Shame is one of the most devious emotions. It tricks us into thinking we are the shame.
Shame has to be addressed as a part of our healing process. We will stay stuck as long as we think we are the shame. Stuck believing that something is wrong with us and that we can’t heal.
The wonderful news is that we can heal and get free from shame, and one of the first places to start is to disidentify from it.
In this episode, we look at the following:
This is such an important episode, and understanding these principles was a milestone in my healing process.
I am so grateful you are here and investing in your healing journey.
I am grateful you are here,
Jerry
1:1 Transformational Coaching:
Learn More Here!
Pick up your copy of my book:
Returning: Meditations and Reflections on Self-Love and Healing
Want to Change Your Drinking Habits?
Reframe App
How is your relationship with yourself going?
Get your free-self assessment guide
Watch On Youtube
Website:
www.jerryhenderson.org
Support the Show:
My Patreon
Get Your Free Weekly Healing Tips!
Free Guided Self-Love Meditation:
Get it Here!
Instagram: @jerryahenderson
Disclaimer
Shame is one of the most devious emotions. It tricks us into thinking we are the shame.
Shame has to be addressed as a part of our healing process. We will stay stuck as long as we think we are the shame. Stuck believing that something is wrong with us and that we can’t heal.
The wonderful news is that we can heal and get free from shame, and one of the first places to start is to disidentify from it.
In this episode, we look at the following:
This is such an important episode, and understanding these principles was a milestone in my healing process.
I am so grateful you are here and investing in your healing journey.
I am grateful you are here,
Jerry
1:1 Transformational Coaching:
Learn More Here!
Pick up your copy of my book:
Returning: Meditations and Reflections on Self-Love and Healing
Want to Change Your Drinking Habits?
Reframe App
How is your relationship with yourself going?
Get your free-self assessment guide
Watch On Youtube
Website:
www.jerryhenderson.org
Support the Show:
My Patreon
Get Your Free Weekly Healing Tips!
Free Guided Self-Love Meditation:
Get it Here!
Instagram: @jerryahenderson
Disclaimer
Awareness isn't just like learning something, it's looking at something differently. It's going from I am shame to oh wait, no, there's a thing called shame and that's what I've been carrying, that feeling that I have, that there's something wrong with me that I'll never change, that makes me feel like the stupidest person in the room and causes me to want to drink myself to death to escape my own presence. You mean, that's a thing and it's called shame. Oh, I just thought it was me. Well, that awareness, game changer, the awareness that an experience gave that to you, game changer, that awareness that you got addicted to this thinking pattern, and that thinking pattern is drawing you back, always into your equilibrium, what you feel comfortable with, game changer, because all of those then begin to give you a pathway to create space, space from you and from that shame. The more space you get, the less you identify with it and the greater hope you have of change. So, becoming aware of it, game changer. Hello everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Permission to Love podcast. I am your host, jerry Henderson, and I'm so, so grateful that you're here today. You know I say that on every episode and I genuinely mean it, because without you, this show doesn't exist and without you, this show isn't a top 10% podcast and continuing to grow. So thank you, thank you for listening, thank you for following, subscribing and thank you for sharing it with other people. You're a real gift. I don't know if you know that, but I wanna remind you that you're a gift. You're a gift to others, you're a gift to this world and, most importantly, you are a gift to yourself, even if you don't feel like it. And if you feel like you're not a gift to yourself, you can learn how to become a gift to yourself.
Jerry Henderson:Now, in today's episode, we're gonna be continuing the series about the healing journey and we're gonna be addressing shame and, more specifically, how do we begin to de-identify from shame? This is such an important part of the healing journey, so please stick around for the full episode, because there's a lot of great points and a lot of great principles that I'll be sharing on this show today. So why is dealing with shame such a key part of our healing journey? Well, it's because shame really keeps us stuck. We're gonna talk about the definition of shame here in just a little bit, but shame's gonna keep you stuck. You're gonna shame yourself out of the healing process, like we've talked about before, you're gonna believe that you're unworthy of healing. You're gonna believe that there's something wrong with you. And so, moving forward in healing, we really have to address shame. If that's something that you struggle with, we really have to address it.
