This is the best definition of shame that I can find:
"Shame is an emotion in which the self is perceived as defective, unacceptable, or fundamentally damaged. Shame is often confused with guilt, which is a related but distinct emotion in which a specific behavior is viewed as unacceptable or wrong, rather than the entire self."I had been doing reading on shame because of my daughter. My daughter suffers from Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD). Because she was abandoned at birth and left in a Russian baby orphanage for 14 months, her earliest experiences were of loss and betrayal This is still true for her and probably always will be true for her. We have no idea of what level of neglect she was subjected to or what other traumas she might have experienced. Because she had no reliable source of comfort, no primal identification with another human being who treated her with love, she sees herself as worthless, powerless and helpless. What happens with children with RAD is that as soon as they start to get close to someone, they do anything they can to push them away as in: "I'm not going to let you get close to me because you are only going to hurt me so I am going to hurt you before you can hurt me."
My daughter needs to feel that she is the one in control and has become a master at pushing us away. It takes the form of tantrums that go on forever, physical abuse of my husband and myself, not properly taking care of her own hygiene, stealing, lying, and breaking things.
I have had knives pointed at my throat, I have been punched and kicked, I have had things thrown at me (I have had stitches in my head from things she has thrown at me), I have been locked in my bedroom, I have had my personal belongings torn and ripped and flung all over the house and I have holes in the walls and windows where she has punched her fist through. I have padlocks on my bedroom door and on my studio door. I have put away everything of value in my house. I do not buy sugar, candy, ice cream, cookies, cake or pasta because she will hoard it in her room.
When our daughter first came home, we thought she was beautiful, adorable, lovely and bright. We were so very very happy. Of course, we then had the problem of trying to explain her to everyone. Immediately after she came home, my husband left for a week to go to the "retreat" in Montana and I was left alone. I was fairly petrified to be totally alone with an infant.
My husband had told his first wife that if he ever got married again, he would tell her first before the boys and he wanted to keep his word to her. At that point, he had been taking the boys every weekend. The first weekend we were home, he went to pick the boys up and bring them to his new home to meet his new wife and their new sister. He told his wife when he got there what the plan was and she said absolutely not and refused to let them go with him.
I wasn't sure that I didn't blame her. It was all of a sudden and a lot of different issues to contend with. The boys were then 8, 10 and 12. He returned home alone which necessitated emergency calls to Sharon and Mr. MC. We were told to have friends come over for support. He was told to go back and not come back home without the boys. He came back with them. Sharon had told me to buy them a ping pong table and we had put it in a screened porch off the garage (this was just the beginning of what Sharon told me to buy and how she wanted me to spend my money.) I remember sitting on the floor in a room at the back of the house with my "friend" and my daughter watching them out of the window playing ping pong on the other side of the driveway.
I think that first weekend, the youngest of the boys said something like: "I'm not going to be the youngest anymore?" and "This is going to take some getting used to." It was awkward at first but we settled in fairly quickly to being a family. The boys never had a problem about their sister and accepted her whole heartedly. We went on family trips to the beach in the summer and skiing in Canada in the winter. I have come to love the three of them as my own children.
I didn't meet my husbands ex-wife for a long time. I met her one day when we went to pick up the boys for the weekend. The previous weekend, one of them had had a headache and I asked her what was the best thing to give him for it. I think that once she understood that I was as interested in the welfare of the boys as she was, we got along fine. After all, we had a lot in common. Sharon had always told me what a horrible bitch she was but she said that about everyone who left so I didn't pay much attention to it. Today, my husbands ex-wife and I are good friends. We talk and text frequently and I have her to dinner fairly often. We don't go to her house because her boyfriend (who has never been married and doesn't have children) doesn't understand why we are all friends and doesn't really want to have anything to do with us.
