Rick: We talked about guilt, Carol, related to clutter. How is shame
different, and how does it fit into the energy around clutter and the stuff in our life?
Carol: Well, I always tell people that guilt and shame are different. Guilt is
‘you feel bad about something you did’, and shame is ‘you feel bad about
you’. You think you’re bad. That’s a very different feeling than if someone
has some specific guilt about something that happened in 2005.
Rick: Right.
Carol: Shame is within yourself. What’s so important about shame is that
many people are ashamed of their clutter. They have this emotional shame about something else in their family, and then they have this habit of clutter that they can’t seem to move through, and then they’re ashamed about that, and it just piles on top of them. Now, they may be ashamed of their parents’ clutter. They may be ashamed of how they were raised. They may be ashamed of the stuff that they have. It doesn’t really matter. The point is that feeling…talk about blocking your energy! Shame really, really
scrambles your clear energy about yourself, about making decisions, about what you want to do, and this is long before you even consider cleaning up clutter.
Rick: It’s also one of those energies that tends to come up after you have
done a bit of tapping. Because it’s so core, and we’re ashamed of it, we don’t tend to bring it up right at the start.
Carol: Right. I had a client who, six months into therapy, finally admitted
that he was ashamed that he was ashamed. He had never been able to tell me before, and it was a turning point. Shame makes us hide. We’re often hiding behind shame. We hide the shame because we’re ashamed we have it. We hide the things that we feel ashamed of about ourselves, our life, or our family. You can’t clear something if you’re hiding from it. If it’s not front and center - the way we do EFT, the subject matter needs to be the target - if you’re not admitting that you’re ashamed, or not telling anyone
that you have this clutter problem or this shame problem, you really can’t address it and energetically deal with it. It’s a bit of a Catch-22 there.
Rick: A lot of times, the shame comes up from our own judgments about
how we feel about the clutter and projecting that onto how we feel other people look at us and define us - by the mess in our house, the mess in our finances, wherever the clutter is. We have convinced ourselves that it means, “I am (blank),” and that blank is not complimentary.
Carol: Right…the judgment. It’s also important to note that many people,
if they don’t have a history of shame from their family - and again, whether they inherited the feeling and the energy of shame from their parents, or whether they were made to feel ashamed - if they don’t have that, it’s unlikely the shame is going to be very big about their clutter problem. It’s more, “Oh, this is just me, and it’s a drag, and I’m going to get to it,” but you don’t have that terrible, cellular shame about it unless you come from a place where you are easily shamed and judged.
Rick: …where shame was a parenting technique! “You should be ashamed
of yourself!” If you heard those words dozens and dozens and dozens of times a week growing up, chances are there’s an energy of shame around anything that you want to shift in your life.
Carol: It’s hard to admit, “This is a problem and I want to shift it,” because
they feel so ashamed. Now, that word ‘hide’, again, is really important because we can hide behind the clutter - relationship clutter, financial
clutter, stuff in our office or home clutter, body clutter - we can hide behind that and use it as a way not to come out and say, “Hi, this is who I am,” right down to the basics where you don’t invite someone to your home because it’s cluttered or you just use it as an excuse. It’s kind of tRicky. Change is always tRicky, I find, with clients. So, any time we can make it
present and available rather than hidden, even if someone is finally
admitting that, “I’ve never told anyone I have this clutter problem.” That would be great, because now we have something to work with.
Rick: You could choose a safe professional to tell, not necessarily someone
that isn’t safe and is going to judge you and not be a supporter. You may or may not have that type of person in your life right now, but you can attract that as soon as you have the desire to be able to safely say, “Here is where I am and here is where I want to go,” including, “I’m ashamed of it.”
Carol: Right. I know it’s a bit global for EFT, but even if we did one on “I’m
charge for a lot of people. Again, it’s not very specific, but it still feels right to people, and then we can be specific on the “ashamed of the clutter”.
Rick: I think that, when you’re doing a global statement like, “Even though
I am ashamed,” and the energy as you’re tapping starts coming up, going from a 2 to a 6 to an 8, you can ask yourself, “Why am I feeling ashamed?” and list the specifics. “What is the indictment against me?”
Carol: Mmm-hmm.
Rick: By getting into the specifics - which we’re going to talk about soon -
and using tapping on the specifics, this general tapping on the shame will bring some of those specifics to mind - thoughts that you have about yourself, thoughts that you picked up from other people. They may have said things that make you feel embarrassed, deeply embarrassed, about where you are. Those are energies that you can help transform with EFT.
Carol: Absolutely. All right, do you want to lead me through? Rick: Sure.