Twisted Knickers

Okay so they’re in a twist as they so often are.

A lovely friend pointed me to this Pema Chodron thing:

http://www.shambhala.org/teachers/pema/shenpa3a.php

about the phenomenon of shenpa–a way we all have of getting hooked by something in an interaction–it seems like it’s a way of getting all reactive, or maybe we could say triggered, or getting into some old script and acting automatically; maybe it’s a lot like what they call acting out.

and then she talks about how we all tend to reach for some habitual way of distracting ourselves from the discomfort of getting hooked, a button pushed.

so i was in a group that seemed a bit jumble of shenpa, others’ and mine.  i’m trying to write about it instead of just doing the whole reactive/escape/acting out/triggered approach that i usually run to. maybe this is just another way to escape the discomfort of a difficult social interaction but hey–it’s a lot better than my usual selection of ways to evade the discomfort.  nobody has to go to the psych ward or rehab, for instance (since my favorite evasion strategy was for a time alcohol, and those are the places it took me).

what happened was that i was speaking my mind/speaking up for myself in a situation where it felt hard.  i did it though and somewhat effectively but also with a smidgen of clumsiness in one aspect (got to have a smidgen) which i could improve upon, or maybe it’s not even that is was actually clumsy much–more than i said something that hit a sore spot, which i did expect might happen and i tried to minimize but may have done that part clumsily, or not, maybe the spot was just that sore.

so as i have now demonstrated, when somebody says things that hook me, that hit my sore spot, one of my reactions is to obsess/replay and second guess myself.  this at first didn’t sound like Pema’s list of shenpa escape strategies but of course it is the same sort of thing.  plus she explicitly mentions how turning the hookiness against oneself can be a way we react/act out:

“In the West, it is very, very common at that point to turn it against yourself: something is wrong with me.”

Yes, well that is one of my favorite hobbies.  And you know it is a way of escaping the discomfort, or sort of, or maybe not that great of a way because it is pretty uncomfortable in itself.  But it is familiar and so easy to slide into that in a way it is sort of perversely comfortable.  It’s certainly one of my top ways of reacting to that icky hooked triggered trancey scripty feeling (I guess shenpa is a bit more concise a term than that little amalgamation).  And right now I’m really seeing my preferred ways of reacting.  I suppose it is needless to say that i do not naturally tend toward what she recommends–“refraining” from whatever habitual escape comforter thing we tend to favor.  But maybe it would be freeing.  More than maybe.  It’s just that it’s so hard not to get pulling into those nice deep habitual grooves!  I like to slip into those grooves. . .but maybe not so much. . .maybe it’s just scary not to.  I think it is more the fear of not reaching for those habits that’s the trouble as opposed to any actual discomfort that refraining from them might bring.  This seems especially likely given that my current top habitual escape reactive thingamos are not particularly pleasurable.  Not like a nice drug.

I would prefer to say I respond placidly to shenpa and gracefully, but really what I do is more like this:

1.  Feel guilty about whatever I might have done to provoke the response that has hooked me.

2.  Feel even more guilty about that and perhaps also just my general existence.

3. Become outraged at the unfairness of whatever was said to me.

4.  Think about how they just aren’t being very nice/wise/self-aware and that’s why they said this thing that is bothering me, while failing to realize that has very little to do with anything.

5.  Feel guilty about #4, and shame about every aspect of the entire interaction.

6.  Obsess/replay what happened, with some further occasional outrage sprinkled in and lots of guilt/shame.

7.  Want to use drugs or any other addictive behavior that happens to appeal at the time.

8.  Possibly use a little of a non-drug addictive behavior to attempt to distract myself or feel better.

9.  Not feel better.  Also possibly feel bad about whatever I just did.

10.  Decide I just can’t handle interpersonal anything.  Feel shame about that.

11.  Try to figure out how to fix the situation, to make it right, often by apologizing, often excessively and without really knowing why or fully meaning it because i’m not even thinking about anything, just trying to fix whatever happened.

12.  Try to get other people to reassure me that i didn’t actually do anything that bad.

So while I am talking about it here, I did refrain from trying to do #12 despite EXTREME URGE to do so right now.  I’m writing this but leaving it alone it all the other ways.  I think it’s not quite refraining but it’s not bad for me.  And I can report that it has been really hard to refrain even to the degree that i did, and uncomfortable, but i think it’s passing now.  When I do all those other things listed above it doesn’t really pass until a lot longer time has gone by.  So that’s pretty exciting.  Maybe this sitting with your feelings/tolerating discomfort advice isn’t as hideous as it sounds.  Maybe a little hideous, but if it works it works.  And it’s not like my little array of methods was working.

 

Foundational Shame: What to do with a Self Organized around Shame?

My title need not be a merely rhetorical question; comments are welcome!

Change Therapy’s Isabella Mori asked about connecting shame and Pema Chodron, and so I thought I’d do a post on that. It is a really helpful connection and good way for me think about shame–it’s such an overwhelming force for me that I do need some new angles. Anyway, I’ve been thinking/reading some about attachment theory too so it’s kind of in here too.

Pema Chodron talks about how sometimes in life we’re being squeezed, how we’re tested/challenged and not always up to it, and that there’s something to be gained by trying to stay there, in that spot, even though it’s humiliating. This isn’t exact because I’d borrowed the book (the advice for difficult times one) and just made a couple notes, but I think this is a decent paraphrase more or less. One thing I get from this is the value of staying in a space that happens to feel humiliating, rather than fleeing and “protecting oneself”–“avoiding shame–but also missing out on something difficult but worthwhile.

