First may I say, holy crap it has been a while since I posted on this site... When I decided I was moving my blog from something expensive to something way cheaper(free) I didn't imagine I would just free myself completely from my duties as the advice queen... sheesh.. WHOM ELSE WILL PREACH AT YOU FOR EVERYTHING IN YOUR LIFE? HUH? ok, well, we have televangelists and those guys that assault you on your way to the "clinic" but WHOM ELSE? That's right, beyotches... just me... Mama dearest in all his regard... soooooooooooo yeah. Now, on to the important stuffus, the bloggity blog...
I lay in bed until 1030 this morning, reading a book by Ann Tyler called "Saint Maybe" and I began thinking how much in my life I blame myself for.
Do you ever have those thoughts that come across you years after an incident and you still have the same burn of embarrassment or shame come across your face? You know there is no reason for it and you know that whatever it was is completely over with and forgotten and yet you beat yourself up about it.
I think it all comes from learning true self forgiveness.
I will try not to get too preachy this morning, my children, but I think this is a necessary topic. Forgiving yourself. A while back I posted a blog on the advice queen website called Forgetting is the Start of Healing, but I don't think that is always the case. Forgiving then allowing yourself to forget is the start of healing. I don't take back my words of advice but I think I should expand upon them and allow a wider interpretation for what it takes to reach some form of self peace.
I have been having some issues lately with peace and trying to find it again, I have become unsettled and a little ticky and nervous, I fly off the handle and I don't really know why. I think I have found some of it. There are parts of me I am not willing to face, to forgive, and to get rid of. I needed to talk to someone... I called my Rabbi. He taught me a valuable lesson and I would like to share it with you and maybe make it more Advice Queenly and less Rabbinical, while his answer is very profound and helpful to me, it is also deeply religious and speaks of the Jewish faith, which some are not ready to open up to, faith, the lesson can be taught in any number of ways.
We must first seek to break our chain of suppression, he called this Anti-Suppressant, in which we allow ourselves to suppress not only blame but all of our feelings of good or bad, right or wrong. We live without DEFINITE EXACTING lines of what is and isn't right, we have to guess and while we know that many of the things we do are or are not right, we feel pulled between justification and suppression of the deeper ones. We must learn to face our fears, our wrongs, and our burdens and hold them out to ourselves to be judged, not hidden away to eat at our souls.
Next we must say it out loud to ourselves. But out loud... Spoken not thought because as an intelligent, thinking, imaginative being, human beings have all sorts of thoughts flashing constantly through their minds. Even thoughts of remorse and self-improvement are not strange to us, but they do not last. In order for our feelings to have any worth, for our actions to have any resolution, for our thoughts to have any meaning we must put them to words and speak them because the process of thought comes together and works better when our ideas are expressed and clarified.
That is not as easy as it sounds. It is usually excruciatingly difficult for people to admit without faltering in the completeness of it that they have done wrong. We excuse ourselves. We refuse to admit the truth. We shift blame. We deny the obvious. We excel at rationalizing. It is when you absolutely face the unpleasant truth we have indeed begun to free ourselves from our inner demons. To put it in a phrase I used in a paper once, when we take our pyx of worry and have communion with our demons, it is then we begin to feel better.
Finally when we have spoken everything, identified where our burdens are, we must then begin the inner dialogue that allows for self forgiveness. Once we forget the blame and just accept that we did something wrong, once we allow ourselves to move past whatever eats at us still, and when we finally stop denying that there is something wrong, we begin to feel better. We come to terms that yes we did something wrong but that was in the past, we are better than that now and while we don't absolve ourselves of it, we do see that we are allowed to move on past that wrong and learn from it. We won't beat ourselves up over it anymore, we won't torture ourselves or lessen our future awareness either. We allow ourselves to say that was the past, this is my future and move into it knowing we will still have some things we do wrong but hopefully we are able to think more clearly and concisely about what exactly it is we are thinking.
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Brie aka Barbara K
CharismaOnIce
Amanda Gulledge
Kerry Lauerman
Joan Walsh
Salon.com
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