I remember an aphorism that came to me years ago when I was sitting with a man who fashioned himself to be a spiritual teacher. Actually, all he had was long hair, a beard and some baggy clothes he bought in India... "when it's easy it's easy, when it's not it's not." He gave me a less than friendly look when I said it. Yeah, it is pretty silly, right? Of course, it is the absolute, fundamental truth of the journey's we're all on. To say we need self-compassion is easy... to actually find it for ourselves isn't easy. We live with a lifetime of shame for all the reasons articulated on this website. We've known horror and we believed it was of our own making. Where do we find self-compassion in the midst of all that? This is our work and blessedly there are men here who have stepped THROUGH that shame to discover the truth. NOTHING that happened before, during or after the trauma we encountered was our fault. Yes, we will struggle with that suggestion with all kinds of arguments... most of which involve the reality that our bodies responded to the attention and we wanted more of it... Surely it was our fault.
And then there was what happened after the trauma ended... the things we did were surely all our fault. We really were... fill in the blank. I knew I was a PERVERT... having sex with men at adult video arcades... stealing lingerie. What a piece of shit! That person has no claim on self-compassion.
We each have our own story that keeps us in the starring role as a piece of shit... Another aphorism I stumbled on years ago was "we identify with our story to find comfort, and dis-identify to find truth." The comfort is simply familiarity. We know that story about being a piece of shit and have told it so many times that it MUST be true... That is the story we're unpacking here and guess what... it is only a small part of the story. I didn't ask my mother to rub my genitals with a piece of silk as I lay in the crib. I didn't ask her to smother me with a pillow. I didn't ask the neighbors to introduce me to their world of pedophilia and I certainly didn't ask to be raped... Yes, it all happened and it all shaped who I became as a boy and a man. Without those experiences I would have been a completely different boy and man. I might have been able to enjoy life, to find and sustain intimacy, have had a family, thrived in my career, had friends and leisure activities that gave me pleasure. Instead, my life was a hell realm... not because I was inherently evil, depraved, a pervert... but because people used me to satisfy their distorted desires. All I've ever done is try to survive... and so I dis-identify from that old story to discover the truth. I deserve self-compassion, self-care... I am worthy of having a life no longer lost in shame, terror, rage and grief. I can have my life... simply by letting go of the story that I am bad. THIS is what we are all doing here... as simple as that.