Extreme childhood shyness evoked a belief there was something wrong with me, that I grossly lacked relational capacity – the most fundamental human quality. The routes of my felt shame were set. I would usually try to work things out myself rather than seek others’ help, so I did the same when I became depressed in my 40s. I extensively read relevant psychological material but didn’t find the answers I was looking for. However, it did lead to my counselling training, which involved my own therapy. In the ensuing years my life completely changed.
Nina, my first counsellor, suggested I walk into the darkness that I described of my mood. I felt this was ridiculous – why embrace something that’s destroying me? As hugely simple as it sounds, it was groundbreaking to realise that a dark place, whether physical or emotional, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad, it just means we don’t know what’s in there. In my case it was a lifetime of repressed feelings that needed their freedom. However, I’d become ‘institutionalised’ with my rigid process.
With Nina I explored my feelings and started understanding them. Through these explorations, alongside my counsellor training, I was interested to learn of the power of environmental influence, and how this likely led to my shyness and therefore my incongruence and conditions of worth. I also became aware that I was probably coming out of my shyness aged 10 but then I suffered a trauma that led to a regression to my old ways.
My unconscious mind – my psyche – was still strongly pulling me towards what it knew best, resolving things myself, so after a few sessions with Nina I felt I could go it alone again. I could still feel very low sometimes so it was a relief to move onto the next stage of my course, which required more personal therapy. With my next counsellor, Nadia, I became increasingly aware of just how powerful childhood experiences are. We explored my childhood trauma where I was able to feel appropriately sorry for that 10-year-old but through my 51-year-old eyes, mind and heart. Due to the suppression of my feelings back then and thereafter I couldn’t access appropriate emotional support, but now I could with Nadia’s help. A lot of this support, evoked through Nadia’s empathic process, was from myself.
I started learning the crucial requirement of self-compassion and self-assurance. I was gobsmacked to identify the levels to which I emotionally abused myself with my dreadfully critical internal – sometimes external – voice. So I needed to learn to catch this process that my psyche would still pull me towards due to its chronic historic conditioning, and change it. This also hugely helped me to feel appropriately sorry for my other earlier selves when shyness greatly inhibited getting on in life – over time I learned to stop berating myself and adopt kindness.
As my training progressed, my last part of mandatory counselling was welcomed as, although I was feeling better, I still suffered. My last counsellor, Joanna, helped me work on my shame. As much as I’d progressed, we explored there was still some shame that my psyche was interpreting as there being something wrong with me.
Through feeling Joanna’s presence and her hugely empathic attunement to me, I came to really internalise that there never was anything wrong with me, it was my psyche’s interpretation that was wrong. We worked through how unnurtured historic guilt repressed through the years had often mutated into shame, on top of the raw shame I felt over my historic shyness.
While this process was nicely ‘cooking’ through the years, psychological defences were being developed by my psyche to compensate. Further work was needed to catch these defences operating and change them. In time this released inappropriate shame and continually evoked more congruence and fewer conditions of worth – a process that updated my psyche appropriately to the present. I came to really learn where I was, who I was and the path I needed to travel.