Jerry Henderson:Now, this was a key breakthrough for me in my healing journey. It was one of the early things that happened to me and one of the biggest gifts that came to me as I started to heal. Now, the interesting thing about it was I didn't know I was dealing with shame. I didn't know that all of the feelings that I had, all of the self-hatred that I was feeling towards myself, all was rooted and sourced in shame. And so that's an important part about shame is understanding and identifying what it is, because most of us don't know that we're carrying it. We just feel like there's something wrong with us, and shame gets so attached and so embedded inside of us that it's very difficult to pull ourselves apart from it, and so we don't even realize that we're carrying shame. We just think that we're shameful, we think there's something wrong with us. So in this episode, I hope to help you see what I saw, which is there is a thing called shame and I'm not it. And how do I learn to identify the sources of that original shame? And then how do I start to de-identify from it? And, like I said, this was one of the most powerful things in my healing journey was separating myself from the way I felt about myself, from my authentic self. So let's go ahead and start jumping in. So how do we de-identify or no longer see our identity as shame or think that we're shameful? How do we create that gap? How do we create that distance between us and shame? Well, the first thing is let's define what shame is.
Jerry Henderson:Shame is the feeling or the sense or the belief that there's something wrong with you, you as a person. Now, I get some pushback around this when I'll share posts or thoughts around you, not being ashamed, that shame is something that's been handed to you, that you weren't born with shame, and I get this pushback around. Well, some shame is good. We should feel some shame, because if we don't feel shame, how will we ever change or correct our behavior? Well, what we're doing is we're confusing shame and guilt. There is a thing that's called guilt, and guilt will motivate us to change. Now, guilt doesn't feel good. I wanna acknowledge that. But guilt and shame can feel very similar and we get confused about it and we think that well, no, I really need to feel horrible about myself in order to change, versus feeling bad about what you did and changing behavior. See, guilt is behavior oriented I did something that I don't feel the best about and I need to change that, or I need to make amends and I need to go a different path.
Jerry Henderson:Shame is identity based. It says I'm something wrong Not I did something wrong, but I'm something wrong. And when you start to think that you're something wrong, then how do you heal, how do you change? Because you're the problem. So here's something that can help you differentiate or define or feel the difference between shame and guilt. Guilt gives us a way out. Yes, even though it feels uncomfortable. Guilt says did something wrong, but I can change it. It was a behavior I can change. I want to be a better version of myself. So let me make these adjustments, let me make amends with people. So there's a path out. Shame offers you no path out.
Jerry Henderson:Shame is that sense of once again there's something wrong with me, and it begins to have this heavy, heavy energy and hopelessness attached to it. So if you're feeling a sense of hopelessness that you'll never change it, there's no way that you, as a broken, uniquely broken person, will be able to find healing and find a loving relationship, find peace with yourself, find the success and the other things that you want in your life, because once again, there's something wrong with you that's shame. So you can immediately begin to identify which one of those things is coming up inside of you, based on oh, is there a way out? Or gosh, am I trapped in a hopeless situation. So let's go ahead and move on to the next point, which is how do we get identified with shame? How does that happen? When did it start to show up in our lives and when did we start to believe that we are that shame? When did that stuff start to happen?
Jerry Henderson:So shame almost always comes from the experiences that we've had in life. We've had an experience and, as a result of that experience, we made some decisions. We made decisions about life. Is life fair? Is life unfair? Is life gonna show up in a way that's always out to get me? I mean, we all know people and you might have been that person at one point or may still be that person that feels like life is out to get you, that there's something wrong with you and so, therefore, everything's gonna turn out bad for you. Well, that was a decision that was made as a result of some experiences that you've had.
Jerry Henderson:Another decision that gets made is about people Are people good, are people bad? Are they trustworthy, untrustworthy? And then what happens as a result of that? If we make the decision that people are bad, that people are untrustworthy, what happens is we then withhold ourselves, we withdraw our authentic self, so we never show up as our true version and we never feel seen and our relationships never feel close, and we start to think, once again, that there's something wrong with us because that decision of people aren't trustworthy, people are not safe to get close to. The effect of that is that we begin to feel isolation, and then we begin to carry the message, or compound the message, that there's something wrong with us because we don't have close relationships, we can't be intimate. We're always told that you're here, but you're not here. We never feel connected, people never feel connected with us, and so all of that, then, is compounding that sense of shame.
Jerry Henderson:Now the third and most important decision that gets made is the decision about yourself, and that decision doesn't always get made consciously. A lot of times it's made at the subconscious level, especially as a child, but the decision making or the pattern or the flow of thinking goes something like this I must be bad if people are treating me this way, there must be something wrong with me. If this has happened to me or these things continue to happen to me and it becomes an identification about yourself, you have these experiences and those experiences cause you to make a decision about whether or not you're a good person, if there's something wrong with you. And the brain, once again, is making those decisions very quickly, subconsciously and over time. It can happen both, yes, in a moment, but it can also happen over time, as we begin to have more and more experiences and we even get into the place of seeking out those experiences, which we'll talk about here in just a second. So the last thing that I'm going to talk about and how we identify with shame is around how it keeps us safe.
