pain and shame

What is there besides pain?
What an incredibly sad question.
What an incredibly thought provoking question.
What is the nature of pain?

From Wikipedia..."Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage...
Pain motivates the individual to withdraw from damaging situations, to protect a damaged body part while it heals, and to avoid similar experiences in the future."
Nonphysical pain is called psychalgia...caused by harm or threat to social connection; bereavement, embarrassment, shame and hurt feelings are subtypes of social pain.

So pain is protective, instinctual, natural...a part of being alive.
What is about this history of abuse that still, 40 years later, binds us with physical and nonphysical pain?
It probably has something to do with the hyperarousal and hypervigilance of PTSD...never allowing us to be taken by surprise again.
It probably has to do with festering wounds.

I have to say that my goal of this healing is to heal those wounds, not continue to pick at the scabs.
I will find the place in my soul and psyche that  allow me to release all of this...
not forget it, but forgive it and move on...with integrity and shalom.

I imagine that my life will still have pain in it...I am not naive...
but the pain will be appropriate and temporary.
It will be intermingled with joy and contentment....
and also with disappointments and tragedies.
I will be open to experience love and trust in that love.
And the shame will be gone...
that word shame is intertwined throughout our writing...
the history and experience of child abuse is steeped in shame...
What a simple word for such a complicated experience.
I need to watch the Brene Brown you tube on shame again...see if I can glean some insight or inspiration from that...
I know that I am healing, and feel as if you are too from your words...
I sense that we are nearing wholeness and comprehension of this lifelong quest to escape the effects/affects of childhood sexual and other abuses.

I am once again circling around the topic of shame...
from a different vantage point...
any insight from your perspective.

I love you,
Maggie