Dear Kshitij:

You are welcome!

“I didn’t understand how my shame and guilt are fueling my emotions of despair, hopelessness etc.?“- to be stuck feeling ashamed and guilty is a terrible emotional experience. If calm and contentment are like the sun gently shining above you, relentless shame and guilt are like thick hail dropping on you from above, hitting you, bruising you. When the hail can drop on you at any time, winter or summer, spring or fall, then you get desperate and hopeless.

“I was criticized for every small thing“- I think of these criticisms as thick hail dropping on you, hurting you, making you bleed.

“I do have a habit of self-loathing, so maybe that is related with my guilt and/or shame related with my intrusive thoughts?“- yes, I believe so.

“Please tell me something I can do to ease these harmful emotions so that I can reach out for help and stop giving so much pain to myself”– to ease and resolve these harmful emotions (shame, guilt, self-loathing), you have to.. heal the shame that binds you. I am using a title of a book I read long ago: Healing the Shame that Binds You, by John Bradshaw.

Here are a couple of quotes from the book: “There is no way you can share your inner self because you are an object of contempt to yourself. When you are contemptible to yourself, you are no longer in you. To feel shame is to feel exposed in a diminished way. When you’re an object to yourself, you turn your eyes inward, watching and scrutinizing every minute detail of behavior. This internal critical observation is excruciating. It generates a tormenting self-consciousness that Kaufman describes as ‘creating a binding and paralyzing effect upon the self.’ This paralyzing internal monitoring causes withdrawal, passivity and inaction”,

“Toxically shamed people tend to become more and more stagnant as life goes on. They live in a guarded, secretive and defensive way. They try to be more than human (perfect and controlling) or less than human (losing interest in life or stagnated in some addictive behavior)”-                  do these quotes speak to you personally, Kshitij?

“I gave a huge amount of effort for my masters, even when I was struggling a lot with my mental and physical health, and all of it was on the verge of becoming zero- I couldn’t do anything. And when I finally got the scholarship, even in that I was just a passive recipient, it just happened to me.  What is the point of putting in your life and efforts when everything is so random?“- You cannot be calm and content unless you experience that you do have control over some parts of what happens to you life, that you can make some desirable things happen and avoid some undesirable things; you have to become active, not passive, when it comes to your life.

“It feels like no matter how hard I try, I can never find mental peace, and even after moving to a better place in life (like getting the scholarship) will bring more trauma“- the difference that will make all the difference for you, is to believe that you have what it takes to handle difficulties and challenges, that you are strong enough and resourceful enough.

For as long as one believes that one has no power over one’s life, no control, no say.. every difficulty can feel overwhelmingly huge.

anita