How to deal with shame?

[Wekz]

Does anyone know a good way to deal with shame? Its a constant feeling for me, and i dont know how to get rid of it. I cant even identify mostly what i am ashamed about, its just there, all the time.

[Psyche_92]

No feeling will subside if you keep pushing it away or want to get rid of it. You not wanting to feel ashamed = keep feeling ashamed. Rejection will keep it alive.

Edited August 22, 2019 by Psyche_92

[Dwarniel]

Teal Swan have huge red flags in many ways, but she actually has really good videos on shame on YouTube, I would reccomend to do a quick search. Word of advice: radical open mindedness needed, she's kinda "woo woo" ;p

[Wekz]

Ive watched her videos, but nothing seems to help...

[BjarkeT]

@Psyche_92 I agree with this.

A good way is to perhaps fully feel the emotion with zero resistance. To move on from pain you have to face it.

[Dwarniel]

Just now, Wekz said:

Ive watched her videos, but nothing seems to help...

I'm sorry to hear that... Did you watch Leos video - how to deal with powerful negative emotions? 

[Fishy]

Read "Letting Go" by Richard Dawkins

[Space]

3 hours ago, Wekz said:

Does anyone know a good way to deal with shame? Its a constant feeling for me, and i dont know how to get rid of it. I cant even identify mostly what i am ashamed about, its just there, all the time.

What Psyche_92 said is definitely the way to go. But this is only half of it. You need to stop resisting the thoughts and feelings. But you must also learn to wholly, fully and totally accept and love the situation that you feel shame about. This may be the only way to overcome feelings of shame. Even if there is no particular situation you're feeling shame about, love and accept that. This has to be done really honestly and genuinely. It is completely possible to cultivate a deep sense of acceptance and love for it. You must not fake this acceptance and love, or imagine your shame in some new light or in some idealistic way. Rather accept and love it for how it is, completely non-judgmentally. Literally smile and laugh at your shame feelings in a loving, caring way. 

I would also say that because you seem a little unclear about what this shame links to, you really need to sit down and seriously contemplate it. Like, actually sit down with a pad and pen and write down all your thoughts to 'why am I creating these feelings of shame?', 'what do I really, honestly feel ashamed about?'. Do this for a good 45 minutes, maybe every day for a week. It's really worth it.

Edited August 22, 2019 by Space

[Nahm]

@Wekz Is there a thought story, memories, associated?

[Zigzag Idiot]

[possibilities]

For me its just:

1. transcendence

2. synthesis

3. reorganisation

It might be too advanced for some people though but I won't make guesses as to where you are.

Reality is the hardest thing for a human experiencing negative emotions but to the degree that they can continually get themselves to stare back at the dragon that has awoken from the fire trying to bring them down, they will be a slayer which will inevitably result in their triumph.

Run across the hot coals, even better, gently walk across them with a grit in your teeth just to show it can't bring you down.

Remember that triumph has many positive benefits associated with it, its like muscle training, you get stronger the more reps you do.

 

 

[possibilities]

For me its like, see pain as a teacher not for something to therapise yourself over until you're like "oh I feel good now"

To me that's BS propaganda that's being pedaled to the masses to make them feel better.

Pain is my friend, I say fuck those who see it as masochistic, they're misinformed. ALL aspects of existence are teachers to me so why should pain be any different?

Once someones relationship with pain changes to this end their ability to grow as a human being will do a complete 180.

There isn't enough time in life not to have this kind of relationship with pain, we've all got a lot of growing, expanding and evolving to do. Sometimes you can't just walk around the wall, simple tricks that people who prey on other peoples weaknesses sell, you gotta go through it! Even if you crack your head open, if that's what truly needs to be done then to me its got to be done!

There's a zero excuses policy when it comes to pain, all excuses are subtle ways that the mind tries to make you avoid that pain.

I am the devil, me as a human being, thus my greatest actualisation will come in facing pain and being triumphant over my regular human condition.

Peace out

[possibilities]

The following sums my previous two comments well, its an interesting subject that I'll document my thoughts to so I can articulate better next time.

