We all have secrets that we want keep hidden away from the world. When I'm talking about your deepest, darkest secrets, I'm talking about those things about yourself that maybe you don't want to remember. Things you don't want to claim. Maybe there was a time in your life where you did a little too much of something bad, or maybe not enough of something good. Maybe there was a time in your life where you did something that isn't quite moral or ethical. But typically these type of deep dark secrets are just electric with shame, and what I want to address today. When you keep things hidden, those parts of you seem to take on a life of their
Instead of using a dark secret as a weapon against yourself, you can acknowledge, neutralize, and own the secret and use it to build self-worth instead.
Self-Worth Means Honoring Yourself
And self-worth is about honoring yourself as is, which means you must not only honor who you are now, but you also need to honor who you were then. Now hear me out. I'm not condoning bad behavior. This isn't about condoning bad behavior or things that you did wrong. It's really about acknowledging reality and coming to terms with who you were, what you've done, who you are now, and where you're going.
The Legacy of Painful Secrets
When I was a young mom, I was inexperienced, high-strung, and desperate to be the perfect mom. I made what I now consider mistakes. Looking back, I realize that I didn't truly know my daughter. I projected my own adult persona onto her instead of recognizing her as an individual with her own personality. Right around the time of her first birthday, all my friends were weaning their kids off pacifiers, and I felt the pressure to do the same. Despite my daughter's attachment to her binky, I decided to take it away, thinking it couldn't do any harm. However, I failed to understand her sensitivity and anxiety. My marriage was failing, I was constantly stressed, and my poor little baby was just steeping in the anxious atmosphere of our home.
Within a day of losing her binky, she began biting her nails, even though she was just a tiny baby. At first, I didn’t relate her nail biting to the loss of her binky, but when it finally realized that she was coping by biting her nails, the guilt hit me like a ton of bricks. And I carried immense guilt and shame for years afterward. I believed I had failed as a mother and had caused unnecessary pain in her life. This deep, dark secret tormented me.
And that is what these deep, dark secrets can do. It was just something that I was carrying around that I can't make up for. I could not go back in time. I could not give her her beanie back. I felt like I actually harmed this innocent person. That I’d made her life painful in a way that I never would've wanted to.
So why do I tell you this? Because this is a great example for me of something that I carried around with this kind of toxic pain that I could do nothing with.
How to Neutralize Toxic Shame
I carried that shame and guilt with me over a decade and never spoke about it. I had learned from it and had matured as a mother, but secretly it still tugged at me.
I can tell you the moment that vaporized the pain for good. I confided in a coaching friend, and poured my heart out about the binky incident, sharing my deep desire to undo the past. He looked at me incredulously and said, "Are you serious? Your biggest regret is taking away a binky? You need to get over yourself."
Those words hit me like a revelation. It hadn't occurred to me that I might be blowing things out of proportion or using this incident as a weapon against myself. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might be taking myself too seriously. Or that this story might sound comical or meaningless to someone else.
Because honestly, that is how it is. In all my years of coaching, I have never been shocked. I have never been floored by somebody's deep secret. I'm always honored to hear it. There is always a brilliant, compassionate, and maybe not very mature reason for doing something, but when you look at who they were in that time with the tools they had I can’t find fault. I simply tell them, "Oh, honey, you were doing the best you could, and that's okay."
So this is what I want to offer to you is what if that thing that you're carrying around, what if that thing that you're using as a weapon against yourself that you're using as this toxic shame, guilt secret that you're hitting yourself with all day long? What if it was never that big of a deal? What if you're totally wrong about it?
What if there's a completely different way of looking at it that would help neutralize it and help you let it go?
I want to offer this to you, because I promise you, if you were sitting here with me and you told me this deep, dark, terrible thing, I would not recoil. I would not think shameful things about you.
3 Steps to Heal Toxic Shame
So since I'm not sitting with you and you can only hear a one-way conversation, I'm going to give you these tools that I use when I'm working with clients, with my friends, and with myself.
ACKNOWLEDGE THE TRUTH.
Start by naming your deep, dark secret to yourself. You don't have to share it with anyone else, but it's crucial to confront and acknowledge it.
Neutralize the story.
Before you can bring your secret out into the light and use it to build self-worth, you must neutralize its emotional charge. Reduce the judgment, resistance, and attachment associated with that aspect of yourself or the memory. Remember, repressing or denying certain traits doesn't make them disappear; it merely hinders your relationship with them. This step may be uncomfortable and even painful, but reclaiming what you've lost is essential.
Own it.
Once you've neutralized the emotional charge, it's time to own your past actions. Give yourself permission to accept that part of you. If it's particularly difficult for you, and you just can't own it, there's a magical word that you can use and the word is “sometimes.” For example: sometimes I am a mother that took a binky away, sometimes I'm a woman who made bad choices, sometimes I'm rude, sometimes I've been unkind. By using this word, you acknowledge that you occasionally you have made that choice. It allows you to bring it down to a more manageable level while still taking ownership.
With these three steps, you can shift anything that is hiding or lurking in the shadows of your past. You can reframe things that have made you feel bad about yourself. Instead of allowing these dark secrets to sit there and fester in toxicity, you can use them to own more of yourself. And by owning more of yourself, you increase your self-worth.