Over the years, I have reflected on my journey dealing with shame and internalized homophobia. I expressed the need to become vulnerable, to open myself up to others and work to find closure from past events that caused the underlying shame. By doing so, I was able to build confidence, self esteem, self worth and learned to love whom I am. Yet while I have been able to rationally and thoughtfully reflect and understand myself, I always felt there was a piece of the puzzle missing on my journey towards self actualization. And the missing piece caused me to make decisions after having come out that, from an outside perspective, lacked proper judgement and rationality. This past weekend, I finally started to understand the missing piece of the puzzle. Through all of my rationalizing, internalization and over thinking, I never had figured out how to do one important thing: Get directly in touch with my emotions. By getting in touch with my emotions, as I have now begun to do (see link on hypnosis thread https://forum.emptyclosets.com/index.php?threads/experience-with-hypnosis-therapy.474264/ ), I am now connecting the dots between my adult mind and my childhood mind. And it was during my childhood development phase of life where so much of the shame originated from. While I have been able to rationalize the shame, what caused it, how it impacted my life, I was never able to directly address it and come to terms with it as my adult self rationalized it all rather than addressed the underlying emotions. Working with my therapist, we have found a way to unlock the door allowing me to go beyond my adult/rational self and confront the shame from my childhood self head on. The experience of getting directly in touch with my emotions was eye opening, intense, challanging, difficult yet so unbelievably liberating. While I now have a new path on my journey to follow with much work yet to be done, I actually now feel that I can actually find a way to put the shame behind me once and for all. A notion, that I never believed I would possibly be able to do before hand (previously I perceived that shame is something to be managed rather than completely solvable). At the same time, I am adding a new element to my personal development - self respect. So while I have built confidence, self worth, self esteem and have developed a love for whom I am, only now am I realizing that self respect is not embedded within those characteristics as I previously would have suspected, but it is unique unto itself. So the next path will focus on self respect while I continue to dive deeper than I have ever been into the shame that has previously consumed me. The outcome for this next phase is to resolve the shame, and both rationally and emotionally be confident, have self worth, self esteem, self respect and love whom I am.
Amiready, many of my prior posts over the years have addressed the shame I tasked myself with working through on my journey. For your benefit and as a summary, the shame goes above and beyond the shame brought on by living in a heternormorative society where we are exposed to omnipresent messaging about living life between a man and a woman just as the shame goes beyond the direct or indirect homophobia we have also been exposed to. Such shame derived from the heteronormative script and homophobia certainly aided in making it difficult to embrace my sexuality as it has for many others. But the shame is deeper than just that which is related to our sexuality and it starts at a young age. Shame may start by unnattentive or dysfucntional parents, it might be brought on by abusive friends, families or even complete strangers, it may be the teasing and bullying that occurs in our youth by others, all to name just a few. Shame can be deep and wide. Rationally identifying with the shame is an important part of the journey. But what I have come to realize is the rational identification, and even the rational justification, forgiveness or closure from it is not enough. More importantly, there needs to be a true emotional release from the shame. For me, achieving an emotional release has been difficult. I guess my emotional wall was up for too long when I was living in the closet to really know how to truly get in touch with my feelings and emotions once I thought I had taken down the wall. While my current daily sensitivities and emotionals certainly did open up significantly after I embraced my sexuality and started to bring down my emotional wall, being able to tap into my historical emotions proved diffult for me. I guess I was simply too rational as an adult and that was a true impediment towards getting in touch with my childhood self. Your questions is an important one, and I am glad you asked it. I hope this summary is helpful.
Very helpful. This process seems to release a lot of emotions and it's helpful to see how people further along are dealing with them.