This might not all make sense to you in the moment, and it doesn't have to, but overtime if you think about it more they'll be incredibly valuable positions to have. Peace

How I reckon you need to look at it is as follows:

If anything all there is is your awareness, everything else is merely masquerading as yourself.

To take proper ‘control’ here you have to have a good understanding of what your body-mind is otherwise you’re going to be misguided like so many other people are and like I was in the past.

To me every aspect of myself outside of my awareness is simply a muscle, a muscle that I can influence and grow overtime. This is in line with considering life in terms of its physical forms, we are after all, clumps of mass of various proportions right down to electrical activity in our minds which itself is susceptible to influence based on how we regulate activity there overtime.

See our minds are constantly bouncing around between various meanings between reality, for any thought we have our brains go “ahh” then “oh okay this” and its all a play of justified meaning based on our interactions in the past (even in just the last second).

This has large implications for what I’m saying here because to the degree that we don’t have a good model for how to interact with reality, say the absence of seeing oneself as the composition of various muscles that we can and are training whenever we engage with them, then this is truly the difference between an actualised life based on understanding the relationship between oneself and the rest of existence in order to bring about those changes versus a life where you’re just living as traitor park trash not even knowing how to look after your 8 children.

I mean, the amount of miswiring, that is, the bad “meanings” of reality that are being bounced around as thoughts between the ears of your average trailer park person would have to be enormous. They’d have to be wrong on so many aspects of reality in order to be living the way they do.

State of living is a reflection of ones understanding of reality, from trailer park trash to your guy on Wall Street to your buddhist in a temple who’s good at being calm and peaceful but when it comes to understanding important subjects that they can teach others are about they’re extremely poor.

I mean how do you think trailer park trash’s views compare to my simple view here regarding the human body? They’d probably think their thoughts are there’s and that they’re right contrary to the external world, and that their feelings are true reflections of them and that if reality doesn’t conform then reality is wrong and sinful.

Do you think he’s going to be like: “Oh I think there’s an abundance of oxytocin flowing through my brain at the moment but I don’t know this person very well yet so I oughta just exert some self control here and monitor more about this person”

Or are they going to be more like: “I love this woman, I hope I can shag her tonight. I feel like proposing already, yes I’m going to propose tonight”

This is where the key to understanding the mind-body from the position of various muscle groups being activated, from chemicals to electrical signals to actual muscle fibres. Its the position of seeing your body-mind as a physical system that acts much like a machine that you can build muscle and strength to in various ways not a "you". Second to this is the realisation that awareness is the key modulator here, if we can prioritise awareness over these other sensations then we can have a greater span over what interests we’re going to provide our muscle exertion. And that’s how I’d put it, choosing what muscles ones going to turn on and flex as opposed to “oh I feel shame how do I get rid of this?”. Nah to me its just awareness that its there, moving through it and focusing on the activation of more empowering chemicals that lead to actions which will in the end reduce the sense of shame because you’ve grown past it. Find the source of the shame sure, map its patterns, question and be mindful of the various ways it activates sure, realise that its not you, its just a pattern of activation at that moment in time that you can influence towards another end if you want.

Let’s take the example of the feeling of fear, “Okay I’m feeling fear at the moment, this fear is presently disabling my other capabilities, I’m noticing the fear, I can sense where its coming from, but I remember the importance of pushing on the activation of other chemicals where I down regulate chemicals that create fear and up regulate chemicals relating to courage.”

This can be done as well, nearly any self control exercise will improve your capacities here.

COMPARISON:

What also helps me I find is comparison of struggle, for example I find weight training a great boost to other activities because the struggles I have here are far more difficult than resisting the temptations of some food or whatever, this is why its important to push yourself. When you push yourself beyond a pain point and you appropriately generalise its utility across all other potential points of suffering, you’ve just increased your capacity to handle any other form of suffering.

So I make it a habit to push myself in pretty much everything.

Life here is a game of strength versus weakness in many ways, because if we reduced all of our strength for example we wouldn’t even be air molecules as H2O has to exist at the cost of something else. This is why I love looking at my body-mind in this way because not only do I think its more accurate, its got great utility for improving my strength to weakness ratio (because that's where my mind immediately focuses), which is of course all relative. It helps objectivity and objectivity will help one moving through this sort of struggle.

