Healing Shame A Journey with Mental Health Experts / #trauma #shame #healingjourney #childhoodtrauma #therapists #selfhelp

Takes everything you've got. Would that help a lot, Craig? Wouldn't you like to get away? Hold on a minute, this wasn't what I was expecting. I always have a ******* meltdown these days at the start of the show, don't I? And at the middle, and at the end. Get to the chorus. Let's get this over and ******* done with, this is show business. Welcome, Craig. I'm so glad to have you here. Thank you, Andrew. It's a pleasure to be here. You want to go where everybody knows your name. Do you want to go where everyone knows your name? No, no, it could be awkward. Right, everybody, here we are once again for South Place Podcast, and this week is going to be probably the most revolutionary show that we've ever put together in terms of helping people understand. But not only understand. Heal. ------- heal. Really, genuinely heal from something that we call shame. Now, shame, as much as I've been researching it, I've realised that actually the root cause of most people's issues comes from developing complexes as a result of feeling the sensations of shame, right? Interestingly, if you look at human beings evolutionarily, every single emotion that we have is ultimately wired for our longevity and survival. There is no accidents in terms of emotions. For instance, I'm walking towards a main road. Craig simply says, Andrew, why don't you close your eyes and cross into the busy traffic? What sensation do you think my body, my unconscious, would immediately fill my experience with? Anxiety, fear. So that energy, that discomfort, that sensation of anxiety, as awful as it feels, is actually trying its best to move me away from the perceived threat to take care of me. But because it feels bad, we actually make almost an enemy and want to move away from our own anxiety to a degree, which actually makes the anxiety worse. And what we want to try and get across on this podcast is almost about some way of trying to develop a much more of a relationship of understanding towards your emotions in a way that can alleviate the discomfort and the energy that's attached to them. So for instance, shame. Well, I can see, Andrew, my anxiety is there to protect me. It stops me getting run over. It stops me walking into traffic. But how the **** is my shame trying to protect me? I go to parties and I instantly feel that really uncomfortable fight or flight shaminess that's filling my whole body and it just makes me want to withdraw. It makes me want to go home early. It makes me make excuses for the reason why I have to turn up late and go home early. It also makes me have reasons and excuses to the reason why I couldn't turn up. It does everything to make me look in the mirror and hate myself. It makes me believe I'm a piece of ---- and worthless. How the ****, Andrew, is that helping me? Well, guess what, motherfuckers, it is. And we're going to explain why. Have you got the answer? Right there. We have got the answer. Woohoo! He's back, baby. Andrew Murray is back. I'm finally completely fooled out from the hibernation I've been in. And now my cognitive functions are optimally running online and I am back. And this is the shame. I was speaking to a client in the week. A lovely man. Still overwhelmed with shame. Seems functional. Got a successful job. But he's always carrying this deep sense of shame. And he can consciously, rationally see how he's a nice person. But emotionally he feels that cloudiness and ugliness and disgustingness of what we call shame. As a sensation. It feels, if you were to imagine now, any time in your life where you felt embarrassed. Or felt ashamed. That energy feels like that. You want to hide behind a blanket or disappear under a rock. That very sensation of shame is driving an energy. It's almost like a magnetic portal wanting you to withdraw and isolate. Now, interestingly, this great guy, he went to some type of Catholic school. Lived in a different country. And the priests abused him. Physically and emotionally. And he was 8 years old. And one of the most heartbreaking aspects of this story. He said to me, he said he loves his mum and dad and he didn't want to tell his mum and dad. Because he was afraid of what the consequences could be. And anyway, the abuse got that prolific. Eventually, he told his mum and dad. And they walked to the priesthood school with him. Confronted the priest. And the priest walked behind him, he said. And he placed his hand on the little 8 year old boy's shoulder. And he went, tell your mum and dad that you're making this up. And he said in that moment he felt an overwhelming sense of fear and realised he couldn't. And he said I've been making it up. And he says what really hurt as well is the next day his dad put a hamper together of chocolates and wine. To give to the priests. Now, interestingly, he's felt that sense of shame all of his life. And he wants to get away from it because it feels so uncomfortable. Understandably, he wants to grow, he wants to heal. And he seeks