we are the wheelchair people
INADEQUACY
FEELING BAD
WRONG DIRECTION
WHEEL CHAIR PEOPLE
OUR LIMITS
MEN vs WOMEN
SHAMING BEHAVIOR
WE ARE THE WHEELCHAIR PEOPLE
Instead of acknowledging, validating and healing our emotions towards feeling flawed, hurt, injured, incomplete, inadequate and damaged we often rationalize and build defenses in order to insulate our selves from those situations and people who cause us to feel inadequate or shameful.
Let’s call it “feeling bad” or if you are French then “not good”. The entire topic concerning our feelings and emotions of being hurt, flawed, incomplete, inadequate or damaged is so very difficult to share with people that we should use different and safer words to describe these feelings and emotions. For simplification and communication purposes lets just use the words “feeling bad”.
Fear of feeling bad causes us to micromanagement our environment in order to produce an out come which allows us to live in psychological peace. We all know that it is important to connect with our own feelings but when it comes to our “bad feelings” we very often try to separate them from us. Simply, we try to defend against, diminish, rationalize, intellectualize and forget the bad things that happen to us.
Here are the commonly used defensives we use to protect us from our bad feelings. We use explosive hatred, anger and the transfer of blame to protect us from further exposure of our bad feelings. We jockey for social position in order to gain self esteem and self worth. We try to escape through addictive/compulsive behavior in order to temporarily forget our bad feelings. We use perfectionism to compensate for fear of inherently defective feelings.
It is not so much that we are running away from life but that we are running towards life but in the “wrong direction”. People are draw towards aliveness and self fulfillment but it can be very confusing as to where we can find the true path to our enlightenment. Our defensive behaviors take us places far away from any real resolve to our true issues. We tend to defend against bad feelings rather than wallow in them for any length of time. Most importantly we must understand that we are living in our own uniquely designed psychological wheel chairs where we must learn to acknowledge, validate and heal our bad feelings.
Our bad feelings about our life and our self often remind us of our uncontrollable limitations. We can choose to continue to feel bad about our limits or we can learn to heal and handle our limitations. It is a fact, a person forced to be in a wheel chair can learn to accept that he/she simply can’t get around like walking people. The “wheeled chaired people” don’t have to feel bad about their inflictions. They can face and heal these bad feelings and learn to embrace life and lead fulfilling lives. These fatalistic alterations to or life do not mark the end to our fulfillment. We are taught that if we just work or try hard enough we can BE what ever we want to BE. There is nothing wrong with positive goal acceptance but we have to understand it as a “goal” and not an invitation to build limitless defenses around us in order to stream line our path to that idealized “goal”.
Without realizing, mentally, we all are like the “wheel chair people”. Flawed, hurt, injured, incomplete, inadequate and damaged. Unconsciously, sometimes our fear of these feelings run ramped in our thoughts and it is not easy to face our changing limitations and feelings of inadequacy. It is not a matter of giving up and accepting the uncontrollable. It is a matte of facing our life situation and selecting from the healthiest alternatives. We need to adjust our mind set and learn to embrace our differences as being okay and even acceptable.
Men and women experience and react to their feels of being hurt, flawed, incomplete, inadequate or damaged in significantly differently ways based on their internalized sexual identification. Here we have men and women are riding along or carry on in two different kinds of wheel chairs which don’t equally allow them to access all the “on and off ramps” in the same way.
Our gender cultural socialization causes men and women to react to their bad feelings in vastly different ways. Men, in North America, can “feel bad” for crying, expressing fear, need for validation and always needing a close emotional association. Also, Women in our traditional culture can be made to feel bad for expressing anger, asserting power or expressing themselves as being different from their partner. No wonder men and women have naturally different perspectives.
We have this huge need to bond with our partner in order to work out our psychological needs. As well, we also have a major need to complete those unresolved issues we had with our earlier care givers and other important relationships along the way. Naturally we are attracted to people who remind us of these earlier dynamics and allow us to attempt to resolve our earlier emotional conflicts with a much more successful outcome.
We must learn to live with our differences and stop feeling that something is wrong or that we must change. Men and women come from emotionally different places and it takes great empathy and understanding in order to help our partner to live with these differences. As well, we have our unresolved childhood issues which perpetuate a reenactment of our past emotions and can alter or interfere with our true interpretation of the present.
Instead of acknowledging, validating and healing our differences, hurts and feelings of being incomplete or inadequate, we often rationalize and build defenses in order to insulate our selves from those situations and people who cause us to feel inadequate, shamed or bad about our self. Our defensive behaviors have the net effect of pushing people away. Even given boundless empathy and understanding by our partner, there is a point where continued protective and defensive behavior will create the same defensive behavior and bad feelings towards the other person. This is where our miss-understood wheel chair behaviors lead us towards the destruction of our partnerships.
OUR SHAMING BEHAVIOR
Our partner helps define our self worth. Moreover, without awareness people are constantly seeking validation of their feelings, needs, and aspirations. Given all the interactions possible between partners there are an endless amount of opportunities for acceptance and empathy or rejection and shaming.
