Share Your Shame

How my reluctance to share my shame and embarrassment is limiting my growth.

Sep 14, 2023

My reluctance to share the things that I am ashamed or embarrassed of are limiting my growth, and although it’s something I have worked hard on since getting sober almost 17 months ago, I’m not as good at it as I’d like to be.

What Happened?

Last week I wrote about The Fuck It Switch and spoke about how a couple of Sundays ago, I hit That Fuck It Switch and overate by around 1,000 calories.

As most of you know, I’m working with a nutritionist to help keep me accountable as I try to understand and repair my poor relationship with food.

As part of this, I am using an app to track my caloric intake. My nutritionist can access the data to get a snapshot of what I’m eating and when.

I was lying on the lounge that Sunday just before dinner time, and my app was up to date. But I’d already hit The Fuck It Switch, and there was no going back. I convinced myself that that day was a write-off and ate another 1,000 calories before bed.

I addressed what happened that day in last week’s blog, which helped me a lot because I haven’t finished a day in a calorie surplus since then; something has been eating away at me.

I had intense internal conflict over whether to enter the extra 1,000 calories into the app.

The logical part of my mind was saying things like, “Enter the fucking data! You are paying this man to help you with this exact fucking thing. This, right here, is precisely why you’ve gone to him for help. He needs to know about these blowouts”.

The emotional part of my brain, which was already in the driver’s seat that day, was saying things to the opposite effect, such as, “Don’t worry about entering it. It’s only one day. You’ve been going so well up until now, anyway. Just go again tomorrow. It’s perfectly okay to have one bad afternoon per week”.

In the end, my emotional brain won out. I chose not to enter the excess calories for that day, and I’ve been a little annoyed at myself since.

I know what you might be thinking. Don’t be so hard on yourself. It’s just one lousy afternoon. Don’t worry, I agree. I’m looking at this from curiosity rather than berating myself for something I can’t change.

Why did I find it impossible to tell the truth about something so trivial?

Sure, I was a little disappointed in myself, and although much quieter these days, I still have that voice inside of me that loves to catastrophise. “You’ve undone all your hard work! These 1,000 calories will never be burnt off. You’ve proven yourself right that you can’t do this stuff. You’ll probably overeat this much daily now that you’ve done this!”

Of course, this is all horse cock, and I’ve maintained a caloric deficit every day since. I’ve lost 1.2 kg this week, and I’m down seven kg since I went overseas a little under seven weeks ago. So, the physical impact has been minimal, making this one afternoon largely irrelevant. The sticking point for me is that reluctance to be honest with myself.

This whole endeavour isn’t about weight loss. I don’t even have a target weight. It’s about repairing my relationship with food, trying to see food as fuel and not use it as a coping mechanism, just like I’ve done with drugs and alcohol.

Since getting sober, I have grown accustomed to sharing my pain. I even wrote about the benefits of sharing my shame only two months ago. It’s the foundation on which organisations like Alcoholics Anonymous were built. You sit in a room with like-minded people, and they share stories of all the shameful and embarrassing things they did in active addiction. I know that sharing my shame via this blog has been a cornerstone of all the growth I’ve been through over this period. There’s something so cathartic and relieving about taking hindering thoughts and getting them out of your head and into an alternate format.

Why I Think It Happened.

So why was I so reluctant to be transparent in this instance, given that I am more transparent now than ever? I’ve narrowed it down to a few things.

Length of Relationship

Believe it or not, I’ve been eating food almost all my life. For reasons we don’t have time to go into here, I have always had an unhealthy relationship with food and body image. I would eat when I was stressed and bored. On reflection, I now believe eating when bored distracts me from my thoughts. “Here come those challenging thoughts again; better pretend to be too busy with them by eating some dopamine-inducing food”.

Realistically, my relationship with alcohol was only about half the length of my relationship with food. My relationship with drugs is even shorter again. Unlike food, I knew I didn’t need drugs and alcohol to survive, and I always knew how I used them differently from my peers was a cause for concern. I didn’t want to believe it; I wanted to think I could change it or, at its worst, knew I had to stop, but I couldn’t.

This is why my relationship with food is proving more challenging to repair than with drugs and alcohol. I’ve been embedding these neural pathways for more than double the time. Which means they could be twice as hard or take twice as long to repair.