Jerry Henderson:The decision to think that there's something wrong with us is often made in order to keep us safe. It's a trauma response. It's a response to other people's behaviors or other experiences that we've had, and so it's a safer decision to think there's something wrong with us than to think that a caregiver doesn't have the capacity to care for us. It's also a safer decision to think there's something wrong with us than to blame the abuser, because I can't control the behavior of the abuser, I can't control what they do, but I can control my own behavior, and so if I think that there's something wrong with me and I make that decision, then I can start to change my behavior and I can begin to act in ways that maybe will keep me safe. If I can find out what's wrong with me and causing them to respond that way, and me being the recipient of the anger, the abuse, etc. Well, if I can just fix me, then these things won't be happening.
Jerry Henderson:Well, that's just not true. You never had control over their behavior and even if you changed, you still got the abuse. Even when you tried to please them and do everything right, you still experienced and we're still the recipient of the pain, and so that, even once again, would reinforce to you that there's something wrong with you. I can never act right, I can never shape up, I can never be good enough, so that embedding of something being wrong with you was a safety mechanism. It is something that has tried to serve you, to try to let you scan your life to see should I change this, should I act that way? And then we get into all kinds of unhealthy behaviors later. Right, it compounds people pleasing imposter syndrome.
Jerry Henderson:All of it just starts to unfold and its source is those experiences that we've had, and those experiences then gave us the messages and then we developed coping mechanisms around those messages in order to stay safe. So this is really important to understand because we're creating space between us and the shame. You see, if we can do a few things with shame, if we can identify what it is, understand that that feeling of shame is what you're feeling about yourself, it is one of the most devious emotions and feelings because it is one of the few things that makes you think that you're it. But if you can identify that that's what it does, that's the way it makes you think, that creates a little space. If you can also identify some of the reasons why you've become identified with shame, how it kept you safe, how those experiences did that and the science behind the decisions that get made, that, once again, is creating some gaps, so that information alone can begin to change your thinking patterns and change the way that you see yourself.
Jerry Henderson:So let's go ahead and move on and let's talk about how being addicted to shame reinforces our identity around it. You might be saying well, addicted to shame, what do you mean? Well, let me talk a little bit about my experience with that. When I was in rehab, we had just got finished with a really great group session around the brain and addiction and how it's not just the physical addiction, there's the brain addiction. There's the chemicals that get released, this whole identity, this relationship with alcohol and other substances, and just the brain science around it. It was a fascinating group. Well, I came out of that group feeling great, very hopeful, and just was thinking to myself man, there is hope for me, there is the ability to change. If I can work on the ways that my brain works, then I can start healing in the area of this addiction and the reasons why I use alcohol.
Jerry Henderson:And it wasn't just because I wanted a drink. There was a whole psychological, chemical and just a whole myriad of things that were behind it. But I didn't understand that. So I went back to my room after the group and I decided to take a quick shower. And when I got in the shower, all of a sudden I was flooded with these thoughts about my past and what a terrible person I was and all the mistakes that I had made, and I just immediately started feeling horrible about myself.
Jerry Henderson:Well, fortunately, I had a little aha moment. I had this realization that I was addicted to shame. Just like I was addicted to the chemical of alcohol, the substance of alcohol, I was also addicted to feeling a certain way about myself. And so, as soon as I started to feel good, my brain threw up a thought to me, kicked up a thought to me about my past and why I shouldn't be feeling good about myself. My brain felt more comfortable, my system felt more comfortable feeling shame than feeling feeling good about myself. And so what did it do? It responded in kind and said you know what? Let's make ourselves feel bad.
Jerry Henderson:I wasn't thinking about it that way consciously at the moment, but this is what's happening the brain kicks up a thought, knowing that that thought will produce an emotion. That emotion will then begin to cause us to have more thoughts. We begin to feel maybe anxiety, depression, shame, and then we begin to think about even more reasons why we can't change, which then produces more chemicals, and this whole loop begins to happen. And when we realize that that's what's going on when we're feeling so terrible, when we're feeling so horrible about ourselves that we're getting back to what is our equilibrium about how we feel about ourselves? Our bodies and our brains are not used to us feeling positive and good and feeling hopeful about ourselves, and so it will begin to draw us back to what we've lived in, to what we felt comfortable with. That's why we self-sabotage, that's why we start ruminating over the past, because we're going back to what feels like home, which is shame.
