I have a desire each time I begin a post to find a song or a picture or a quote that adequately represents what I want to write. At times I search for a couple of hours and, finding nothing that fits, I shut down the computer. My thoughts have fallen flat as I sought representation.
I have a heavy heart tonight. I feel as if I have swallowed a stone that will not move. Yesterday I replied to a facebook post. My reply is below:
I have, at one point in my life, internalized non-verbal shaming and, through a process I don't fully understand turned that shaming into feeling ashamed of myself. I began to feel less than, apart somehow, and, in time, I did not need to experience shaming to stay in that frame of reference. I was at once my shamer and the shamed. I grew up in a culture where morals and value systems were based on religion, culture, fear...pretty much as they are now. All of it came under the headings of who was right and good and who was wrong and bad. It could hinge on the color of your skin or your faith or even on the sins of your family. I don't know about other areas of America but in the south it is entirely possible to be shamed for belonging in a family with a "history". So, I became angry, fiercely opposed to authority and full of low-self-esteem and shame. To make a 63 year old story much shorter...it was the very attitudes Lynne pointed out that began to bring me out of that darkness. There were, along the way, people who loved me without judgement, in fact they delighted in me. I remember them vividly. Their love and acceptance actually hurt. Yet, the acceptance planted seeds of self-acceptance and I began to evolve. Having people love us exactly as we are without effort or attempts to change us is powerful beyond anything I can think or describe. Judging others is incredibly dangerous. Wisdom is awesome. Compassion minus condesencion (sp?) is delicious. Grace sets us free. The difficult part of this approach to life is that I must act in this way with each person I meet, including those who do not give grace or acceptance, and that is when I know I truly grasp what I have been given.
Lynne is my daughter. She had written about judgementalism and a form of love that prides itself on loving what one considers the unloveable resulting in a particularly brutal form of shaming. Silent shaming. A loud, insidious silence wearing a smile while giving a hug. The unspoken smugness of the "I love you anyway." The echoing of shame as it is absorbed into the shamed one's psyche. The indelicate shiver of pleasure the shamer secretly experiences as shaming is hidden both in the giving and in the receiving. Even now as I write these words I have a visceral response in my own body. What has me momentarily paralyzed is that someone I love as much as I love my own life is in a position to experience this loathsome gift of shame and from those he loves so well. And I cannot step in and take the bullet for him or scream out to him to run. For this I am full of angst at the moment. I would cover my darling one with my own body and take the pain for him if it were possible. It is not possible. I want to hate anyone who brings harm to this precious one. This is my challenge. If I am to ask for mercy, I must give mercy. The unloveable in me must bow to the love that set me free and choose to forgive as I have been forgiven, to fill the emptiness in me with the love I have been so freely given and pour it back out on those I love the least. Oh love that will not let me go, grant me strength, my Lord! Create in me a new heart. Allow my love for You to love the unloveable and, in so doing, point the way to You, the Alpha and the Omega, who died for me so that I might live and live to follow You. Amen!
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