I had a mental/psychological break-through this weekend. I'm not sure how much I want to explain in the forum of this blog, but it actually fits pretty well with the topic of being Gracious.
Quickly, I had a work thing on Saturday. The speaker talked about tons of stuff related to working with kids. One thing he talked about was Shame. He listed many, many symptoms of having grown up in a "shame-based culture." I had every one of them.
So now, I'm going to try to work on that. He suggested that the best solution for these people is therapy. I tried that long ago and it did no good. I'm still paying the bills for it, and it did not help me AT ALL. I'm not doing that again, even with a new therapist. No way.
Actually, when I start to think about it, this entire blog experiment is surface level, and what I really need is to go deeper. That's probably why I haven't seen much change over the past 7 months. Being able to take complements (which is what I was thinking when I added "gracious" to my list) would be a RESULT of dealing with all the other crap I apparently have to deal with.
I did just start thinking about the Shame thing, and came up with several memories that helped. I was raised with the idea that what people think of me is, in fact, important. I think that's the biggest reason for most of my "symptoms." These are specifically:
people-pleasing
perfectionism
comparing self to others
setting unrealistically high expectations for self & others
beating self up when things don't go exactly right
not being able to handle it when things don't go your way
several more I can't remember
I have every one of these.
Now what?
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