperately wanted to just find my prince charming; to be swept up and out of my shame and have my heart restored.
I was also deeply empathic, and could feel the pain of those around me so palpably because of what I myself had experienced. I was drawn to boys who had broken hearts and had hidden parts of them as well. I wanted to reciprocate what I had hoped to find, with the goal of loving someone despite what they saw as unworthy and transforming their heart. I glamorized this idea and I now believe that my energy and my presence resulting from my thoughts resulted in the type of boys that I was most drawn to and those that were attracted to me.
When I was 16, I met one such boy and fell for him quickly and hard. I wanted this so badly. My heart was broken when I found out that (in high school terms) he had been “hanging out” with not just me, and that he was about to move. Then he moved away to California (two states away). It took a long time to get over the story I had built up in my head about him. Then, two years later, he moved back. I was invited to see him. I was still desperate for real love and hoping to find it in improbable places, such as the human hearts of broken boys. I believed the lies he told me, and rekindled the flame of this fictional love in my head. I clung to this relationship again that re-emerged almost instantly.
This relationship did not yield what it had promised yet again, and instead became a prison for me. I did not find a love that was unconditional, but a love that was so deeply conditional and did not in the slightest bit resembled real love. In its very nature, love frees us and accepts us completely. It empowers us and restores our hearts relieving us from the pain of the lies. I was weak and easily overpowered by the lies I was served and I hung onto this relationship anyway, hoping that it would change and that I could find what I was starving for, if only I could become something. If I could be enough. I shut off parts of me and conformed the rest. I compartmentalized the pain of the relationship, and hid the way I was treated from all of those around me, and I dissociated myself when it got too difficult. The shame and fear where overwhelming; but the outside world saw a smiling, productive young girl.
With promises of change, I actually married this man. It was a decision that I should not have made in reality, as the change was clear to be a lie from even before the big day, but I saw no way out because of fear and the way I clung to this story and trapped myself. I felt tied to this person in so many ways that made me feel like I had no other option. The shame I held was so deep, and was used against me so effectively that I felt I was unworthy of anything greater. I felt that this was my only hope. So, I stayed, and I married him, and I idealized the future, continuing to bank on the idea that there would somehow be a dramatic and beautiful fairy-tale ending. There are so many stories from these six years of my life that are painful to remember but also don’t even seem real. Because of my ability to dissociate, which happened when I seemingly watched much of it take place as though I was above and not actually in my body experiencing any of it, these stories don’t seem like they actually happened.
Then, after six long years, HE ended things. It was an incredibly confusing and heart-wrenching time. I have no idea how I would have gotten out, or if I ever would have if not for him being the one to decide it was over. Part of me was incredibly devastated, because I was still immersed in so much fear and shame and because of how isolated my life had become and how I had closed off that real and huge part of me to anyone around, I had nobody and nowhere to go. I had hidden my pain so well that when I needed people, when I needed help out of the emotional hole I was in, I had nobody that really knew me and the one person he had advised me was acceptable for me befriend, he had now begun to date.
At the same time as I was feeling devastated and hopeless; the other part of me began to feel a strange liberation, an excitement for living free of all of the bondage of this relationship and all of the continual pain. I heard whispers from God of hope and peace, of healing and a real and fulfilling life. I made some big mistakes after this, but I got to live, free of this life that had been my prison for such a long period of my young life. I was like a toddler, learning how to be human. I had been seeing and continued to see a therapist who helped me to try to navigate my life on my own for the first time ever; having gone from living at home to this situation at eighteen with no time to really grow up and figure out what it meant to be me. I had gone from my mother’s home to this home, and now I was free. I was free to be me, to try to begin to unpack who that was, and to try to learn to accept her.
It was many years before I would actually learn to accept myself. But I started to live life and try and push through some of the lies that I had embraced as truth.
During this time, I pushed through a lot of experiences that helped me to grow and feel empowerment. That led to my future and allowed me to feel like there was more for me.
