part three: how God used a kid's movie to heal my heart from shame
And then I heard the stillest, smallest voice ask me a question. “Why can't you tell her?” Then it asked another one. “And why don’t you tell her everything else?”
This is the third installment of an ongoing series. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to read parts one and two below.
So I sat there in that squishy black chair, listening to the whispers and laughter of the people around me (most of whom also happen to love this movie almost as much as I do), my brain trying to process so many conflicting feelings at once as the scene approached.
Joy.
Fear.
Gratitude.
Anxiety.
Excitement.
Terror.
I wanted to let go and let myself just enjoy that moment; to bask in this sweet, surprise gift from my best friend and be fully present in the theater with her and all my other family members. But that was the night I learned a hard truth:
We don’t outgrow our shame.
part three
The morning after the surprise movie night, I woke up with my chest and stomach tied into suffocating knots of anxiety.
Something’s wrong.
Ignoring the feeling, I got up and did my best to go about my day as normally as possible. I was doing an okay job until shortly after breakfast, when I received a sweet text from my mom that made me cry.
After that, I couldn’t stop crying.
It happened any time I was was by myself. Driving was particularly brutal. I would get into my car and shut the door, and as if on cue the tears would start pouring down my cheeks. They’d continue to fall until the next time I had to be around other people, when I managed to stuff this weird sadness back inside my body until I was alone again.
During my lunch break I left an emotional voicemail for a close friend of mine, a person I knew could relate to my mental health struggles even if she couldn’t fully understand this particular situation. She called a few hours later while I was sobbing inside my car for the fourth time that day. We made plans to meet up that Friday.
The next couple of days continued in roughly the same way. I dreaded the moments when I had to be alone, but I also didn’t want to have to explain to anyone what was wrong with me when I didn’t even know what was wrong with me. It began to feel like something about the movie night had permanently broken me.
On Thursday morning I was lying in bed, my gut still turning somersaults, trying to figure out what I could tell this friend about what happened in the theater that night without telling her all the nitty gritty details. I remember thinking, “I can tell Megan about the scene in the movie and how intense it was for me as a kid, how anxious I felt leading up to it even though I was also really excited about it, how overwhelmingly wonderful and terrifying it was to be in the theater with all those people . . .
“I just can’t tell her the real reason it affected me so much.”
And then, out of the blue, I heard the stillest, smallest voice ask me a question.
“Why not?”
Then it asked another one.
“And why don’t you tell her everything else?”
Out of all the times I’d cried over the last three days, this was the hardest. That’s because I knew whose voice I’d heard, and it wasn’t mine. I also knew that He was right.
It was time to bring this thing — every part of it — into the light.
So on Friday night I drove to Megan’s house, sat down on her couch with a mug of tea, and told her everything.
The movie night.
The damsel-in-distress fixation.
The masturbating.
The scene.
At some point during this excruciating confession I paused, struggling to find the words I needed to keep going. That’s when my friend put her hand on my knee and said this to me:
“Hey, I know this is really hard for you, and I just want to make sure you know that you don’t have to be afraid to tell me anything.
You are safe.”
These were the words I’d been waiting to hear since I was a little girl.
To have someone I loved look me in the eye and promise she wasn’t going to run away even though she now knew my deepest, darkest secret was freeing in a way you can only understand if you’ve experienced it yourself.1
It would be easier to say this was the end of it, that I had this hard one conversation and was suddenly freed from shame and guilt forever . . . but the truth is, this was only step number one in the long journey that lay ahead.
Here’s a fun fact you may not know: whenever you bring something into the light, the enemy is going to do everything he possibly can to drag you right back into the dark.
What followed that conversation was the worst three weeks of my life.
The fourth and final part of this series will be released next Monday, June 2nd.
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Curt Thompson sums it up like this: “...shame’s healing encompasses the counterintuitive act of turning toward what we are most terrified of [being exposed]...But it is in the movement toward another, toward connection with someone who is safe, that we come to know life and freedom from this prison.” (The Soul of Shame, 2015)
I am so glad you listened to God took that step! And wow, I'm so glad your friend responded in such a loving way. That's definitely something to aim for as a friend!!
🤍🤍