Jerry Henderson:And if you doubt this, I just want you to take a moment and I want you to think about a time where you were doing good and things were great, and then, all of a sudden, you had a thought about something you did in the past. How quickly did you spiral down into feeling bad about yourself, sabotaging a relationship, sabotaging an opportunity, seeking an escape through an addiction or whatever distraction that you needed to get away from that feeling. See, that's just how incredibly powerful the brain is. It can suck you down from a really high, high of feeling good about who you are into a very low, low. And so when I understood that, when I understood that's what was happening, it gave me hope, it gave me the ability to see. Wow, just like I got trained to feel shame through the experiences that I had and then the rumination about those experiences and then locking all of that in to my brain, you see what's happening, right, every time we have that negative thought attached with that negative feeling, I'm driving and digging a groove into my brain where my neural pathways are going, that's where we go, that's where our easy path is Feelings of shame, feelings of hopelessness, feeling bad about ourselves. Well, if I was able to do that, create those neural pathways and that sensation. Well, you know what I can do the other side, I can do the other way. I can, not that there's a side, but I can do a new belief system, new neural pathways, that believes that I'm worthy of love, that there's goodness about me, that I'm not what happened to me, that I deserve to feel good about myself and to love myself and attach the emotion to those thoughts and we'll talk about that here in just a second. But that then begins to give you new neural pathways.
Jerry Henderson:So addiction to shame is reinforcing our identity to shame. And how is it doing that? Because, once again, anytime we start to feel good and move forward, it's uncomfortable. And then all of that stuff starts to come up. And then what do we say to ourselves? You see, you'll never change. You know everybody else can change. But they don't understand that every time I try to, I really didn't start to feel bad about myself and I shame myself out of healing. And anytime I start to move forward, I take five steps back. I'm just never going to change and it must just be who I am. I'm just a person who's uniquely broken and going to live like this forever. All of that is that addiction to shame trying to bring you back home, which then, once again, is reinforcing your identity to it. So now let's go ahead and move on to de-identifying. How do we de-identify? I'm going to share five primary ways that worked for me in de-identifying from shame. These were absolutely game changers. They're exactly the reason why I started to heal, started to see hope and could see that I could change by going through this process of de-identifying from the shame.
Jerry Henderson:And number one is that awareness. I can't overemphasize the awareness of things in our lives. When we become aware of things, everything begins to change, things begin to open, we begin to see things differently, and that's why it's so important to engage in things that help open up our awareness, whether it's books, this podcast, therapy, coaching, whatever it is that's going to work for you to expand your awareness. And that awareness isn't just like learning something, it's looking at something differently. It's going from I am shame to oh wait, no, there's a thing called shame and that's what I've been carrying, that feeling that I have, that there's something wrong with me that I'll never change, that makes me feel like the stupidest person in the room and causes me to want to drink myself to death to escape my own presence. You mean that's a thing and it's called shame. Oh, I just thought it was me.
Jerry Henderson:Well, that awareness, game changer, the awareness that an experience gave that to you, game changer, an awareness that you got addicted to this thinking pattern, and that thinking pattern is drawing you back, always into your equilibrium, what you feel comfortable with, game changer, because all of those then begin to give you a pathway to create space, space from you and from that shame. The more space you get, the less you identify with it and the greater hope you have of change. So, becoming aware of it Game changer. Number two is identifying the experiences that gave you that original sense and source of shame. Once again, it could be one experience or it could be multiple experiences, and here are four primary experiences or primary life things that happen to us that cause shame to come around. One is trauma.
Jerry Henderson:Trauma, as we talk about often, is not what happens to you, but what happens in you and you make those decisions and things happen in your nervous system, they happen in your body and they get stored in you and so you're carrying it around with you and, yes, it becomes so hard to separate all of that from you because it's so stored in every system, in every part of you. And that's why I'm so passionate about the work of self-love and so passionate about the work of advocating for those who have experienced trauma like myself and advocating for getting that shame out of our systems, because it just like attaches to you so deeply that it makes you feel like you can never change man. I want to let you know you can, you can begin to de-identify from the shame, from the trauma, and we can't go back and make the trauma not happen. But if trauma is something that happened to us, then we're stuck right. Well, that event happened and now forever. There's nothing I can do about it because the trauma happened. That's who I am and my life is sucky from now on. But if it's something that happened inside of us and decisions that got made, then we can heal, we can make different decisions, we can learn how to get that stuff out of our body, release it through somatic therapy and other ways of in other experiences and breath work, etc. To begin to cleanse that stuff out of us, change our thinking patterns, and so all of that gives us a lot of hope and understanding that there was an experience that happened, there was a traumatic experience and that then led to sources of shame of. There must be something wrong with me because that happened.
