Soulshine

   Feelings are my friends. Say it over and over. Make it your daily mantra. We humans have been blessed by God with a myriad of feelings— all of which are present to help us process life and grow into healthy mental and emotional states. Yet, many of us learn at a very young age to avoid our feelings at all costs. We learn to run from them or to turn them off completely. Either way we end up become emotional pressure-cookers.    Emotionally unavailable people are left feeling nothing but an underlying numbness or shame-based anxiety. Sooner or later suppressed feelings cause us to explode into anger. This anger always ensures that shame will raise its ugly head and stare us in the eyes. And if we are unable to face this shame, we will run from the shame and into the arms of our addiction of choice.     What most of us fail to understand is that every time we are greeted by an uncomfortable feeling, like shame or guilt, we anxiously reach for the fire...

As I’ve emphasized before, addiction is an emotional dis-ease, and the primary emotion that fuels addictive behaviors is shame. So let’s define shame. According to Webster’s Dictionary shame is a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety. Merle Fossum and Marilyn Mason say in their book  Facing Shame  that "While guilt is a painful feeling of regret and responsibility for one's actions, shame is a painful feeling about oneself as a person." I agree with Fossum and Mason. Guilt is an emotional that arises when we realize we have said or done something hurtful or wrong. Guilt is primarily about our behavior, which we can change. It’s true that we can be ashamed of something we’ve said or done, or failed to say or do, but guilt is the primary feeling that motivates us to be responsible for our bad behavior. Shame, on the other hand, is a devastating feeling about our own defectiveness or inadequacy as a person. Shame is ...