Healthy guilt: a lightbulb

[Guest guest]

I think I've just made a pretty significant breakthrough and I'd

really like to hear if the rest of you have experienced anything like

this. I'm still trying to put this into words, so I hope you can bare

with my wordy, slightly confused post!

One of the things I struggle with is holding myself to unreasonable

expectations. When I don't meet these standards, I have some pretty

nasty self-talk and I tend to panick and loose my ability to focus on

anything--including whatever I was originally feeling guilty or

ashamed about. What I realized today is that this dynamic may have

actually served the purpose of not allowing me to feel real, healthy

guilt or shame when those feelings would be appropriate.

Today, I didn't live up to even what I think are reasonable standards

for myself(nothing really earth-shattering, but still things I'm not

happy about). This is nothing new, but I just can't remember ever

having the experience of facing something like this w/o the numbing,

panicky feeling that I am all bad or that I'm some kind of monster or

whatever.

At first, I was shocked at the intensity of it and felt pretty awful

and overwhelmed, but it's a lot easier to make things right and to

think my way out of bad situations with this new, uncomfortable

feeling. I've already appologized to some people and have come up

with some new solutions that I think are going to be much better than

my original approach.

It's a little embarassing to be suddenly realizing what it's like to

have feelings that " normal " people just take for granted--I sometimes

feel emotionally handicapped. But now I can really see that

appropriate emotions really do serve a purpose and are worth having.

Trish