Throughout my journey of helping others heal and through my own self healing I discovered my own patterns unearthing themselves and this was such a gift from the Universe as they unfolded because I was able to heal through learning and writing about these lessons that came along the way.
One of those lessons was what I like to call the Shame Spiral. This never-ending road of shame which continues to raise its ugly head at the most unimaginable moments.
We’ve all been there on the shame spiral…you know those times when you continue to do something like, ‘self- flagellating’, something that you know just isn’t good for you, but you just keep doing it…?
Whether it be eating a whole bag of lollies, a bag of chips or an entire block of chocolate. We know we ‘shouldn’t’ do it, but we just keep going, sometimes we could keep going until it makes us almost physically ill, right?
Same with the negative self-talk, the voice in your mind saying, ‘Oh that’ll never work’, ‘you are too dumb’, ‘too fat’, ‘too thin’, ‘not smart enough,’ ‘people don’t like you’, ‘you’re getting old’, ‘you’ll never find a partner’, ‘you’ll never be good enough’ and so on and so on and so, on it goes!
And we know deep down that this is not helpful information, it’s all just a bunch of SHITE!!! But how do we stop it? How do we put this, sometimes constant berating to an end?
Vulnerability!
Out of all the negative emotions we experience in our lives, the one negative emotion, we can obliterate with one simple move is shame! We kill shame with vulnerability.
Shame is when we feel bad for being ourselves, we identify ourselves as the problem and we berate our pure being for it. We self-ridicule because we believe that it is our shortcomings or us as a person, that is the problem. When we are feeling guilty about something, it is a far healthier emotion to feel than shame. Guilt is when we feel remorse for something we did, a behaviour. Whereas when we experience shame, we are going within, and we are holding judgement on ourselves for being bad or not good in one way or another.
The good news is that we can overturn shame with vulnerability but the bad news is, most of us don’t know how to do that.
Now we know that by being vulnerable we need to share with another person our pain. We need to share how we feel and to be completely raw and real. And this is a great way to eliminate shame however if you don’t have someone to share your shame feelings with or you would just rather not right now, how else can we be vulnerable to help us to move on from shame?
The answer is to be vulnerable with yourself. Who’d of thought you could do this? I discovered that you can and it works.
When you are feeling bad, when those negative emotions rise from within and you find yourself eating that bag of chips and not being able to put them down…
When you drink that whole bottle of wine and open the next bottle, while you’re almost falling over from the first one…
When you’re berating yourself in the mirror, looking at all of your faults that by the way none of us can actually see…
It’s time to get vulnerable, to get comfortable with being vulnerable with you! So how do we do this, I hear you ask… well, it’s about asking yourself some self-soothing questions. Ask yourself, in that moment of despair…
How are you?
Are you okay?
What do you need right now? What is it you want? What is it you really need?
When we open ourselves up to having compassion and love for ourselves, we can rise up out of these self-limiting thoughts and behaviours. When we allow ourselves kindness and come from a place of love, we can step out of that sabotaging behaviour and find out what it is we truly need at that moment.
It’s time to embrace you, the pure light that you are and you can do this right now. You wouldn’t be right here, right now if you weren’t ready to learn this valuable lesson of self-love, self-compassion and self- forgiveness.
So go within, be gentle and kind and find what it is you truly need in these moments and gift this to yourself. Because you know what… you are so worth it!
Oneness is an excerpt from Hayley Latham’s Book – Be You, Do You, For You. This is available in our store via kindle or paperback through Amazon.
Leave A Comment