I finished college, attended also by both him and his now fiancé, switching classes to avoid unpleasant confrontation after the backhanded way that it had ended… but I began to realize what a blessing it had been. I began to realize that I had been so dominated in my thought world by the lies that, were it not for him ending it, I would still be trapped. Again, I don’t know that I would have ever become mentally and emotionally strong enough to leave that situation if he even would have allowed that. I also have no idea what would have happened to me as the interactions were slowly escalating from mostly emotional to more and more physical and it was not going in a good direction.
Rewinding a bit, I remember, in the early days of the transition, when we had just split and I still wasn’t sure what was happening and was still hoping to regain my normalcy, however unhealthy it had been. I was sitting in church one Sunday before going to work, and the sermon had been talking about how God’s blessings can be mysterious; how we need to trust him and how we never know what he’s going to do, but that he can and does provide miracles; that nothing is impossible for God.
Of course, I thought at that time that the miracle would be that he would restore the relationship, healing the pain and transforming this man into the prince charming I had always hoped to find but didn’t feel deserving of. That was my interpretation, and one that I laid my hat upon. Only days later, I went to dinner with him to hear the announcement of his relationship with “our friend from school”. She was my only friend at the time that knew anything about what had been going on because I had only just started to open up to her about what how he treated me, and now… they were together. The shame and rejection, the fear and loneliness, the betrayal and the lies; sank deeper and deeper. I remember guzzling wine that evening and walking the block crying my eyes out on the phone with his mother. I was utterly alone. I didn’t understand. How… Why?.. I was devastated and couldn’t put the pieces together from my revelation in the sermon from just days ago. I felt like my heart had been ripped out. It wasn’t until later that I realized that it was the way that my thoughts reinforced the shame I already had through this situation that brought on the most pain. My loneliness was compounded as well and that alone was enough for me to feel overwhelming despair.
As the hours and days and passed, I began to feel the liberation and excitement emerge. I battled ruthlessly with the hurt I experienced, but through both of these I started to see that there was no love at all in the relationship, and that loss of love was not what these feelings of grief were about. I had not lost something great, or even good. I just had lost the only relationships I had and was deeply lonely and utterly lost emotionally because I had nobody that really knew me at all. I was full of fear. I was faced with the truth of my isolation and desperation for love. I was alone, except there was God. It was me, God and my thoughts; and I battled daily to try to get myself into an upward spiral or try to stay out of the downward spiral. The shame of having my friend chosen over me, of having shared with her a piece of my heart and her despite this choosing him, of the abandonment of one who didn’t love me to begin with, and the rejection and betrayal was the source of the thoughts that created my agony. I had immense guilt for feeling liberated but also didn’t understand having these competing emotions until I started to be honest and pull out the truth about the whole situation. I continued to see my counselor and began to push forward.
I survived the pain, I finished school with honors, I got promoted at work, twice. I became a runner, running long distances. I still had a lot of pain but I focused as much as I could on living my life in this new found freedom. I was young and naïve and still ignorant to so many things. I still had a lot of fear and shame and blame, but I was surviving and I was starting to thrive in some areas despite this, and it was incredible.
I tell this story because there is value in not hiding from the stories of our past. For a long time, I was ashamed of this relationship. Of how I allowed myself to be treated. Of the way I acted in this relationship, and who I masked myself as. I thought that this made me weak. I thought that it was something to hide, and when I did tell the story, I had to tell the story about how terribly I was treated in great detail to offset the overwhelming shame and need to be accepted in other people’s perceptions of my experiences. The truth is that it is a part of my past. He was a very hurting man, hurting other people. I now know that I didn’t deserve that and that staying was the way I was surviving at the time. I know that I did my best with my life every step of the way, and that even though it wasn’t perfect, it is a part of my story. It is a part of my journey. I know that this doesn’t make me less than someone who didn’t go through the same situation or make the same choices.
I know that from this experience, I have a deeper understanding for the power of our thoughts. The way I thought about myself going into that relationship manifested in the way I lived my life and the people that were drawn to me. The behaviors I had and the way I let other people treat me had reasons for being as they were, not that they are justified or good, but it was survival.
