Secrets, Silence & Shame: How Our Stories Can Keep Us Stuck or Set Us Free by Rebecca Brown, MSW, RSW

 

Rebecca Brown takes us on her own journey in the hopes that she can inspire us to go on our own journeys of self-discovery. She shares with us her story of becoming a writer and a bonus exclusive excerpt from her book Shelter from Our Secrets, Silence & Shame. Download your copy and follow the tour for even more. Best of luck entering the great giveaway!

As a mental health clinician, Rebecca Brown has been a safe place for many to seek shelter from their secrets, silence and shame. Inspired to finally slow down, stop running from herself and share her own story, she found ways to seek and savour her own shelter.

Rebecca's personal journey takes us through sadness, tragedy, self-sabotage, the impossible pursuit of perfection, distorted thinking and eating, engaging with her shadow self, divorce, and numbing with alcohol, all in an attempt to avoid the story needing to be shared.

Dispelling the limiting beliefs we hold about ourselves can unlock our limitless potential to reach goals we never dared to dream. From the Boston Marathon to working with horses, Rebecca sets out to prove to herself that anything is possible when you don't listen to the negative stories you tell yourself.

Everyone has a story. We become who we are because of what has happened to us, and because of the stories we tell ourselves. But do our stories continue to serve us well, or keep us stuck? Are our stories fact or fiction? Is it time to rewrite the versions we have been telling ourselves?

Shelter provides strategies to help reframe the thinking patterns we have developed, and offers tools to recognize when we are suffering from our own thoughts, feelings and actions. Resilience-building techniques are woven through the pages, and encouragement for the lifelong journey of collecting moments of awe and happiness.

Seeking and reading Shelter is a gift of self-compassion and self-discovery. Rebecca's hope is that it will be read with a highlighter in hand, pages folded down, re-read, recommended to a friend, and used as a guide to start sharing our own stories with those we love.

We may not have written our beginnings, but we have the ability to write every word from this point forward and just imagine where our stories can take us when we are free of secrets, silence and shame.

Read an excerpt:

My back story begins with a career in medical social work, my dream job. I knew from the time I was sixteen years old that I wanted to help people with the challenges life puts in our paths. I was a pretty good student, and in my last few years of high school I really buckled down because I’d set my mind on exactly what I wanted to do. I knew which university I needed to go to, and I worked hard to get there. It was also the farthest university in the province from where I lived, which was exactly where I wanted to be at that time. As far away from home as I could get.

I also knew that I didn’t want just any social work career. I wanted to work in a hospital with people who had experienced trauma. This felt comfortable to me. I could stay calm in a crisis and understood the impact of life-changing traumatic events on a person and their family. I worked hard through my undergrad program, and in my fourth-year internship, I was accepted to work in a hospital rehabilitation program for patients with spinal cord injuries.

I was exactly where I needed to be.
I knew that I could help people here.
I loved this job.

My patients were primarily sixteen-to-thirty-year-old males who were injured while engaging in high-risk behaviours, like cliff diving, drunk driving, or contact sports, or in vehicular accidents. Some had attempted suicide. Others had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time and had broken their necks, backs, or seriously damaged their spinal cords.

My patients were beautiful young men, full of life and often the life of their parties.
Until the accident.

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My journey to become a writer began in the early stages of the Covid Pandemic. As a mental health clinician for over 35 years, I have been a safe place for many to share their stories and their secrets. It was finally time to share my own. Here is an excerpt from my book’s introduction which will give readers an idea of what my story is all about.


I haven’t been sleeping well.

When I don’t sleep well, it’s usually because my subconscious is trying to
come to the surface of my conscious mind. There’s something tugging at
me, pushing and nudging me to finally do it.

It is a deep longing to share the story, and not just my own story.

I hold a place in me for the stories of others.

I believe that this is the reason for my work; it is time for me to share these
stories.

I have worked in the world of trauma for over thirty-five years, and
although I know that I have helped the people I interact with personally,
I can’t help feeling that I can help many more people if I write a book.

A book to share the insights, ideas, experience, and strategies I have learned
from the stories I’ve collected over a lifetime.

A word, or perhaps a title, keeps coming to me: Shelter.

Shelter from our secrets, silence, and shame.

Is this the time to offer what I can to the world in an effort to provide meaning,
affirmation, validation, and tools to help others in their own shelter-seeking?