Jerry Henderson:The second thing that often brings shame is religion, toxic religion, where people are taught that they were born a sinner, that they were taught that they need to behave in certain ways to please God and if they don't please God, they'll be under God's judgment. And then they're a part of a community where they share about their struggles, they share about their pain and then they're accused of not praying enough or not being godly enough, or they just need to read their Bible more, or whatever the narrative is, and so that shame gets compounded on them. And so religious experiences, negative religious experiences lead to a lot of shame and people are carrying that shame around, and I'm going to be doing episodes around specifically Christian shame. And how do we begin to de-identify from that and how do we begin to let go of those things? And just how sticky it can be when you mix trauma, god shame, all of that together. That is a tough tapestry to begin to try to unweave and we'll talk about that in future episodes.
Jerry Henderson:Now the other thing around religious trauma is the abuse and I've shared some of that in previous episodes the abuse that you experience in churches from those who are spiritual leaders, whether it's sexual, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, all of that. Those traumatic experiences really can bring such an immense amount of shame. But if we can begin to see that it was those experiences in the church or in the religious system that you were a part of, that taught you that, that tried to embed that in you, that people who felt shame, preachers and teachers who felt shame and were preaching from their own source of shame and were shaming others in an attempt to release some of their own shame. See, we can only reproduce who we are. If you're a person who feels so horribly shameful about yourself and you begin to share the gospel or you begin to share religious teachings with other people, it's going to come out in a shame-based way and then people are going to begin to absorb that and think that there's something wrong with them. So all of that, all of that religious experience, can lead to deep senses of shame.
Jerry Henderson:Now the next experience that I want to talk about is the experiences of relationships. We've gotten into a toxic, abusive, harmful relationship and that person was so abusive and so relentless and they're shaming of you, their judgment of you, to try to control you. You see, when we shame other people, we judge other people. It is such a manipulative control mechanism to beat the other person down, to make them feel bad about themselves and then to begin to feel a sense of dependency and to begin to attach to that other person in a very toxic way. It just becomes so harmful to our nervous system and our belief systems about who we are and that sense of shame really gets embedded in us because that person is all the time treating us that way. And so once again we begin to think, well, what's wrong with me that I'm in this relationship allowing myself to be treated this way, or thinking this is the only thing that I deserve, and then another person would be treating me this way, so I must be this way. And then you might also be in a family where one of the partners, or the abuser, is rallying everybody else around to tell you how bad you are. They might even be doing that with your children or relatives or your parents, or there just becomes this very toxic environment that happens, where they are teaming up on you and from every angle, and you're like, well, it must be something about me, it must be who I am. Well, no, once again, it's an experience of that relationship with that person who has done that stuff. And even if they've influenced other people, once again that influence is coming from that person. It's not you. I know it's so hard to de-identify from that, but to de-identify from it is to recognize that it is coming from experiences.
Jerry Henderson:The last experience I'll talk about is our own actions. So we'll say, well, because I do these things. I must be that thing. And no, it's not true. And I want to reinforce to you the fact that a lot of our actions that we're doing are because of the trauma that we've experienced, their coping mechanisms that we've developed, and now we're shaming and judging ourselves because of coping mechanisms that we developed. I mean, if we think about it logically, we often don't right. But if we'll just take a moment and say I had a traumatic experience as a child or a traumatic experience in a relationship, I developed a coping mechanism.
Jerry Henderson:What is that coping mechanism? I don't know. Maybe it's people pleasing, maybe it's seeking substances. Maybe it's seeking toxic relationships. Maybe it's the inner critic, all of the things self-sabotaging, all the things, the behavior. Maybe it's lying, because you had to lie to stay safe. All of these coping mechanisms got developed and now you're doing actions in life that are reinforcing it, right, because you're trying to reinforce your core belief about who you are and you're backing up those experiences that you've had by your behaviors. Well, all of those things were developed as coping mechanisms to keep you safe, and now you're judging them and now you're saying that you're such a terrible person because you do those things.
