When it comes to healing toxic shame, one concept you may not hear about much is the importance of working with the biological and primal emotion of disgust.
Yep. You heard me…disgust! But why? That has both a long and short answer. The short, or simple answer, has to do with the biology of shame. Bruce Liptons shares, “If we were toxically shamed via the many, many ways in which human parents dose out toxic shame to their little ones, we will manifest in our cells (our biology) a sense that we are literally, ‘bad meat’.
By ‘bad meat’ — this means we grow up thinking we are distasteful (disgusting) and worthless and not worthy or deserving of goodness…we literally have the wiring in our system that we are rotten.
(For example, one common thing you might hear a parent who is shaming their child in a toxic way say: “You are a rotten child!”, or, “you’re spoiled rotten!”)with enough time, that kind of language and energy seeps into our entire cellular physiology, our movements, our body postures, and yes, how our muscles (our meat) sense us living in the world. We literally believe, feel and express that we are rotten and bad and undeserving of anything good and whole.
To build our capacity to be with this sensation, the emotion of disgust, we need to start small first.
We have to get better at noticing bodily sensations like our temperature, our thirst, our need to need, to stop eating, to feel the ‘easier’ emotions like sadness, joy, and most importantly anger and healthy aggression .. which can happen by becoming better at feeling daily frustrations and resistances and setting boundaries”.
Get better at being with the body’s sensations and biological needs, and you start to build the capacity to be with the tough qualities of disgust.
REMEMBER: Sensations often hold the unconscious material of the body — i
Let that sink in. Feel. Sense. Pause.
Healing shame boils down to embracing vulnerability, authenticity, and acceptance.
Biology is queen AND king here.
We have to listen to both sides to move through this deeply embedded stuff. witnessing how our past conditioning keeps us from having fun, letting go, trusting, being honest with ourselves, connecting with others, and most importantly, connecting to ourselves while connecting to the environment around us.
This conditioning also keeps us from moving freely and healing our body and all that it contains. Clients in a 90 min ZOOM session become free, because we go back to the root cause for understanding.
One theme that pops up without fail is shame, along with a cellular worry that we are getting something wrong, that we’ll be punished, or we look stupid, be laughed at, are holding up the group, that no one cares about what we have to say, and on and on… I lived feeling these things for a very long time, getting to the other side has been a gift and the reason I do what I do now.
All these thoughts that swirl and suffocate us come, for the most part, from a time in our lives when we were most likely shamed (ridiculed) in a toxic way (usually via our parents, siblings, school teachers).
When you work with me I have 100% success and get you to the root cause for understanding so YOU ARE FREE!!!!!
And while the space is safe, it is fascinating how our old demons of toxic shame show up and play out as soon as we blend multiple dimensions of ourselves.
The good news is that this can be worked with, soothed, and healed. This work goes back to the beginnings of how we learned to move, play, interact, and advocate for ourselves.
We have the potential to heal the deepest wounds that have been carved and cut into us. We just need to make the decision to do it and then never look back.
The other aspect of shame is how we perceive ourselves – how our cells are imprinted. Hugs
