Thank You, AppleTV, for searing that sound into my brain, via Ted Lasso.
Let me cut to the chase. My Therapist this week scrambled my entire being with a piece of psychological insight I will never forget.
Our brain protects us from grieving by invoking our shame instead.
If you are having to read that again, I understand. This has turned my entire world upside down and simultaneously, unlocked my ability to access decades-old debilitating grieving I must now face. Let me give you some sources upfront; these are the original individuals with the credentialed expertise: Ronald Fairbairn’s Moral Defense gives the classic architectural root of why self-blame feels safer than helplessness, while The Change Triangle by Hilary Jacobs Hendel provides the modern neuroscience of shame as a physiological blocker for grief. Lastly, I can offer Pete Walker Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, which I am reading now. This post I will undoubtedly write over many days, but rather than waiting to publish it in its 80% state and tweaking incrementally, I will publish it now, then keep writing. I am that floored by the power of what I was finally ready to hear.
If you have been tuning into the study of shame, like I have, you can stop. Shame immediately falls away when you identify the actual grieving beneath it. This turned my morning run into a sobbing red zone. Let me explain.
I know the very moment my childhood psyche shattered; I was nine years old. It was a culmination of life events whose neurological bill came due on a singular day. I’ve written about it at various times on this website, but always as an observer. I was already not living with, and scarcely seeing my Mother for over a year by the time she was working as a dorm teacher across our large, industrial city:
I was getting to see my Mother so little, it was agonizing. On the day I recalled today, I was at her Teacher’s quarters for the morning, and was expected to go to school in the afternoon. Hungary at that time dealt with overcrowding in elementary schools by creating classes that together attended either in the morning or the afternoon, switching weekly. It was getting near the time I was needing to head to the city bus stop and I was losing it. I was crying. I didn’t want to leave Mother’s side. Looking back, I’m sure this was hard on her. I’m sure my attorney Father made things very difficult for her and she was worried about not complying with the divorce proceedings. How it worked for me though was I understood none of this, and because my Mother is an Imago Turtle, there came a point where she just reached overload with my demonstrated grief. I found myself on the sidewalk outside her building alone, with the edict I had to make it to afternoon school. I can recall my immense, overpowering panic, my loud sobbing, and the knowledge I had to get myself to that bus stop. It was up to me. I was to have to carry on from here. …and high-schoolers were watching. Fourteen, fifteen, and I was a snot-nosed kid. Pathetic. Abandoned or unbrave? I was sure I couldn’t live with either. I kept dragging myself toward the bus stop while at times breaking loose and sprinting backward toward my Mother’s building. I couldn’t see her and I wasn’t sure if she would be there in her flat. I knew no other part of the dorm high-rise nor the rest of the campus. I did know she would be unwelcoming if I returned. She was certainly clear on that.
So I kept inching toward the city bus stop, pausing, restarting, pausing, restarting, over and over. …and then something shorted within me like an overheated circuit that shuts off. I was able to stop the agonizing back-and-forth. I had a reprieve from my lost psyche ricocheting…looking for oxygen. I could just be numb and move, get on the bus, arrive in class.
I could readily describe the events and some of my feelings from a bird’s eye view, but I couldn’t earnestly access the emotions of that moment…until now.
I told my Therapist about writing Four Generations and No Shortcuts followed by Moral Chokehold, and he pointed out how readily and rapidly I turn on myself. I don’t allow my own childhood grief to get air because I believe I have forfeited that right with my own adulthood failings. He told me that was actually my brain protecting me.
What? My brain automatically flips to blaming me for all hurtful things in my life (via shame) and that is to protect me? So he explained.