But now I’ve realised that, at the very least, I can be a little less harsh on myself when I inevitably fuck up.

Different Audiences

I have no issue jumping on here or talking to my psychologist about how I used to crawl under the kitchen table at 4 a.m. with my iPhone light on, hoping to find one last rock of cocaine on the ground underneath the table where I’d just been sitting.

That makes sense, though; these blogs sit there on the internet for people to read only if they choose to. A psychologist is impartial and, unlike a nutritionist, is qualified to understand behaviours, addiction, and neural pathways.

I don’t even think it’s about not wanting my nutritionist to know what happened because I intend to tell him about it next time we catch up. I think it was more so that I would rather do it over an online meeting than him just reading my data to allow me to explain myself.

This is ridiculous because I know that he won’t care. He understands that we are human and will have bad days. Maybe I don’t, though; perhaps my expectations of myself are too high, and I need to keep working on finding a balance between doing the best thing most of the time and understanding that it’s not sustainable to strive for perfection all the time.

Ultimately, the hard truth is that I didn’t want to admit what I’d done to the person who mattered the most: me. Entering that data into a fucking app would mean accepting and being accountable for poor choices that didn’t align with my goals, and that, on this occasion, was too big a pill to swallow.

My Own Perception

For some reason, in my head, having a poor relationship with food is more embarrassing than my problems with addiction. Maybe it’s because they are more deep-seated, or maybe because the immediate impact of binge eating is easier to hide than abusing substances. As Terry Crews said, “Addiction grows in secrecy”.

Whatever the case, this is where I need to focus most of my attention moving forward. The key to success lies in being gentler with myself. I guess acting like the world’s going to end because I’ve eaten a little bit too much will make me more likely to hit that Fuck It Switch, but we’ll see how we go.

Actions From Here.

You know those nights when you’re just about to go to sleep, and then you’re brain kindly decides to remind you of one time 15 years ago when you said something slightly awkward in front of some people you didn’t know that well, or more importantly people who don’t know you very well and the thought of it makes you cringe?

Then you sit there wondering if those people ever think about that exact moment and wonder what they think of you. You lay awake wondering about the thoughts and opinions of people who mean nothing to you and have more than likely forgotten that this moment ever took place. Then you start to wonder why the fuck you are thinking about this shit at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday when it has no impact on your life. Then, you push the thought away and try to forget it because it’s not helpful.

This is similar to how I felt this week. That constant, mild nag in the back of my head, trying to figure out why I made my choices. I don’t know why it’s been nagging at me so much, but my choices don’t align with my values.

Moving forward, rather than trying to avoid these thoughts and squash them back down, I need to practice sitting with them and calmly explaining how irrelevant and unhelpful they are to me—reminding myself that it’s not the actual event affecting me but how I feel about it. You can’t change that it happened, but you can change your perception of it and how you think about it.

I have had the wrong idea about these types of events for so long that I’ve ignored them and told myself they’re stupid, irrelevant, and not worth investing my energy into. Now, though, I’m starting to think that these thoughts are our brain telling us that we have unfinished work to do around them.

We tell ourselves that they don’t matter, and logically, they don’t, but they keep rearing their ugly heads because we keep pushing them to the side as though they are unimportant. So, somewhere deep down, something about the event matters to you, and the only way to work past that and prevent it from returning is to process the thoughts and feelings.

Why does the thought make you feel like it does? Should it make you feel that way? Did anything of significance happen before the event that can explain why it might’ve affected you so much? Is it impacting your life currently, and is it likely to in the future?

Hopefully, this helps because life is too short to ruminate on silly, insignificant shit. We don’t control when these thoughts present themselves. Still, we can control how much impact we allow them to have. This is easier said than done though. Nothing changes, if nothing changes. So it’s time to try a new approach.

That’ll do for today.

Cheers Wankers.

What do you do when your brain reminds of things you have done that you are ashamed of or embarrassed by? Have you found an effective way to process those thoughts?

Have you too found that trying to ignore them only means they come back again and again?

I’d love to hear about your experience.

Share Your Shame

How my reluctance to share my shame and embarrassment is limiting my growth.

What Happened?

Why I Think It Happened.

Discussion about this post