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Viliam comments on Open Thread, January 4-10, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Dealing with shame by embracing a vulnerability, fear of vulnerability and letting that shame be
I feel full of shame which I can’t explain. I feel that it is linked to my gender identity, sexuality and/or body.
why
When I asked Google why I feel this shame with search terms linked to the above suspicions, I landed on a page suggesting that shame in adult males is linked to child abuse. The point that really hit home was the comment: ‘’Males are not supposed to feel vulnerable or fearful about sex.’’ Was I sexually abused as a child? I didn’t think so. Though, one link on the page, hyperlinked as ‘sorting it out for yourself’appealed to my confusion. I clicked on it and reconsidered. There are some circumstances from my childhood that I had not considered child abuse that I can reframe as child abuse. The article disclaims that fussng over labelling is not particularly helpful. But is thist a healthy reframe or experience to identify with? That remains unclear to me. Those articles were not so helpful other than to indicate a dead end.
how
Rather than ask why, I reckoned it may be more prudent to ask how. How can I overcome these feelings. My line of questioning was influence by the memory of a friend who once mused that she is grateful for all the relationships that didn’t work out, because there was something good in all of them, something to learn from, and something which helped her grow...or something like that. I supposed that my feelings of inadequacy may relate to my past relationship experiences...and lack thereof. Another Google search yielded neat articles about learning from relationships that didn’t work and healing past relationships. I particularly like the way the latter article summarised it’s key points visually at the start. So, I looked for other articles in the same category on that website and found two articles that I reckon will be useful guides. The first is about survivng bad dates and healing childhood scars that create bad adultrelationships. I feel good about what I have seen here. So, I hope it will be useful to ya’ll.
The key points for me in this research experience are the points given for what not to do in one (but not the other) expert beacon articles. The what todos are fairly available knowledge. I reckon people are less likely to condemn poor ways of doing things in real life. So, the article was relatively valuable, and invoked a stopping rule by cutting off the reason I was searching for an answer in the first place - the drive to* *suppress these feeling of vulnerability, that I feel, while focussing on the negative**
DON’T
"Abuse" is not a binary thing; it's a scale. Just because you were not at one extreme, does not mean that you were necessarily at the other extreme or near it.
Depends on how you are going to react to the label. The healthy aspect is that it may allow you to see causalities in your life that you have previously censored from yourself; and then you can take specific actions to untangle the problems.
The unhealthy aspect is if you take it with a "fixed mindset", and start crying about your past ("I am tainted, forever tainted"), or in extreme case if you start building some ideology of revenge against the whole evil society (or parts of the society) responsible for not preventing the bad things from happening to you.
Seems like you are choosing generally the good direction.
Okay, I wouldn't go that far. ("What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger", Just World Hypothesis, etc.) It is good to react to bad things by deriving useful lessons. However, in a parallel universe you could have good things happen to you, and still derive useful lessons from them. (Or you could derive useful lessons from bad things that happened to other people.) Bad things are simply bad things, no need to excuse them, no cosmic balance that needed to happen to make you a better person. That would mean denying that those things were actually bad.
Being able to turn a bad experience into a good lesson, is a good message about you and your abilities. Not about the bad experience per se. A different person could remain broken by the same experience.
I'd say: Use the past to extract useful information and move on, not to build a narrative for your life.
I'd say: Admit that some people have fucked up, but don't waste your time planning revenge (it is usually not the optimal thing to do with your life). Maybe don't even analyze too much who or how precisely have fucked up, if such analysis would take too much energy.
I agree.
Depends on context. Feelling vulnerable (in situations where you feel safe) is okay. In public, we all wear masks, so it would be inappropriate to e.g. start thinking about your childhood when you are at a job interview.
Keep focused on where you want to get.
That really depends. Authenticity is often more useful than wearing a mask.
In present politics Trump is successful while being relatively authentic. There's a lot of power in it.
Respectfully, Trump is very skilled at sounding authentic. I'm not sure that he is authentic, but some other politician could easily be more authentic while lacking Trump's skills at sounding authentic.