My nephew was going to college in the Boston area at the time. One weekend one of my cousins from Denver came to visit so I invited my nephew and another cousin to all have dinner with us. That was my family's introduction to my daughter and word spread quickly so I didn't really have to tell anyone else. We just introduced our daughter as their new cousin and that was that. I was asked all kinds of questions about where she was born and how the delivery had gone, etc. and I just lied and lied. No, it wasn't a lie, it was clever sincerity.
I started going to class in Boston when we returned from Russia with our daughter. It was carefully orchestrated by Mr. MC. We were to come to class with our daughter at a specific time on a specific night. When we got there, our daughter and I were introduced to everyone. I only knew two people in the room (the "friend" that Sharon had given me and her husband.) A number of people came up to me after class and congratulated me and said how happy they were to meet me. Most of the people didn't really acknowledge me. My husband had told me which women he had dated and one of them sat there and stared menacingly at me for weeks and then she left school. There were a number of young mothers and pregnant women in the class who sometimes came to me for advice. I lied to them as well.
I was a stay-at-home Mom for awhile. I felt isolated and lonely because I really knew no one and I couldn't tell anyone the truth anyway. People said that I would make friends once my daunter was in school. It felt strange to me to start new relationships with a whole package of lies. I went to a new mother play group and they were all women in their early thirties who had given up good jobs to become stay-at-home Moms. They all had brand new houses where everything in them was new as if they were starting brand new lives (which I guess they were) with no history whatsoever. I had an old house filled with antiques and things I picked up off the street. We had nothing in common.
Frequently we did things with my "friend" and her daughter as the girls were about the same age and got along very well. She was the only one that knew my daughter was adopted (although later I found out that a lot of people knew but that's another story). I was frequently disturbed that my daughter seemed to prefer my friend to me. Was I not a good mother? Was I doing something wrong? She also seemed to prefer my sister-in-law to me as well. She would allow them to cuddle her and spoil her. With me she often hit me and had frequent tantrums. She screamed when I put her in her car seat and immediately unbuckled herself. She screamed at the music on the radio and wanted me to change it every few minutes.
I will probably say this again but I will say it now: most women in my situation would have joined an adoptive mothers group not a new mother's group. I was so invested in keeping all of the secrets that I never even read anything about adoption, never went to an adoption support group and I didn't complete our post-adoption assessments. I didn't apply for her to be readopted in Massachusetts because I had no idea that I was supposed to. I didn't think of myself as an adoptive mother, I tried to think of myself as a new mother. I eventually did make a few friends and it was hard to keep up the pretense with them. Lying is always a difficult road and it is exhausting as well. I was starting to forget who I told which lie...
In one of my classes (I am studying for a change of profession) recently, someone did a project on vulnerability and introduced me to two TED Talks by Brene Brown that are absolutely amazing to me. I cried through both of them. I wrote this poem last spring after I saw these videos when I realized the central focus of shame in both my daughters life and in my own life (by those "people", I mean the cult):
My life is a spinning top
Whirling haphazardly out of control
And balanced on two points:
Those “people”
And my daughter.
My trauma
Her trauma
Her shame
My shame
Round and round it’s all the same.
I want to end
This crazy dervish dance.
Sit in the sun.
Smell the sea.
Plant flowers.
Live simply.
Simply love.
Simply love.
http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability
http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_listening_to_shame
Shame is also part of the reason that I and my friends stayed in school as long as we did. Sharon capitalized on our own feelings of being in some ways defective, unacceptable or damaged. I think everyone feels that to some degree but not to the extent my daughter feels it where it always eclipses everything else. Sharon took our faults and used them against us and also used them to keep us in school. The Gurdjieff tradition says that everyone has a "chief weakness" and of course no one knew what their weakness was but Sharon did. We waited with baited breath for Sharon to tell us our weakness. At a certain point, she might tell a student what that weakness was and use it against them. I remember one story of a new student who asked if he could have a receipt for his tuition for tax purposes. Of course that was out of the question, so Mr. MC told him that his main problem was that he was stingy. A simple request got turned into an hour long harangue about his faults as in "How DARE you ask a question like that!"
