Shouldn't Be Ashamed

 

As I work on dealing with emotional eating and regaining my health, I have had to explore a lot of painful emotions and incidents, that paraphrasing Lennon/McCartney, led me to my door. Its been very difficult to face a lot of these feelings, at some points I’ve spent a lot of time crying as I release these feelings to the universe. I don’t need to hold onto them anymore-they don’t serve a purpose in my life and all they are doing is literally weighing me down.

 

Shame is one emotion that has been part of my burden. I won’t go into the details of what led it to be an overriding emotion in my life, but the constant awareness of my “defects” has caused a lot of hurt and pain and has kept me from living my best life. For most of my adult life I have struggled with feeling “not good enough”, which is blatantly not true. It wasn’t one situation or experience that led me to the stinking thinking, but an accumulation of them. Over the last few months, I’ve been working through some of these lies I have told myself:

 

I’m not good enough

I can’t do anything right

I am such a fake

I can’t do anything right

 

My inner voice was such a mean girl, and I unfortunately believed her. I became an overachiever, trying to prove to myself (and others) that I was not flawed and that they were wrong about me. I spent so much of my life in pursuit of perfection that I missed out on a lot. To a certain extent, it has also damaged some relationships, as well as kept me in ones that should have been cut loose long ago. In terms of my health, it would be the reason why I would spiral downward and give up if I had a slip up. The chorus reminded me that I would never get healthy and do anything right. Its not true, but that’s how I internalized it.

 

There’s a similar thought process with home-keeping. I can’t do things perfectly, so why would I do them at all was very persuasive. I have hopped on and off the Fly Wagon so many times, but I always go back because deep inside, I know it works. Its letting go of my inner bully and be like Nike and just do it.

 

Letting go of the shame I’ve dealt with didn’t happen over night, and is an ongoing process. I still deal with negative thoughts on a regular basis, and sometimes find myself getting caught in a whirlwind of them. That’s when I need to stop and breathe, and take a step back. I need to reason with that mean girl and put her in her place.