Transcript

Thanks for joining us again on Like Driving in Fog, an emotional healing podcast. I’m Mary Young, and today’s episode is about shame. That’s a hard one for me.

I was thinking the other day about shame, because I was sharing what has been - in my opinion - my deepest secret with a friend of mine whose opinion I really respect. And I was afraid that the secret would change my friend’s opinion of me. The truth of the matter is in the 30 years that I’ve known this woman, I have never seen her be judgmental, but she’s from an older generation and I was afraid that she would judge me. probably because she’s from my parents’ generation, and my mom would have judged me in a heartbeat if I had shared this, and at the same time she would’ve been telling everybody how she wasn’t judging me at all.

The thing is, I needed to face my fear that this woman might judge me. I needed to face my fear of sharing the truth about my past. I mentioned this briefly in my episode about acceptance, and how sometimes you have to accept things you don’t want to accept -- things you wish weren’t true. I wish that I had never been seduced by the woman in my past. I wish that I had not been so vulnerable and so needy, and that she had not been such a predator, but I can’t change my past. I can wish that Jack France had not been so happy to be around little girls, but again, I can’t change that past so I had to learn to accept it. And I also had to learn, in both cases, that the shame I was carrying didn’t belong to me.

That one was hard. It took a long time to get that about Jack France, and it took a long time to get that about Sally. If you have been abused, or molested, or raped, or otherwise traumatized, you may also be struggling with shame. And I just want you to hear this, if you don’t hear anything else in this episode...

You do not need to be ashamed.

You have done nothing to be ashamed of.

The shame belongs on the perpetrator, on the violator. And one of the great tragedies of sexual abuse - especially incest - is that the violators have managed to twist things around so that the person who was violated carries the shame.

That. Is. Wrong.

Very, very wrong.

And it can take you some time to come to grips with that, and to believe that about yourself, and to accept that about yourself.

You can come back and listen to this podcast as many times as you need to while you are working on reinforcing that belief in your own mind.

How did I stop carrying that shame?  Therapy.  

You know by now that therapy is my number one answer to almost every question.

How did you do this, Mary? Therapy.

How did you to come to grips with that, Mary? Therapy.

But it’s not just going to therapy. People go to therapy for years and don’t get better. What it takes to get better is doing the work. Whatever homework the therapist gives you, whatever journaling you need to do... doing the work is how you get better. Doing the work is how you become emotionally healthy.

Yes, I can say therapy as a generic answer, but the reason therapy worked for me is because I had a counselor who said you need to do this, and I was able to talk to the counselor and share with the counselor these experiences that I would have been ashamed to say to anybody.  And my counselor listened, and accepted me. And instead of saying shame on you she said I’m sorry you had to go through that. Both of my counselors stated this -- Tricia in Texas, Tracy here in Georgia -- they listened without judging. They listened with understanding, and they affirmed that there was no shame to me, no reason for shame. And if you hear that enough, then you start to internalize it. But here’s the other part of that. Telling your counselor -- hey, that’s as safe as you can hope to get. If you have a good, ethical, responsible counselor, you’re going to get the same kind of responses I got. No judgment, no shaming, simply acceptance and maybe some sadness about what you’ve gone through. But you can’t spend the rest of your life in your counselor’s office (tempting as that may be sometimes).

You will not get past the shame monster until you have faced it down, and defeated it in your own mind. And for me, the only way to do that was to share what I was ashamed of with other people. And yes, I can picture the look on your face, and I can hear your thoughts going what?! What?! What are you thinking Mary, there is no way. If people really knew me, they would reject me. If people really knew me, they would run screaming the other way.

Folks, don’t sell your friends short. My closest friends are devout Christians, and the secrets I was most ashamed of are things that devout Christians are supposed to go: oh my gosh, no! I can’t know you anymore, because that’s so terrible, and that’s the reaction I was expecting, even though I knew my friends.

And I knew my friends well enough to know they wouldn’t be that way, but that is still the reaction I was afraid I would get. So I used to wait until I knew somebody really well, and I would give them just a snippet. And then I would wait until I knew somebody else really well and I would give them just a snippet. And to really know what had gone on in my adult past, you had to be like a best friend. And certainly not family. there were only a couple family members I trusted enough to tell about Sally, and that was back what was going on before even recognized that it she was predatory and abusive. But I’ve never shared with the rest of the family, because my family lives to judge. That’s what it feels like anyway.  But my friends...the friends that I have in my life. They live to love, not to judge.

And it reached the point, as I was getting more emotionally healthy, that I didn’t want to hide anymore. If you keep hiding your shame, then you always feel like you have a reason to be ashamed, and we don’t.

We really don’t.

It’s not our shame to carry.

A couple years ago, I finally got brave enough to talk to Tracy - my current counselor -about Sally, and about the whole experience. I’d never talked in detail about it. I had mentioned it in passing, and I had realized at some point that she had been emotionally abusive, but I had never really sat down and looked at it with my counselor the way I’ve looked at so many other things in my life until a couple years ago, because I was ashamed.

Tracy and I looked at it. We talked about it. She listened to me, I listened to her, and she helped me see similarities between what happened to me when I was four and what happened to me when I was 24. And after talking to her, I found the courage to email my close Christian friends and tell them about my experience with Sally. And you know what?

Not one of those people judged me.

Not one of those people said oh my gosh! That is so terrible! I just can’t be your friend anymore!

No! They all responded with love, and with caring and concern, and that helps dissipate shame. Shame can’t thrive in a loving environment. Shame can only grow in darkness and judgment. Bring it out into the light. Shower it with love and acceptance, and shame goes away.

Does that mean it’s easy to talk about? No. I am still dealing with the fact that I was emotionally abused. I am still dealing with the fact that I was gullible, and taken advantage of, that I was naïve and taken advantage of. But that’s not on me, that’s on the predator.

I want you to remember:  it is not your shame. You were not the predator; you were the prey. It’s the person who perpetrates the shameful act; the person who betrays the trust; not the person who was hurt, that should be ashamed.

Don’t be ashamed because somebody took advantage of your youth.

Don’t be ashamed because somebody stole your innocence.

Don’t be ashamed of the fact that you trusted somebody who should’ve been trustworthy.

It’s not on you.

It’s on the person that betrayed you, the person that hurt you.

You have nothing to be judged for, and you don’t need to be judging yourself either.

I know you’re not going to absorb all that in one podcast episode. You will probably hear me say this again in future episodes. You’ll probably read it in my book when I get my book done, but I’ll say it one more time before I call it a day:

It is not our shame.

All we did was trust people who were supposed to be trustworthy. There is nothing shameful in that. Keep telling yourself that, because it’s true. And because part of how you heal Is by giving up that shame, and realizing that you are not the violator. You are the one who was violated. You’re the one that was hurt, but you can heal.

Really, you can heal.

Thanks for listening to Like Driving in Fog.   Until next time go make it a great week.