"Boundaries are your values in action." ~ Randi Buckley

When you have an abusive mother it can be hard to discern whether your values are actually yours.

Not to mention that sometimes what we see as a value is actually a stress/survival/trauma response.

For example, you may say you value compassion and then feel guilty when you set a boundary with your mother.

As clinical psychologist Becky Kennedy says, that's not guilt. It's the pressure of being responsible for whatever she's feeling, ingesting and digesting it, so she doesn't have to.

You set the boundary. She gets upset. Your conditioning kicks in and says, "I will take your upset and make it mine. I will feel it for you and I will call it guilt."

But true guilt arises when you do something that is out of alignment with your values (with "your" being the key word) AND with the understanding that you may not have been able to fully explore and develop our own values for any number of reasons, including childhood trauma.

Here's the kicker: compassion is a value (and a skill) but people pleasing/fawning is not compassion, it is a stress/survival/trauma response.

This is something so many of us get twisted.

Because we want to be seen as "good."

So we perform "compassion" in the face of ongoing abuse and violence, which of course we do because we're scared, which of course we don't want to acknowledge because...shame.

We say things that we think make us look good. We parrot disclaimers. Again, of course we do...this isn't me criticizing that powerful urge.

But it is NOT compassion. It is Idiot Compassion (as coined by Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche).

"Idiot compassion lacks intelligence and wisdom, leading to enabling behavior rather than true support. It involves giving people what they want to avoid conflict, alleviate your own discomfort, or gain approval, even if it reinforces negative patterns or harms them in the long run. True compassion, in contrast, is wise and informed, setting necessary boundaries and offering what is genuinely needed, even if it's difficult."

In Shame School we untwist and unshame all of it.

​Shame School starts September 16 and runs 12 weeks.

• Format: 90-minute group Zoom calls on Tuesdays at 1 p.m. Eastern (recorded)
• Community: online platform for connecting in between calls
• Resources: Access to the online Shame School Library
• My book: An autographed copy of You Are Not Your Mother: Releasing Generational Trauma and Shame

If you're in, if you want to take this deep dive with me, click here.

Much, much love,

Karen