LOA — S2E7: Feelings Woe Joy
From Shame to Self-Love Part II
The Love One Another (LOA) newsletter is for people on the journey to learn to love (better). This year the focus is on loving oneself.
In consideration of your time, I try to keep these on the short side. I’ve broken this thread into parts. Part One is here.
How do we go from shame to self-love?
That’s what I’ve been trying to do, in various ways and more recently through this newsletter, to change my narrative. In retrospect, it has taken me a several decades to accept and embrace my emotional self and, as it turned out, that was the first step to revising the internal narrative from shame to (self-) love.
The generational antagonistic relationship with emotion got passed on to me. The truth is that we live in a world that devalues emotional expression. Though males are disciplined one way, and females are taught another, we’re all trained to suppress our emotions; I submit because no one knows what to do with them and my parents certainly didn’t.
These two things I’ve learned and accepted:
a) Learning to deal with emotions is secondary to struggling to meet basic needs.
b) Maybe this is what is meant by being made in God’s image.
The first point is obvious, and I was privileged to have the resources and a parent who normalized getting professional therapy. One therapist, we’ll call her Dr. Lisa, taught me that emotions were signals, not harbingers of doom, and that we could let them wash over us like water in the shower.
The second point: Genesis 1:27 says that God created mankind in his own image. (Now I’m applying LGBTQ pronoun rules and respecting the pronoun used in the Bible, which was “God-breathed” (NIV Bible, 2 Tim. 3:16). Other books state that God is not a man and that His ways are not our ways. It came to me: What, then, do we have in common to have been made in his image?
Emotions.
God feels anger and jealousy. He feels sorrow and joy. God feels love—is Love. Therefore, it is possible that we were made in His emotional image.
Feeling our emotions and paying attention to what they are signaling, then, is vital. Shame is an emotion. Growing in love meant finding and acknowledging that I had misapplied and had internalized shame.
Because healing, or unlearning, takes time, the next step in my journey entered the realm of needs and self-compassion.
See you in three weeks.