Lavender & Lace

Trauma is a word used very casually these days. For most people it means just having a bad experience, usually one that “sticks,” and isn’t easily forgotten. But trauma actually is; any event that overwhelms our ability to cope. As any psychologist will tell you.

The important distinction is that trauma is not what happened to you it’s what happened inside of you, as a result of what happened to you. 

An example of trauma from my own life would be my adoption as an infant. It was the psychological damage of not being able to attach to a primary caregiver. It was the anxiety I had as an infant of not being comforted when I cried. Not having the same face appear to soothe me when I was upset. Not recognizing the scent of the person lifting me into their arms. It was confusing. It was upsetting. It was unfair. And I, very early on, developed the perception I had of myself as being “un-wanted”. Or abandoned. And, who gets abandoned? Someone who doesn’t deserve to be loved. 

As a child, I developed this subconscious sense that I wasn’t “good enough”, not “lovable enough”, and thus, I spent most of my life trying to prove that I am those things. Which then drove all sorts of behaviors…which in turn, created all kinds of problems…

I want you to imagine that you live on a planet where everyone has a skin disease. For two or three thousand years, the people on your planet have suffered the same disease: Their entire bodies are covered by wounds that are infected, and those wounds really hurt when you touch them. Of course, they believe this is a normal physiology of the skin. Even the medical books describe this disease as a normal condition. When the people are born, their skin is healthy, but around three or four years of age, the first wounds start to appear. By the time they are teenagers, there are wounds all over their bodies.

Can you imagine how these people are going to treat each other? In order to relate with one another, they have to protect their wounds. They hardly ever touch each other’s skin because it is too painful. If by accident you touch someone’s skin, it is so painful that right away she gets angry and touches your skin, just to get even. Still, the instinct to love is so strong that you pay a high price to have relationships with others.

The Mastery of Love
DON MIGUEL RUIZ

In his book, The Mastery of Love, Don Miguel Ruiz calls this disease “emotional wounds” but I would like to propose another definition. I would propose the disease he is describing as “shame”.

What is shame?

Shame is the greatest consequence of trauma.

Shame is not an emotion.

Shame is a belief.

It is a core belief that is developed in childhood when a child is abused, neglected, abandoned, or their needs are not consistently met.

Shame is birthed out of complex trauma.

I used to think that shame was the same thing as guilt. But it isn’t. There’s an important distinction between the two;

Guilt says, “I did the wrong thing”.

Shame says, “I am the wrong person”. 

Guilt is a good system that is designed to correct unloving behavior. It allows you to feel the weight of your mistakes and spur you into correcting wrongdoing.

Shame, on the other hand, is the problem area because it is a negative core belief about yourself.

For example:

“I was given up for adaption as an infant therefore I was unwanted.”

“I struggled with a learning disability as a child therefore I was stupid.”

“My parents often seemed upset with me and criticized me therefore I was a problem.”

“I have had many failed relationships therefore I am difficult to love.”

Coming out of complex trauma these are some of the things I grew up believing about myself. These were the reasons I was rejected, abandoned, neglected, abused. These are the things that told me there must be something wrong with me and that I was unloveable.

And eventually, over time, this shame develops into fear. It morphed into all kinds of different directions and affected all of my adult relationships.

It meant that I could never be vulnerable. I could never risk being seen as “weak”. Id have to wear a variety of masks to fit into a number of different social situations. It would require me to lie, keep secrets, and be dishonest. To isolate to self-regulate. And be overly critical of myself because I couldn’t risk being seen as anything less than perfect.

Why? Because deep down I believed there is something fundamentally wrong with me and there was too high of a risk of being known.

Complex trauma survivors often carry this belief that, if I do something wrong there is no way to fix it. I’ll get punished for it, it’ll get thrown in my face, told I deserve it, and I’ve learned (even subconsciously) that failure requires beating myself up. That is how I was parented, that’s how I now parent myself.

Learning about shame has been one of the most difficult journeys I’ve have to take recently because it’s always been something that has operated within me on a subconscious level. It has impacted me my entire life, I just haven’t been completely aware of it. And as I’ve have been learning about it, it has caused so much distress and so much heaviness that I’ve had to figure out how to carry.

