Raised With Shame
Being Raised With Shame
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128 South Main Street • Pearl City, IL
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WILDBERRY FARMS
815-777-1107 • Hanover, IL
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Levan
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8065 Highway 78 South • Stockton, IL
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3626 South Massbach Rd. • Stockton, IL
815-947-3154
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SPAHN & ROSE
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116 W. Queen Ave. • Stockton, IL
815-947-3214
We are proud to support
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8
Throughout my 27-year career of working
with sexually abused women, I find most of
them carry an enormous amount of shame.
Growing up many of them have been
manipulated into believing they didn’t have
unconditional worth. By this I mean, we all
have worth. Not because of what we do,
what we look like, or the things we accomplish. We have worth because we have been
made by God and He values us. Period.
Instead, their value as a human being has
been attached to the manipulation that was
taking place for them to “service” an adult
in their life. Because of this conditional
value, their wellbeing as a valuable and
dignified person was physically and emotionally compromised.
A girl full of shame from a dysfunctional
or “shame-based” childhood carries repetitive messages internally that makes her feel
like she was and is “ unworthy or less than”
other people. She believes she was and is
not worthy of proper care and protection.
She often has grown up believing her purpose was and is to be “used” by others. I
will never forget a sweet 18-year old girl
telling me “All men have ever wanted to
do is play with my body and my mind.” I
wanted to weep. This young woman was so
confused and hopeless about who she was
as a human, and also about her future.
Children are falsely shamed by adults for
a variety of reasons; being curious, being
a non-conformist, for needing what they
needed, for feeling what they felt, for their
body, for spiritual things, and the list goes
on. These children are often raised with
repetitive messages like “you are in the
way,” or “you don’t belong,” or “what you
feel isn’t important.” Sometimes the messages are even more traumatic like “you
exist for my pleasure,” or “you are the
cause of all my problems,” or “I wish you
had never been born.” A child doesn’t get
to choose when she is born or to whom. And
children are sponges and absorb whatever
their caretakers throw at them.
As a child grows they begin the process
of repeating these messages to themselves
and thus internalizing the messages as
their own, and as their truth. When they
approach the teen years they are likely
to “act out” these messages and become
their own abuser. In other words, they have
taken on the responsibility of perpetuating
the message in their own head.
| Illinois Spring/Summer 2013 | abusemagazine.org
When I work with women, often the lies
they believe about themselves are traceable to a variety of adults who repeatedly
scolded them for these things when they
were little. I remember a client telling me
that she struggled with making her bed.
When I explored the issue with her we
found that while she was making her bed
she would hear her mother’s voice in her
head saying, “You never do that right. What
is wrong with you? You are so incompetent.”
So in essence, she had taken on the job of
reinforcing her mother’s dysfunctional message to herself. In the counseling session
I would often say “Wow, you are talking
to yourself for her!” Most of the time the
women I worked with were completely
unaware that their self-talk had become so
destructive and was perpetuating lies from
their childhood. It took some time to get
out from under the oppression these messages created emotionally.
If you are reading this article and saying
to yourself, “That sounds just like me,”
then I want to speak to you about that right
now. I want you to ask yourself, “What are
the shaming messages I am giving myself?”
I want you to know those messages are NOT
your messages. You have borrowed them
from someone in your life that was dysfunctional and confused.
They might have been someone you
loved, or still love, but that does not discount the fact that their messages are lies,
and you don’t have to believe them anymore. What you believe about yourself,
your world and your future is up to you more
then you realize. The Bible says, “When I
was a child I thought as a child… but now
I have put away childish things.” In other
words, you can learn to treat yourself with
the respect and care that you needed when
you were little, but didn’t get. By the way,
you deserved respectful treatment when
you were little, just like any child does.
It’s just that you didn’t get it, because the
people around you weren’t able to give it to
you. So its time to break the cycle.
YOU
CAN DO IT!
Source: Ruth Harbor – www.ruthharbor.org