Turn the Shame Into Love

I am in agony of pain. It doesn't happen often anymore. But today I am in agony of pain. On Twitter I am known as 'Happy Sophie', 'Wise Sophie', 'Wonderful Sophie'. All the loving things people say about me. I love Tweeples for saying all this and I love myself for bringing all these friends into my life, for creating a supportive reality on line as I already have in my beautiful little New England town.

My life is gooood in so many ways!

But today, another layer is being uncovered, another veil is being lifted. I was reading today's post on the Violence Unsilenced site and I remembered. It all came back flooding through me, through my body once again.

Of course
I have forgiven. Many times.
I bear no grudge. Anymore.
I understand why it happened. It was mostly PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder)
I want no revenge. The best revenge is to live well.
I know we are born good. Then stuff happens.

But this one sentence in today's post: "I think I was a very smart little girl to freeze the natural love a child feels for a parent because he was a violent, scary man." had me unexpectedly howling with pain as I realized how true that was of my own childhood. And in the next second I understood, in every cell of my body, why both my marriages failed: because as an infant I 'froze the natural love a child feels' and promptly became ashamed of myself for 'not being nice'. Because where love cannot be, other things take hold, like fear, shame, anger and distance. When we freeze love, normal flowing interactions stop. And that is exactly what happened in my parents home. I worked on it for years, healed many many layers and aspects of this horrendous mess. But today I realized that the last layer was shame. A shame so insidious, so much a pervasive part of who I have thought I was that it prevented me from seeing that sometimes the love is still frozen and I create or attract unnecessary distance in my life.

I am going to go to bed early. And in the morning Happy Sophie will work her magic, remove blocks, change patterns, dissolve shame into love and download joy. And I will be held and guided through it: two wonderful, sweet, supportive, compassionate, safe men are already scheduled to spend time with me tomorrow to coach me on how to move my life forward. They are exactly what I need and they are very typical of the men I bring into my life nowadays: sweet support. Fixers, not destroyers.

My life is good.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for hearing and seeing me. That is exactly what the victims, ex-victims and recovering soldiers of violence need: they need to be seen so that THE ABUSE STOPS. And I posted this today so that my shame stops here and now and is transmuted into love. So be it.

What are you going to do to dissolve shame into love for yourself or the people around you?