Why Your Negative Shame Spiral Might be a Positive Sign
Do you have parts of yourself that don't work well? Are your family members scared or worried that you’re struggling with a health habit or a functional issue in your life? Maybe you're:
Constantly argumentative?
Frequently negative about your life?
Creating behaviours and lifestyles that don’t serve you?
So many of us are held back in our lives by lack of acceptance, lack of oneness, and the blame and shame cycle. Surprisingly, these often arise for people as they go through the process of becoming consciously aware. I like to refer to it as a time in our lives when we have our “conscious incompetence”.
But if you're not consciously aware of these aspects of yourself, who cares, right? The only people you are affecting are the few people around you, and most of the time they think that's just how you are. If that's how you're living your life and you feel happy and comfortable anyway, mainly because you're not consciously aware of it, more power to you.
However, what happens when you become consciously aware of these behaviours, whatever they might be? What if you recognise they don't work and there might be something “wrong”? You may start to question why you feel so negative about X, Y, or Z. You may wonder which part of you is constantly creating conflict with people.
The realisation may not be easy
Finally, it may dawn on you.
“Oh, my goodness! I am responsible for this. This is me. I did this. I created this life. I did that thing to my partner/my friend/my lover/my daughter/my mother or whoever.”
You realise you did this. The awareness comes like a clunk. It has a heavy energy that pulls you into a shame spiral of constant negative thoughts. They take you around the rim and into a downward negative spin of thoughts, blame, and frustration.
“Oh, my goodness, how could I have done this?”
“Where am I going with this?”
“Why have I done this to myself?”
This constant “circling the drain” stuff is scary at times because it can put us into an exceptionally negative state.
This is big and not in a good way. Being in this spiral stops us from changing it. We cannot change a situation if we are blaming, shaming, and getting frustrated with ourselves.
For this reason, conscious incompetence can be dangerous.
Unless we can pull ourselves out of this bleak place, we never leave it, and we can't change. Things never get better. The negativity, the frustration, the arguments, the health sabotaging, whatever it is we're doing, cannot change if we don't first fully accept it and fully accept ourselves.
The three rules to healing
I've said this before, and I'll say it a million more times: three universal laws help us heal and change.
The first one is acceptance. The second one is forgiveness. The third one is love.
The first one, acceptance, requires us to get out of judgement and blame. Unless we get out of judgement and blame, we stay circling around that drain of emotions. Those negative emotions pull us down and keep us in a state where we constantly feel helpless and unable to change. There's nothing we can do. We feel stuck.
There is a stuckness about constantly causing a fight with your partner, for instance. Your self-talk is stuck.
“Why am I doing that?”
“Why do I keep doing that?”
“I don't want to do that anymore.”
“It just doesn't serve me.”
“It doesn't serve us. Why do I keep doing that?”
That constant kind of blame-shame is exceptionally frustrating. The way to get out of it is to step out of judgement.
Allow yourself to step away from the blame and shame cycle
Get curious
Detach
Take a step back
Notice: Oh? That's really interesting…
Let the curiosity kick in and step away from it being all your fault. You may find yourself spiralling into negative shame-blame again (“What’s wrong with me?”).
Instead, step into curiosity.
“I did that? I wonder why I did that? That's interesting…”
It helps you to take a step back.
“Why did I behave like that? It’s interesting that I keep creating this argument with my partner.”
Did you truly choose this for yourself?
That consciousness, that awareness, that detachment is huge. We can fully accept ourselves and recognise and understand that it's not our fault.
In the truest sense, if we could consciously choose our situation, would we choose that? If the answer is no—and 99.9% of the time it is no—we do not need to keep blaming ourselves for this. This is an unconscious belief. This is an unconscious behaviour. We are not choosing this.
If we can fully grasp this powerful concept, we can start to embody that sense of acceptance and oneness of ourselves, the situation, and what we've created. Even if we've created this situation, it doesn't mean that we need to blame and shame ourselves forever. It doesn't help.
Instead, we can bring in the beautiful universal law of oneness and acceptance. We fully accept ourselves in this situation, exactly as we're showing up.
That, my friends, is the first step to changing the behaviour. It's a powerful and important step.
I hope this resonates and you understand that oneness, and acceptance, is the key out of this. It is the first step in that conscious incompetence phase. It helps us become empowered to recognise we can do it differently.
The universal law of oneness is powerful. Remember to get curious. Take a step back. Become aware of what you’re doing, but that you didn't choose it. Fully accept this situation and that up until now it didn't work for you. Because now you have the power to change it.
I hope this has been helpful. Have a wonderful week.