All young children are vulnerable and need their parent(s) for their very survival. When those parents demonstrate they are unreliable and unprotective, a child is faced with a grave dilemma: 1) comprehend that there is no one else to care and the child is unprotected and alone, or 2) reject this mortal threat, mentally shield their parents from blame and turn inward to devise a strategy to be more worthy of their love and protection. The first one leaves the young brain spiraling in an existential crisis. The second fakes a semblance of control: “If I can be better, I will earn their regard.” This sets the child up for a debilitating neural pattern. …and that is brain-rewiring insight. To a child, choice number one is psychological death. A child cannot survive believing the adult responsible for them has abandoned the post. So the psyche takes the only exit ramp available: it turns inward and attacks itself. It labels the fear pathetic and the grief unbrave, because believing we are the flawed and failing gives us an illusion of agency. If it’s my defect, I can fix it. So I soldiered on, marched to the bus stop, took the seat, and spent the next four decades mastering competence so I would never end up helpless on the sidewalk again.
So what does this have to do with my morning run? Well…remember, how in my earlier writing I could detail my memories from a bird’s eye view and my feelings clinically? Not this time. This morning, as I was running on the sidewalk, I all of a sudden could feel what it was like on that long sidewalk in 1984, leading from my Mother’s dorm building to the city bus stop. It was like looking at Google Maps, then dropping into first-person street view, but also gaining the four-dimensional, raw emotions. I immediately began crying. Raw and uncontrolled. I could, for the first time, feel my debilitating longing for my Mother in a way I hadn’t felt since then, not for one second. It was terrifying and agonizing. It drove my heart-rate into the red, maximum zone despite changing nothing about my actual running speed. It was visceral and alarming.
That red-zone heart-rate spike was the physiological proof of a trauma circuit reopening. It wasn’t a cardiovascular response to running; that was pure autonomic activation. As I now understand, running provides continuous, rhythmic, bilateral stimulation, which is the exact mechanism that unlocks stored somatic memory. My feet striking the pavement physically mirrored my nine-year-old child pacing, stopping, and running between the building and the bus stop. The cadence of my running finally bypassed my executive functioning (my intellectual distancing), and shoved me straight through the door my brain had barricaded way back in 1983. I cellularly felt my distress. It makes sense a nine-year old child should be terrified in this situation, therefore shame was entirely out of the question here. That, too, was crystal clear. What was waiting underneath all that scaffolding my brain had created wasn’t a defect or a personal failure. It was the purest, most elemental human emotion that exists: a terrified child who loved her Mother, desperately wanted to be with her and feel safe and seen. Instead, she was completely shattered by having to walk away alone, then triaged by shame to be able to carry on.
…and then, for the years that followed and all of the ways my reality was erased was purely torture. I allow myself my right to my anger. That also doesn’t make me who my Mother boxed me in to be.
For someone labeled too much by a withdrawing parent, anger is usually the most forbidden emotion in the catalog. In an Imago Octopus-Turtle dynamic, whenever the child’s distress or outrage boiled over, the parent retreated further into her bunker, effectively communicating: “Your anger is destructive, your big feelings are dangerous, and you are the reason I am locking the door.” That is the box my Mother built for me, then made sure she inoculated my loved ones all around her with the narrative that my emotional intensity makes me defective, unlovable, and unsafe to be around.
Accepting my anger now without turning it inward into shame breaks that box entirely. I am finally allowing myself that:
- My anger was proportionate. Having my lived reality of enduring sexual abuse that was systematically minimized and erased is psychological torture
- My fire is not a character flaw. I was not hysterical and unreasonable; I was a child screaming for an adult to see me
- This survival fury does not make me the villain. I can feel angry at the years of neglect and gaslighting without buying into the story that it was my out-of-control behavior that caused my Mother to abandon me over and over.
When I was nine on that sidewalk, I had to override all of my internal panic and alarms. I had to forcibly override my nervous system to shut down my anger and my grief just to survive the walk to the bus. I then spent forty years keeping the lid on that pressure cooker because I knew that when the lid came off, she declared me the monster over and over. …but on that sidewalk this morning, I could clearly see both truths at once: I was a terrified, abandoned little girl who desperately loved her Mother, and I am an adult woman who has every right to be completely, unreservedly furious at how I was left there.
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