Day 180
Shame is a powerful word. It is also a bit of psychobabble fad that I resisted for years. Am I ashamed of things I have done? Of course. Is shame a thing, or just a label to help cut to the chase with someone that's misbehaving? I don't know exactly how I feel about those questions anymore. I have concluded that, in my life, shame is something that I carried so tightly that it strained every part of me. Still, I don't like the word or the way it gets tossed around as both the cause of my addiction and somehow the source of my redemption.
This word is not the only conflict I have with recovery terms; I resist labels and groupings and anything that suggests I'm not responsible, or worse yet, that I am responsible. Okay, so I'm conflicted. Shocker.
No matter my wrestling with what we should call things, there is a reality to shame and how it has dominated my denials of that and other issues. It has not been clear to me when the shame began to affect my behaviors, much less my feelings. There undoubtedly was and is shame for my recent acting out, but the more I learn about my thought life, the more shame I feel about what I thought was a safe place for my fantasies, and that goes back decades. This chronology is still not clear to me.
–JR
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