Edited August 22, 2019 by possibilities

[Tom T]

I have quite a lot of information on shame  and how to deal with emotions on my common place book I will copy and past it all here a lot of the material here comes from t#Teal, Leo, and my own contemplation,  books on shame and workshop trips.

 

there are three causes of shame that I know of so far... the first cause is to do with not fitting into the social norms of your society and the second reason is that you were constantly shamed by your care givers when you were a child. 

 

shame which comes from being constantly shamed in your childhood by your care givers works like this 

We all desperately need love, especially during childhood. A child who dose not get a healthy dose of love of there parents when they were younger grow up feeling like the most unlovable and unworthy people on the planet. They feel like if there parents cant love them then who can?

Shame usually stems from deep emotional neglect during childhood. The child feels neglected and unloved and this is the identity they unconsciously create for themselves.

How self-hate can stem from childhood: basically in childhood if we are not treated with enough love and our parents are contantly criticizing us or hitting us or projecting. The trauma from this can be so overwhelming to the point where we can create toxic defence mechanism to try to protect ourselves. So what can happen is we can start shaming ourselves and we start hating our selves so noone else has to do it. Its to painful to have other people shame and hate you so you have to do it to yourself. Its like having someone about to punch you so as a defence mechanism to stop them hitting  you, you start punching yourself and the other person is either like "omg theres something terribly wrong with you you need some help" or they go "yeah you should punch yourself" so thats what its kind of like when you start using self-hate as a defence mechanism. You start to shame and hate yourself becuase its to painful to have other people do it to. But this is  a toxic defence mechanism...

 

shame which comes from random experiences in childhood that you cant remember anything about

basically you can have shameful traumatic experiences in early childhood that seem innocent to everyone around you at the time or sometime its not so innocent to everyone around you. these experiences can stay locked within your subconscious mind or decades but you have no conscious recollection of them. this is probably whats happened to you if you don't know why you feel so shameful what you basically need is energetic release therapy for trauma and I talk about that at the end of the post. 

shame from not fitting into the social norms of your culture works like this 

Shame is the act of looking down upon yourself. When you feel shameful you are looking at yourself within a context that you are a bad person in some particular way weather its due to your gender type, having mental health issues, being to feminine, being to masculine, being homosexual, not liking the way you look, not liking your personality, not liking you'd body size, beating yourself up over mistakes from the past etc and many other things.

 

Now its important to understand that the things we feel shameful for come from social norms and standards that have been invented by human beings over time which enable us to survive in the world. They enable us to fit in, they enable us to get along, they enable us to have a well functioning society. Shame can actually help us survive more comftable as shame can be used to keep us and other people in line and act and behave well for social survival purposes. But by not conforming to the social norms of your society can create chronic shame within you. For example if you grew up in a society where everyone murders people it would not be shameful to have desires to murder people but in our society the social norm is that murder is bad and so if you had a desire to murder someone you would most likely feel deep shame. Another example if you lived in a society where everyone was gay it wouldn't be shameful to come out as gay but if you lived in a deeply religious society where being gay was seen as a sin then you would feel chronic shame for being gay and the last example I have is if you lived in a society where everyone was super health conscious you may feel shame if you pulled out a dough nut in front of lots of people because that would be socially unacceptable but if you lived in a society where everyone ate doughnuts 24.7 you wouldn't feel any shame at all if you pulled out a doughnut because it would be socially acceptable.  

 

Us humans are group animals and part of our social survival strategies is to fit in ! We so desperately want to fit in due to fear of being looked down upon by other people and being seen as weird and a lot of the time our self-esteem is intimately tied in with what other people think of us which means when people look at us in a bad light we can also start to look at ourselves in a bad light to.

 

We first learn this behaviour from our parents or care giver when we were younger. As children we learn that certain aspects of our selves are good and certain aspects of our selves are bad and we learn that if we behave in a way that our parents and care givers consider bad then we will not get the love and approval we need from them so desperately and we also learn that if we do bad things then we are inherently bad and this is what sets the foundation for all the other relationships we have in our lives.

