Gunhild Archer, counselor

Earlier this week I got feedback on how I was showing up with my social media content. Uninvited feedback. It brought up skin-crawling kind of shame.

I went through days of thinking, struggling, being confused, getting to clarity, thrown back into confusion…

Then, I posted a video where I intentionally gave myself room to feel and express what was brought up by the feedback.

More back and forth, fighting myself, doubt, confusion, moments of clarity, struggle, (trying not to struggle before remembering struggle is a part of the process) …

Talking to my two safest people.

Morning pages.

Writing drafts for Instagram/Facebook posts.

It culminated in making this video yesterday, leading to a night filled with heavy dreams, and then yet another set of morning pages, which brought, what feels like, the final clarity.

The topic is shame and self-gaslighting.

Some of the patterns brought to clarity are (and it’s interesting how they fall into two camps):

-> I feel a need to defend myself.

-> I feel like I want to be right.

-> I’m better than.

(Transparency: Getting to the level of awareness I show in this post, brings up the feeling of being better than. I could follow up with the word “peasants”, and “looking down at”, to give you the vibe. It feels shameful to say that out loud, and I also feel like it’s important for me to do so. I’m putting my shame out there to show myself that I’m allowed to have “ugly” sides. It’s easy to judge “being better than” as “wounded ego” aka low self-worth (which is unattractive). Humility is the more favored character trait.)

-> I tell myself my perception was wrong.

-> I tell myself if I just showed up better, the conflict would have been avoided.

-> It’s my fault, I’m to blame.

One clarity that came to me super early in the process was the sentence: “It’s wrong to be right”. It is still something I’m grasping, but it basically means seeing what I’m seeing will get me in trouble. This belief tends to default me into owning my action, words, and feelings, as wrong. It must me who’s at fault. I should have done something differently. It must be me who should change my behavior. Excessively owning my responsibility IS the shadow. The same goes for the belief that people are equal when it comes to self-awareness. I mean, I can’t know better than you what’s going on in you… That would make me a person who puts herself above others. An inflated ego is uncharming. No one modeled that it’s ok to better than.