Echos, maybe the shame is more about being seen by your T with those needs and feelings? For me, up until recently my subconscious demanded that I fly under the radar (even my own) emotionally. Which meant that no-one, not even myself should notice my feelings. It took me years to become more aware of my emotions, I got better at this "feeling-thing", noticing what is going on on my inside. But showing those emotions unfiltered?? Or even - showing those emotions directly, uncut and unfiltered to someone who matters to me? That would send my in downward spirals of shame and guilt. Because ultimately my subconscious rule for survival was "I must extinct myself - so I won't experience extinction." So acting against this rule and allowing myself to be seen would result in self-punishment.

The painful thing is, at the same time I was deeply longing to be seen. As I really am. Yet I was constantly boycotting myself. Because of the "flying under the radar" rule.

This survival rule thing really helped me to emotionally grasp what I was constantly doing to myself. And absurdly I was constantly submitting myself to the exact thing that was my greatest fear....

For me, shame and the other dark stuff like self-punishment turns up, whenever I have done something against those 'important' rules. It is like my personal alarm system that is supposed to tell me that I stepped outside the boundarys. Unfortunately, the system didn't get the memo that the war is over. And is still acting in high alert.

So ultimately, experiencing this (negative) emotional activation might be a sign that you were expanding (which you were). So maybe this perspective might help you 'holding' those emotions a little bit better?

There's a book (L. Heller/A. Lapierre: Healing Developmental Trauma). which has helped me tremendously in learning to handle my feelings of shame and guilt. In this book they talk about expanding our emotional terrain. And that quite often, after expansion follows some form of contraction. Because the expansion feels 'new', uncomfortable or even threatening. So we react (automatically) by activation of our fight/flight/freeze-responses.... The good news is, it gets better. The more often we expand, the more our inner system re-learns and realizes that there is no need to fight back any more. The not so good news is, it takes time. A lot of time. And allowing ourselves, again and again, plenty of new experiences, so that the inner system can learn new responses. And it hurts so so much being in the middle of it. It sucks. Full stop.

Try to be kind and gentle to yourself, especially to those vulnerable parts who are in turmoil. Maybe there's something that would feel soothing to this smaller side of you?

Sending you a warm, big hug,

cinnamon_roll