Jerry Henderson:I want to encourage you. You're an incredible person. You have survived, you've come to the point and the place you are today. You're a fantastic, incredible survivor. You are amazing, and just because you haven't figured out how to heal the coping mechanisms, because you haven't yet really healed that original source of trauma, doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. What we have to do is we have to be able to see that. We have to see that we had experiences that then led to our actions.
Jerry Henderson:Am I making excuses? No. Am I saying that we need to stay in those same patterns? No. But what I am saying is, as long as you're judging them and you're not bringing awareness to the fact of why they're there, you're going to stay stuck in them, you're going to reinforce them, you're going to repeat them. So the greatest gift you can give yourself in healing radical kindness, radical gentleness, radical curiosity those gifts. And so what we would do in this moment, working together and working with other people what I would do is begin to understand that you had this experience.
Jerry Henderson:Now you have these actions as coping mechanisms. Can you look at them with love? Can you see that part of you with love? Can you greet it with kindness? Because, as long as you're judging it, it's going to stay closed off to you. And as long as it's closed off to you, you're not going to be able to figure out why it's there. You're just going to keep beating yourself up, saying I'm a terrible person because I do that. But no, that thing keeps getting repeated because it wants you to pay attention to it. You're doing that behavior subconsciously to draw your attention to a place that needs to be healed. And then, if you can draw your attention to that thing that needs to be healed, with kindness, with gentleness and instead of judgment, because when you judge it it closes. When you treat it with kindness, it opens. So it's just like any other relationship that you have.
Jerry Henderson:Remember, you have a relationship with yourself and that relationship is determining everything else in your life. So if you had a relationship where somebody was judging you, coming at you harshly, what do you do? You clamp down, you shut down, you get defensive, you withdraw, or you begin to say things, or you go into hiding or whatever. You don't show up as your best version. It's the same thing with you.
Jerry Henderson:Your relationship with you, how you approach yourself in the healing process, is everything. That's why I'm such a fanatic about self-love, because it's going to open you up to healing. It's going to open you up to yourself and you are the source of your own healing. You are the person who's going to figure out how to heal your life. But as long as you're closed off to yourself, you're never going to get there. And so let's start opening ourselves up to ourselves, by loving ourselves, by being kind and gentle and curious. So I hope you can see that even the experience of your own actions is something that's important to understand and will begin to allow you to have compassion for yourself and will begin to help in the de-identifying from the shame.
Jerry Henderson:Now, another thing that's really important in understanding how to de-identify is understanding that feelings follow actions. Okay, why is that important? Because we often wait around and think to ourselves well, I'll be healed, or I'll change, or I'll do this or address it, or I'll be able to let go of the shame. Once I don't feel shame, or once I've been good enough whatever good enough is, or I haven't done this behavior or done that, or I can feel a certain way about myself. Then I can start to really change, then I can really start to let go of the shame. It's not how it works. We have to first show ourselves through actions that we believe what we're talking about. We believe that we're not the shame. So that's a really important part of what I'm getting ready to share.
Jerry Henderson:Next, because as long as we stay stuck in the well, I can't act on it and I can't change it until I feel like it. Because as long as I feel shameful, I'm stuck. So now I need to wait till I feel a certain way before I can start actually acting like I love myself or acting in a way that isn't a shameful person. So that just keeps so many people stuck because your car is stuck in park and as long as it's in park you're not going to make any progress. So let's get the car out of park, let's put it in drive, let's move forward, let's move forward even not feeling like we deserve to move forward. And then we make corrections along the way, and sure you might wind up in a ditch occasionally, but at least you're going somewhere and you're not staying stuck. So I just want that as a data point as we begin to go through these next points, which is the feelings are going to follow the actions. Don't wait to do the action until you feel like it Okay.
Jerry Henderson:So fourth thing that we want to talk about in de-identifying is what we're doing, is we're retraining a habit. This is so important to understand. If we've come through all the things that we've talked about already, that we have a definition of shame, we've had experiences, we've got addicted to it, etc. Then we go, wow, those are things that got embedded in me and I got trained that way. How do I retrain? How do I, like, change that? So for me it was very exciting. There was a lot of hope around it.
