The Silent Killers

Guilt is a crazy emotion. It can grab a hold of you, sink it’s claws in and make you bleed. Even when the claws are gone the mark is still there. A mark to remind you of what had a hold of you, and when you look at the mark it can open again. Sometimes you think the mark is gone but there’s a scar there to remind you of what to feel guilty for.

This has been the one of hardest parts of the journey back to myself, to look at the marks for when I’ve felt guilty and be able to acknowledge it and move through the emotion. It’s tough. It’s something that I struggle with. This is how I’ve spent the past month - working through guilt and shame that I thought was already worked through. Sometimes it just comes out of nowhere, sometimes something triggers it. The spiral of not moving through the emotions takes hold and I just sit in the space longer than I have for the past six months.

I call these, guilt and shame, the silent killer emotions.

The emotions that are kept in the dark because it’s too painful to talk about. Lately when I talk about what happened with people, I go in this merry-go-round of “well I made decisions in those moments”, “I have accountability for my actions”. I get subtle reminds of what I did with those moments. It’s hard to pull yourself out of that spiral if you get in too deep.

I try and remind myself that I was making decisions based on what I knew at the time and learned behavior. I’ll own that. Sometimes its hard to be ok with that. To think that you can only act based on what you know - that you can be a product of your environment and that you can change that environment to be better for yourself in the future.

Self forgiveness is hard, we are always hardest on ourselves. I know I act differently around people when I’m stuck in this guilt/shame rut. I know the darker side of me wins. I know that it’s time to go back to therapy.

The healing work is never over, time to keep growing.