therapy to try and not feel shame. And that's the ******* problem. Because I said to him. Let's imagine you never had shame in those moments when you was abused and humiliated psychologically, emotionally, physically. Where you felt like you was the main person that was physically abused. And you always questioned why the other boys didn't get as much abuse as you did. Let's say that you didn't have that emotion, that unconscious emotion, that sensation. That come up and made you feel so ---- about yourself. That feeling of wanting to isolate, that feeling of wanting to get away from that crowd. The feeling of wanting to hide under a rock. I said if you never had that feeling, you'd have probably fought back. You'd have probably shouted and stuck up for yourself. And what would have that done? It would have got ten times worse, the abuse. So the very feeling of shame, as uncomfortable as it was. Was the only true ******* friend that you had. That came in, filled your body with that energy of withdrawal and discomfort and needing to isolate. To try and limit as much as possible the abuse that could come your way. Now how fascinating is that? It's a little bit like trying to get you through it, isn't it? It's your mental, so just like you burn your arm and your arm comes away. The mental side is trying to drag you away from reality and such. And create an environment where you just get through it. Yeah, so what we need to be able to do is to heal. Now it was great for him in that moment. Because it was like, oh my God. He'd managed to, for the first time in his life, actually feel some bond towards his shame. Not an unconscious resistance of ever feeling it again. He felt some sense of the developing of a relationship towards it. Was this the first time in the session he'd ever felt this? The first time he'd ever felt it, yeah. You made him look at it from a different perspective, didn't you? Look at it from a different perspective. But for me, this is what's most important. And I could be wrong, but I said to him, these aren't perspectives. It's truth. That's exactly what's happening in the Buddha. When they observed apes as human beings, it was evolving. If you look at the beta males that get close to the alpha males, as soon as there's any type of potential conflict, you'll see the beta male's head drop and it will care and it will look. If you look at the ape's body, we have no doubt that that ape is feeling shame. And that shame is literally reducing the probability of that ape being hurt. It's a survival response to protect the ape. So this isn't perspective. This is truth. We're not playing around with, okay, just write down 10 reasons why you are worthy. And trying to manipulate the body. The body's going, no, **** you. I have literally evolved over hundreds of thousands of years and I know how to keep you safe. And you ain't going to bullshit me into believing I'm worthy. I need to feel like I'm worthless so I never get hurt in that way again. The body will not trust the mind. The mind isn't powerful enough to try and manipulate the body into trying to convince the body that it's worthy now. So what we need to be able to do is go into the feelings and the sensations and begin to feel a connection towards them. A true connection. Remember, as little kids, when you've been going through this shame, and everybody's been through shame, and everybody's carrying some unconscious shame to some degree from some experience that they had with those beautiful people that we called mom and dad who were just as shame bound as us, which were carrying complexes, which unconsciously inflicted us with the same sense of shame. But when we're talking about moving forward, it's how do we now learn to begin to build a relationship with shame. And for me, the way we do it is when we go back to that same reflex, if someone comes up to you every day, think about it like this. If I go to raise my hand to Craig, he's naturally going to flinch. He hasn't consciously thought with his rational mind, I need to flinch. His unconscious is far quicker and far more intelligent. And it's been hit a billion times through every experience of every ancestor that's gone through something horrific or dangerous in every life that was lived before Craig. And that is wide into his genome. So in that moment when I raise my hand quickly, there's an absolute sense of discomfort in Craig that literally will create a flinch or he'll punch me back and hit me in the gob. Two defense mechanisms. So to shame, the way to resolve it is to respect your shame, to understand it, to feel a sense of compassion to it, that this shame was taking care of you better than your ******* mom and dad. If he was being abused by your mom and dad and your shame was withdrawing you and making you spend a long time in your bedroom, it was doing that to make you least possible get hurt anymore by them. That shame has been there for you from the moment you were born, an unconscious algorithm and defense mechanism that is inside of you that was protecting you before mom and dad was. So how