Jerry Henderson:And here's what I did. I went pretty darn basic. I went as simple as possible. You see, the challenge with healing is we often complicate it so much and it's actually a self sabotage technique that we do. We make it so complicated that we can't heal, and it reinforces the belief that we can't heal, and so what we want to do is make it as simple as possible. And here's what I did. I said to myself Jerry, I want you to treat yourself like you have a dog sprain. I want you to just start training yourself how to fetch, how to do something. And how do you do that? Repetitiveness, over and over and over. You just keep at it. You're just going to train yourself, get as basic and as simple as possible, and I began to research and understand how that training begins to happen in neuroscience, of how habits are formed and what does that do, how do we work that in our systems. And so that really was a key part for me to go. Let me just look at myself. Basic I've got a brain. It gets trained. If I got trained certain ways, I can retrain it. Let me retrain myself as if I was training a dog.
Jerry Henderson:So the first thing I did was I put notes and reminders everywhere about what I wanted to believe about myself, about what I wanted to think about myself. So I put it on my mirror, I put it on my phone screensaver, on the fridge, in the car, I mean every place that I was going to be, because I needed those reminders in retraining myself and retraining the habit. Because what happens is we start to spiral right, we're just like autopilot into shameville, and then we're just thinking, oh, you know what, the other day I did X, and then, before we know it, we're wanting to hit the bottle or we're wanting to do something, or we want to escape. So here's the really important part of that. You get those reminders.
Jerry Henderson:What is it that you want to believe about yourself? What do you want to hear yourself say? And I often encourage people to start with, start with the opposite of what you've been saying to yourself. If you've been saying that you're a piece of crap and you're unworthy and you're a horrible person, write the opposite statement. What do you want to believe about yourself? What do you want to feel about yourself when you think about you, when you see yourself in the mirror? What do you want to see? What do you want to feel that? Write that down and put it everywhere. What's going to happen is you're going to find yourself spiraling. You're going to find yourself getting into the shame, thinking that reminder is going to be there. It's going to grab your attention. What you're going to start doing with that is the mantra inside of your head, which leads me to the second point about retraining, which is mantra work.
Jerry Henderson:You might say well, mantra, that's kind of that spiritual stuff where it's the new age, where it's this or that, or whatever your definition is. I really don't care, because it works. It's fantastic because what a mantra is is simply a positive affirmation with emotion and mindfulness attached to it. Here's the difference. Here's where people really get stuck, and I've talked about this before. They'll do a positive affirmation and they'll say it with no energy, no feeling. Their brain is like yeah, we don't believe that. That's ridiculous, move on. That's why you feel that way. That's why you feel like oh, it's hokey, it's silly. Positive affirmation I look in the mirror. I love you. You feel that way, but that's because there's no emotion attached to it.
Jerry Henderson:There's even more that we can do. We can go through what I like to call the fast method, which is feelings, actions, speech and thinking all combined together. We start first or I started first with the words and the emotion that I wanted to feel. You can do an internal mantra. It doesn't always have to be said out loud. I encourage you to do mantras that are said out loud as well. There can be that mantra that's just in the background of your mind, which is just I am worthy of love, I am worthy of love, I'm worthy of love, an emotion attached to it. What would it feel like If you're struggling with the feel like? Always encourage people.
Jerry Henderson:Think of someone, an animal, a person or whatever that brings, or an experience that brings a feeling or a sense of goodness to you, and then really attach that feeling to the mantra that you're saying or repeating in your head or out loud. Speaking it out loud can be so powerful because once again, you're going to hear it, you're going to think it, say it, hear it, feel it. You're combining all of that together and that is going to have some real impact. But it really gets into that emotion because you're reforming a habit about how you think about yourself, because shame is primarily thought-based the thoughts that you have about yourself. That then produce the emotions right. That then produce the way that you talk about yourself. That then produce the actions okay, and it just becomes the loop. But it almost always starts in our brain, right in here in our brain. That's where it typically starts.
Jerry Henderson:So what we're doing is we're going through rewiring, we're forming new thinking patterns, new habits, new ways of doing things, and so we're having reminders that remind us when we spiral or we get into negative thinking about ourselves or feeling shame. We're going to activate this mantra, we're going to activate this way of thinking and talking and feeling about ourselves, and that is going to have a powerful impact and you're going to have to be patient with the process. Some of this stuff took me six to eight months to overcome, but I figured I'd rather give it a really good six to eight month run and live another decade or two with carrying that crap. So, whatever you're going to have to do, whatever time it's going to take, it's a lot better than carrying it for the next few years, few decades or for the rest of your life. All right, deal.
