1731 || love yourself unconditionally || heal the shame that binds you

0:00Welcome to the Make Your Damn Bed Podcast, a daily motivation podcast designed to help you get out of bed every morning with a little company from me, Julie America. If you struggle with consistency, let's build a little momentum together, whether you make your bed or not. Good morning, Sunshine, welcome to another day of the Make Your Damn Bed Podcast. According to John Bradshaw in his book, Healing the Shame that Binds You, there is no greater potential for painful shame spirals than through rejection. This is a truism for all relationships, but for shame-based people, rejection is akin to death. We've rejected ourselves, and when someone on the outside rejects us too, we feel like it proves what we fear the most, that we are flawed, and effective, and unlovable. Rejection means we're indeed unwanted, and there's nothing redeemable about us. Bind you, there are degrees of rejection, ranging from the storklerk not smiling back,

1:02or being left by a cherished lover, but either can be experienced as a physical pain. He recommends doing inner child work and grief work to be able to handle separation, loss and rejection in a more conscious and legitimate way, so that you're not furthering your own pain. You need your feelings mirrored and affirmed. You need to find support from someone else. You need legitimization and time. Grieving a rejection takes time. One of the worst things you can do is cover up the grief with another unfinished sense of grief by like jumping into a new relationship or trying to pretend it didn't happen. The key is reminding yourself that it is safe and survivable to be rejected. Where it sucks, sure it's painful, but de-centering your pain from it makes it so you can learn from it, rather than continued to worship it.

2:02Now towards the end of the book, Bradshaw goes into a pretty diabolical description of diabolic, but I want to skip past that because I think that the premise is still valuable, which is it is all gray. There is no black and white. There are rarely absolutes. There are rarely clear cut pictures of what is right and what is wrong. He quotes John Sanford who said, deliver me from people who want to do good, because in their zeal they overlook the impact that they're good as doing to individuals and the ultimate consequences of their actions. They're so focused on doing good that they center their own feelings, not the actual good being done. Bradshaw calls this a cover-up for toxic shame. In righteousness and blame, in speechlessness or conformity, in fear and the loss of autonomy, we go to extremes to cover up this deep shame, but it only furthers it.

3:04Healthy shame moves us to polarity, not being all or nothing, but both and. Again, it's not either or it is both and. Bradshaw then goes into some pretty dated references to how sexuality develops with the deeply-shamed person versus how it should and a healthily-shamed person. And though I don't agree with all of the nitty-gritty, and I think, again, a lot of it is dated, I do think that the overall theme of trying to uncover your true, real self is a valuable practice. Bradshaw says, quote, I've referred to the true self as the indestructible center of the self. Major spiritual traditions have always referred to this core of self as the soul, but the shame-based false self is a necessary adaptation for a person's survival. He quotes Claven and Kriegman who say, we have, from the very beginning, some form of implicit

4:05intuitive capacity to know certain givens about ourselves. We have a class of motivations that are largely independent of the shaping and regulating influence of the rational world. Basically, some parts of our personality are conditioned by our family and some of them are natural. And they refer to this context as inclusive fitness, asking what must a human child accomplish psychologically in order to enhance their own inclusive fitness? If life has an edge and only the fittest survive, how does a tiny, helpless infant ensure it's survival in a world filled with cultural biases? And as we mentioned in a previous episode, there's so many things that play a part in our reality, this consensus reality, as Bradshaw calls it, our religion, our school system, our family, our friends, all of those factors drive us, and some of them induce toxic levels of shame.

5:06But how do we overcome these obstacles to find and identify our true selves? If you are an overachiever naturally, and your family has a lot of demands of you, you're probably going to use your talents to take care of everyone else, not yourself or your own drives, and deep down you learn to feel some toxic shame that comes from hitting your false self against your real self. Your own feelings and need for self care and nourishment and high capacity were judged as not okay, so you repress them and you use them to deceive everyone into thinking this is my natural self, taking care of others instead, when in reality it should have been balanced between the needs of the time. But we cannot overlook how good we are at lying to ourselves. But the natural ability to deceive is part of our true selves ability to survive, regression of the true self is an evolved adaptation used by a child as a deceptive tactic, and

6:12a developmental strategy to help them get through life a little more quote unquote safely, at least from their perspective. But once our toxic shame is embraced and we come out of hiding, we can begin an uncovering process. This involves developing a solid sense of selfhood and self esteem and space to allow our true selves to reveal themselves slowly without judgment. We all have a natural drive to connect with others. And so while we may have to pretend and use a false self to survive, which is typically an unconscious process, we do have an innate desire for an empathetic mutuality with our true selves. Our true self is in there begging to be seen and empathetically connected to other people. But life does not permit us to be connected to a huge number of others. So instead we need to work on finding secure attachment figures and a few good friends, while also recognizing that they are humans and will make mistakes too.

7:16But if there are a select group of people that you can practice taking the mask off with, your brain will start to recognize that it's safe to do so and may start to do so unconsciously. So you can start to get to know your true self without so much work. We unfortunately can't love others if we don't love ourselves. We can be no more honest with others than we can be honest with ourselves. This means you have to get comfortable embracing your imperfections, embracing your ability to make mistakes and still show up. Your ability to not give up even though you felt like it's so many times. Your precious inner child was wounded and has put on some armor. This means you may have lashed out and done things you're not proud of. But I find if you remind yourself that this was just how you reacted to keep yourself safe and now you recognize that that is not the safest reaction, you have grown from it. You're worshipping the problem, you're simply acknowledging it and moving on.

8:19Because if you ignore those problems, you will continue to ignore all of the good that was hidden behind them. Quoting Sheldon Kapp who wrote, I cannot rid myself of my demons without risking that my angels will flee along with them. The thing is, there is a great deal that you don't know about yourself because you've internalized shame and that closes the door to your expansion of who you are, of who you're destined to be. When you live defensively in secrecy and hiding, putting on a mask, it limits your life drastically. When you're always on the defense, you can't be present. When we freeze our perceptions, we actually freeze what the world can give us. Poet David White says, when our eyes are tired, the world is tired too. So we have to let down some of these defenses so we can see what is in front of us. Instead of focusing all of our energy on sustaining these barriers that have actually just created a shrine.

9:21As always, you can access all of the resources from today's episode in the show notes if you're interested. In the meantime, just know I love you so much. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day and I will talk to you tomorrow while you make your damn bet. Goodbye, cutie. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of the Make Your Damn Bed Podcast. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss tomorrow's episode. You can follow on Instagram and TikTok at mydbpodcast for occasional updates. And if you could rate and review this episode five stars wherever you're listening, it genuinely helps the podcast at its core. And if you have anyone in your life you think might be interested in hearing what I have had to say. It also makes a huge difference in the sustainability and my ability to make this something worth sharing. So if you have questions or want specific advice, you can email me at mydbpodcast at gmail.com. In the meantime, I've been your host, Julie America. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day and I'll talk to you tomorrow while you make

10:24your damn bet.