Shame vs Humiliation

I've started reading a book by Brene Brown, well, another book by her. I already read the book on Daring Greatly, which is the new one, and now I am going back to a previous one, called I Thought It Was Just Me. I suspect that I should have read them in order, but I'm approaching this stuff in the way that I can stomach it, which means sneaking up on it, I suppose.

I think that I am going to spend a long time with this book. I already can see that I am going to have to read it again once I finish it. But for now, I'm going to do a little processing, aka, venting from just the first few chapters. I suppose this is my reader beware, and also, that I probably won't want to explain it either.

To start with some definitions, humiliation is "I did something bad". (aka not in line with my values or unjustly accused.) shame is "I am bad." (aka my identity.)

This really puts a completely different perspective on the whole last year at St. David's. I think right up to the very end, I was merely humiliated. But the Thursday meeting was the biggest betrayal of my own identity I think I have ever endured. To have, in fact, worked through so much of the shame in my own life and my spiritual autobiography laid that all out, and that is what I talked about for the whole 3 hours we spent in discernment, which I really don't think that it can even be called discernment, and then to have a group of people who hadn't really been paying me any attention so completely throw me over. Well, I am fairly inarticulate about this at the moment.

It boggles my mind that I am so crushed by such miserable people. Despite the fact that I know it was a totally different church, and one I would never willingly attend, it was still, in some contiguous way, my grounding. To be told, we don't see the priesthood, but we see this other thing and we should explore that, or even better, we don't see the priesthood, how could we be exploring this differently, which was the conversation I was prepared to have - that would have been fine, that would not have impacted my identity.  But to get back, sorry, we weren't really paying attention and you don't make any sense, and maybe you are a little psychologically unbalanced since you told us about your mental health FROM THE VERY FIRST DAY but we seem to have completely not heard a word you said. I have never felt so invisible in my entire life and to have Barbara and Sara say that, well, I never did understand those women, but to have Pat and Jean say that. That is what hurt the worst.

But really, I hadn't thought about the experience as being shame filled. I hadn't really thought about it in terms of all the years and people that had invested in me and my process and my feeling that I had let them down. I know that they don't actually feel that way about me, but it doesn't seem to make me feel any better.

I think this does go some way to explaining why I can't seem to go back to church. I know, from being at seminary and talking to so many priests about their formation and experiences as ordained people that they are people who have been deeply formed by shaming experiences. And if they aren't, I think they may be psychopaths, in the clinical sense, not in the murderous one. I just don't even know how to talk to people right now who let that happen to them, because I can't figure out why I couldn't. And I either don't know how to respect anyone who lets that happen to them, or I don't know how they would ever understand my choice not to take that abuse, since they so clearly did. I like to say that all the therapy the church insisted on made me too healthy to be in the church, and I wish I could think that is a joke, but it also makes me angry because I was perfectly horribly broken before all that therapy and would and did gladly let people walk all over me.

I don't know how to go back to a place that I know is so evil. Shannon keeps telling me that it's hard once you have seen behind the curtain. But, no wonder it's so full of priests who hoard power and parishioners, no wonder they are so petty so often. What a terrible thing to do to people and then ask them to model the love and forgiveness of Christ. I think it would be kinder to just nail people up on a literal cross and the ones who don't physically die, give them the collar. At least it would be less subjective. At least we wouldn't be asking people to expose their bellies and get stepped on in order to prove themselves.

I don't know how to go back to the place in me that felt so whole. I miss my own self so much. I think suffering is over rated. And I'd like something else please.