does Betty, who's now 65 and she's crippled with shame, which is a really difficult thing because we're looking at two things, two survival responses going into conflict there. One survival response is, I need to make sure Betty feels a low sense of self-worth every day. So Betty never goes out freely and gets hurt and humiliated in the same way again. That's how my shame will protect better. Shame being the thing that's there, a child's best friend in a moment when the world has become dangerous or humiliating or unsafe. So Betty's in a house, but guess what? She's got another instinct and it's the instinct to build connection, to feel like you're wanted and part of a crowd, because there's another instinct hardwired into Betty's survival, which means it pushes her towards this feeling of wanting to feel like she fits in, wanting to have people around her because there's safety in that. When you weren't part of the tribe, when you was ostracized or alone, there was more like the chance you was going to run out of food or be eaten. So it's a survival instinct that's written into your genome to build connection. From a rational perspective, from an experiential emotional perspective, it just feels lovely when there's people that you have things in common with and you share the same interests and you can talk. And that conflict between her shame, which is trying to help her survive, and the very part of her that wants to connect to people to survive, creates a type of neurosis where Betty just feels so frustrated and upset and it even adds to even more shame. I want to, I like people, I want to be around people, but I feel so walked around people and I don't make those connections and now I feel even more ashamed, which energises Betty to even more withdraw. And the more she withdraws, the more she gets depressed because she's going directly against the instinct to connect and build connections. Well, people listening at home will find it very difficult to understand how you can talk about shame with such intent that you are telling the truth. They will not understand how you can really, or both of us, can really talk about emotional feelings so openly because it's kind of a place we don't go in everyday conversations. Now luckily this guy, I'm guessing, went to therapy and luckily knew what his shame was. Some people at home, if you think of shame and have you been shamed, your ego might be so clever, you won't even remember that bad memory, it can be buried inside can't it? 100% buried, it gets repressed or suppressed. Now I'm thinking, I've thought of a way that people could do what you say. Andrew's telling you to feel possibly one of the most worst feelings in the world where your ego just wants to run away, it wants to isolate, it doesn't want to go to that party, it doesn't want to go around people. He's telling you to flip this, accept it and acknowledge it. Now I'm thinking, the story of the chap who said it was abuse, you might actually not get down that rabbit hole straight away when you start to think of shame and do I have any problems. Your earlier things would be minor things, so it would come out in your behaviour. You're making me feel a little bit ashamed now because you're talking to the audience at home, to the camera and you're making me feel a little bit insignificant. Well I'm sure you'll get over it Andrew. Well I absolutely will get over it. Now people want to not feel bad don't we, that's like the most basic thing of psychology, but unfortunately the way the unconscious protects you and keeps you safe and tries to optimise your sense of survival, it puts survival as a priority over how well you feel. That's the incredible thing about the unconscious. The only thing it truly cares about is you surviving and if that means it's going to fill you with shame so you don't get completely hurt from a scary unsafe external environment, it's going to do that because it prioritises survival and longevity over Betty feeling great today. But we want to try and help Betty feel great today don't we. And the way to begin to do it for me, if we're looking at that healing journey, is we need to begin to feel the sensations of shame initially. Now this is quite a groundbreaking type of therapeutic framework here and what we're trying to really do is if you imagine now going somewhere like Barcelona and you look at a beautiful cathedral, anyone that goes out into the outside world and has some sort of a hobby and looks at things and enjoys understanding things, how they work, must begin to start to turn inwards and look at the architecture of their own minds, how their own minds formulate emotions and sensations and what the actual meaning and purpose of that is because if you truly want to escape mental health crises, you need to fundamentally learn exactly the architecture of your own mind and one thing that I am convinced of is the more I begin to understand the architecture of my own mind, the more I realise is that my unconscious, my fears, my worries, my anxieties, my shame, my guilt are all highly