But suffering that is not transformed is transmitted.

There were things that happened to me in my life that I didn’t fully understand and things about myself that I didn’t recognize until the day my life imploded. I didn’t know that the things that had happened to me at a young age were radically affecting my daily life. It took many years but it finally dawned on me that the unhealed trauma from my past was having a profound effect on my day to day. 

Shame can be triggered in hundreds of different ways and activates many different systems inside of you. And one of the away my brain proposed to cope was to find value, externally, by comparison. I will now have to PROVE that I’m better than someone else…which will always spiral into the inevitable insecurity.

A few years ago I went through something really horrible. I was bullied pretty relentlessly and that had a massive effect on my mental health. And I’ve spent a lot of time in therapy since then trying to work through all the wreckage of that experience.

I couldn’t self-regulate when triggered. I didn’t have healthy coping skills. I reverted back to behaviors I knew “worked” when I was a child of lying, isolating, using, and acting out of my shame. It was my body’s way of coping with familiar feelings that threatened my survival. And it inevitably ended up destroying my life.

All of us have had places in our lives where things were done to us that were terribly unjust.

And if nobody has ever looked at you and said this to you, let me be the one to say it, human to human;

I’m sorry for the places where you have suffered. You have had things done to you that were not right. Where people who should have been better to you were not better to you, out of their own brokenness. Those are deep things and I’m sorry that it happened to you.

Everybody responds differently to crisis, but trauma of any kind makes it difficult to function even at a basic level.

And very often, our first reaction is sorrow and grief. I’m sad that you did that to me. Why did you do that to me? There’s a grief that comes from that and I believe that grief at the deeper level is the healing of the human person. But there’s a secondary emotion that comes from underneath that. It’s a righteous sense of anger. How dare you do that to me. That was so hurtful. I didn’t deserve that. And if we are honest about it, many of us have a very complicated relationship with anger. Many of us aren’t able to recognize that there is a healthy side of anger that allows us to truly stand up and say what is happening to me is not okay. Instead of internalizing it and allowing it to fester and grow, which can enviably cause all kind of damage.

But here’s the cold hard truth: No one gets away with anything.

Doesn’t matter if it’s years, months, a lifetime ago…suffering that is not transformed will be transmitted.

Healing doesn’t happen overnight. Dealing with your hurts, habits, and hang ups don’t happen overnight. Forgiveness doesn’t happen over night.

But it’s very important that it happens.

Healing is the ongoing encounter with Gods love and truth that brings us into wholeness and communion.

One of the hardest things about recovering my relationship with the Lord was learning how to live in my most vulnerable places.

There isn’t anywhere I can go to hide from Him. He knows everything anyway…and yet I still fight this urge to hide. These feelings of shame come bubbling to the surface and I feel myself questioning him; why haven’t you turned away?

But Jesus has never looked at you and wished you were someone else.

He knew exactly who I was before I was even anything.

He made me exactly how I am because he wanted me to be exactly who I am.

With all my quirks, flaws, shortcomings, social awkwardness, introvertedness, perfectionism, questionable coping mechanism’s…One of the most healing revelations I have had is realizing that I don’t have to spend hours trying to explain myself to Him or find just the right words to apologize in spite of myself. He knows.

And can I just tell you this; there’s no part of your life that He is ashamed of.

You and I are ashamed of many things in our lives and we try so hard to hide our wounds. We try so hard to hide our inadequacies and the places we fear make us unloveable. Even in marriages sometimes, there are things that spouses can’t even share with one another because there’s so much shame surrounding them.

But Beloved, He is not ashamed of you.

One of the beautiful things about Jesus and one of my favorite things about Him is His reverence for you and I.

He has some much kindness and respect for us. How He waits to for us to be able to be open to Him, how He doesn’t force us to do anything, He doesn’t violate us. But He calls our hearts to bring us home.

He’s not coming to fix us.

He comes to love us.

And I have found that this is actually the very best news ever. Because I am constantly at war with this belief that I have to get myself cleaned up before I can approach Him.

But time and time again, he reminds me; just come…exactly as you are…and we will get through it together.

And there’s so much healing in knowing that.