Scattered pieces

Yesterday Liz gave me a handout about shame.  Intellectually I realise that I probably have feelings of shame, but I don’t identify with the feelings or concept of shame as it pertains to me.  To be honest, even after reading the handout, I still didn’t really get the concept.  So, I went in search of the answers in the literature…

Tomkins (as cited in Rahm, Renck & Ringsberg, 2006) states that “guilt concerns what one has done, whereas shame concerns who one is.“  Tomkins also considers that shame exists on a continuum from mild embarrassment through to humiliation, with chronic feelings of shame occurring when someone experiences humiliation for extended periods of time.  If the person carries the shame overtly, they will experience physical symptoms such as sweating, blushing, palpitations and hiding behaviours.  If the shame if covertly carried, the person will still feel the shame, but won’t be able to recognise or name it.  Shame will be described by those covertly holding it as feelings of being ‘stupid’, ‘feeling bad’ or ‘insecure’ (Rahm, Renck & Ringsberg, 2006).

As part of their study, Rahm, Renck & Ringsberg (2006) looked for word cues which lead to Indicator groups and their aspects of shame, as seen below:

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This makes more sense to me than the quite abstract concept of shame.  It becomes a tick-able list where you can identify aspects of your behaviour and feelings.  It also helps to then draw the links to other experiences, behaviours and feelings – for example if you repeatedly felt betrayed by an authority figure, then this will impact on your ability to trust people and form attachments to those around you.

According to Feinauer, Hilton & Callahan (2003), “shame promotes a desire to hide and disappear and may intensify to the point of wishing to no longer exist”.  Suddenly lots of little things about the concept of shame started to click into place… W has a rule that we must be invisible, she is also the first step on our road to suicidal intent.  So it seems as if I carry shame not as an emotion, but as a symptom and indicator of the abuse and experiences from my past.  It is chronic and covert in my life.  What is confusing is that much of my serious self-injury is based around ensuring that I experience more shame.  This makes no sense.  I understand that we will look for what is comfortable and familiar; sometimes that comfort and familiarity comes from self-injurious behaviour.  But why would I seek further humiliation?  Another topic to research while I’m off work relaxing…

This really only touches on aspects of shame, but it’s all I can cope with at the moment.  If I’m up to it later in the week I’ll expand on it so that I can process it in time for my session next week with Liz…

Wish me luck, I pick up the mother for another three week visit tomorrow…

References

Feinauer, L., Hilton, H., & Callahan, E. (2003). Hardiness as a moderator of shame associated with childhood sexual abuse. American Journal of Family Therapy, 31(2), 65-78. doi:10.1080/01926180390167115

Rahm, G., Renck, B., & Ringsberg, K. (2006). ‘Disgust, disgust beyond description’ – shame cues to detect shame in disguise, in interviews with women who were sexually abused during childhood. Journal of Psychiatric & Mental Health Nursing, 13(1), 100-109. Retrieved October 5, 2009, from CINAHL with Fulltext.

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Now playing: Missy Higgins – Warm Whispers
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“Unfit for work…” those words sting, they really do.  They’re the words used to explain why I won’t be able to work for the next 12 days.  They’re part of the standard form that the doctor fills in, so it’s nothing personal, but it means failure to some of us.  We know that our functioning at work has been so poor that there was no other choice, but it still cuts us to the core of what many of us perceive as our self-worth.  M in particular, is struggling with being put off work, yet she was the one who made the appointment and mentioned the problems we were having, knowing full well that enforced sick leave was the likely outcome.  M couldn’t hand the medical certificate over in person – it would be like admitting failure and having to face the disappointment of those around us; so we left it on the team leaders desk with an email message apologising for the inconvenience we were causing.  Some of us consider this the wimps way out… failing to face up to our responsibilities and the repercussions of our actions.

This morning we got a text message from our cynical work friend asking how we were.  I wasn’t sure how to respond, I know that in some ways I’m trying to protect her – she’s got enough on her plate without hearing my sob story.  So I sugar-coated what was happening.  No one at work was expecting us to have this time off, so it probably came as a shock.  I suppose this is one example of how we can appear so high functioning, but really be a total and utter mess.  What I fear the most is the reaction when we get back to work… will people alienate us, want to hug us, avoid talking about it?  At their core, the people that I work with are good and kind people, but they don’t understand mental health issues.  This means that I will odds are lie about what has happened when I get back to work, I’ll find some acceptable lie that doesn’t make them squirm.

This week we’ve also seen Jo and Liz…

Jo became quite worried about our safety after we did a collage with her.  It can be quite amusing on one level to see Jo’s art work which is all about love and happiness, while ours is dark and full of violence.  We both had mindless woman’s magazines to use as base material for the collage.  I had words like key, disappear, invisible… Jo had love and rainbow.  I had a picture of a puppet running through a door… Jo had a smiling woman on the beach.  She was concerned about our safety to the point of contacting Liz.  Poor Liz also now realises how much we were testing her when we first started seeing her – with Jo we go with the flow, but with Liz we resisted and argued at the beginning.  This wasn’t deliberate, but rather an unconscious way to see whether Liz was going to be able to help us heal and put up with what we could throw at her.

When we saw Liz, it was what I would consider a disaster.  Little Michelle came forward and made it almost impossible for us to speak.  She has such a problem with words and forming them that it’s like she is stuttering, but I don’t think it’s a true stutter, I think it’s more about not wanting to tell the secrets.  At one point, we were stuck on one sentence, and in particular one word… “I’m not special“.  We were so incapable of saying the word special, that we ended up having to write it down.  Little Michelle stuttered through explaining that she wasn’t “that word” to anyone, because if you were “that word” you then got hurt.  She wanted to runaway so that the pain would stop.  Liz offered to runaway with her, but Little Michelle said that no one else was allowed to come.  All the time this was going on, there were ones in the background yelling that she was telling lies and it’s all rubbish.  This was the first time the messages about it all being lies were so closely tied to someone saying anything.  Little Michelle shared no abusive events, but her presence alone was enough to stir-up the denial and nay-sayers.  That probably means something in psychology land, but to us it just felt crazy.

So we have 11 more days before we are allowed back to work…  We’re meant to relax and unwind…  This is terrifying!  Work is our structure, our safety.  Suddenly we’re meant to do this thing called relaxation and rest.  We’ve actively avoided doing either of those things for about 20 years…  Today we survived by going down to the gardens and taking pictures with the new lens’ we got the other day.  Not sure how we’re going to cope with another 11 days of this.

Here’s a random photo we took today…

Cherry blossom

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