 

We learn that in order to survive successfully in the society that we are apart of we have to construct a social image of ourselves. This social image that we construct and present to the world is usually compiled of all the best attributes about ourselves and leaves out all the negative attributes about our selves. We choose to do this for self survival purposes. We feel like if people saw all the things we consider negative about ourselves then they may start treating us in a way we don't want. People may treat us with less respect, people may not give us the love we desire, our best friends may decide they don't want to hang out with you anymore and start judging us, maybe our boss would  fire us if he or she knew all the things we perceive to be negative about ourselves and this is all legitimate stuff. This is a real danger to our personal self agenda in life so of course we hide things about our selves in order for us to survive effectively.

 

Shame is also used as a weapon in the justice system with the desire to turn criminals into obedient members of society. This is the best we can collectively do right now but in the future the justice systems main focus will be on raising the consciousness of the criminal to the point where he can no longer be criminal but we are a long way off that.

 

Many of us can develop chronic shame about things like Mental health issues, having learning difficulty's, being depressed, not being the popular ones in school, being to feminine, being to masculine, being homosexual, being lesbian, body sizes that society says are not okay, ageing and becoming older, our beliefs about the world, our personality's, our family backgrounds, being divorced, being a different nationality to the country you live in, Emotional neglect in childhood and many many more !!! And the reasons these things produce shame in us is because they all affect our social image which  affects the way people treat and see us and that affects the our survival self agenda massively. There's nothing wrong with any of the things above its just society on the whole dose not approve of what you feel shameful for fully. But maybe there is no right or wrong way to be? Maybe all  these shameful things are just constructs and inventions of  human mind and of society? Maybe its all a game?

 

So, wouldn't it be nice if we could just stop feeling so shameful for every little thing we don't like about ourselves?  How do we learn to accept our selves in a radical way? Well, In truth we cant have total radical self acceptance of ourselves without totally eradicating our egos BUT we can significantly increase our self-esteem and self-love even with an ego by implementing the right habits into our lives and that is what I have tried to put together for you in this workshop homework. The process I have outlined in the homework gives you a process you can use to slowly build up self-love over time so you can learn to accept yourself fully

 

what I suggest you should do

 

firstly I think you need to learn how to treat your feelings properly with this technique 

 

We are ususally to quick to disguard our feelings and to do our very best to shut them off. We do this becuase we do not want to feel uncomftable negative emotions but what we end up doing is creating distrust within our selves. Anytime we try to block off our negative emotions we are basically saying to yourselves that "we should not feel how we feel and we should not be feeling this right now" but most of the time the truth is the exact opposite. The truth is, is we should be feeling exactly the way we feel. Theres a belif in society that theres a certain way you should feel and if you dont feel that then theres something wrong with you but the actuality is is you should feel exactly how you feel and there is nothing wrong with you for not feeling okay.

 

 

What i am trying to say is we should never dissuade or disapprove of our emotions becuase we should be feeling exactly the way we are feeling. We are creatures with serious survival needs that need met and if we dont meet those needs neagtive emotions will start to arise and its silly trying to block these negative emotions from your conscious mind and what we should be doing instead is the following.

 

 

1: become aware of your emotion.

2: care about your emotion by seeing it as valid and important.

3: listen empathetically to your emotion in an attempt to understand the way you feel.

4: Validate your feelings. You do not need to validate that the thoughts that you have about your emotions are correct instead you need to remind yourself that it is a valid thing to feel the way that you feel. "i could totally understand how that could make me feel shame and most people would feel the same way if they were in my shoes".

5: allow yourself to feel how you feel and to experience your emotion fully before moving towards any kind of improvement in the way you feel. We need to give yourself the permission to decide weather you want to move up the vibrational scale and up into a different emotion. This is the step when you need to practice unconditional presence for yourself. Be there as support for yourself without trying to fix yourself.

 

 

------do this 1,2,3,4, step formula every time you feel a negative emotion. You will see that as you stop resisting your negative emotion it will dissipate over time. Incorporate this into your life and train yourself to do this while in the midst of expeiancing a negatvie emotion.

 

You should also train yourself to do this method to 

This process allows you to naturally shift any negative emotion you are experiencing in the moment.  What we usually do is we try to run away from our negative emotions but this isn't the best way to deal with our emotions because what ever you resist persists.