I’m also hoping to provide shelter for my grandmother’s story, my father’s
mother, which has come to light out of the darkness, the shadow, and the
grave, where it was been buried with her for over twenty years. During
the quiet months of early 2020, I had time to go through some old family
albums, and I came across material I had tucked away in a box with some
photos and papers about my grandmother’s life. The papers were from the
search I’d started a few years earlier online.

It’s ironic that I’ve been working in the field of trauma for my entire
career yet had no knowledge of the traumatic secret buried deep within
my own family. I have a profound need to understand my grandmother’s
pain and suffering as a young girl, a young woman, a wife, a mother, and
a grandmother. To our knowledge, she never spoke of this to anybody.

Ever. And that’s what makes this trauma a tragedy. We’re all helpless to do
anything to ease her pain. It also explains so much about her personality,
her vulnerability, her strength, her resilience and her suffering … in silence.

I want to tell her story in a way that releases its silence. I will endeavour
to treat her secret story with the utmost respect and compassion. As I
unwrap it, I will gently present it and cradle it in the most delicate lace
handkerchief, as she would have wanted. I will be that safe space for her
secret to finally be set free, and I’ll give her story shelter and honour it with
understanding, love, and compassion. I feel both compelled and encouraged by her memory, which is giving me the voice to share her story and release the secret and the silence, because secrets only survive in the darkness. When we release them to the light and let them rise to the surface, they lose their power and control over us, and this is how we become free of the shame. This is my hope in telling her story.

I also want to write this book from the perspective of the child I was and
from the lens through which I viewed the world around me at the time.

My understanding of events and situations that happened to me, or around
me, impacted me in profound ways. I’ve held on to a great deal of pain and
shame, and through my own inner work and working with many people
who had similar experiences, I’ve learned how to reframe and understand a
different perspective to the stories I told myself and held on to for so long.

Stories are often recalled in fragmented snapshots of moments, which get
stuck in our minds. I’ve learned how to connect the dots of these moments
and weave meaning and understanding through them to create a mosaic
of memories that has become the fabric of who I am. By sharing my story, perhaps others will feel less alone with their secrets and shame, and they’ll trust enough to start
sharing their stories in a way that releases them and allows them to seek
shelter.

Otherwise, as in the case of my dear grandmother, the story may stay
buried and secret for over one hundred years. Life is too lonely a road to travel on our own.

When we become too focused on the goal or the destination, we risk not
seeing the beautiful possibilities and moments of happiness and awe right
before our eyes, in this present moment. We can turn to our drugs of choice: alcohol, caffeine, cannabis, pain killers, food, chocolate, potato chips, exercise, work, self-harm, sex, competition, shopping, social media, or a million other things.

Or, we can seek shelter through music, mindfulness, nature, laughter,
yoga, running, working out, tea, meditation, cooking, creating, reading,
connection, animals, hobbies, art, or a million other things.

Essentially, the question to ask ourselves is: Do I want to numb out or tune
in to what I am thinking, feeling and doing?

There is so much hidden beneath the surface of calm water;
hidden secrets and buried treasure.

But we cannot heal what we keep hidden.

When we become quiet and stop listening to the stories we have told
ourselves, and instead seek shelter in our wisdom, when we are willing to
risk being vulnerable, open and authentic we can start to imagine the new
stories waiting to be written.

I hope that my words will help lighten, enlighten, and lead you through
your own journey to find the shelter you are seeking.

REBECCA BROWN is a clinical social worker with over 35 years in practice ranging from medical social work, childhood trauma, vicarious trauma for first responders, international psychological first aid, and Equine Assisted Therapy. She is honoured to hold a faculty appointment with the Department of Family Medicine at Western University in London, Ontario. She teaches extensively on the topics of trauma and resilience and has delivered keynote presentations throughout North America. She shares her life and career with her husband, a family physician and trailblazer in the field of Lifestyle Medicine. Together they live and work on the shores of the Great Lake Huron, where they seek and share shelter with their six adult children, four grandchildren, extended family and friends, two dogs, two cats and one horse.

Connect with Rebecca L. Brown

WEBSITE https://rebeccabrown.ca/

INSTAGRAM https://www.instagram.com/rebeccabrown.ca/

GOODREADS https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/22150115.Rebecca_L_Brown

Rebecca L. Brown, MSW, RSW will be awarding a $15 Amazon/BN GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

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