Escaping The Spiral
How the shame and self doubt spiral can render us motionless and leave us feeling hopeless and powerless to speak up about things that matter - and how to begin resisting the spiral.
Dear reader,
Shame is a powerful experience, it is pervasive and can feel all consuming. And it can make us feel as though we are powerless and that our voices don’t matter.
But that is the lie that shame wants you to believe - that you don’t matter and your voice is not important enough, smart enough, educated enough, anything enough, to matter. But it is just that, a lie.
Shame lies to us by telling us that we are not good enough and that we are unimportant and insignificant in the scope of voices that are being heard from every angle, every side and every direction.
Shame would have us believe that, because we are not well known, college educated or because we “don’t know enough”, that we don’t matter. That our voices don’t matter. That our words don’t matter.
This is a lie.
No matter who we are, where we come from or how we show up in the world, if we have something important to say, something that has the potential to even just make one person feel less alone, see a different perspective or learn a different way of looking at the world, then our voices are most definitely important and absolutely needed in this world.
Even if only one person reads our words and gets something valuable out of them, that means that we have made a difference in the world and that small difference has the potential to reach far beyond that one persons world.
If we plant a seed in one persons heart or mind, that seed could grow out into a family, a community, a city, a country or even around the world.
So, how do we stop shame from killing that small seed before it has the chance to grow beyond the garden of our own thoughts, values or beliefs?
“Shame cannot survive being spoken. It cannot tolerate having words wrapped around it. What it craves is secrecy, silence, and judgment. If you stay quiet, you stay in a lot of self-judgment.”
Brené Brown
In order to overcome shame, we have to speak about it. Shame cannot survive when we talk about it, because shame thrives on silence and it lives in the dark places in our mind and body that we don’t speak about, so to speak about shame is to render it powerless to hold us in it’s grips.
That is why I speak so openly about my shame, because I know that, in speaking about it, I am taking away it’s power.
I am not going to pretend that this is an easy process.
In fact, today I spent hours procrastinating before I finally had the courage to sit down and begin writing this essay, because shame was telling me that anything I had to say was not valuable enough to matter.
The thing is, what value my words hold for another is none of my business, nor is it within my control. What one finds value in, another may not.
It is not up to me to decide whether my words will have value to another, it is only up to me to speak or write the words that feel true to my values and what I wish to convey to the other through my writing. How another receives those words has nothing to do with me and everything to do with that person’s view on the world and their unique experiences.
That all being said, it is easy to sit here and say that all we need to do to overcome shame is to speak about it and to share our thoughts and beliefs, regardless.
However, when we have systems of power actively weaponizing our deepest shame stories and intentionally putting us into a state of fight, flight or freeze by inundating us with policies, stories and mind games that overwhelm our nervous systems to the point of completely shutdown, it is not as easy as simply choosing to speak about it from that state.
Those are the times when we need community, when we need the support of others to help us through the overwhelm so that we can get back to a regulated state and be able to feel safe enough to speak or write the words of our hearts and minds again.
These systems of power know this. They know that we are more powerful when in community with each other, that is why they work so hard to divide us. Because they know that when we are divided, when we are isolated from our communities, we are much more vulnerable and easy to manipulate and overpower.
That is why it is so vital that we stay in community, that we find those communities of people where we feel safe, seen and heard.
In times like these, when they are doing everything they can to take away our rights and our power, our lives depend on staying united in our communities. Literally.
“Alone, we can do so little; together, we can do so much”
Helen Keller
And our lives depend on speaking up, even when it is scary and feels as though we are in danger. They want us to stay afraid, so that we stay silent. That is why it is so vital that we do everything in our power to speak up.
That doesn’t mean to say that we shouldn’t listen to our nervous systems when they are telling us that we need to take a break and take time to regulate ourselves when we are overwhelmed, though.
That is just as important a part of any resistance as fighting and speaking up.
We cannot help any movement or resistance from a place of complete overwhelm or shutdown.
Take breaks when you need to. Do whatever it is that makes me feel safe, regulated and grounded enough to come back and continue fighting.
Every resistance needs people who are doing everything they can to push back against injustice, fascism and oppression. It also needs people who are regulated and feeling strong and present enough to put their full self into the fight.
That is why it is so important to always be paying attention. Both to what is happening around you on the outside and what is happening within you in your inner world.
None of us can truly help any form of resistance if we are not taking care of our nervous systems, our minds and our bodies at the same time.
So, speak the shame into submission and resist any system who uses shame and fear to control you, just do it in a way that is also paying attention to how your nervous system, mind and body is reacting, and act accordingly.
Because caring for our whole selves is a form of resistance, too.
Love,
Lulu x