Johnny Cash From The Darkness To The Light

Johnny Cash From The Darkness To The Light

I recently watched the movie on the life of Johnny Cash called “I Walk The Line” and have been listening to Johnny’s hit album of 1968 called “Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison”. The story and the movie parallel each other in the depiction of the deviant sides of Cash and the conflict of the criminal element within himself to become more whole.

In the album “Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison” Cash sings songs of the experiences of a reckless, unlawful life that divulges the angry world of the criminal. Cash probes to a deeper level of the victimization of those who break the law. The conflictual paradigm of how an individual can be the perpetrator as well as the victim is one of Cash’s central themes.

In the song “Cocaine Blues” that is featured in both the movie and album Johnny sings from the point of view of a man who murders his lover. The song expresses the shamed individual that is: trapped in a life of defeat, killing their partner in an insane moment due to their betrayal, later being the powerless victim in begging for mercy to the court and in the end living in the regret of the helplessness of their mistake. Cash guides the listener through the criminal’s perspectives of their rage acted out in violence while quickly turning to the other side of victimized role of the killer. The verses of the song changes from the killer’s defiance to those who confront him and then to the shame within the man by seeing his life trapped again in his old familiar wounds.

“Cocaine Blues” resonates with the life of Johnny Cash and his own personal conflicts that guided him to criminal behaviors. In the movie “I Walk The Line” Cash’s greatest unresolved trauma is the childhood death of his brother. Blame was inflicted onto Johnny from his father who expressed that the death was somehow the younger Cash’s fault.

This shame haunted Cash through out his life leaving him with the false belief that he was incomplete. Much like the inmates of Folsom a deep sense that they are less than others manipulates them to react to life’s challenges in insane and aggressive ways. While listening to the album the alliance of the inmates feelings to Cash’s music seems to resonate as part of the recording.

By living in the self-judgment of a deep sense of shame and guilt Johnny Cash has walked the line of the deviant. Cash has felt it in his own heart of sorrows what many criminals have felt: the separation from society through their own upbringing as a shamed individual.

Cash experienced how the wounds of shame is a force within that needs to be fed in both humiliating and rewarding ways whether that be through the belittlement from his first wife, to being adored by fans or numbing the pain with drugs and alcohol. That gnawing pain never left Cash as he struggled with addiction through out parts of his life. At the same time Johnny Cash has led a hero’s journey singing songs that comforted and inspired others to find their own personal freedom. He found his much peace through the love of his wife, reconciliation with his father and sharing his testament of life with others.

The pain and separation from self that being shamed creates is an underlying energy that is like a wounded ghost within us. It is the voice within us that tells us we are less, or deserve less. It begins weaving a pattern of other emotional reactions such as anger, guilt, self-doubt, violence, addiction, depression and others. As powerfully overwhelming as these emotional reactions sometimes feel they are only the symptomatic behaviors whose deeper source is often shame.

For most a shamed life begins in the first years of life through the projections, statements and actions of the parents. It creates the basis of how the child looks at them self in relation to the world. In addition the parents were most likely shamed as children and then model to their own children how to react to the pain of shame through anger, aggression, addiction, etc…

The cycle can be broken in an adult life. It requires a strong desire on the individual to look at their life and examine how their life was created. In that process the person discovers the dynamics of how their childhood was created and how they were shamed.

Going through this intellectually is essential to understand the stories of what happened in our life but it is only part of the process. As we recall the past we feel what our body re-experiencing these past traumas through sensations in our body in areas such as our stomach, colon, solar plexus, heart etc… It is energetic memory of the anger, fear, guilt and/or shame. Resolving these energetic memories can bring us the freedom from the suppressed memories.

The energetic journey to uncovering shame may begin by knowing your anger, guilt or fears in the beginning. As those energies uncover the deeper suppressed parts of us come up. For many people shame underlies it all.

When we are able to identify these emotions as energies we find that there is nothing to fear about them. Their essential component is energy that is the essence of the suppressed memory of the experience. Once these memories are revealed and released, the behavioral patterns change and the emotions related to the shame clear as well. A weight of the past is permanently relinquished.

Bart Sharp works with people to release suppressed emotions. Through this healing process the individual learns how to live a life without suppressed emotions such as anger, rage, fear, guilt and shame. Bart teaches these tools to his clients so that they will be able let go of limitations as they find them.