[Leed]

From Days of Healing Days of Joy

"I find it awfully hard to give myself a break. I don't know where that attitude comes from". ...................................................................Walker I.

"I can't. I shouldn't. It's my fault." These self-abasing and self-defeating thoughts are expressions of shame. Because repeated thoughts turn into beliefs and long-held beliefs turn into actions, thoughts rooted in shame can lead to tragedy.

People who live in shame come to believe that it is not okay to make a mistake. They imagine they should know what to do without having to learn it. They think their wrong judgments mean they themselves are wrong.

But it is human to make mistakes. If we acknowledge we are human, we are defining ourselves as people who always have something to learn (Thomas Edison failed to perfect the light bulb until his ten-thousandth try). We are saying we have to keep going if our plans don't work out right away. (Walt Disney went bankrupt seven times before he met with success).

"Thou shalt not be human" is the command of shame. What rubbish! How can we be anything else? Why would we want to be?
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I pray I will live comfortably with human limitations. I will try to accept from myself what I accept from others.

I'm sure all of us in recovery have felt shame at one time or another. Maybe we were brought up in shame. Maybe it was self-taught. But whatever, we're all familiar with it.
Making mistakes always caused me shame. It didn't matter whether they were small, unimportant mistakes or if they were huge mistakes that effected many people -- the shame was very painful. I used to literally hide from shame -- growing up, I'd go in my room and hide. As an adult, that wasn't possible -- I was forced to face up to it, and I didn't really know how.
Once in recovery it was stressed that we were "ONLY human" and the word ONLY was stressed. In the scheme of things, I'm not that important, but the mistake I made could have been. We have to allow ourselves the "right" to make mistakes as long as they're not out of apathy. We ARE ONLY human.

[Travelinglady]

Thanks, Leed!