Taking off the mask of shame
Yesterday for the time in my life I spoke publicly about being a survivor of an abusive relationship. Not just a relationship but a marriage. The thing about abusive relationships is that the physical abuse comes in the later stage of the abuse but all forms of abuse can continue to happen parallel to one another. Why speak out after the big escape and divorce?
My main objective is to raise awareness and to help people recognise even the subtlest forms of abuse and for us to take a step back and ask..what is going on inside of me that is a magnet for continuous abuse. The truth is that choosing to walk away or run away is only the beginning. Even though I had escaped the torture and decided to start my life over, at a location at least 7 hours drive from the home I shared with my ex husband, somehow he still managed to press my buttons and pull me into a web of anger and regret. Even though he could not physically harm me anymore, the damage that was done to me psychologically, emotionally, financially continued to affect my life deeply.
I had given him so much power over me that I was struggling to retrieve it. To move on everyone says you must forgive, but even when you think you have forgiven, anger seeps back in and he took every opportunity to boast about his lifestyle. "Stay focus on your purpose Iris" I would say. He was a vehicle to your transformation...stay focused...But each time I would just be getting my life on track and somehow like a terrible storm, we would wage insults from afar and I would slip into a dip. Like a yoyo this would continue and I realised that there was still something I had not dealt with and that's why he could trigger emotions that would set me on a path to inner destruction. I was still wearing my mask of shame. Shame is a concealed, contagious and self-destructive emotion. Shame is one of the most intensely felt self-conscious emotion (Tangney, 1995), much more than guilt, embarrassment and humiliation. I would even say that shame is worse than anger because it is a neurotic irrational feeling of worthlessness that is inflicted upon an individual as a result of a repeated traumatic experiences.
When you get to the root cause of what the problem is, you are on the path to transforming that aspect of your life. My mask of shame did not originate with abuse, divorce, having to start all over again, the mask of shame usually begins in childhood, when we hold onto something that made us feel so inferior and less than and so we attract people who also wear a mask of shame.
In the heat of an argument years ago, my ex -husband turned to me and said "do you think I'm inferior?" I did not use that word in the argument which he seemed to be having with himself as I wasn't even responding to his rage at that time. I looked at him quite confused. Years later I came to understand it was his projection of himself. People abuse people who they perceive to be weaker than themselves because the abuser is struggling with his or her own self-esteem and beliefs of inferiority. Be careful not to absorb another person's perception of themselves and internalise it and make it your truth. Ask yourself, what emotion do I need to deal with, why do I need to wear this mask of shame? What am I so so afraid of that I have to conceal?
Before talking about this publicly, I had an internal dialogue "If after the talk a woman comes up to me and says SHAME, then I would know that I still have my mask on, because she still sympathises with me instead of seeing me as a symbol of transformation". I had no "shameful" comment so now I know that SHAME no longer has any power over me.
As we go into a period of 16 Days of Activism of NO VIOLENCE against women and children, I urge women to do a deep reflection on ourselves. Change will come from us as conduits for life. Let us start birthing a violent free society.
At the Women's Function Theme 50's Diner at Church Alive Scottburgh, KZN South Africa
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