Fear, the guardian

As I was sitting on my couch, writing in my journal, I was lead down a path where I was able to feel and release some stored shame from childhood.  When we are emotionally wounded and unable to process the pain at the time, we store it in our bodies.  It is walled off until we are able to process it.  Oftentimes it is our fears which are guarding wounds.  The fears are saying "don't go here" it is painful.  For to release a wound, is to go into a wound and re-feel the trauma and pain we were unable to feel at the time.  Wounds which are laid down in childhood are waiting for us to grow into adults so we will be better able to handle the experience of feeling and dealing with the experience.  As adults, we can see things from a bigger and/or wider perspective.  For example, we are able to see our parents as humans who make mistakes and have their own wounds.  As children, we are sponges who just soak up whatever is in our environments.

Especially me.  I am a human emotional sponge.  I am an empath which is having the experience of feeling everyone else's emotions.  It has been a lifelong journey to be able to separate out myself from other people.  I feel emotions intensely and emotions on the lower end of the scale such as anger frighten me.  Combine that with a fear of rejection and you have someone easily emotionally manipulated.

Back to my story.  I was writing about how as  an adolescent and young adulthood, I had no concept of the government, really and how it personally affected my life.  I was attributing that ignorance due to being poor.  First of all, there were no learning opportunities in my environment about our government. Second, I never had things to lose.  We did not own property.  My mother quit her low paying job when I was in the 7th grade.  She never really talked about why.  Somehow we were existing.

During this time frame, we went on food stamps which is a government program.  I had a memory of walking to the grocery store about 1/2 to a mile away and buying groceries.  When it was time to check out, I was absolutely humiliated. I remembered that sometimes my mother would send my sister and  myself to the grocery store with food stamps in hand.  If we wanted to eat, we would have to go through the humiliation of paying with food stamps.  Sat here on my leather, yellow couch, I released a wound tonight form long ago.  Ashamed of myself for having human needs.  The basic human need of food, I was ashamed for needing to eat.  This must be how a homeless person feels when they are seen hunting in a garbage can.  Ashamed for needing to eat.  In fact, I usually fall to pieces when I see a homeless person looking for food.  It is the same thing.  I am no different than the starving homeless person.  They are just a reflection of myself.  Seeing the shame in the homeless person is a reflection of the shame within myself.

Where did I get this shame, I asked myself?  How did I know to be ashamed of using food stamps?  I absorbed it from my mother.  She passed her shame onto me.  It was she that was ashamed which is why she oftentimes sent her children to buy the groceries, so she would not have to experience it herself. She dumped her emotions onto me and I absorbed them.  Not everyone who is on food stamps is ashamed of themselves.  If there would have been discussion about it in our house, that it was presented as not something to be embarrassed and ashamed about, then it would not have been as traumatizing.

Back to fear.   What fears did I have that were protecting this wound?  You know, the fears that say "do not go there, it will be painful."  I believe it is tied into survival needs.  Food and housing which are basic human needs and when my ability to survive is threatened, it is translated into being afraid.  So, for example, the loss of my home in foreclosure was creating all of this fear.  The fear was guarding this wound of being ashamed of myself for needing a house or food.  I have been identifying my being, my beautiful being, with the kind of house I live in. And if the house and food are gone, then there I am again, back to being an ashamed child.

I am working with owning everything I see on the outside as a reflection of myself.  Everything, EVERYTHING that is in my experience, I am creating from the inside.  If we embrace our fears, then the gift on the other side is the release of what it has been guarding.  After the release of a fear, then we will no longer need to create it on the outside in order to see it.  That's the plan, anyway......