Topic: Shame
Sometimes, according to Brene Brown, what psychologists label a "narcissistic wound" would better be described as a "shaming moment." That's certainly what I now realize happened to me during my first conscious recollection of shame.
Believe me, it was traumatic! Unlike children who have been traumatized by their parents into believing that they are not worthy, I was conditioned to believe the opposite!! My first shaming moment came when I was eight years old.
We moved. Moves weren't usually all that difficult for me. Compared to how most children experience them, I often welcomed the change. Good thing, since I had several big moves as a kid, though a lot fewer than during my preschool years when my preacher-father was still trying to "find himself."
The problem was that third graders in the new city were doing much more difficult work than I'd ever seen. In second grade, they'd learned to write in cursive and learned much more difficult math concepts than I had. I was totally behind and scared to death.
It didn't help at all to have been led to believe that I was the smartest kid in the world. I had been the smartest kid in MY world, up until then. If they'd had double promotions, my old school would have already had me in 4th grade cause I was a "problem child." I could do anything the teacher handed me before she could finish passing out papers, never missed a word, but certainly didn't get along well with my peers. Socially, I was a dud. For I'd been raised in a world of adults.
Frankly, I was a spoiled brat with an over-sized brain! I know that now. Though neither my parents nor I saw the "brat" part. What a shock to find myself as "less than average" at school, and still struggling to gain the relational skills that were lacking!!!
That experience altered my world--perhaps, unlike most incidents of shame, it served some good, along with bringing me down closer to the reality that I had needed to have about myself and the much larger world.
It took a long time to get through the grief that allowed me to come to grips with who I really was. I'm not saying it was an experience every child should have at all. It took time to recover and to grieve over my loss of status. Perhaps it was a rather unique process of recovery from shame, as I learned to better integrate into the flow of traffic, where I wasn't the only kid in the fastest lane that seemed to be built just for me. Where I could learn, as I'm still learning, that it's okay to just be normal. Where to struggle with the wounds of shame IS the normal.
