DO AWAY WITH THE SHAME

Where you are in your life, no matter how diminished and small you may feel, your incompleteness is your authenticity. Just the very sense of longing in you is the voice of God speaking back to you, so start with your incompleteness, and when you feel your incompleteness, I hope you have some calluses on your hand from giving yourself a little pat on the shoulder because that’s where the journey begins, that’s where the great myths actually begin, with a sense of incompleteness. (Martin Shaw - Interview extract from Mud and Antler Bone)

The work of renowned psychologist Carl Jung exposed how our personal and collective lives follow, unconsciously, the paths traced by earlier mythological stories, stories that we have seen are living testimony to our ancestral difficulties and their attempts to resolve them.

When in 2018 almost half of all men and women in the USA have experienced a form of abuse by an intimate partner - making it 24 people a minute being victims of abuse in the USA alone - simple daily rapports should become widely recognised for their profound power to affect negatively and positively our developing brains and identities. These are people we meet. These are people we love. These are people whose underlying psyches we ignore at everyone's peril.

The very long term implications that any tragic loss or intentional abuse has on future generations is written on the daily difficulties that traumatised individuals face in regulating their physiological and emotional selves, and so ultimately no one is excluded from having an interest in the healthy development of any other human being, for we all lose and gain from the direction we take in this respect.

Liz Mullinar, founder of Advocates for Survivors of Child Abuse and CEO of the Heal For Life Foundation, laments the lack of campaigns that focus on encouraging us to listen to someone's childhood trauma experiences, a friend, a colleague, a relative. She encourages, in her TED talk, to approach people with obvious mental difficulties or addictions, with a question about how their childhood went. She wonders what a culture of this kind might have meant for Hitler, who was himself a victim of childhood abuse. Likewise, to those who have experienced trauma, she suggests to drop the shame and blame, and declare to the world what you went through.  

As research continues to stock detailed evidence from the lives of the millions affected by tragedies of all kinds, we, as a collective, can begin to change the foundations of our societies, perhaps one less spank at the time, or perhaps one less silence at the time. After all, while there innate natural forces that resist looking at trauma for what it is, there is also evidence in many of us for the curiosity and courage that is needed to look straight into the eyes of a tiger behind a bush.

Wishing you Well,

Your Shrink in Bansko