Some thoughts on shame

I have been thinking a lot lately about what a shame bound society we live in.  I was talking the matter over with my therapist, Katina yesterday.  I have realised more and more over the past few years how consistently I run my own inner dialogue of shame, though not as much these days as I am becoming more aware.  I am learning to reject inner voices of shame and instead finding loving voices inside to answer back.  The loving voices aren’t always there but they are a great deal more present than they were even six months ago.

Yesterday after returning from my therapy session I was browsing through a book I bought a while ago Conquering Shame and Codependency 8 Steps to Freeing the True You.  In it I read the following

Shaming, abuse and real or perceived unfairness breed anger in us as children.  However when parents are manipulative, inconsistent, indifferent or interfering, children may not express this anger directly due to dependence upon them and their love.  Expression of anger may also be disallowed or shame bound. Without a loving connection to our parents, we turn this hostility against our real self, which we’ve come to believe is unworthy or love and respect.  Our experience of shame is now intensified and self perpetuated by a shaming, devaluing voice, usually of one of our parents which takes up permanent residence in our minds as an inner critic.

It’s as if a record needle were stuck, forever, skipping and replaying the same critical inner dialogue, often reminiscent of the parent’s words.  This voice continually tries to turn us into our ideal self in a tone that ranges from mild frustration to one of malicious self contempt.  Whatever the tone, we live with a punitive, persecutory detractor in the background.  This Critic, or inner judge, puts us in unending conflict with our real self, as the drama of our childhood unfolds internally.

In extreme cases, the Critic can overtake our personality to the point that we feel nothing good or worthwhile about ourselves.  We’re constantly disappointed in ourselves and see only flaws and failures.  We no longer have access to strengths or abilities and believe every one of the Critic’s accusations as truth, and no one can convince us otherwise.  The Critic compares us to others to reinforce evidence of our defectiveness.

Darlene Lancer the author of the book goes on to explain how the critic sets us up for chronic and paralysing self devaluation, makes us lose trust in our true impulses, beliefs, thoughts and needs, divides us in half, fosters our expectation of unrealistic goals, encourages us to conform to unrealistic ideals, suppresses genuine feelings such as fear hurt or anger or assertive actions and fills us with deep shame which can then be projected  onto others.  It then creates a divided self within as we increasingly try to act in the ways demanded by external reality, while our true self, often now full of anger and pain at being left behind acts out and screams silently from within, often through symptoms.

Can anyone else out there see that what is being described is also on some level a reflection of how our mainstream society and a lot of social media these days operates on ideals of perfection, appearance and behaviour which are unreal illusions and cause much unnecessary suffering and harm as well as perpetuating states of inner self division?  This is what my therapist and I were talking about yesterday.

Having shame used on us, we learn to turn against ourselves and others.  We no longer see much deeper than the surface to the heart of what may be going on.  We look for who to blame or where to pass off the hot potato.  We lose touch with emotional intelligence which would inform us that we or people are actually struggling with very real human emotions and individual ways of being and expressing themselves which should by no means be seem through the lens of shame or subjected to invalidating or disempowering oughts and should which are then imposed with an iron fist (even if often hidden in a flowery coated kid glove of platitudes!)

I am, of course not the only one thinking about shame.  Brene Brown devoted many years of her life to researching shame and has reached some powerful insights into how shame prevents us from embracing and expressing our own vulnerability which is really where the true source of our power to connect with and love each other and be our true selves lies.

I touched on this shame/invalidation issue in a post earlier in the week : The Mirror which explored the shame a person who had gone through loss was feeling about suffering grief.  I myself have personally been shamed for grieving countless times in my life.  When my sister died a few years ago I was personally shocked by some of the things what were said not only to me but to my mother.  “Well it must feel like such a blessing now to know she is liberated from a life of pain!”   Well Noooo of course it was painful for us to feel my sister’s suffering in later years, but her life still had meaning and we still miss her anyway.  That is just one thing said.  I wont say much about any more but the key thing trying to be communicated beneath the surface was that in some way the grief we were feeling should not be as it really was : a valid expression of love and loss.

It saddens me greatly that we are so full of shame as a society about things that should not be seen as shameful.  We hold up ideals of beauty, achievement, happiness, togetherness and success that are not always realistic for all of the population.  When and if some curve ball appears out of left field that may blow the carefully ordered perfect ideal universe apart others are trying to create the ball is often deflected or thrown through our own window of reality, shattering our fledgling attempts to be and embrace REAL.

Not understanding our own shame and how it drives us leads us to co-dependency.  It blocks our expression of real, true and authentic emotions.  Holding ourselves up to an ideal imposed or created by a mind barricaded or defended against the less rational ground of primal feeling is damaging, it is unrealistic.  It provides no avenue for the true, rich, messy, creative chaos of life which is continually trying to birth tender new shoots out of the rich compost of past so called defeats, failures and mistakes : the stony ground of loss This stony ground is where we come to know that we are continually reshaped once we let down defences and surrender to the life force that is trying to birth the new through us on any day which only occurs as we surrender to the process and deep feeling associated with it, be that anger, rage, tears, pain, confusion and deep despair on some days.

Does this blog make sense?  It seems to have assumed a life of its own.  I am so sick of shame and of people who don’t deserve shame being shamed.  I am sick of the shame I have made myself swallow and I now want to spit out.

And I do see and feel that there is a growing force out there of realness trying to birth and speak for the need we have as a species to face how shame disempowers us and continues to steal an opportunity for the burgeoning feminine forces of love, compassion, empathy and wisdom to express and transform much of the suffering many are enduring on this planet at present.