 

Emotions are highly counterintuitive. In order to gain more mastery over your emotions we can not do it by acting macho, we can not gain control over our emotions by  trying to rationalize them away, and we don't gain mastery over our emotions by just irrationally acting out on them but we can gain mastery over our emotions by feeling into them so deeply to the point where they just naturally shift on their own.

 

In order to make our negative emotions shift naturally we need to go from a place of wanting to feel better to being willing to feel.

 

You can do this with any negative emotion you have like fear, anger, guilt, sadness etc.

 

Here are the instructions below for feeling into your emotions fully.

Step 1) sit down somewhere and completely relax your body.

Step 2) get into the present moment

Step 3) feel into your body and feel into the emotion.

Step 4) feel the emotion and identify where it is in your body? Is it in your chest? Your hands? Your feet? Your neck? Your stomach? Etc where is it in your body?

Step 5) keep on feeling into the emotion and get a full sense of what it feels like, dose it ache? Is there a tingly sensation? Is it really tense and tight or is it really lose and soft? Is it warm or cold? What colour is it? Dose it have a texture?

Step 6) fully feel the emotion.

Step 7) the next step is to allow. 

Step 8) let this emotion flood your entire body.

Step 9) now imagine explaining this emotion out into the room so its both in and around you for a while. Remember don't get lost in the mind, don't go into thought story's or anything just feel the emotion you are currently feeling.

Step 10) allow again. Allow yourself to feel the emotion in your whole body with no judgement or resistance.

Step 11) just sit and do nothing for 5 minutes, or 10 minutes or 20 minutes.

 

While you do this process make sure you relax your entire body and make sure you are taking long and deep breaths in and out.

 

And that's the hole process. Use this whenever you feel a strong heavy emotion and remember the goal is to feel fully into your emotions and let them shift on their own.  Feeling into emotions is one of the best ways to shift an emotion so try it out and see what you think !!!

 

So now you know how to treat your emotions properly practice doing this on a daily basis until it becomes automatic for you !!! it will take you a while but keep practicing it until you get good at it and it becomes automatic for you. so get that down AND ALSO I bet that your shame comes from a deep shameful traumatic incident from childhood that you cant remember consciously but subconsciously its still in your mind. what you basically need to do is energetic release therapy. there are many form of this but one in particular is awesomeeeeeee for healing trauma and its called access bars. therapy.

what you need to do is find an access bars practitioner in your area and have like 10x to 20x sessions. it bet it would create some major shifts within you. basically access bars works like this.... 

Access Consciousness is a form of therapy which recognizes that there are 32 bars of energy that run through and around your head, storing the electromagnetic component of all the thoughts, ideas, attitudes, decisions, and beliefs that you have ever had about anything. Access bars takes all the considerations, thoughts, feelings, emotions, decisions, judgments, and beliefs from any lifetime, that are electrically stored in the brain and releases them. This release occurs when the bars are touched; it allows that stored junk to be released.

Some of the benefits of doing this therapy are

The ability to perceive your life, body and relationships with more clarity and ease.

Greater motivation and problem solving capacity.

Significant increase is joy and happiness.

Improved manageability of depressive and anxious tendencies.

Improved  manageability of post traumatic stress disorder.

Decrease in interpersonal and intrapersonal conflicts.

Deeper relaxation and non interrupted sleep.

 

I would definitely recommend it as its awesome !!! its help me a lot and it has helped many other people. search and see if there are any practitioners in your area and if you don't have one in your area research some other trauma energetic healing techniques as there are lots out there !!!!

 

also if your going to be implementing the stuff I say make sure you watch these two videos by leo because they will probably be important for you... 

• Ego backlash 
• Patience 

 

 

hope this helps  !!!

 

Edited August 23, 2019 by Tom T

[R-Type]

Wow Tom you're post is awesome and a massive help! Will save and reread it, as it gives much insight and good instructions on how to handle shame issues, which I have to a life crippling extend too. 

