Whose Rules Are You Living By?

Every recovering person carries the heavy burden of inner-shame. We were shamed as children and it easily enslaved us into feeling very bad about ourselves. To this day, we are still struggling with identifying and disabling the shame that tells us we are worthless mistakes.

In order to eliminate this shame, we need to identify the source of it and what it is that keeps stoking it inside of us. The source of my shame is pretty easy to identify: My parents, certain teachings of the Church (or the way they were skewed by various authority figures), bullies, teachers, certain societal norms, etc. But identifying what inside of me keeps stoking my shame is more difficult.

Turns out, for many of us the truth of what’s stoking our shame is this: Someone else’s rules. I now understand that I have continued to shame myself, just like my mother did, because I am still living by many of the rules she forced upon me as God given truth. In reality, these rules were my mother’s truth, not God’s. They were often false truths that had been handed down to her, that she had chosen to fearfully embrace, and that she then chose to enforce on me.

I doubt my mother ever challenged the rules she was taught as a child. And for the most part, neither have I. But I realize now, that much of the internal shame I still experience is tied to rules I’ve never successfully challenged.

It’s important that we get in touch with the rules in our heads that cause us to feel shame and guilt. Once we examine those rules, we can challenge them and determine by our own informed conscience which rules are true and which rules are false. Once we determine that we don’t believe in a rule that we are still blindly following, we can acknowledge that the rule belongs to someone else (a parent, teacher, etc.) and we can let go of it.

Letting go takes work and time on our behalf. But we can successfully replace old rules that were never ours to own, with rules and beliefs that are truly valid. In doing so, we will be consciously eliminating a great source of our inner-shame. We will then be more at peace with ourselves, feel better in our skin and we will be happier living in closer union with our Higher Power, who loves us as we are— not as we were wrongly told we had to be to be acceptable.