The Sound of One Paradigm Shifting
Last week I was getting to the end of reading Dr. Richard O’Connor’s book, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn’t Teach You and Medication Can’t Give You (Berkley Books, 1997). Some parts weren’t helpful, but overall I would recommend the book. Anyway, I was getting near the end of the book and I was stopped by the following two paragraphs:
Depressives fear intimacy. We put on masks for the world, because we believe our true selves to be shameful, unworthy. With practice, we can keep our masks up all the time, so no one ever knows what we think we’re really like inside. We can fool everybody into thinking we’re loyal, honest, generous, and caring when deep inside we are convinced it’s an act.
But if you keep up the act like this all your life, who are you fooling? Who is the real you? Is it the one that people love, or is it the secret self inside? I submit that the real you is the self you present to the world; this is the self you are responsible for. The inside self is an artifact of depression, guilt, and shame, no more than a trick of the mind, but one that can dominate our life unless we let people know about it. (pages 315-316)
These words nailed me. I have for years been trying to figure out who the real me is that I have kept hidden and I have gotten lost from time to time in that quest. Lost because I can’t find anything and there are some places where I am afraid to go to look inside because I am afraid of what I will find (not anything hideous, but something painful). However, lately I have been questioning the whole being afraid of what I will find thing. I have allowed some early experiences of rejection color and oppress my view of my self for 25 years. And as I remember those episodes, they are rejections that I did not deserve. They were attempts to shame me (successfully I might say) for nothing that I really did.
In other words, I have been afraid of a ghost of shame that was never really there in the first place. True that fear-induced depression and paralysis has led to some very true episodes of guilt for sins of omission, but those no longer have to be true. The Self that I have been living is one that I enjoy and I am glad that I can claim that Self as true. I also am glad that I can welcome into the care of my life the times of pain and struggle, but not for shame and judgement, now for healing and grace.
This is going to take some getting used to, but I think I am going to enjoy this paradigm shift a whole lot.
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