Vol 027: The Shame I Didn't Know I Was Carrying.
A recent flare-up cracked open a part of me I didn’t even realize needed healing.
Last week, I posted a Truth Talks video all about my birthday fundraiser and shared a bit about where things are at with The Chronicon Foundation. It’s not too late to donate if you want to support and you can do that directly on our website here before diving into this week's post!
For the last few weeks I have been going through such a deep experience with my body and it’s left me fatigued on an extraordinary level. I got a virus that completely knocked me out for an entire week and then several complications from that virus followed which has left me at less than half capacity since the end of March.
The truth is that in the midst of all of it, I am wavering between a deep sense of peace, and a deep sense of shame and I wanted to share this with all of you because I think some of you might resonate with my experience.
The peace has come from such a beautiful place.
That place where the Divine dwells within me and reminds me that I am being perfectly guided even in the moments that bring me to my knees. In fact, especially in those moments.
The peace is there reminding me that I have been in debilitating health situations countless times before and that I have always come to the other side with more clarity, more understanding, and more love for this body that is my home.
The peace also has me notice the love I have in my life and how this love is healing. I see the people who show up for me, call, and check in with genuine concern and offer their support even when I know I have to work through it on my own. I take their love in and it starts to heal parts of me.
This is where the peace comes in. It calls me toward it slowly and softly and consistently in times when I want to be afraid that there is no peace left. It shows up and reminds me and I open my heart enough to take it in.
By about the 6th day of feeling unwell, I was also visited by a deep sense of shame, which honestly surprised me.
I was in a nervous system session with my coach Amy and all of a sudden I started to cry. I cried from a place so deep within me that I knew these tears carried old feelings and stories.
The tears were not just about this moment and how tired I had become throughout the week of being so sick, or how scared I was starting to feel, they were steeped in shame around how sick I got because it reminded me of how sick I have been throughout my life.
The shame carried in thoughts like “I should have known better and not gotten this sick” as well as feelings of being such a burden on others for having gone through so much.
I was surprised at the feelings that were coming to the surface but I was also so clear that they weren’t just about this moment.
The divine medicine of these last few weeks has been around healing this deep and old wound of mine that I didn’t even know was there.
The shame I have carried around getting so sick that the people who loved me had to have so much of their lives revolve around my illness and not my well-being.
I didn’t realize it but I was carrying a lifetime of shame for not knowing how to be more well or healed. For not being different and having a different experience.
I consider myself fairly in touch with my emotions and thoughts so to discover something new like this was a bit of a surprising experience for me. Even though the road to uncovering it was a wild one and filled with a lot of discomfort, I am so glad I was able to let it come up so I could love myself through it and heal it.
After getting to the realization that this shame was living inside of me, I was able to face it in a way I hadn’t done before. I spent time with it for a few days. I journaled about it and got it all out on paper.
I didn’t shame myself for feeling such shame, even though I knew I didn’t need to carry such heavy feelings. I accepted that it was there so that it could lift and release and that’s exactly what it did.
Have you ever felt this type of shame around a big part of your journey like this? What have you done to work through it? Are there moments in your life that have challenged you but also brought you more peace? I want to hear about them in the comments below.
✨ You’re Invited ✨
You are officially the FIRST to know about this really exciting event I am hosting with two dear friends, Gina Moffa and Dr. Kanchan Koya on June 10th in NYC.
This event is going to be a Town Hall style where we will be giving our audience the chance to share and open up so we can hear the wisdom YOU have inside of you.
We will be diving into the ups and downs of the wellness industry and how we can reclaim our power from an industry that has often done so much more harm than good.
It’s going to be powerful and so important. I love doing events so I hope you will join us! We have an early bird ticket price for the next two weeks only so don’t miss that. I cannot wait to be with you all so soon.
Get Your Early Bird Ticket Here 💕
With Love,
Nitika
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Hi Nitika,
This is SO serendipitous, it has to be something moving in the ether for us all to heal. A couple weeks ago I connected with a shame I didn’t know I was carrying. I was blown away by the fact that, after all the inner work I had done — some of it on the shame of my chronic illness specifically — it had escaped my awareness.
I also felt compelled to write, and so, even if it’s long, I’m going to share some of it here. I know it will help someone.
I’ve been connecting the dots between being a highly sensitive person (HSP) and chronic illness. As HSPs, we learn to suppress our true feelings, our true selves, because our depth is not welcome in this world. And this has consequences; often expressed in our physical body because the stress of the suppression affects our immune system. More on that elsewhere.
In the past several years, I’ve had multiple epiphanies revealing to me I was meant to talked about my experience with chronic illness. I never really followed through. Honestly, it terrified me. A couple weeks ago I finally understood why.