Interestingly, our life partners are most often the best reflection of our own lives. The people closest to us and especially those people, who love us, give us the best clues to our inner self. However, we must understand that these same people may not be able to meet our needs, nor understand, empathize or accept our actions, feelings or thoughts. These are two separate issues.
Usually, our partner knows our strengths and weaknesses better than anyone and can use this knowledge about us towards our benefit or detriment. The more we trust and value our partner, the more likely we are to believe and rely on the analysis of that partner. Our partner holds the knowledge and ability to push our buttons and place into question our meaningfulness and significance as a person. Our life partner can cause us to conjure up and manipulate our inner “self” feelings concerning adequacy or shame.
Often, in close interpersonnal relationships we shame our partner with no conscious understand of the actual consequence of our action. Mostly our intention is not to shame our partner but to meet our own needs or validate our feelings and aspirations. Since our partner is the primary target for our projected feelings about our self, he/she will always be treated like the proving ground for our feelings and emotions about our self. A common form of projection occurs when a partner is angry over some work mishap and then goes home and “takes it out” on his/her partner. Just as we can project our feelings of anger on our partner, we also can project our feelings of inadequacy and shame. As a person when we feel inadequate we are experiecing shame.
A quick note. In any act of shaming their is a sender, receiver and a message. In order to consciously experience shame we must be able to interprete an act of shaming as being shamful. This is often not the case. After years of being shamed by the same person or situation we disregard this shame and this contributes to the development of the Stockholm Syndrome. Stockholm syndrome is a term used to describe a real paradoxical psychological phenomenon wherein hostages express empathy and have positive feelings towards their captors, sometimes to the point of defending them
It is possible for a partner to shame the other partner by telling him/her that they “don’t care”. Thus, this attack of the partner’s “ability or capacity” to care and love conjures up feelings of hurtfulness and feelings of inadequacy. Men & women don’t understand this total rejection by their partner because he/she embraces their “love feelings” with great devotion but express these feelings in often vastly different ways.
Men can especially experience these hurt feelings of shame from a character attack of their “love feelings” because they are already experiencing their own battle over internalized feelings with respect to learned aggressiveness and shamelessness. Men are brought up to act aggressively in work, play and in their love lives. Men are often brought up to embrace and initiate aggressive behavior which promotes a shameless demeanor. Aggressive men can be interpreted as uncaring and insensitive but this is simply not true.
So by telling your male partner that he categorically doesn’t care; touches his shameful feelings about himself, triggers similar unconscious shame feelings and triggers defensive behaviors. In many ways, this is similar to telling your child that he/she is unlovable. When we categorically condemn our partner for being uncaring or unloving then we are shaming them.
Men simple don’t process and address their thoughts and feelings like women. Generally, men are not as emotionally invested in the same way as women. They seek out validation in a different way. Most importantly, for this analysis, men experience and process shame in a different way than women.
Moreover, men who are shamed by their female partner can act, in the longer run, withdrawn when confronted by an aggressive woman. It is in man’s nature and training to physically and mentally react when confronted with aggression. Thus, men can react with extreme caution for fear of further confrontation. Their instincts take over, like a lion, they will not move but watch at full attention. With their adrenalin raging and on the edge of danger they will stop dead in their tracks before moving further. These hesitations can then be followed by subsequent and stronger attacks by the female partner which further renders him predisposed toward further inaction.
Next time you treat you partner as unloving or uncaring take a closer look at how alert and hurt he is from your words. His reactions may well seem like he is even over reacting or reacting about the wrong thing. This is because you have touched his shameful feelings about himself and he has pushed the smaller issues of what you are talking to the side.
It is valid to say that when faced with shaming mistrust from our partner we can or will tend to be cautious and not further expose our selves in order to avoid further erosion, dismissal or down grading of the remaining valued parts of our self esteem. Then, when we send our partner into emotional hiding we are shaming him/her by not allowing them to express them selves in an open forum. This kind of behavior is most common among couples that are in the latter stages of separating from each other. It is in this stage, that couples are usually hurting and shaming each other.
The most common reason why women experience shame from men is because of inadequate validation of their thoughts and feelings. A male partner may thus treat his female partner as thought she is mentally weak for needing unnecessary validation and consideration. As well, women can be shamed by being ignored or denied equal consideration because they are simply "shut out". Women are more comfortable in validating the feelings and emotions of their families and friends. They are more empathy and relationship oriented as a direct result of their emotional development and child development skills. Men who do not recognize nor accept these feelings by women are often unknowingly shaming their female partner.
It is important to be able to recognize and be somewhat knowledgeable of our conscious and unconscious shaming feelings and behaviors. We are all continuously guilty of OUR SHAMING BEHAVIOR in some form or another because of our need to continuously assert and prove our self in the external world. In the end, we can only recognize and acknowledge our responsibility in shaming and hope that our partner understands and empathizes with our situation.
The author wants to bring to light the working concepts of self psychology. Through our understanding, healing and reshaping of our selves, we can reclaim those disowned parts of our real self and bring greater fulfillment in our relationships.
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