Jerry Henderson:Now the last thing I'm going to talk about in de-identifying from shame is corrective experiences. If that shame has come from the experiences that we've had in life, we need to give ourselves new experiences, or corrective experiences. Okay, because your nervous system, your brain, your body want to have new experiences. Your brain wants to see you experiencing, feeling, going through something new as a part of the rewiring system, as a part of de-identifying. And as you have those new experiences, you can then begin to see and say to yourself well, maybe I am worthy of good things because good things are beginning to happen. And then, as you notice those good things, you'll actually start to attract more of them, you'll actually start to seek them out, and so your whole system begins to shift towards goodness, shift towards love, towards yourself.
Jerry Henderson:And so what are some of those corrective experiences? Just real quick, I'll go through two. One is self-love. Self-love is a corrective experience for those who are dealing with shame, because you've been beating the heck out of yourself and now we're going to flip it to loving the heck out of yourself. That is a corrective experience and I want to remind you once again it's going to feel uncomfortable, it's going to feel strange, it's going to feel awkward, it's going to feel kind of hokey, doesn't matter.
Jerry Henderson:All that is is you're experiencing a new culture. Have you ever gone to a new culture and things have just been different. You felt a little awkward and things didn't resonate. It's because you were in something that you weren't familiar with, and it's the same thing in loving yourself. You're having an experience that you're not familiar with, so it feels unfamiliar.
Jerry Henderson:We're working to make the familiar feel unfamiliar. We want shame to feel unfamiliar. We want the things that feel unfamiliar to us to begin to feel familiar to us. We want self-love to feel familiar. We want that to feel like home to us, so that self-love practice is deeply healing for a person who's dealing with shame, and the person who's dealing with shame is going to say well, I don't deserve self-love. That's the voice of shame. Self-love is. It's kryptonite, it's the thing that's going to begin to heal that, and you're going to see through the veil that it was just a story. It was just a belief system and a habit and a way that you got trained. As you begin to love yourself and when I say love yourself, I'm talking about loving all the parts of yourself. We're going to have to learn to love all of the parts. We'll talk about that in another episode.
Jerry Henderson:So let's go ahead and touch on this last part of it, which is experiencing empathy, and that empathy, once again, can come from yourself and self-love practice, but then also experiencing empathy with other individuals, being able to share your struggles with a safe person, and sometimes the safe person has to be with somebody we have some distance from. It can't always be a person or partner, it can't always be a family member, it can't always be somebody in the church if you're involved in a church system, it sometimes has to be somebody that we have a lot of distance from, and what I mean distance is that they're not in our daily circle. So that could be a therapist, could be a coach, it could be a trusted counselor or somebody else. Or if you do have a friend that you feel like you can be totally vulnerable and be accepted by, that's gold, that's beautiful, that's one of the most healing things. But if you don't have that, then finding a space that has some distance, but whatever you need to do to be able to share, to share that stuff that you just don't want to share with anybody ever right, and that doesn't pop out immediately. There's a process of trust, there's a journey in together.
Jerry Henderson:But as you get those things out and you're being met with empathy and you're being met with love instead of judgment and you're being met with yeah, I've struggled with that too it's fantastically, incredibly healing because it's beginning to show you that you're not the only one who's dealt with it. Shame will send you the message I'm the only one who's dealing with this, or I'm dealing with it worse than anybody else, and here's why I can't heal, and that's why Bob or Sally can heal, but I can't. Being met with empathy when you share something with somebody is powerful because it's going to let you know they're not judging you. So why are you judging yourself so harshly? And even if they didn't have the same experience that you've had. They had other experiences that were painful, that they've learned to walk through as well. So finding that is really important. Well, I hope that today's episode has really served you and helping you de-identify from shame or with shame as a part of your journey. I hope it's helped you to see that there is a source of shame and that you are not that shame and that you can begin to heal and move forward from it.
Jerry Henderson:Now just a few announcements as I close out today's episode. Number one group coaching. If you've not yet had a chance to sign up for that, you can still do so. Just go to jerryhendersonorg forward slash group coaching. The other thing is my book so Excited it's coming out. We've got it back from the final edit and we're just going through the final touches on it, so it's going to be for sale really soon. If you want to know exactly when it gets released, the day that it goes on sale, sign up for my newsletter. You can do that at jerryhendersonorg forward slash newsletter or you can simply see the show notes in this episode. Well, thank you for being here today and for listening. Now, if you haven't had a chance yet to sign up for the Facebook group for the Permission to Love podcast. You can see the show notes here that I'll give you a link to sign up for that group. We'd love to have you there as we discuss our healing journey and I want to remind you, as always, you are worthy of your own love.