shame

Escaping Toxic Guilt by Susan Carrell

I came across Susan Carell’s book Escaping Toxic Guilt while scouring the library shelves for something on topic of dealing with shame. Guilt and shame are close relatives. According to Carell:

Guilt is feeling bad about something you’ve done, while shame is feeling bad about who you are.

Hmm… I could relate to that. Furthermore, toxic guilt occurs when we feel guilty even though we aren’t doing anything that violates our own value system. Often the source of this guilt is conditioning by controlling parents or other domineering authority figures in our childhood.

(more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

The Dance of Fear by Harriet Lerner

The main thing I got from Harriet Lerner’s book The Dance of Fear is that fear and anxiety aren’t just individual problems; they totally impact the way we relate with each other. Anxiety is contagious and gets passed around between us whenever we interact with anxious people. Families, companies, organisations, churches, countries and social groups of all kinds can become infected with anxiety that affects everyone in the group. When a social system becomes fear-based or shame-based, everyone in it suffers.

Fear can be like a dance, often involving other people

Since anxiety causes suffering, we naturally want to escape. One way of escaping is to dump our anxiety on someone else. Being a sensitive person, I’ve always been susceptible to having other people’s anxiety dumped on me, but it’s only now that I’m learning to recognise when this is happening.

This book helped me identify such a situation once when I volunteered to lead a public speaking training course run by my Toastmaster’s club. I had run it successfully several times before and we always got great feedback from the participants on how valuable it was. But this time I wanted to make it even better by talking more about how anxiety works physiologically, and throwing in some exercises I had learned during my acting classes to help deal with fear right up front.

(more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Recover From Childhood Emotional Abandonment

One of the most challenging childhood scenarios for a man to recover from is emotional abandonment. I grew up in a household where emotions weren’t dealt with openly in ways that felt safe to me, so I know this scenario backwards; and so do most of my clients.

However, emotional abandonment can be hard to spot unless you know what you’re looking for so to find out whether emotional abandonment in childhood could still be affecting your adult life, check out my article on 12 Adult Signs That You’ve Experienced Emotional Abandonment In Childhood.

(more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Deal With Someone Who is Upset

Many men (and women for that matter) in our society don’t deal with their emotions well. As a result, most of us are walking around carrying an ever-increasing accumulation of emotional baggage that can get triggered even in seemingly innocuous situations.

People who are upset need empathy, not judgement.

For an example where this happened to me, check out my recent story on Why I Got Upset In Guitar Class. I’ll wait here while you do that…

… OK!

Dealing with people who are upset can be very challenging. Part of what makes this challenging is that other people’s emotional upset is likely to trigger our own unresolved emotional baggage. This is why many people try to shut down expressions of unpleasant emotions in other people or resort to “rescuing” behaviors intended to stem the flow of another person’s feelings that are making us uncomfortable. Naive rescuers often think they are “helping” because they see the upset person appearing less outwardly distressed; but the upset person is simply internalizing their emotional pain which has disastrous consequences for everyone in the long run.

(more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

Why I Got Upset In Guitar Class

I’m a full time music student at the moment, and I’m loving learning how to write songs, perform in front of people and express myself through music. Music is great because it deals with both the analytical and emotional side of our brain.

Becoming a rock star isn’t all riffs and distortion. There’s conflict with other musicians to navigate too.

However, the irrational nature of emotions means that they don’t always arise just when we want them to. Most of us are still carrying unhealed emotional baggage from our past which can get triggered in what might otherwise seem fairly innocuous situations. This can make dealing with unexpected upsets challenging both in ourselves and in other people.

In yesterday’s guitar class, I got triggered by my teacher’s response to what I though was a fairly intelligent question about whether the best way to improvise over a chord sequence in a major key would be by using the associated relative minor scale. My engineering brain thought that this would lead to less potential dissonance; but for any other budding musicians out there the answer turns out to be No: you use the minor pentatonic scale of the same key.

(more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Deal With Being Lonely

I recently joined a men’s group which now meets at my house once a fortnight. The idea of joining such a group was suggested to me a few years ago by a mentor of mine and they’re highly regarded in the men’s work movement and in books like Steve Biddulph’s excellent book Manhood. A few years back I started hearing about them all over the place and when I start hearing about an idea from multiple sources, I begin paying attention.

