DL posted in notes yesterday about “vulnerability hangover” and I immediately recognized what they were describing. After I publish a newsletter I feel disgusting for a few days, like I want to crawl out of my own skin. It’s really hard to put words to, but it’s such a deep seated feeling of self-disgust that just overwhelms me—and no amount of positive response to the piece shakes the feeling. I can’t even identify the exact narrative attached to it, which makes me think it’s related to preverbal trauma. I haven’t published in a few months but I’m working hard on my next post. I’m actually planning to publish it the day before a therapy appointment so I can begin to work through the feeling in therapy (previous posts I published on a Monday, then didn’t have therapy until Friday and by then the feeling has past).
My therapist doesn’t do emdr but we do a lot of somatic work that I think may work similarly.
“It’s not about ME but about the scripts”-whooo that got me in a good way. I have this longstanding fear that I’m unwanted-able. Meanwhile I’m feeling through so much anger over the ways I felt like I had to silence myself in order to be loved which only resulted in alienation from myself. That is for healing to externalize these beliefs. The most insidious thing about shame/religious trauma for me is that even when recognizing harm caused to me, the knee-jerk reaction is still to blame myself.
A deeply ingrained belief I'm trying to let go of is that my accomplishments are what determine my worth as a person. This was reinforced over decades of my life of receiving praise for being a perfectionist and doing well in school. It overlapped with growing up in evangelicalism too, basically for receiving praise for doing all the right things a "good Christian" would do. Oof, how this has carried over into feelings of shame as an adult, feeling like I'm letting down everyone who told me as a teen "you have so much potential" and "you're going to do great things for the kingdom of God." Mindfulness helps me combat it - staying in the present and accepting what is right now. And videos like this one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUjYy4Ksy1E) - about how saying things like that to kids is putting a super unhealthy burden of expectation on them. "Shame lives in the gap between reality and expectation" is the key idea from that video, and I'm learning every day to remind myself that "expectations" and "potential" don't actually exist, and to accept what exists and how things are in the present.
Script I deal with and wanna be done with: "I'm responsible for almost everything wrong in the world."
There's a particular early childhood Trauma with one of my caregivers that I identify as a significant contributing factor for this script (one which EMDR has helped with, some), but I also see growing up in evangelicalism as a contributing factor. The general evangelism mandate is one part of that - it's a lot to feel responsible to save as many people as I possibly can from eternal torment, but even more so I fault that my tender very young self was taught I personally was/am responsible for murdering God and that I can never deserve anything good but instead must utterly depend on this same deity to show me mercy. So I guess I'm hitting on another significant script there: "I'm not good enough." I point to the same religious environment as well as that same childhood Trauma as factors leading to that one taking hold. Perfectionism was one of the fruits of this, for sure, for me. Expecting myself to instantly master anything I take on has tripped me up so much.
Another challenging one: "I'm on my own and have to take care of myself because no one else is there for me." I've been working on another difficult childhood trauma in EMDR lately that seems to have solidified this script for me, in a life-threatening situation where the people I needed did not show up.
I like the script idea, for differentiating the belief from oneself. I've similarly found relief with the mindfulness idea that notes that there's a part of me having the emotion, which isn't the whole of me, because another part of me is also making the observation I'm having that emotion.
Christine, you excelled in this post at making a complex topic exceedingly clear! Inner work with my therapist has raised many such old scripts to consciousness through EMDR and guided meditations and healed them. The trauma scripts are actually easy to recognize. They are always generalized thoughts that make us feel inadequate: I'm too tall, unlovable, always a failure, too irritable, a bad dancer, etc. OK, that last one was thrown in for a laugh, but for me it wouldn't be far off the mark. 😂 They can also be thoughts that attack others as a distraction from our own feelings of inadequacy. The amazing thing is when we dig up the earliest instances of those thoughts, we see they were formed when we felt unloved or unsafe and didn't have the capacity (either because we were a child or overwhelmed by ongoing trauma) to recognize they weren't true. It's amazing how EMDR opens the door to those memories. And if the therapy is undertaken in a safe loving environment (either a caring therapist or lovingly reparenting ourselves), we can replace those old thoughts and with new positive ones. Your post perfectly described how it works and gives us all hope that we can heal our inner pain.
When these thoughts come, almost always at night, when I'm most vulnerable, I try to diagnose them as coming from Satan, who knows my weaknesses. I say "try" because sometimes I'm half asleep and I have to struggle to separate dream from reality. Even I do, I pray and that does the trick.
Christine, I realize you are now post-Christian, and I respect that, but I'm sure you understand that for those of us still with the program, Satan is not an externalization of the script.