If shame happens when we meet our limits, we can’t ever grow if we aren’t willing to experience shame. So not letting fear of humiliation narrow our lives seems a key principle here.

I’m okay so far, with this aspect of shame. I can be oddly shameless in some ways, with a high level of willingness to look foolish or to try things that I may very well not be able to do. I like trying. But though I don’t find that shame limits my behaviors too much these days (as far as I’m aware at least), I have a terrible time tolerating the feeling, and it does sometimes make me more likely to be self-destructive or self-sabotaging. So here’s the hard part (or the hardest part, for me).

Part of what shame is for me is the feeling of basic unworthiness, and part is about the experience of having that somehow (in my mind at least) demonstrated or revealed. So the shame-based belief might be something like “I don’t belong here/I’m not part of this group/I don’t have a right to be here” (and “that’s why I eat worms”. . .). Those thoughts that run through my head unbidden bring the feeling of shame. Or maybe they follow it as the mind’s explanation of the more primitive emotion/sensation (because it is about the sensations in a very basic way, the flushed skin, the feeling of taking up too much space, the sense of something being askew somehow, the anxiety. . .). At this point, though, it’s mostly an internal state, except if the physical signs are noticeable, of course. But it can also have a more external aspect, if I feel that my unworthiness has been demonstrated or revealed. Over-the-top blushing could move into that zone. Or something more relational: if I come into a group of people where I might know some of them (this happens in particular at 12 step meetings, where there will be people I’ll know to varying degrees and want to greet). I might then look over at someone I know and think I’m catching their eye and smile or wave or something. If they don’t actually see me, overwhelming shame floods me. It’s not that this is a situation where I’m feeling snubbed; it’s that I end up feeling exposed, because I have made a connecting gesture and it’s not been taken up. Of course an actual, intentional snub would have a shaming effect I’m sure. But it doesn’t take that; it takes much much less. When I’ve read about infant and caregiver interactions, it sounds like part of that dynamic is a cycling through a process of reaching out, connection, overstimulation or disruption of some sort in the connection/attunement, and then shame, and of course ideally then repair/reconnection and so forth. So shame would be, if I understand this rightly, a normal response to disrupted attunement. It wouldn’t have to be a big deal, just a part of the disruption/repair nature of relationship, even a sort of regulator, in a way. Except sometimes we get stuck there. And an infant needs that attunement repaired, and doesn’t know how to make that happen very well yet. And that need for attachment is more important that anything else at that point, more than any other need, essential for survival. So the infant attaches to something, because he or she has to; the choice is this: attach or languish and die. (Now I’m moving into my own speculations.) And what’s there all around is shame. So shame is the familiar ground to which he or she returns in times of crisis or disorientation. Giving up shame would mean a great emptiness inside, and it would mean giving up a large part of what constituted the person’s first and foundational relationship(s).

So it’s hard, and terrifying. That’s what it boils down to.

Pema Chodron also says that “when we buy into disapproval, we are practicing disapproval.” So here’s another angle on shame that I see opening up the tangle I’ve just been describing. If I accept shame’s hold over me, I am taking part in the work that shame is doing in the world. It isn’t possible to say I’m its innocent victim, because I took over the work of shaming myself long, long ago. I’m quite good at it, and ruthless, and cruel. I don’t think I shame others this way (I hope) but I shame myself, which makes me a “shamer” as well as a “shamee.”

One of the things I decided very early in life was that although I can’t always keep others from hurting me, I can choose not to hurt others, or at least to try not to (of course I do sometimes hurt people, unfortunately, as do we all), and certainly I do not have to join the ranks of those who take pleasure in hurting others. This decision was and is very important to me, deep.

And here I am, in a way, joining that other side, the side who hurts without a care for the suffering she inflicts, because that’s exactly what I do to myself, often without even realizing. I don’t like to violate my prime directive (that’s basically how I see those things we decide early in life and hold to through the years with a passion). And for me that’s a serious source of motivation if every there was one.

Clutching Attachment vs. The Cheerful Contemplation of Mortality

Recently, I’ve read some Pema Chodron for the first time, and one of the (many) things that struck me was that she said we have to have “the courage to die” and not just once but “continually.” I don’t have it in front of me anymore so the context isn’t as sharp in my mind as it was, but at least the way it hit me was with the idea that we have to able to face our fear of death (and loss and grief and the not-having-of-things/people etc) and be brave enough to let go, to surrender.

I think of the way when I’m tense or afraid or both I sometimes clutch at things with a hand or two, a perfect image of desperate holding-on, or panicky attachment physically expressed. And of course it doesn’t do the least bit of good–although it does create that illusion of proactive watchfulness, of doing something rather than lying around passivity, hence it’s attraction. And the thing is it can make the fear/anxiety worse, because things escalate, with the body-tension sending adrenaline and distress signals to the brain, and the mind replying with a green light for intensified alertness and stress; it’s quite a little cycle. Plus, clutching like this, I can’t feel the breezy thrill and lightness of letting go. I can get carried away that too, but it’s no bad thing in itself. I think all this is the difference between these two images, really:

So letting go allows some lightness and even pleasure (I’m all for that!).

But it’s not just that the courage to die is only a metaphor for letting go in a more abstract sense, necessarily. It can actually be about the dying, about the practice of awareness of one’s own mortality.

One yoga teacher I had described corpse pose as practicing dying (among other things). Practicing dying can be part of living, and of course we’ve known for millenia that awareness of one’s inevitable death can sharpen life.

Memento Mori, Death and the Maiden, The Dance of Death. . .

To be continued–unless, of course, I happen to die unexpectedly before I get the chance (she said cheerfully).