Mad
Sad
Glad
Hurt
Afraid
Shame
Hope
Whenever I state these, people always ask me, well, what
about love? I answer that love is
the core of everything. It is
called many things, but feeling connected to others and ourselves is our basic
humanness. The other seven are
ancillary and help us negotiate the basic problems of love.
Love is the most basic need of all. To feel welcomed, valued, honored and
accepted (to name a few) is what every one of us hopes to achieve.
Each feeling has its accompanying need and consequence if
not met.
So I am going to take each feeling and expand on it a bit in
hopes that people can begin to articulate what they are feeling a little
better. That helps a lot in
relationships
It always amuses me that if you ask a man what he feels, he
will tell you what he thinks and obversely, if you ask a woman what she thinks,
she will likely tell you what she feels.
The integrating of thinking and feelings creates the outcomes we all
desire. Putting who you are back
on what you do.
The sixth feeling, SHAME has been the toughest for me
personally. The thing about shame
and guilt is that they are the masters of disguise. Shame is that terrible moment when the inner eye turns on the
self, examines the self and finds the self deficient with no hope of redemption
– when you just want to crawl under the bed for oh, say three weeks or so. Shame is a break in the interpersonal
bridge and is very painful.
Shame is hard to talk about because- well we are
ashamed. The mystery is what
triggers the shame spiral and what to do about it. It is often triggered by some push away statement or
gesture that seems unimportant and innocuous at the time.
You will seldom see shame in another person; it gets
disguised as anger, fear sometimes crying. We will do almost anything to avoid that horrible sense of
any more visibility, because that is the crux of embarrassment, to feel
overexposed and vulnerable. More
then any other feeling, shame is a break in the interpersonal bridge and when
that is triggered we feel suddenly small, naked and somehow less worthy as a
human being.
Shame needs repair of that interpersonal bridge mention
above; an apology is often all it takes. If that need is not met, it leads to
the avoidance of intimacy, self-denigration and hiding out. On the other hand if the repair happens
the person becomes clear, concise and outspoken.
It has been my experience and observation that shame end
shame bound identities controls many people's lives.
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