"but nothing horrible happened to me"


I had a conversation with someone who said she felt the need to figure out what happened in her past that made her want to overeat. In looking through old journals she noted that she had written things like, “I don’t understand why I eat when I’m not hungry” and “I must want to be fat so I can be unattractive because something horrible must have happened to me as a child.“

She said she had been prompted by therapists, self help books, and the media, to look for something she said "simply wasn’t there."

Then she said: But I do have some work to do in terms of shaming myself and thinking I was a failure when it wasn’t the truth. It's going to be difficult to unlearn after all these years of hating myself."

My genuine, unironic response: Maybe the "horrible" thing that happened is that you were taught to shame and hate yourself.

While you were born in a body that is physiologically wired to experience the sensations we call shame, you were not born ashamed. You were not born hating yourself. You were taught to do that.

Being ashamed of yourself – hating yourself – isn't just par for the course. It's not an inherent way of being. It is not a personal failing.

It just feels that way because we've lived with it for a few thousand years.

They say a miracle is simply a shift in perception.

Unshaming is when you change your perception from "this is just who I am" to "this is what I was taught and conditioned to believe about myself."

Unshaming is both an individual process and a collective responsibility.

Unshaming is the ultimate in cycle breaking (even if you think you've already passed that ish down).

It's not too late.

Much, much love,

Karen

Karen C.L. Anderson

Founder of Shame School and author of You Are Not Your Mother: Releasing Generational Trauma & Shame and Difficult Mothers, Adult Daughters: A Guide for Separation, Liberation & Inspiration

Read more from Karen C.L. Anderson

Someone recently called me out for being hypocritical because in one day I posted what they saw as two opposing opinions: one was about living a life so saturated in love that no one can convince you to hate, and the other was about cutting ties with...certain people. The person identified themselves as one of those "certain people" and then went on to tell me how good they are because of the volunteer work they do, and so on. It made me glad I've done my shadow work around being...

I have a like/dislike relationship with AI. I dislike it for a few reasons, not the least of which is that four of my copyrighted books were illegally downloaded from pirated databases to "teach" AI large-language models. There's also a bit of "I'm old and can't deal with the pace of technology so get off my lawn" energy in there too. ;-) I like it because it allows us to do things like this. This is my current self holding my four-year-old self (if you want to make one for yourself, keep...

...that Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, whom I quoted in my previous email, had a history of sexual abuse and rape of both women and men. Thank you to those who shared this with me. Much, much love, Karen