Marrying Peter Pan's Shadow
Running from ourselves by chasing people who hide the exact same shame we refuse to face.
I found this thing yesterday, and it connected in a unique way.
I keep dating people who behave as though they are consumed with shame. But I’m convinced we are most attracted to and choose to date our mirrors — so that must mean I’m also consumed by it. We prefer to witness the parts of ourselves we’re refusing to openly acknowledge, projected onto someone else, so that it feels external from our own identity. So we can avoid confronting it.
Like being married to Peter Pan’s shadow, before capturing it. Infantile.
Then, when things go badly to reinforce whatever bad-luck story we are still attached to, we can easily blame the other person and continue avoiding our real selves.
I believe words that can land find us when the time is right. Until then, we’re deaf to them. The sound as clear as a foreign language broadcast.
So I woke up after an especially vivid dream where I had been trying to go back to a home I used to live in, I lost the keys. And on my way back I was attacked by a big vicious dog. He mauled me and my little dog — though I’m not certain if it was Dora or Millie in my dream — killing her and nearly killing me. I took it to mean: it’s not my place to keep trying to go back to past things.
If that’s true, that also means I need to properly deal with my shame around things past so they can be put to bed properly.
And this video came up as a recommendation, when I have no watch history around shame or guilt healing. Thanks Universe, you always have my back when I need it.
Some of my favorite lines:
Almost everything written about forgiveness begins in the wrong place.
It begins with the person who hurt you and asks how you might let go of what was done.
and
The mercy you cannot extend to yourself is the mercy you will never manage to extend to anyone.
and
Guilt is about behavior. It says, I did something bad. Its object is an act, something you did that sits outside you and can be examined, named, and often repaired.
Guilt is painful, but workable because it points at a thing in the world and says in effect, go and put that right. It is the psychological engine behind apology, amends, and the changed conduct that proves the apology meant anything.
[…] guilt turns out to be associated with empathy, with taking responsibility, with constructive repair. It is oddly on your side.
It still assumes you are capable of doing better or it would not bother directing you toward repair.
and
Shame is about the self.
It says I am bad. Not I did a cruel thing, but I am a cruel person. Not I failed, but I am a failure. And here is the structural problem. You cannot repair a self the way you can repair an act. There is nothing to go and fix because the verdict is not about a deed but about your nature and your nature feels fixed.
So shame does not send you outward to make things right. It sends you into hiding.[…] Shameprone people, far from being more moral, tend to be more defensive, more prone to deflect blame, more likely to lash out, and more likely to repeat the very behavior they are ashamed of.
Shame attacks the entire self so totally that it dissolves the very agent who might have acted differently. If you are the problem, there is no spare intact part of you left over to fix it. So you flinch, you conceal, you repeat.
and
The emotion we imagine burns the badness out of us is the one most likely to keep the badness in place.
I highly recommend watching it in its entirety:
There is no shortage of resources from which I can pull shame from my historical records. I grew up learning to carry the shame of the adults around me, and learned how to generate my own shame to keep the habit going.
It’s gotten easier for me to clearly see when someone is else is showing up full of shame in their words and actions. I’m still learning how to recognize the ways it shows up in my affectations.
Learn to walk before we run. But we’re growing none-the-less.