Some of us are blessed with great guilt hormones. There was a time in my life where I was nearly consumed with guilt for being alive. Man, those were hard days and weeks..., yes, years. My guilt hormones were turned on by a religion I grew up with/in that had “guilt” as a main factor. I was not sweet, nor mindful, nor quietly sitting with hands folded in my lap. I was not that girl. I was not that woman. To be alive was to be guilty, was deemed “not enough”, and this cultural, social, disrespect, that flooded my whole being, I had to work very hard to shed off myself. It was terrifying. I had to turn my back on a “God” who was, to me, a monster out to get us no matter how ‘good’ we tried to be. I was guilty for merely being born. The struggle to break free meant to go against every fibre of my being that had been conditioned. It meant I could lose everything, including my children. My children were my only thing in life worth living for. In the ‘turning my back and walking away’, I took the chance that was a huge spiritual chance. In the moment that I broke free, it was as if a huge mountain had been lifted off my soul. I suddenly knew that I was in charge of my soul and needed no mediator between me and my Creator. I dropped the word “God” as it was attached to my soul according to the conditioning. I used “Creator” so as not to identify with that monster God. Don’t think there was not sorrow. There was. And it is not like I have been able to completely unburden myself of the conditioning. I have children who now see their mother as “the Other”, “the one “who could keep them from reaching the highest kingdom of God. It caused, and causes still, them great sorrow, too. But I had to save myself, save my own soul. There is such peace, most times, in knowing I have a personal relationship with my Creator. If I am immersed with those of that conditioning... and, being a mother means there are times I have to be, I sense that guilt trying to winnow its way back into my psyche. It takes great courage and being very Present, to not let it have me drown in that guilt again. I do not let myself be bitter about it, angry and spiteful about it. I have made peace with it as best I can. I know what bravery and courage it took to be in this soulful spiritual space. Once I thought I could not afford to walk away from it. Today, I know I can not afford to let it draw me back in. I am still learning to tamp down the guilt hormone.
The guilt hormone is cortisol. I had not thought of this before. Cortisol is a stress hormone that leads us to freeze, flight, or fight reactions. It is an ancient reaction that kept our ancestors alive in perilous times. Some of us get to a place where we feel persistent guilt over past things we cannot change. We carry guilt like a heavy backpack of reasons we are ‘not enough’, not ‘good’ enough …never were, never can be. It becomes our reason not to take responsibility, in the Present. We stop feeling normal remorse and simply move it to that space of shame and do not have it move us to make things right as soon as possible. Rather than learn from a mistake, we allow it to be a pronouncement of another reason we are not enough, not good enough, and we do not move forward with a positive lesson learned. We refuse to move forward because it feels easier not to. Our sense of self is crippled. We use every ‘evidence’ of our failure to meet the mark as further pronouncement of what we come to see ourself as: a failure. We may have forgotten how to ‘pull up our big girl panties’ and make things right as best we can so that we can live out being a better person tomorrow than we were today. Shame is part of the guilt response…a normal response. What is not normal is that we become satisfied with it and guilt becomes the focal point of every decision, every reaction to every day life, and we would rather feel guilt than take responsibility and cleanse ourself by restitution and return to a knowing that we have done the best we can with the skills we have. That does not mean that we accept that level of maturity. We are meant to be lifelong learners. Every misstep is an opportunity to learn and grow. I figure I have spent a lot of my time with ‘root rot’. We can become stagnant. We almost feel our low self-acceptance is precious. It becomes more precious than the cleansing feeling of making restitution and rising above our human frailties. I do not want that any more. I refuse to deny the lessons offered me. I want peace in my life and I will never have that if I allow myself to live in constant shame…for everything… for even being born. It is an insidious thing. It is lying, at night, trying to go to sleep, but have the judgement of Peter at his pearly gates reading off a tome of our daily errors. We allow it. We ARE in charge of how we see ourselves. It matters not what others think of us. To be happy, purposeful, serene souls, we have to know what we believe is good and right and productive. If we deal with opinion of others as witness to who we are, we are way off the mark. We are not who others think of us. We are what we think of ourselves. We choose to be positive or negative. We choose to let guilt and shame be the center of what we think of ourselves sand we will act accordingly to all be evidence that we choose to accept. Refuse it.
We are meant to be joyful beings. That tired response: “God doesn’t make garbage” really is true. We are here as answer to some ancient ancestor’s prayers. I am sacred. I am necessary. I matter as a part of creation. I choose to think of myself in this light. You choose that too.
©Carol Desjarlais 3.4.24
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