You can be standing in the middle of something good, a good woman, a good life, work you are proud of, and still feel like you do not belong in it. Like you would stain it just by touching it.
You let people get close, but never all the way. Some part of you is certain that if they ever saw all the way down, they would step back. So you live slightly outside your own life, one foot out the door of every good thing, waiting to be found out.
I am going to say this part carefully. Somewhere young, something was done to you, or done around you, that you were too small to stop. A boundary was crossed. You were made to feel unclean by something that was never your choice and never your fault.
A child cannot hold that the bad thing came from outside him. It is too big. So his mind does the only thing it can. It pulls the bad thing inside and makes it part of him. I am dirty. I am ruined. I should not touch what is good.
That is the Contamination filter, and here is the lie at the center of it. You took the stain that belonged to what happened, and to the person who did it, and you put it on your own skin. You were the place it landed. You were never the source.
This one lives in the body, usually before you had words for it, so you do not argue your way out of it. The work goes underneath the language to take the charge off the encoding, then separates what happened to you from who you are, then rebuilds you into a man who can hold and be held without the alarm going off.
What was done to you was real. The stain was never yours. Set it down.
Check your intel before you move.