Happy Recovery

Has your emotional alarm clock been going off, demanding your waking? Is there a part of you that wants to change? Have you been hitting the snooze button, silencing its loud ringing in your brain, and hoping it would quit disturbing you?

Some examples of hitting the snooze button are buying self-help books and not reading them. Or agreeing with their wisdom but choosing to stay stuck. Maybe you hide in drugs and alcohol, shopping, or sex. Or you hid by over-focusing on the lives of other people or became compulsively religious. These are all temporary methods to silence the disturbing need for change.  Someday, like all of us, you will have to quit ignoring the emotional alarm clock and metaphorically get up to change…silencing its ringing. Is today the day?

Everyone has a special place where we hide our most embarrassing experiences, the things we did not wish to see the light of day or perhaps terrible emotional, physical, or spiritual wounds inflicted upon us by others. We terrorize ourselves when we internalize the experience. We store this pain and ugliness deep within our physique in an area called our Shame Closet.

When this shame festers in the dark, it metastasizes and becomes emotional cancer, affecting joy and happiness. Shame, when not treated, becomes a person’s definition, and people so affected become “shame-based,” where self-loathing trumps self-love. Has anyone ever abused you more than you abused yourself?

Is today your D-Day when you storm the beaches, attacking the shame that dominates you? Correction…that is not right…that you allowed to dominate your joy.