Here is my story and my most recent aha! moment.
My disease, ulcerative colitis, started at 11 years old, at a time when it was unheard of in children. The shame of the symptoms had me keep it a secret for two years. I didn’t tell anyone. At 13, I had a colonoscopy that deeply traumatized me. As crazy as it sounds today, I actually drove myself to the clinic. I felt too much SHAME to let anyone be there with me. I was left alone with a doctor — a man named Loutfi, with dark skin, thinning slicked-back hair and big glasses. Once in his office, he dismissed the nurse and asked me to get undressed. What happened next… wasn’t right.
Very few people know about this because I still feel SHAME. I’ve never shared this publicly.
A few days later, our family doctor called to talk to my mother. I picked up another receiver in the basement and spied on the conversation. He told her I had ulcerative colitis, that it was incurable and that I’d to learn to live with it for the rest of my life.
I remember the rage rising inside me. Rage like I had never felt before. One, how dare he talk to my mother and not to me! Two, how dare he presume to know what the rest of my life would be like. Then I walked upstairs and pretended I hadn’t heard what I had heard.
Suppressing my truth and my feelings was already who I was.
For the next few years, I was put on various medications. They didn’t really work, and they had side effects. Once I had my driver’s license at 16, I started taking myself to various naturopaths and holistic therapists. At some point I was taking 80 supplement capsules a day, trying various diets, including only eating boiled lettuce and goat cheese.
I still felt a lot of SHAME. Like I was a burden, complicated, less than a “normal” person. I was often met with, “Bon! Annie’s sick again.” And asking my father to pay for my treatments wasn’t easy either.
After I left home, I kept the extent of my disease and the intensity of my pain behind closed doors. Many times, I drove myself to the ER and was met with disbelief that I had even managed to get there. Once I showed up with a swollen tongue from dehydration and malnourishment.
Still, to people around me, at school, I looked just fine. I got very good at wearing a mask.
At 28, facing the certainty of death after a month-long hospital stay, I accepted a surgery I had refused many times before. Doctors removed my colon and reconstructed my digestive system. In a weird déjà vu, I took a taxi to the hospital for this life-threatening surgery — no one was available to take me. It was a horrible experience.
The decades that followed were not easy. I still live with several physical challenges and limitations. The last time I almost died from complications was in 2009 (or 2010). I’m a vibrant 60-year-old woman, filled with love, joy, and wonder (except when I’m not). I still believe my best years are ahead of me.
…
IT'S A PRETTY POWERFUL STORY OF SURVIVAL, RIGHT? So why has sharing it been so TERRIFYING? What I recently understood was that it was SHAME that stopped me from seeing myself as a SURVIVOR.
Not the shame of the child, but the SHAME OF THE ADULT who, on some deep level, wondered what kind of fucked-up person lets herself suffer like that, for so long, without asking for help? You’d have to be pretty messed up to behave that way. And REAL SURVIVORS are honourable in their conduct. In my mind, I definitely didn’t qualify.
But a few weeks ago, I understood that I DIDN'T CHOOSE to handle it that way. My behaviors were not conscious choices at all; my ISOLATION, SILENCE, SELF-DOUBT and SELF-DENIGRATION — my INABILITY to see myself as a survivor rather than a screw-up; they were the deepest, most insidious layers of LEARNED SUPPRESSION.
That’s when I knew I had to start PROUDLY sharing that part of my story.
Because those “non-choices” are not unique to me. Learned suppression is the experience of the highly sensitive, and of those of us who have lived with the shame of chronic illness.
And it all has to stop. For our sakes, and for the sake of the world.
Because the world needs our brilliant blend of depth, courage, strength, resilience, intuition, compassion, and wisdom we developed BECAUSE of our journey with chronic illness.
As much as we have suffered, we were never broken; we were being forged.
Life has been hard for us. That’s a fact.
But what if that pain had a purpose?
What if instead of making us feel like victims, it was our portal for transformation?
What if our suffering wasn’t a curse but the path on our Hero’s Journey?
What if the places we’ve assigned shame are the very places where our power lives?
It's time for us to flip the script.
THIS IS THE ALCHEMY WE ARE CALLED TO PERFORM.
We take shame — and turn it into survivor.
We take pain — and turn it into power.
We turn feeling like a victim — into becoming the heroes the world needs today.
Not because we asked for any of it.
But because it is our destiny.
xox
Annie
Survivor
Hi Nitika. I’m Rachel. You write with such clarity. Thank you for your vulnerability and courage to share this. It is very hard to have illnesses and to need help throughout the flares & episodes. I have also felt shame and felt I was a burden. I accepted this over and over, that I wasn’t a burden and that my family wanted to be with me. And let it (the shame) move on through me. Thank you for your post.