Disability Coping Essentials: Thankful for Learning to Embrace Disability

I know I have said this before – I love Thanksgiving! For the total foodie I am (I really think I have a second calling to work for Wegman’s, the be all of grocery stores), I love the whole process of preparing a feast and gathering with loved ones to share it.  However, what I love more is the emphasis on being thankful.

There are so many health studies out now that show how being grateful improves mental status and physical health. Sometimes, we reap the most benefits when we learn to be thankful for what creates the biggest challenges in our lives. In learning to appreciate what gives us the most adversity, we become stronger and wiser.

Enter the third step in the 5 Essential Principles for Coping with Disability –

Embrace your disability as part of who you are and give back the shame.

Embrace your disability? The thing that has changed your life so much?

You may have difficulty embracing what you have a hard time accepting or perhaps even hate. How can you embrace something you do not like, do not want, and which may even cause pain? When a difficult event is happening in our lives, our natural tendency is to begin to shut down and cut off our feelings. For many people, this urge can lead to addictions of all kinds—food, drugs, alcohol, sex, shopping.

If you have the courage to remain aware and take an honest look at what is going on in your life, profound changes can begin to happen. By looking at the struggle and why it is so difficult, you honor the struggle and the impact it has on our daily lives. When you do this, you are not submitting to it but rather allowing yourself to incorporate what you are meant to learn from this so that you may become more fully the person you are intended to be.

Okay, that makes sense, you may be thinking, but give back the shame? What’s that all about?

For centuries people living with disabilities have taken on a collective sense of shame that gets in the way of fully embracing our disability. We need to give it back.

We’re not broken; there’s no fixing needed here. We just need to embrace the beauty and wisdom disability holds for us.

Most people do not like to talk about shame. It is one of those human emotions we all experience from time to time, yet few care to admit it. Many have shame about feeling shame. Shame keeps the struggle alive between wanting to fully love others and ourselves but feeling unable to do so because of this sense of unworthiness that floats about our beings. Shame blocks us from our ability to love more intensely and become all we are meant to be.

Shame keeps us stuck in a vicious cycle of self-hatred and denial. When we are dealing with such destructive behavioral patterns as these, the unconditional love and light within is buried deeper and deeper. Shame can engulf our love and light so powerfully that we can easily forget how beautiful and lovable we really are. Even more powerfully, it can make us believe that we are ugly, full of faults, and unworthy of another’s love, particularly shame regarding our disability.

The release from this burden of feeling unworthy and devalued creates the entry point for our light and power. The key to dealing with shame is to remember that no one is born with shame. It is always given to us either by other people, society, or our own false sense of self. Because of this, we can always return it to where it came from and let go of what was never ours to begin with!

This Thanksgiving, I wish you all the gratitude your heart can hold for your disability.

*Excerpts from Firewalk: Embracing Different Abilities have been used.