The story of bread & shame

Reading from my blog on my discoveries of what Bread & Shame have in common. "This is not a story about bread. This is a story about how the undercurrent of shame shows up when you least expect it.  So, as I was saying – there I was, cutting into a piece of freshly baked bread and taking out (wait for it) margarine to put on it (with salt, of course, I’m not an animal!). As I am doing this, I am noticing my own internal dialogue “margarine is disgusting” “I don’t know what you’re doing but…gross” “this will definitely kill you” and other such stuff going through my mind while my body is doing the action of prepping to eat. Everything I do in my line of work revolves around pattern interrupting habituated patterns of thought (and replacing them with Quantum TLC™). So I was surprised to notice that this very dialogue had been going on in my head every.single.time I eat bread.  This time I paused … I noticed … and I asked myself what I often ask my clients … whose voice is that?! Ah, there it is. My fathers.  Now, up until today, I would try to rush through all the actions, put the margarine on, add the extra salt, and wolf the damn thing down (before anyone sees me?). I chose to take ownership of my choices (in this case, to eat bread with margarine and salt because I damn well please). And in having done so, I noticed the undercurrent that was running the show of my moment for 36 years of my life: internalized, deeply rooted shame. Now, if you are curious about exploring this nominalization called shame, I offer you some resources for you to consider. Shame is culture’s most powerful weapon because it works. In the last Igniting Your Potential monthly gathering, I found myself saying something along the lines of “parents intentionally choose shame as a tool in order to control their children’s behaviour”.  But today, once I noticed, I chose to pause, and slow down. "