What's really interesting is that shame can have its origins on different layers. One being the childhood neglect/trauma the other being not fitting into social norms. As we're such complex creatures I'd guess that we all have to carry all kinds and intensities of shame stemming from many different experiences throughout our life. It will take quite some time to dig through it... 

So, a big Thank You from my side. And in case you have further links to articles or book recommendations please feel free to post them here too. Hugs, R

Edited August 22, 2019 by R-Type

[possibilities]

I’ve tried the Teal Swan technique but I don’t buy into it, to me it doesn’t seem like there’s a good model for what emotions are in the context of the being. I think neurosis creating repression for example is simply due to a lack of awareness. I like Teals technique up until there’s a complete awareness of what’s happening within my body but I don’t think there’s an inner child or anything like that, to me it’s as much awareness as possible followed by creatively selecting activation patterns that are going to facilitate me in the moment. 

The inner child to me is just a euphemism for “hey you’ve been repressing some stuff go find this thing called the inner child until you find that something” and then afterwards resolve that thing, it’s not reflecting something that I’d refer to as a good model of the reality of what’s happening within us.

I don’t think a dolphin, gorilla, dog and so on has an inner child, especially not an ant, I so however think it’s a useful construct to help a human who’s a little more complicated to overcome repression.

Good share though I agree, it’s a good thing to open one’s mind try out.

 

[possibilities]

One pattern that I think everyone needs to take notice of is that this "inner child" that people speak of seems to only take relevance once someone has experienced psychological injury, if you were happy and nothing was ever wrong then this "inner child" concept would never need to come to light. The inference I'm making here is that this seems to be pretty indicative of what I'm saying, that this "inner child" concept people have invented is merely the consequence of figuring out a way to get someone to discover unresolved trauma that may be there. Moreover, trauma is such a loaded, loaded word, quite often it can be more simply and practically phrased by simply referring to them as neurological patterns that have emerged in conjunction with say an enlarged amygdala, that's on the more extreme end, that with meditation the amygdala will decrease in size and so will some of the trauma. Reprocessing past memories WILL work though if you're engaging with them well, but I think you gotta understand what's happening there too, you're reactivating the chemicals tied to those memories and the reprocessing is changing the chemical signature, for example, you might transfer the feeling of a memory from the feeling of pain to the feeling that you get when you release dopamine. It's amazing how simple we are like this, many people are misinformed and so they never really recover or if they do they won't reach their potential beyond this point.

Edited August 23, 2019 by possibilities

[Surfingthewave]

@Wekz Why do you think you suffer with shame? Brene Brown has written some excellent books on shame, guilt and vulnerability. 

[Tom T]

@R-Type Glad I could help and yes I do have many other information and links on shame and I will share them here.

firstly I will talk about shame and how it creates fear of intimacy with other people.

• You feel like you cant open up to people because you feel like if people got to know you they would reject you and you fear the rejection so bad to the point where you just cant open yourself up to people. You cant be intimate with anyone. You feel like absolutely no one would love you if they knew the truth of you fully. This gives you a deep feeling of being disconnected from others. This makes you feel extreme loneliness even if you are surrounded by lots of people.

 

• for tips on how to overcome this watch teal swans fear of intimacy 

Secondly I have links on shame and how it creates narrsicism (this is an interesting aspect of what shame dose). 

before you read this bit on narrsicism I want to state that not all people who are shamed in childhood turn into narcissists but some do as a coping mechanism.

basically narrsicism is caused by deep shame that stems from childhood. what happens is a child is born and he or she cant seem to do anything right for there parents. the parents criticise, shame, bully and scapegoat the child to the point where the child feels deep shame about him or her self. as a coping mechanism the child creates a fake identity to cover up all its shame. the child gets completely lost in this fake identity to the point where they can barely distinguish there shameful true self and there fake identity they have created. (when I talk about the true self im not talking about it in terms of the absolute true self im just talking about their egoic self) but anyway the child creates this fake self so it can get all the admiration, acceptance, love and praise it needs, this is called getting narcissistic supply. A narcissistic person dose not love themselves they have created a fake identity/self image which they are in love with but this fake identity/self image covers up there shameful true egoic self underneath and all the stuff that there true egoic self feels shameful about just get projected onto everyone else around them. you see when you reject an aspect of yourself you end up getting negatively triggered emotionally when you see it in other people out there in the world and that's what happens is they project all there self-hate onto everyone else around them without being conscious of what they are doing. also narcissists deny their own feelings and they also deny the feelings of everyone around them to. This means that narcissists lack empathy which is useful for helping helping us sense other peoples moods. A narrcicst may even doubt that other people have such feelings.  This makes it perfectly acceptable in a eyes of a narcissist to be ruthless, exploitative, sadistic and destructive to other people.

