So last night,one of my little people that I’ve known for some time now and has always insisted is not impacted by his trauma, began to talk about what he calls the “The Vault” in his brain. He talked about how this is locked down tight and has all the bad stuff in it. The Vault is something he feels he can choose to open but will just open on it’s own sometimes, flooding him with all of the bad he wants to escape. He said sometimes it is just too heavy but insisted that it’s better to keep The Vault than have to see all of the darkness inside of it.
I was blown away by his insight and while I have referred to it as “Our Closet”, the idea remains the same. The way I explain it is this:
Have you ever been asked to clean your room and you super duper didn’t want to so you shoved everything in the closet? The answer for most people is “absolutely” – for me its, I’m an adult and I still do this sometimes because honestly I HATE cleaning. (Occasionally, I have a kid who looks at me weird and says “no” and I wonder what their parents are doing that I need to be doing 🙂 ) The next question is could we clean like that every time? No…why? Because at first it’s just annoying right, you go to find something and you can’t because stuff is everywhere, or maybe, it gets a little worse to the point that you grab something and something else falls out at you. Or perhaps, we’ve done it so much and for so long that we can’t even shut the door anymore or it bursts open on it’s own and the mess comes flying out on top of us.
Why are we talking about a closet? Because, just as my little person shared, we all have one but instead of clothes, toys and shoes, we push away our trauma and our emotions because people expect a “clean room”. Dealing with the mess isn’t fun but the more we push it away, the harder it gets, the more impacts us and we lose control over it. Just like his vault opens sometimes, our trauma, if we don’t attend to it, will make the choice for us to deal with it, and usually at the worst times and in the worst ways.
We like to pretend that if we just ignore it, try to not think about it, at some point it will fade; but it doesn’t. I also asked my little person to do something last night for me. I asked him to hold out a glitter bottle straight out in front of him.
“Is it heavy?”
“No, not really at all.”
“Okay, keep holding it…what’s happening?”
“Well it’s getting heavier.”
Exactly, it may be the same “weight” but the longer we hold onto our trauma, our emotions, the heavier they will get and the harder they will be to ignore. I often at this point, will reach out and hold the bottle with them.
“What happened now?”
“Well it got easier to hold.”
Brene Brown (probably one of my favorite humans on this Earth) in her book, The Gifts of Imperfection, says this:
Shame needs three things to grow out of control in our lives: secrececy, silence and judgement. When something shaming happens we keep it locked up, it festers and grows. It consumes us. We need to share our experience. Shame happens between people, and it heals between people. If we can find someone who has earned the right to hear our story. We need to tell it. Shame loses power when it is spoken.
At first, my little person all struggled with this, “it’s not shame, I know that, shame is when you do something bad.” Brene defines it: “Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging. Guilt = I did something bad. Shame = I am bad.”
We hide, and hide from, our feelings, our trauma, our experience because we feel that we are not enough and if someone just knew our story, they would see that too. We blame ourselves for what we went through because we weren’t strong enough to stop it, or because we feel we deserved it, because we feel we are a burden or our feelings aren’t valid.
My little person and I talked a lot last night that I would love to say that it will just go away. That as he wanted to argue, we get used to it, so it’s easier to hold onto the weight, but in the end, it only gets heavier and harder to hold. We are running from ball and chain that is attached to us through a mud puddle.
Healing happens when we find someone who has earned the right to our story and we start to share it. Because shame can’t exist without secrecy, silence and judgement. We have to share it, speak it and find someone who can hold that space with us and support us through it. And when we put shame down, we get to start to live. We become lighter and our life is no longer focused on just surviving.