intelligent, caring, compassionate parts of myself that get ignited in moments of crises or uncertainty or unsafety to best possibly increase my chances of survival and if I can fall into that energy and rather than make an enemy out of my emotions and actually begin to walk towards the discomfort of them with the intuitive sense that they're there and they're trying to take care of me and learn to feel them and learn to breathe with them and really be vulnerable because it's very triggering to do but really open yourself and learn to slowly open yourself up to that vulnerability you begin to heal but it takes time and it takes effort and it also takes really good people around you that actually want and accept you for the level or the speed in which you're healing not pressurising you, letting you go at completely your own pace I haven't seen you in ages Betty and you're not a good friend because you don't come out well let's really try and understand Betty and let's give Betty exactly what she wants let's tell her that we love her, tell her that we're going to be here no matter how long it takes and help her through it rather than projecting our own sense of rejection onto Betty because Betty hasn't come out with us, it's like understand what's really going on dig deeper, go deeper and understand it well you said a lot of things there that I think somebody at a certain awareness level will definitely grasp and get if there's people out there doing the work I've got a little story for you that I think might help those people who are a bit kind of more irrational they have the shame and the guilt and they just do the bad behaviours and they think that's just life, they'll never change what about this, tell me if you like the sound of this you have a smoke alarm in here Andrew if there's a raging fire where? are you speaking metaphorically or there's not a smoke alarm in here is there? metaphorically there's a raging fire and it goes off it alerts you you survive the smoke alarm you're very pleased with it's done its job now another time you light a candle you blow out the match the alarm goes off again thinks it's a raging fire inside you every day there's a smoke alarm going off sometimes telling you there's a raging fire you've just blown out the matchstick haven't you and if you can be aware when this happens to do what you say connect with what's going on before or even when it happens you might just react just say what you want to say but then if you go back and look at this whether it's an hour later, a day later you can actually really process what was it about that scenario that brought out the raging fire because really it was just a lit candle and that's for me how you over time you can start to get closer to the big ones like certain times you've been ashamed of getting close to the big ones I always innuendo it in some homo way at the end and ruin everything right so because it's my favourite song and it's our first podcast in the bar what do you think of the new studio Craig now we've had a new studio for the past three of our new episodes we've had one studio in the summer house one studio in the house and now one studio in the bar so what are you thinking about this studio is this better than the other two studios which one do you feel the most comfortable with I have to say that I like the house the big roaring fire in the background but if you get a nice roaring fire in there boring this will be the one now let me finish with the cheers song because after all Betty does want to go where somebody knows her name it's just that her body doesn't want her to go where somebody knows her name because her body learnt that people that knew her hurt her but the other instinct of wanting to connect and build relationships to feel safe that soul that aspect of her true nature wants to be a lovely place to go where everybody knows her name everybody's glad she came you want to be where you can see people are all the same Yum want to go where everybody Yum knows Yum knows sing it come on Making your way in the world today Takes everything you've got Taking a break from all your worries Sure would help a lot Wouldn't you like to get away Sometimes you don't know your name Come on Betty You come and sit next to me Betty I hope she doesn't ******* stink of piss Always glad you came I'm sorry I didn't mean that You want to be where you can see Troubles are all the same You want to be where Everybody knows your name You want to go Come on Betty I'll see you next week When Andrew Will tell us about the session With the priest from the same story That's not funner I'll put ya down Betty butter Making your way in the world today Takes everything you've got Taking a break from all your worries Sure would help a lot Wouldn't you like to get away? Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name And they're always glad you came You want to be where you can see Our troubles are all the same You want to be where everybody knows your name You want to go where people know People are all the same You want to go where everybody knows your name