if you understand what I just said above then I think you might get a lot of insight from watch this documentary on narrsicism on youtube. if you understand the causes of narrsicism and then watch this documentary it will start to make a lot of sense on how narcs exist n behave the way they do.

Shocking full documentary - narcissism / narcissistic personality disorder ( psychology )

Thirdly I will talk about self-love techniques

 now here are a self-love techniques for increasing your self-love.

even though I am going to share these techniques I am actually quite hesitant to introduce them to people. the first reason is because shame can go really deep and a lot of the time I don't think its enough to just do some self-love techniques I think you have to go more into your childhood traumas or literally change your metaphysical world views on certain things you feel shameful about. 

im also hesitant to introduce self love techniques because I don't want someone to start doing a technique for a few months, see that it dose not work for them and then think of themselves a failure which drives there shame to an even deeper level so these techniques can back fire if you are not careful. 

but never the less these techniques can be powerful. experiment with each one and see how you feel. if it dose not work for you please don't think of yourself as a failure  because different techniques work for different people and also you might have to go deeper than just self love techiques most likely but try them out n see what you think. 

before you try to use these techniques make sure you watch Leos video title "what is love an advanced explanation" 

mirror work for 90 days in a row

"Mirror work... it's important to make this a daily routine. Every night, remove your clothes and your make up if you are wearing any !!! Look in front of the mirror in your home where no one will see or disturb you for 10 minutes and just stand there and look at yourself. Look deeply into your own eyes. It's normal to feel uncomfortable but just keep looking into your eyes. Just perceive yourself with no judgements. If you can hear your thoughts judging your appearance in any way just say to yourself “thank you for sharing” and let them fade away. After you have stared at your own eyes, simply take in your whole image. Notice every individual part of your body. Look at everything from head to toe with no judgement. After you’ve looked at yourself say “I love and accept you exactly as you are” while continuing to look into the mirror, begin to deliberately project love and compassion toward yourself from your mind. Imagine sending it into the reflection, into your own heart. Imagine your heart taking the love and compassion and pumping it through your arteries and veins throughout your entire body. Send that love and compassion to anywhere you feel that needs it. Give yourself permission to accept yourself for all your flaws, anything you've done, anything you don't like about yourself, just accept and love it !!! When it feels you have soaked in enough love continue with the exercise by looking in the mirror and force yourself to accept yourself fully. Love is all about accepting what is so force yourself to love yourself as you are with all your imperfections. Force yourself to love your imperfections !!! Then look for things that you like about yourself then acknowledge these qualities out loud or just in your head, this may be a physical trait or a personality trait." Teal swan

(Its best to do this technique with a full size mirror where you can see yourself from the top of your head to the tips of your toes). 

 

• self-love meditation on YouTube for 90 days in a row

 

• write out 10 things you like about yourself and read it daily (I know its hard to find 10 things if you don't love yourself fully) for 90 days in a row

 

• list 10x new ways you will show love to yourself and start implementing them straight away

if these techniques are not totally life changing for you then don't drive your shame even deeper by think of yourself as a failure. I fail loadssss while trying to fix my problems. you cant take it personally. your just experimenting. see what works for you

OVERALL I THINK MY POST WHERE I TELL YOU HOW TO TREAT YOUR FEELING IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THESE SELFLOVE TECHNIQUES !!!!! THAT WIL HELP YOU THE MOST BUT FEEL FREE TO TRY OUT THESE SELF-LOVE TECHNIQUES ALSO  

 

Hope this helps much love tom !!! xxx

 

 

[Tom T]

here is also two good books for shame and self-love

counselling skills for working with shame by christaine sanderson

shadows before dawn by teal swan