Exploring Shame Through a Lens of Irish Repro History
This week’s guest is Eimear O’Neill. She is a love and dating expert with some fascinating and wise perspective on shame. Her account of the reproductive health journey of the Irish people leads us down a fascinating and heart touching path of abortion exploration.
Follow her on Instagram @eim.oneill
Show Notes:
0:42 Clubhouse @amandastar @eim.oneill
2:03 Eimear’s introduction
3:01 “We want to create something different to what we’ve always known, but how do we do that”
5:29 “...brining light on to the shame, it can’t exist anymore”
6:00 “We didn’t even realize the depth of the consequences that came about because of the shame we were carrying… it’s not our shame to carry”
7:26 “We couldn’t understand why abortion wasn’t allowed… this is such an ancient rule that doesn’t make sense for any of us that it applies to”
10:45 “I started to talk to my parents about an issue that we’d never really discussed before”
11:30 “It’s not me that the law affects, it’s the younger women, and they’re saying they want it so I have to listen”
12:25 “When we started talking about it more, our whole society discovered the depth of the trauma that had been taking place before”
13:42 “When Irish society started talking more and more about what used to be in the dark… widespread horrors...”
14:33 “The importance of speaking about our experiences… and finding safe places to share our stories…”
15:00 “It was the stories. It was empathy, the compassion, that was the most important thing”
16:08 “One of the things I’ve realized about shame is that it can only survive in the darkness… shame can’t survive in the light”
15:36 “Once it was their time to share their story and they brought it to light, it lost its hold on them and actually changed a whole society”
16:40 Unmarried women in Ireland- Mother and baby homes “What happened in these homes was nothing short of horrific” mass graves, high mortality rates, vaccination trials, babies sold to the US...
19:29 “SO hard to wrap your head around this, that the state and the church were supporting this whole system…”
19:53 “When that all came to light, I started to realize, it benefited them for society to feel shame… it was in their interest for families to be so ashamed by their daughters that they would send them into this system… we were brainwashed”
20:34 “It wasn’t just a moral issue of what was right and wrong, it went so much deeper”
21:16 “The only reason it wasn’t me was because I was born later” … “the last one closed in 1994”
22:25 “The nuns would say ‘you’re just a prostitute’ … they were spoken to as if they were humans without dignity”
23:39 “For them to tell us that it’s immoral to use contraception or terminate a pregnancy and then…” “when they say pro life, are they really pro life”
26:16 “Holy shit, they set us up; we fell into a trap, so we would go along with what they wanted… it’s all made up, all this shame, it’s not ours”
27:07 “That it was all part of a big story that was used to control society” ... “they just manipulated us”
28:12 What do you do when you realize- this is not my shame, but it feels like mine?
28:35 Understanding the conscious and subconscious mind- subconscious driving most of your behavior
30:13 Subconscious mind often stored for people in their body, “that’s why you have a physical response”
32:00 Befriend it- “you’re safe with me, it’s ok”
36:07 Guided Meditation- leave your sexual shame behind
51:04 “That shame is not ours we get to choose to leave it in the past. Every single one of us is enough exactly the way we are. If you don’t feel that shame, then other people’s judgements will be able to roll off your back, because you can only feel rejected if you are rejecting that part of yourself.”
52:02 “Being able to give yourself that love is something that’s within everyone’s power.”