All of it happened because both of us where trying our best with who we were and where we came from, with our incredible pain and shame, and what we thought and how we felt, to do our best. It was painful. It doesn’t feel real. My marriage to that man was a choice that would have been nice not to have made. It would have been nice to have been strong enough the first time that things went sour, and I knew that it wasn’t good, to have the belief that I was worth more and to not accept it and to move on.
BUT something new for me surrounding this part of my story is that I am no longer ashamed of this chapter of my past. I am not ashamed of the choices or the mistakes I made. Even though they hurt a lot, and they were not all good, they paved a way for me to follow further and learn even more. I can hold myself and him accountable for our own actions and yet look without shame and see beauty in the growth I have had from all of it. I grew so much from that experience, and only now as I am finally really learning to accept my past as a part of my journey, but not a part of my identity, am I really able to embrace it.
We don’t have to hide from our past. There was such a long time where I hid from stories of my past, but this actually kept me looking back in fear, and distracted me from looking up and forward and being present. Now, not only do I know that this story doesn’t define me, but I know that I can rewrite the past and reclaim what took place in a new light from a new perspective. In my story, I can focus on what empowers and not on what shames. I know that I do not have to write my story for anybody else, to prove or justify anything, and I know that I have the choice in how I see my stories going forward. Also,.. I get to continue with my story. It didn’t end there.
I don’t blame this man, and actually in some ways I now thank him. Not for the way he treated me, but for the opportunities I have and have had now to learn from those experiences I had back then. I have a deep compassion for him and her and his family now and the level of pain he must have been feeling. For so long it was hatred. I hated him. And I feared him. But that is done now. It is not helpful for me or my life to hate him or to fear him, or anybody else. I do not know the level of pain he was enduring in his own internal world. I don’t know what his stories where doing to his thoughts. I just don’t know.
What I do know is that when he let me go, it took a while to really understand my freedom but I began to spread my wings. When he let me go, he gave me the gift of my life back. I started to heal and found and fell in love with the man of my dreams, my actual prince charming. The love of my life was right there on the other side of all of that pain, and this radically imperfect guy is a the most amazing man I have ever known.
I now finally know that I don’t need to be ashamed of having been divorced, a shame I battled for so long, because that doesn’t define me, and that part of my story connects me to others with overlapping stories and empowers me now to rise up and to bring others with me who would otherwise wallow in a similar shame. It gives me a platform to help others to accept themselves and live their own lives in a way that they can become their own source of empowerment as well.
Along my path, the more that I have been able to stick to my own paper; to focus my thoughts on the step I am taking, not focusing on the fear and potential challenges and catastrophes all around me, not comparing myself to others, but simply knowing I am enough, loved and lovable, that I am where I need to be and keep moving forward; when I continue on this way, I know that I will get to where I need to go. Things might happen, but when I focus on here and now and my path, I will be able to remain free. I will no longer allow my thoughts to trap me in a prison. I will no longer accept other people to impose thoughts on me that create that mental prison. I will surround myself with those that enforce the thoughts of truth. I will continue to grow and accept my imperfection, working toward improvement with accountability and effort, but accepting who I am as separate and apart from the successes and failures in my actions.
How do you see yourself as it relates to your past? Do you have a narrative that holds you prisoner, trapped in a story of shame and fear from past choices and experiences… always looking back, always distracted from living your life? Do you understand the deep difference between guilt and shame?
Brene Brown says that guilt says “what I did was bad”, and shame says “I am bad.” We can be accountable for our choices and actions without shame only when we realize that our actions are not who we are but are just that, they are good and bad choices; choices that we make as a reaction to the emotional fruit of our thought world. These actions are a tool to learn from as we navigate our journey. When we think that our actions define us, then we are trapped in the prison that it creates for us, so afraid of that which is beyond our control, that we fail to take action where we do have power to live fully. Happiness is not about living perfect lives without mistakes. Happiness is about living imperfect lives where we are grateful for what we experience, and we soak in all that is; seeing it for what it is, in reflection and awareness. Happiness can’t happen when we are constantly looking behind us in shame or cowering in fear of the future. Happiness happens now, but only when we are here.