DL posted in notes yesterday about “vulnerability hangover” and I immediately recognized what they were describing. After I publish a newsletter I feel disgusting for a few days, like I want to crawl out of my own skin. It’s really hard to put words to, but it’s such a deep seated feeling of self-disgust that just overwhelms me—and no amount of positive response to the piece shakes the feeling. I can’t even identify the exact narrative attached to it, which makes me think it’s related to preverbal trauma. I haven’t published in a few months but I’m working hard on my next post. I’m actually planning to publish it the day before a therapy appointment so I can begin to work through the feeling in therapy (previous posts I published on a Monday, then didn’t have therapy until Friday and by then the feeling has past).
My therapist doesn’t do emdr but we do a lot of somatic work that I think may work similarly.
“It’s not about ME but about the scripts”-whooo that got me in a good way. I have this longstanding fear that I’m unwanted-able. Meanwhile I’m feeling through so much anger over the ways I felt like I had to silence myself in order to be loved which only resulted in alienation from myself. That is for healing to externalize these beliefs. The most insidious thing about shame/religious trauma for me is that even when recognizing harm caused to me, the knee-jerk reaction is still to blame myself.
A deeply ingrained belief I'm trying to let go of is that my accomplishments are what determine my worth as a person. This was reinforced over decades of my life of receiving praise for being a perfectionist and doing well in school. It overlapped with growing up in evangelicalism too, basically for receiving praise for doing all the right things a "good Christian" would do. Oof, how this has carried over into feelings of shame as an adult, feeling like I'm letting down everyone who told me as a teen "you have so much potential" and "you're going to do great things for the kingdom of God." Mindfulness helps me combat it - staying in the present and accepting what is right now. And videos like this one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUjYy4Ksy1E) - about how saying things like that to kids is putting a super unhealthy burden of expectation on them. "Shame lives in the gap between reality and expectation" is the key idea from that video, and I'm learning every day to remind myself that "expectations" and "potential" don't actually exist, and to accept what exists and how things are in the present.
Script I deal with and wanna be done with: "I'm responsible for almost everything wrong in the world."
There's a particular early childhood Trauma with one of my caregivers that I identify as a significant contributing factor for this script (one which EMDR has helped with, some), but I also see growing up in evangelicalism as a contributing factor. The general evangelism mandate is one part of that - it's a lot to feel responsible to save as many people as I possibly can from eternal torment, but even more so I fault that my tender very young self was taught I personally was/am responsible for murdering God and that I can never deserve anything good but instead must utterly depend on this same deity to show me mercy. So I guess I'm hitting on another significant script there: "I'm not good enough." I point to the same religious environment as well as that same childhood Trauma as factors leading to that one taking hold. Perfectionism was one of the fruits of this, for sure, for me. Expecting myself to instantly master anything I take on has tripped me up so much.
Another challenging one: "I'm on my own and have to take care of myself because no one else is there for me." I've been working on another difficult childhood trauma in EMDR lately that seems to have solidified this script for me, in a life-threatening situation where the people I needed did not show up.
I like the script idea, for differentiating the belief from oneself. I've similarly found relief with the mindfulness idea that notes that there's a part of me having the emotion, which isn't the whole of me, because another part of me is also making the observation I'm having that emotion.
Christine, you excelled in this post at making a complex topic exceedingly clear! Inner work with my therapist has raised many such old scripts to consciousness through EMDR and guided meditations and healed them. The trauma scripts are actually easy to recognize. They are always generalized thoughts that make us feel inadequate: I'm too tall, unlovable, always a failure, too irritable, a bad dancer, etc. OK, that last one was thrown in for a laugh, but for me it wouldn't be far off the mark. 😂 They can also be thoughts that attack others as a distraction from our own feelings of inadequacy. The amazing thing is when we dig up the earliest instances of those thoughts, we see they were formed when we felt unloved or unsafe and didn't have the capacity (either because we were a child or overwhelmed by ongoing trauma) to recognize they weren't true. It's amazing how EMDR opens the door to those memories. And if the therapy is undertaken in a safe loving environment (either a caring therapist or lovingly reparenting ourselves), we can replace those old thoughts and with new positive ones. Your post perfectly described how it works and gives us all hope that we can heal our inner pain.
I relate so much to the scripts you've shared. Yay EMDR!
Sounds like it might be similar to what I recently wrote about here?
https://briantervo.substack.com/p/behind-the-scenes-0c3
When these thoughts come, almost always at night, when I'm most vulnerable, I try to diagnose them as coming from Satan, who knows my weaknesses. I say "try" because sometimes I'm half asleep and I have to struggle to separate dream from reality. Even I do, I pray and that does the trick.
Ok
Christine, I realize you are now post-Christian, and I respect that, but I'm sure you understand that for those of us still with the program, Satan is not an externalization of the script.
I feel silenced