As hard as this may be to wrap the mind around - the antidote to shame is exposure in the light of love.
Alright, that’s the end of the post - but let me now take you through the entire thought process of how we get here, sound good?
The Roots Of Shame
Shame is something we develop in childhood, as a way of trying to protect ourselves.
As odd as this may be to consider, the reality is that when we are in that delicate first phase of life, when we are fully dependent upon our caregivers for all of our needs and when we have no control over our surroundings or our levels of pain and pleasure - we learn that the way to achieve safety, the way to get our needs met, the way to get out of pain and into pleasure is to be loved, supported, understood and provided for by someone outside of us.
We learn deep in our bodies and our nervous systems that the way to be safe, the way to be provided for and the way to be in a state of having what we need was to be seen, loved and cherished by another.
In this time of our lives, we didn’t have the capacity to understand that our caregivers weren’t omnipotent and all powerful. From our perspective, they were the arbiters of reality. They were the ones that had total control over whether or not we ate, slept, had toys, had fun, were hurt or harmed - they were the ones that, from our perspective, fully controlled our life experience.
This meant that in any situation where we weren’t getting our needs met, where we weren’t being loved and supported, where we felt abandoned, abused, hurt, harmed or in any way unsafe - we perceived that this is how the world worked. We perceived this as being ‘the way things were’ and we perceived that the ONLY point of control WE had was to try to adjust our behavior, our expression, our way of being in some way in order to try to elicit a different response than the one we were getting.
We could not see that our caregivers were separate from us.
We could not see that they may be doing things that had nothing to do with us.
We could not see that they didn’t have ultimate control and power.
We could not see that their rules for life may not be how it always works in all situations.
We could not see that their opinions of what was right or wrong may not be the ultimate truth.
We could not see that they may have been failing us in terms of support and giving us what we needed - and that that wasn’t our fault or because of us.
We could not understand that they may be harming us and that this may be a flaw/fault of theirs, not ours.
All we knew was that if we were being abandoned, harmed, shamed, rejected or otherwise were in a situation where we weren’t getting our needs met, that the ONE thing we had control over was our behavior. The one thing we had control over was how we reacted and responded.
We learned deep in our bodies that when we were abandoned by, shamed by, rejected by, or otherwise harmed by our caregivers that this meant that we needed to change, alter, fix, get rid of or otherwise amend whatever behavior we perceived to be the ‘cause’ of them doing what they were doing.
Because we literally had no other point of power. We had no other control.
We couldn’t control our circumstances. We couldn’t control our caregivers. We couldn’t provide for ourselves. We couldn’t understand our own needs and get them met in some other way. We couldn’t protect ourselves from harm if our caregivers were going to harm us.
We could only figure out how to manage, navigate and adapt to the situation in order to try to reduce the levels of pain and increase the levels of pleasure.
This is where we developed shame.
How Shame Becomes A Way Of Being
From here, in order to shut down our genuine expression, in order to make sense of the pain/harm that our caregivers may be causing us and in order to try to gain control over the situations where we aren’t getting our needs met/are feeling abandoned - we develop shame.
We develop, either through our own volition or through being told by those around us, an idea that there are ‘bad’ parts of ourselves, bad ways to be and bad behaviors - and the reason we see these parts and behaviors as bad is because they are what we perceive to be the CAUSE of the pain we’re experiencing.
We, from our childhood perspective, believe that it is our behavior that is causing our caregivers to treat us how they are treating us - we connect our actions with their actions and then try to control our behavior in order to try to prevent a negative response from them or to try to elicit a positive one.
If we perceive, for instance, our caregivers pulling away from us - making us feel vulnerable and like we aren’t going to be provided for - we are going to start to look for the patterns of behavior that we have been exhibiting during those times of love going away, whether those connections are real or imagined, and we are going to start to develop and existential relationship with whatever behavior we connect with that abandonment response.
If we connect crying with our caregivers pulling away, we will learn to stop crying and to have shame and guilt every time we do allow ourselves to cry.
If we are told by our caregivers that it’s not ok to be loud or to express in any particular way, we again are going to develop and existential relationship with these behaviors and parts of ourselves - because on the one hand they are our natural expression - they are what feel GOOD to us in the moment - but they get us a RESPONSE that we don’t want - abandonment - and thus we need to have some sort of negative EMOTIONAL trigger to stop us from doing what feels natural/right - and that is where shame comes in.
In order to control our behavior and natural responses, we develop a negative emotional loop that helps us control ourselves in order to try to protect ourselves.