What I am talking about here can be summarized in a different way for application to your own life. I am talking about the fact that no part of your story needs to drag you back into shame. No matter what you’ve done, or where you come from; no matter what, it is not about being arrogant enough to think you don’t need to take responsibility for your actions, rather it’s the opposite, it’s about taking responsibility for your own role in your life, and through that accountability making choices to be present and loving and in that way changing your life and your future. If you believe in Christ, you believe that you are forgiven for any and all mistakes of the past. Regardless, the past happened and can’t be changed. Punishing yourself continually for things that happened before is not your job. There are consequences in life for our actions, the natural punishment already happens. Don’t let shame torment you. Allow yourself to see the blessing in the lessons of the past, to make amends and shift your trajectory and then rewrite the perspective of the story for your own benefit and growth.
I have already talked about rewriting your story. In this episode I would ask you to take some time to do three things related to rewriting your story. First, I want you to reflect on a part of your story that still impacts your thought world today. A narrative that impacts your ability to love and accept yourself. That hinders you from forgiving yourself and or others. This is a story that needs to be reflected on, and rewritten. First though, is reflection. Think about the story. Identify where the shame lies. What are you telling yourself? What messages are you linking to your value as a person, and not just as a judgment of your actions? You need to first be heard in telling your story, even if the one doing the listening is the adult version of yourself. Be totally honest and unfiltered.
Then you need to find the lessons gifted to you in this experience. What did you learn through this experience, how have you grown? What do you now understand that you don’t think you would have otherwise? Are there any passions you have that you think are linked to or somehow related to this experience? Shifting your focus from the challenges you faced and your actions, to having gratitude for the ways that this was used for good in your life… however small or insignificant you may see these fruits as being. Sit with it after you have reflected.
Finally, find the freedom in rewriting your story and knowing your story in this fresh perspective. Find the freedom that comes in accepting yourself, not just as who you are now, but as who you were then. Knowing that you were still the same person, but you were believing and acting in the belief of lies that may have derailed you. Accepting the person that was, who needed love; for me knowing that God always loved and accepted me. That nothing I did ever surprised the all-knowing God, and thus none of it ever disappointed him. Knowing that I was loved and am loved with the same unlimited overwhelming love, so that my worthiness was never tied to what I did or failed to do… knowing this allowed me to give myself grace. Rewrite the story, with truth, with accountability, with grace and acceptance. See the beauty in the brush strokes of your life and find liberation in not hiding any longer from this person.
We find courage and resilience only on the inside of total acceptance. We cannot accept what is without accepting who we are within. We are already accepted by our creator, and it’s simply a matter of understanding to the depth that we can grasp, that despite our path and any factors affecting it, we are loved and forgiven and have opportunities right now to learn and grow from all of it. I am not telling you to live your life in a way that doesn’t take into account your actions; what I am saying is that our actions are a result of our thoughts. Our thoughts result from truth or lies. If we can believe the truth that is only founded in love, and rewrite the thoughts that are founded in lies then we are able to impact the actions profoundly and at a foundational level and are able to find liberation and true happiness on an internal and enduring level, not a volatile fleeting feeling that rests on the judgement of our actions, but a connection with truth and presence and gratitude.
Today, my hope for you is that you are able to find something impactful in my story and the thoughts I have shared. I hope that you can become aware of the power you have in the choice to do this work. The work we do on our thoughts results in our emotions and finally our actions. Happiness is a result of regular choices in your thoughts. Building a habit of becoming aware of your thoughts and choosing thoughts that free you from the lies, this begets true happiness; true peace. The journey won’t be perfect. Like any habit, it takes practice and commitment, but to truly live a life of freedom it is the worthiest work you will do.
I hope you have a wonderful day and a week full of moments of presence and gratitude.
Sincerely,
Holly Ann Kasper,
The Radical Imperfectionist.
