The pas de deux of shame

Shame is a destructive force, especially when it is re-enforced by someone you love, even more if they are your life partner. If you are uncomfortable and disconcerted by what you are, uncertain about what it makes you, fearful of how others may react, you are made vulnerable. It makes you doubt yourself. It erodes your self-confidence and your self-esteem.

If your partner's reaction is to be ashamed about that within you which they find difficulty in accepting, then they are caught in a double bind: they love you, but they do not love what you are. They want to have the one without having the other, but it cannot be like that. They will not face or embrace what it is they find distasteful within you, but you need it to be faced and embraced, very much need that to be so, to help overcome your own fears because of it - to know that you can be loved as you are. They love you, but reject that in you which they feel is shameful. Because you love them and value their opinion of you, you take on that shame that they feel and it drives you further into a more permanent and damaging shame. Such a poisonous dance for two.

But what if that which is being denied is what your core being is? What if it is about how you were born, how you are made?

Imagine being biologically both male and female in the same body, the one hidden within the other, but no-the-less there, very much there. Now imagine your life partner denies the existence of this and makes any reference to it, any illusion, any sign or mention completely and utterly taboo. Think how that might drive you into feeling shunned. Making you feel that so much as the least mention and you will be completely and totally rejected as an abhorrent object of unmitigated shame.

They have found some form of accommodation with it by exporting their difficulties, by denying that it is there. This puts the onus on you join their game of pretending that it does not exist - or facing being shunned.

That is the pas de deux of shame.

Take no thought

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day [is] the evil thereof.

I was stuck much by this as I sat in the silence last Sunday, it seemed to speak so clearly to my current situation, for I have been much vexed by fears of the future and what might become of me; but uncertainty must be embraced as part of so many lives in these times, and compared to the uncertainties of earlier so much less reasonably so - earlier times of war, times of famine and times of plague. We here in the West have been blessed with almost a lifetime without these. We have come to expect peace and prosperity as being the norm. Yet every time has its uncertainty, even the most stable, for every apparently stable time has within it the potential to collapse into chaos and disorder, which in turn will see a new stability arise from it, but it may be a long time before that emergence is seen, and there may be much suffering before it is achieved.

Joy

Joy lurks hidden in shadow waiting to pounce unexpectedly upon you; frantically you search for her, but the more you seek the less she can be seen, the more allusive she becomes.
Abandoning your quest, she sneaks up on tiptoe and wraps you in the folds of her embrace, the warmth of her soft skin pulsing life into you. She whispers "now" and you are soul lost on the breath of her words, unaware that there is a you any more.