Dear Sadlyconfused,

you are very welcome!

It’s wearing your heart on your sleeve (or rather, your face!) and having no control over it. It leaves you feeling so vulnerable and exposed around people who aren’t always very kind about it.

Added to that is the secondary shame of having been bullied for my shame reactions by my father, sibling, people at school and a particularly nasty teacher.

I had the luck that my mother (or my father) didn’t shame me for blushing. And neither did my teachers. I am not sure about my classmates, I don’t think they teased me for blushing either, since my blushing started mostly in secondary school, and they weren’t as cruel as some of my classmates in primary school. So I don’t recall having been teased for blushing (although I did believe that everybody thought of me as a freak because of that!)

You unfortunately were shamed by your father, your sibling, a particularly nasty teacher and your classmates. That’s very very hard and I feel for you.

The kids I can forgive because they were insecure bullies, but the fact that there wasn’t a single, empathetic adult to reassure me that there was nothing wrong with me meant that it became more of a complex than it should have done. I feel so angry at them as a I recall it, which is probably a healthy reaction!

Definitely, it must have been devastating for you. Not just the children bullied you, but also the authorities figures, whom you admired and looked up to. In fact, this teacher should have been called to responsibility for his unprofessional behavior…  Your classmates were probably encouraged by his attitude, and therefore felt free to mock you even more.

You said you had a well-meaning mother, but it seems that she didn’t protect you from this kind of shaming? Have you told her about this nasty teacher? What was her reaction?

I feel so angry at them as a I recall it, which is probably a healthy reaction!

And you should feel angry! This teacher should have lost his job! And your father – well, he really was a cruel, heartless man.  A sadistic man, I should say. I think it would be good if you could express your anger in a safe, therapeutic setting, because it will help you to build the capacity to say no, to set boundaries in the future. To not allow people to bully you and disrespect you.

Thank you so much for sharing your positive outcome with healing your shame, it’s so reassuring that your cheeks became less reactive as your self-compassion grew! …If you don’t mind me asking, how long do you think it took you to start noticing that your change in self-talk was having a positive impact?

You are very welcome. I think I took me a few years of intense work on myself. But I think the largest impact was when I started feeling compassion for my inner child – that’s when I could slowly let go of that core shame and of the core belief that “something’s terribly wrong with me”. When I no longer believed that I am defective at my core, I could relax more and it didn’t feel like torture to simply sit among people, or in a lecture, or at a public event.

I’ll aim to get into the habit of speaking to myself kindly before doing things I know are likely to trigger me. I think at the moment I get preoccupied with the discomfort of feeling panic and have been feeling that anything kind I try to tell myself will have no impact, so it helps to read that someone else has been through it and managed to make such inroads with healing.

Perhaps it would help you to do some EFT tapping (EFT – emotional freedom technique). I haven’t tried it personally because I didn’t know about it at the time, but apparently it helps to calm our nervous system.

Dr Nicole Lepera, a clinical psychologist, has a youtube video about it, titled: “Emotional freedom technique (EFT)”. You tap on 9 meridian points, while telling yourself “Even though I am feeling anxious, I deeply love and accept myself.” Perhaps this method has a stronger effect than just speaking to yourself kindly, because it involves working on the nervous system too.