When we are being harmed by our caregivers in some way - when they are pulling away, abusing us, yelling at us, taking our pleasure away or causing us pain in some way - again we are going to have no other option but to assume that WE are the cause of this on some level.
Our childhood reasoning is going to kick in and it’s going to tell us that we deserved to be treated how we were, that it was our way of being that caused the treatment and that we need to change ourselves in order to avoid that treatment in the future.
If we get a POSITIVE result from doing things that don’t actually feel good to us, again we are going to start to develop these false parts of self as way of getting the love, connection and attention we need. For instance if we notice that empathizing with and being a little councilor for our caregivers means that they finally slow down enough to give us some attention, we are going to lean into that behavior - even if on a true emotional level it doesn’t feel good to us to be doing that.
We develop shame around parts of self and expressions that we perceive to be connected with being rejected, abandoned, abused or not given what we want and need - and this is because we perceive that if we can change these aspects of self, we will finally be safe. The shame is a protective mechanism against ourselves, in the hopes that we can become what our caregivers want us to be, so they will then love and provide for us.
On top of this, we will notice that when we start to expose and process our shame, that a lot of the time our shame is covering up our TRUE emotions.
As children, we didn’t have the capacity to process being angry at our caregivers for not providing for us. We didn’t have the emotional capacity to process being sad about being abused, to process our fear about not having the connections we wanted and needed - rather all we could do was turn around and blame ourselves for what was happening, in the hopes that again we would be able to change ourselves enough to then get the love we wanted.
So rather than being able to feel the anger we would naturally feel when our caregivers took our toys away as a punishment for being too loud - we would have simply developed SHAME around our loudness. We would have developed the idea that being loud is bad, is a flaw in us, is something wrong with us, and we would have worked to become as quiet as possible.
So now as adults, we have all these parts of self that we are suppressing and rejecting, we have all these underlying emotions that we haven’t processed and we have a knee-jerk reaction to ‘fix ourselves’ when we are in pain, in order to try to make that pain go away.
All of this separates us from our true selves, from real reality, from what we are actually feeling and wanting, from our true needs and from being able to create a life that actually feels good for us.
Shame is what buries the truth from us.
Shame keeps us stuck in patterns of self improvement that never go anywhere - because as adults, we are no longer in that temporary codependent relationship with our caregivers, and we are no longer in a situation where their reality has to be our reality.
Exposing Shame Through Love
As adults, we likely have shame around a few things:
1. Parts of ourselves that we learned in childhood were the reason we were going to get abandoned, abused or neglected in some way.
2. Expressions we perceived got us abandoned, abused or hurt in some way.
3. The feelings of pain that come from not getting our needs met that we know no other way to process and perceive.
4. The coping mechanisms we have developed as a way of managing our unmet needs and unprocessed emotions.
As adults, we all have parts of self we think are wrong and bad - and when we start to bring these parts into the light of love, when we start to look at WHY we think these parts are bad, why we think we can’t be how we are, why we think that we must reject and deny these aspects of self - we are almost always going to find that it was because we connect these parts of self with the pain of being rejected/not getting our needs met.
They are the parts of self that were either explicitly rejected by our caregivers or other authority figures/peers as we were growing up or the parts of self we subconsciously connected to being rejected, abandoned and abused.
We are going to discover that as we bring these parts of self into the light of love, that they are not inherently bad - but rather they are parts of self that were misunderstood by us and those around us.
As we love these parts safe, we will slowly start to realize that we CAN be ourselves - and while some people may not like it, while we may get rejected and while we may need to work to grow, develop and MATURE these aspects of self that got cast into the shadow - that they are not actually ‘bad’. They are who we are, and we need to learn to love and accept our own expression even if that means accepting that some others may not like it, in order to feel fulfilled in life.
We may discover that we are extraverted when our caregivers celebrated being a homebody.
We may discover that we are naturally drawn to the arts when our caregivers expected us to be little scientists.
We may discover that we are naturally quiet when our caregivers celebrated being outgoing.
It will be our work to learn how to love these parts of self safe, how to rearrange our relationship to them and to see them as GOOD PARTS - as being who we are - and we will need to do the tough work of learning to love and accept ourselves as we are, even if that means processing the pain of rejection from the past and the present.
It’s the same with our expressions.
We may discover that we are naturally loud, naturally a ‘cryer’, naturally someone who thinks out loud or needs a lot of alone time - and all of this may be something we again need to learn to accept about ourselves. We may need to learn to make peace with the fact that we are who we are - bringing these aspects and expressions into the light of love, learning to accept these expressions vs. continuing to believe that they are wrong, bad and the reason we are in pain/that people don’t like us.
We are going to have to start to recognize when we are in pain, and when that pain drives us into loops of trying to fix and change ourselves.
We will have to start to recognize our loops for what they are - seeing that every time we feel like we need to learn to be smaller, every time we feel like we need to fix our bodies, every time we start to nit-pick our behavior, physical appearance, way of relating or whatever else we tend to ‘scapegoat’ as being the ‘bad thing about us’ that we need to fix as being just that - a scapegoat.
We will need to bring that thing we think we need to fix about ourselves - the aspect of our being we have shame about - into the light of love, and then we will have to start to ask ourselves:
‘What am I REALLY feeling right now?’
‘What if this isn’t about my body, my job, my relationship status?’
‘What’s hurting, what am I needing right now that I’m not getting and what am I getting right now that I’m not needing?’
‘Where do I perceive that if I changed this thing about myself I would finally be LOVED and safe?’
We will have to start to dig deeper, down past our self improvement to see what is REALLY going on.
Then we need to expose that in the light of love, compassion and curiosity, starting to move from a place of self support vs. self fixing.
Finally, we will need to look at all the ways we cope, numb, self sabotage and seemingly hurt and harm ourselves and others and again, we need to ask ourselves WHY.
- What are we ACTUALLY feeling that we don’t know how to feel?
- What’s happening in our lives that hurts that we don’t know how to deal with?
- What parts of self are we trying to suppress or deny?
- What emotions are we running from?
- What needs do we have that aren’t being met?
- What emotions are there - what sadness, anger, rager, fear or resentment are we carrying - that we are turning in on OURSELVES instead of being able to clearly see and process?
- Where did we learn that these parts of self are not ok?
- Where did we learn to blame ourselves instead of feeling what we are actually feeling?
- Where did we learn to accept what hurts?
- Where did we learn that our needs and wants weren’t ok?
- Where we were cut off from the capacity to be ourselves and be safe?
- How were we hurt and harmed and how did we blame ourselves for this?
- How can we start to show up for who and what we are right now, how can we bring unconditional love to ourselves in the ways that we are and the ways that we feel, and how can we start to get to KNOW ourselves and then learn to SUPPORT ourselves - vs. living to fix and change ourselves into something we perceive will finally get us the love we want?
Realizing Perfect Love Doesn’t Exist
This journey requires that we let go of the idea that if we perfect ourselves we will finally be set free to experience a life where we never have pain again.
It’s about realizing that all this trying to fix, change and alter ourselves - all this shame - is coming from a childhood place of not being able to properly problem solve and not being able to properly process our actual emotions.
It comes from a place of not being able to identify what’s hurting, what’s wanted, what’s not wanted and how to support ourselves in REAL reality to get our needs met.
The true remedy for shame, is love.
It’s realizing that we are never going to be perfectly safe and provided for - so we can stop striving to be perfect and we can start learning to love and validate who and what we actually are.
Then we can start to express and feel our actual emotions, and we can start to learn about who we actually are and what we want and don’t want.
Then we can start to rearrange our lives in a way that helps us get more of what we want and less of what we don’t want through intelligent action - not through the hopes that if we become pleasing enough to those around us that THEY will then perfectly provide for and protect us.
Because this is what we are REALLY doing when we are living from shame - we are subconsciously believing that if we become what those around us wanted us to be, that they will then finally love us fully and in that, we will get the secure connection we needed to feel safe and we will get the provision we needed to grow and express fully.
When we realize that we will never perfect ourselves enough for this to happen - we can FINALLY be free to learn from real reality.
We can finally start to love the parts of ourselves we have cast into the shadow safe, and we can start to express those parts in healthy ways.
We can start to see WHY we cope, numb and self sabotage, what we need and what we want, and we can start working towards getting those needs and wants met in real reality. We can start to see what’s hurting us, and how we can take our adult power to shift those things.
We can start to connect with our actual emotions - our anger, fear, resentment, sadness and desire for change - and we can stop turning these emotions in on ourselves, and finally start expressing them, processing them and moving through them in a healthy way.
THIS is what happens when we expose our shame to the light of love.
We slowly start to see who we really are, what we want, what we don’t want, what we feel and what we need to do to arrange our lives in a way FOR OURSELVES that feels better.
We let go of the idea of a perfect love coming as a result of us perfecting ourselves, and we start to come into our adult problem solving perspective - where all of our power actually lies.
Exposure of shame in the light of love, compassion and curiosity leads to insights and power.
THIS is what then allows us to heal and move forward.
This is why exposing shame is the medicine.
<3
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