The topic of shame has been popping up a lot lately. Shame is the deeply rooted belief that we hold inherent flaws that make us unworthy or unlovable. Since shame is a passive emotion, it's turned inwards and is therefore incredibly self-destructive. Shame can turn into self-loathing, which in turn taints our interpersonal and professional interactions.
How can we release shame? One of the first things we need to do is to think about what it sounds like. Whose voice do you hear when you think of the "unlovable" parts of yourself? What tone is it? And - this is a big one - how old do you feel when you hear it? (That's a trick question - almost all of us revert to early childhood.)
Shame is so difficult to unlearn because it's the case of story vs. event that I wrote about earlier, except with shame, there is no event. There's no hard fact that the story is built around, which makes the story even more difficult to unravel. We can't separate it out because we believe it to be fact.
I'll draw from my own life again because it's the one I know best. I was an overweight child. There was likely a medical reason for this and I'm specifically not including what that was because that didn't matter. What did matter was that society, at the time, reminded me over and over again that the worst thing a little girl could be was overweight. Since I didn't remember a time when I wasn't overweight, I internalized that something was inherently wrong with me. There surely had to be some sort of flaw that made me a terrible thing. And you can imagine how believing about myself that tainted, well, everything.
Now, let's think about it: even if I was an overweight child because I had some deep character flaw (which is ABSURD to say about a child) - so what? Why was there so much shame attached to being fat? Who actually cares? Why was that the marker of value?
I'm using this example because you can swap out being overweight for anything at all. We learn shame about needing glasses, about wearing braces, about failing a class, about being from a lower income family - you name it.
But stop for a moment and ask yourself: is anyone born inherently worth more or less than anyone else?
No. The very idea that someone is born with more value than anyone else is crazy. So, let's flip that: you and I and everyone else were also not born less than anyone else. Full stop.
Think deeply about what shame you might carry around. Think about the story around it. It's painful because it's so interwoven in the fabric of who we are.
But start to unravel it to understand that there is nothing - not one thing - inherently wrong with you.
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