"I hold onto my shame/feelings about myself even though intellectually it makes no sense. I need to separate that part of myself out of the equation. I'm holding onto so much shame even though I know it doesn't really belong to me. What will I be?" quote~geez

This is something a lot of people do in general geez. For a person who has been abused or taken advantage of in some way, there can be a sense of guilt that they had allowed it to happen somehow. Or just an overall inner shame that the person might not be good enough or is ruined somehow.

I have been working on this myself in therapy geez as I mentioned. And it really takes time to work through it all. And yes, all victims tend to feel a need to hide it somehow and do whatever they can to avoid it and block it off so that person can just keep going.

For me, well I didn't really realize that my past shaped me in a way that kept me from not even trusting myself at times and holding back in ways I didn't realize I was holding back. I realized that there has always been a part of me that was very vulnerable and I kind of thought I had it stashed in a corner of my mind and locked away. And what I am doing now is facing that stash and working on actually recognizing how it shaped me into feeling like I had to be on the defensive all the time and that that is the way I had to live my life.

In my last therapy session I told my therapist that when I do think about my past I get really confused. I see the way I have handled it and protected myself and because of that, I am more aware of how I can still do that. So for me I get really confused because I feel like my methods of dealing were not as good as I thought because though I did deal, I also surpressed a lot.

My therapist told me that what I am feeling is very normal as well. And the whole idea behind this part of my therapy is to go over how I dealt before and to fashion a new way of dealing that helps me learn to also know how to not continue to feel I need to surpress so much. And in this stage of therapy I am learning how to re-integrate and re-establish in a healthier way. It does take time to do this and everyone is different in how much time this takes them.

The other important thing to remember is that we all stash things from our past that we didn't quite know how to handle at the time. And that doesn't mean we need to keep feeling that we actually failed. It is important to remind ourselves that we can still learn in spite of whatever we experienced that we didn't really know how to address at the time.

When you talked about not knowing if you were even going to even want the life you have been involved in anymore or if the people around you were going to even agree with who you are now going to become? Yes, I hear you, I feel the same way. And I also feel that the people around me are just not going to understand it when I no longer want to be that person who just lived my life around "them". There were so many times in my past where I "just" went with the flow. And now I can't do that anymore.

Right now I feel like I am in a cacoon where I am only part here. And while I am in this cacoon I am changing and I am not really sure yet what is going to finally break out of that cacoon. Maybe you can relate to that as well.

Open Eyes