You don't need to be alone in your loneliness.

You don’t need to be alone in your loneliness.

It’s taken a few attempts to find a group that really works for me; this is my third men’s group in fact. The first one didn’t meet often enough to really get traction, and some of the participants seemed so stuck in their own ways that I found the meetings very frustrating. We spent tremendous amounts of time on situations that had seemingly trivial solutions, like one guy who was in a lengthy and expensive legal battle with his sister. Even on the basis of his telling of his side of the story, we all thought he owed her an apology rather than more litigation. He didn’t see it, and instead wanted our moral support for continuing to attack her in the courts over a dodgy property deal that he had engineered. I didn’t enjoy being around guys who were wasting their energy on crap like that.

(more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Overcome Your Fear Of Being Seen

If you’re anything like me, you feel self-conscious in front of other people. Last time I caught an airplane, I went to the front of the plane to use the toilet right behind the cockpit, and had to wait at the front because it was already occupied. I felt that rush of shame on realizing that the other passengers could see me waiting. Somehow in my head, I imagined them thinking the worst; even though they probably weren’t thinking about me at all.

In situations like this I like to pretend that other people are always thinking great things like “Wow, he’s awesome!” when they look at me, and while that’s helpful, it hasn’t entirely made the anxiety go away. One of my favorite hobbies is playing music, and it recently gave me the opportunity to confront this fear head-on.

I’ve been playing guitar for around 6 years now, and I can strum up a decent tune on my own or playing with friends. But I get nervous playing in public; I feel anxious and my mind wanders through a series of stressful thoughts like “I’m crap!”, “I’ll mess it up”, “They (whoever is listening) won’t like it”, “They won’t like the song I’ve chosen”, “My singing sounds bad” etc etc.

It’s exhausting!

The first time I played guitar for an audience was in my guitar class, and although I was nervous it went really well. The teacher wanted us to have a good experience playing in front of people, and the best way to conquer the fear was to play in front of a friendly crowd who were all in the same boat as beginner guitarists.

The next time I played in front of an audience was in a comedy club, doing a variation of American Pie with humorous lyrics. I was so nervous that my left hand couldn’t make the chord shapes, and the anxiety got worse the longer I played. One of the guys in the audience yelled out “You’ve killed a great song!”

Damn hecklers! Damn anxiety! Damn damn damn damn damn!

It was a few years before I wanted to play in front of an audience again.

(more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

Read Healing The Shame That Binds You by John Bradshaw

Let’s have a bit of a chat about a massive topic that undermines self-confidence and that is called shame. And in addition to just talking about it, I reckon that there’s a book you should read about it, which is this one: It’s called Healing The Shame That Binds You by John Bradshaw, and it’s an absolute classic in the area of dealing with this nasty substance called toxic shame.

(more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

How Your Emotions Work

Hi, I’m Graham. I had 18 years of formal education – that’s 12 years of primary and high school, and then another six years at university studying engineering – and during that time, I learnt a lot about how to think but very little about how to feel or how my emotions worked.

In fact, I can’t remember in that entire time a single class where I sat down and had a teacher teach me how my emotions work.

Now, possibly maybe in art classes or in music classes or maybe even in English they might’ve come close, but really nothing all that direct and concrete.

And that’s a shame because, fundamentally as humans, we’re all driven by our emotions. All our behavior is an attempt to either move towards pleasure or move away from pain.

So emotions are absolutely key to getting what we want in life. They’re also the key to a successful relationship, especially with women.

So in the rest of this article, I’m going to give you a quick introduction into how your emotions work.

(more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

The Biggest Factor That Undermines Self-Confidence

Hey there, it’s Graham here. Now, if you’re interested in making some serious inroads into boosting your self-confidence, then you’ve come to the right place because what I want to do is talk about the number 1 factor that undermines our self-confidence the most. And it’s an interesting one because very, very few people are even prepared to talk about it. So you’re probably wondering, “Well, what is it?” Well, it’s very simple. In one word, the problem is shame.

Now, you probably recognize shame as a feeling of embarrassment or as a feeling of inhibition that holds you back from doing things sometimes, and it’s often accompanied by the thought in your head of “What are people going to think? If I do what I want to do, if I act on my impulses, then what are people going to think?”

(more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago