Trying To Rewrite My Inner Script

The tsunami of survival, inspirational, and “look how well I’m doing” posts definitely trigger my feelings of inadequacy and shame. These powerful emotions are familiar old frienemies that never actually leave me, but shrink in power, into the back ground only too happy to grasp any opportunity to swell up to fill my inner space with doubt and accusations. 

We all have our inner script, that dialogue that goes on within us that we believe to be absolute irrefutable truth.  Our core belief about ourselves.  Many of us are adept at ignoring, masking or defending against these without even

being aware of it.  Our subconscious works really hard to protect us from uncomfortable and painful feelings, emotions and traumas. Often these defences become obstacles and prisons that inhibit our awareness from recognising who we truly are. A lifetime of minimising emotions and trauma can result in an impenetrable citadel being constructed around the raw darkness and pain that you fear seeing or the world catching a glimpse off.  
I am not suggesting that anyone should take a battering ram to their inner citadel.  Defences are there for a reason, to protect.  Awareness is at the centre of gradually uncovering the hidden and finding who we are.  It doesn't matter how far along the road of processing your “stuff” you are, awareness and acceptance is key. With awareness comes the opportunity for change or to choose not to.  For me it has taken years to get to where I am today, and I am very much a work in progress.  

In preparation for this I did a timeline of when I thought I started working on myself.  Off the top of my head I would have said that it was around the time of some major incidents that occurred within my job that shook me to the core and turned my perception of who I was in relation to the world upside down. A full on identity crisis. In doing the timeline and listing in order when things happened, started, stopped etc I noticed that I actually started the process over a year earlier.  Out of the blue and with no identifiable reason, I asked my close friend if I could go to church with her.  I never had a road to Damascus moment of suddenly and spectacularly switching the light on. For me it has been a much slower and organic growth. In saying that, a moment that particularly comes to mind as being a significant point in my awareness process and my faith, was during a session of Christianity Explored. The group were shown a clip looking at what it means for God to shine a light on your heart.  I am sure I wasn’t the only person in the group that felt the terror of my all being known, but what it did for me over time, was to unlock something.  In feeling the fear of being seen, I had acknowledged that there was something to see.  I wasn’t simply what the world saw, the mask or what my blinkered view revealed to me.  Was this all part of Gods plan? He allowed me the space I needed to build trust in what I was feeling about developing faith. Had it happened like a bolt of lightening, I wouldn’t have trusted the extreme nature of the emotions. Going through life, relationships, work, trials and challenges as well as intense psychodynamic training and therapy, without God would have been unimaginable. That clip had given me a new inner script, a counter script. God knows all of me and yet he still loves me. No matter how massive my shame grows, no matter how unworthy and helpless I feel, it cannot consume me any longer.

The understanding that feelings, losses and traumas don't leave us but instead become a part of who we are was both reassuring and disappointing. Knowing that I didn't need to defeat them was welcome but that I wouldn’t be free of them, not so much.  In a training session the void and emptiness felt in bereavement was described as always present but altered in the space it took up within. That it changes in size and density. Sometimes it is overwhelming and yet it can become like a smaller shadow that sits with you always and is welcome as part of your life as you hold the loss and allow it to be.  As overwhelming as it is to begin with, I would wager that nobody would want the love and memories to be forgotten. To denying your grief and loss of any sort is denying the importance that the person is to you. I feel that viewing other difficult emotions in the same way could be helpful.  I know it sounds good but it isn’t my default position and therefore not easily maintained when remembered.
My identity and therefore my world were turned upside down by external events and loss, triggering my inner vulnerabilities and accepted perceptions of my place, purpose and defining character. For you it may be or have been something very different, a bereavement, the loss of relationship, empty nest, a change of place within a family, loss of health or the loss or addition of a label that has defined you in some way.  The list goes on and for each of us, whatever it is that changes your solid ground to swamp, it is life altering. The desolation of being alone in the swamp, vulnerable and uncertain and not sure how you are supposed to be now.  Who am I now, without XXX? It takes time to reorder a world.  

Working on my awareness of me, has been key in my search for self. Once, during a check in at the beginning of one of my first counselling trainings, I described myself as being like the weather. Some days its not rainy or sunny or cold or hot, it’s just there.  There was nothing there to identify.  That terrified me. Either I was totally empty inside or I was unable to feel. After 4 years of therapy, it turns out that I have spent a lifetime denying my feelings and silencing my inner voice because of my belief that I’m not worthy to be heard. The irony of this is that, throughout my childhood I was called a chatterbox, often told that I say the same thing in several different ways, using too many words where only a few were necessary (necessary for who?). Amazingly my subconscious has been trying to be heard all this time. Trying to be seen. To have a voice. To feel understood and acceptable. 
The first person I need to be seen, heard and accepted by is myself. How can I ask it of others, if I don’t connect with and acknowledge myself? My whole self, the good and the bad, my strengths and vulnerabilities, my darkness and my light.  There are still the same internal scripts and feelings that have overwhelmed me more than once, but they are not the whole, they are a part. They no longer fill my horizons.  Knowing that I have God beside, behind and in front of me, holding me up, I can weather whatever storms are released from within, little by little, even through the overwhelming darknesses there is light.