A poem about struggling with self-doubt, shame and fear.

[bluepalm]

I'm struggling with shame and guilt today, berating myself yet again for terrible choices I made that have led to so much pain; principally getting caught in a dreadful marriage straight from a dreadful childhood. But pitted against my shame and guilt today is a new understanding about developmental arrests that I'm getting from reading Pete Walker's wonderful book 'Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving'. His writing is giving me a stronger sense of what I was 'up against' in trying to protect myself from predators all those years ago. I knew even then that I was terribly poorly equipped to make good life decisions, but I can see now that it was not through my own failures that I was left so poorly equipped. I had been deprived of what a baby girl needs in order to learn how to protect herself in this world. 

I wrote the following poem when I first entered therapy as a young woman, expressing how it felt then to be trying to manage my life while constantly lost in self-doubt, shame and fear.

Flitting shade-like, hugging the walls

Flitting shade-like,
hugging the walls
along the corridors of my mind
they come quite silently,
my devils,
and silently they lay me waste.

Doubts come confidently,
ceaselessly,
arrogant in their sureness,
aware of the multitudes
that creep persistently
behind them.

Hot shame pants quietly,
doggedly,
sure of its mark,
certain that its touch
will scorch, that its heat
will burn holes in
my wholeness.

Fear sneaks and springs
and darts through any crack,
cutting through freshly grown
roots, severing the tender tendrils
of my being, throwing the earth
in my eyes.

And as defence I seem to have
so little.
My forces stand unsteadily beside me,
unformed as yet into coherent cohorts,
unable to spring as one at my command.
They engage in swift uncoordinated forays,
retreating for rest at
too soon intervals,
leaving me vulnerable, afraid, teetering.

bluepalm

[Three Roses]

❤️

[Not Alone]

shame....fear....doubt......you are a wordsmith in your expression of these deep, painful feelings.