ABSTRACT
Early memories of my own childhood come in snapshots and not in narratives. This is true for most of us. These snapshots are of both positive and negative experiences. My love of books and the adult creation of an enormous library clearly goes back to being taken to the library when I was three years old. I trace the start of my vocation as a priest to learning the Lord’s Prayer and the 23rd Psalm when I was a child. I also trace and connect my experience of sexual shame to one particular childhood event: I was probably three years old and I was in the backyard with another child. I wanted to see his bottom. I was only interested in the curve of the buttock and I patted it gently. At that moment, my mother came on the scene, hysterical and furious. I learned then that I had done something terribly wrong and it has always stayed with me. This memory was like a branding. It was 36 years before I could even speak about it and every time I did, I had the awful feeling of shame arise within me. Even now, I still feel the anxiety of shame rise up inside of me, even though I know that I was doing nothing wrong and was involved in age-appropriate quasi-sexual exploration. But on this fateful day, sexual shame and body shame came together. I knew, and never forgot, that this part of me was bad. It is different today: I still feel it, but now I know that I did no wrong. My mother had implanted sexual shame within me. Before I came into recovery for sexual addiction, I thought it was authentic shame. Now when I feel it, I know this is just a ‘shame script’, in other words feelings of shame from my past, which, in reality, have no weight or validity. I have learned to say to myself, ‘Here it comes, it is just a shame script. It has no validity.’
