‘It’s naive to think you can ever get rid of shame completely.’

There are some sentences that stop you dead in your tracks when you hear them. Words that become frozen in time, waiting in some other realm for you to return to them over and over again, waiting to be replayed. ‘It’s naïve to think you can ever get rid of shame completely’ was definitely one of those sentences. It was a sentence from my therapist who was quoting her supervisor. It would seem that I am storing up quite a collection of these memorable sentences from her. Another classic was ‘I have never wished you were my daughter, or friend.’ Ouch. That one really cut deep, especially after it followed ‘I love you, you are one of the most beautiful people I have ever met’ several years before. But I digress.

When I heard those words about shame I felt my blood run cold and my heart sink. It seemed like all sense of hope had melted instantly from the world and I wanted to cry. I’m well practised at hiding my feelings from those around me and so I didn’t. I kept up my pretence that everything was completely fine. ‘It’s naïve to think you can ever get rid of shame completely’ could have been just like any regular sentence, but it wasn’t.

That’s the point of the mask, to hide the inside just as much as the outside. It has a dual purpose.

I wasn’t conscious that I did this until my therapist pointed it out, saying that my face was often expressionless and unreadable. Initially I wondered what is wrong with my face? But now it has become known in our sessions as ‘the Solly face’, meaning that I’m doing it again and we laugh about it. She says it is a tactic that I have developed over the years, a survival skill. It’s harder to be mocked and ridiculed if people don’t know what you’re thinking or feeling.

Though admittedly, I have become so good at this now, so good at masking my emotions that it often seems I have hidden them from myself as well. It has become so instinctual to stuff it all down inside, to stay silent, to keep myself hidden. There in lies the root of all of the behaviours that I struggle with, apparently. Emotions it seems, have to get out one way or another, especially if they are eating you up inside. For me this has resulted in years of battling with an eating disorder, self-harm, compulsive hair pulling and skin picking, behaviours which have left physical scars.

It seems somewhat ironic that such intense feelings of shame, silently nurtured over decades, would ultimately lead to behaviours that breed even more shame. It wasn’t until I went to therapy that I even had a word to describe that feeling of being dirty. The kind of dirt that you can’t wash off. It was shame. Of course. I had lived with it most of my life and yet I had never been able to define it, to characterise it, to give it a name. Shame. It’s powerful. Now it seems it will be here to stay forever, like an old friend.