Shame on who?

“Shame on you!” “You should be ashamed of yourself!” “What a shame…”

Have you heard these phrases before? I think it would be a rare person who hasn’t. What happens for you as you read them here, on this page? Shame… shame can slice, as accurately as a scalpel in the hands of a surgeon, deep into the core of us. It can hold us in a vice-like grip, determining for us how we engage with the world around us. It can stop us in our tracks; it can propel us in ways that, really, we mightn’t choose for ourselves if we felt differently.

Destructive, domineering, demanding… shame can be quite a vicious companion. We can call it “embarrassment” if we’d like. And, if we stop to think about it, isn’t “embarrassment” really a more palatable way of saying “shame”? 
 
Shame can be a very early experience… think of a toddler, on a potty, making a poo. And being enthralled by what they’ve produced - playing with this magical substance! What happens if their caregiver, far from sharing their joy and fascination, reacts with horror at the ‘mess’ and wades in with “Naughty! Mustn’t play with that! Dirty!” There might be some real emotional truth to the expression 'being caught with your pants down' and the shame around what might be seen. And that the reaction to that differs so wildly from our own experience can have its own impact…
 
Shame stings. I wonder if it might be helpful to think of it in this way: it can be what we feel others might see of us; that which we’d rather keep unseen. It could be experienced, also, as what others might see of our “stuff” which is unknown to us. How might that unknown-to-us “stuff” be received by others? What if it were ridiculed or criticised? What if we absorbed that response over time and our own experience of ourselves grew to be based on ridicule or criticism?
 
Of course, shame can be perpetuated in that perverse sort of bullying that demands our collusion - that sense of being told to deny our feelings: “Don’t be ridiculous, you’re over-reacting, don’t be so sensitive, I’m just joking, you should be able to laugh at yourself.” Where care is dependent on hiding and suppressing our own experience of ourselves and complying with others’ needs at the expense of ‘self’… how does that leave us feeling? Embarrassed? Ashamed? Shaming can have many faces. And carrying the shame can feel heavy indeed. 
 
Shame can help us to self-regulate, following social rules to ensure social acceptability. And this sense of shame can be influenced by any number of historical, cultural, religious or family traditions. What happens for us when different cultures or traditions, with different rules, meet and mix? When they conflict?

Shame can also, with the heaviness of the rule book that it makes us carry, prompt us to try, perhaps desperately, to get it right. To follow rules minutely, to colour within the lines we see - and to anticipate those we can’t. What might it be like to get it wrong?

What might it be like to not know the rules, to use the wrong colour crayon, to mistakenly go outside of a line of which we weren’t even aware? What happens when we feel that we just don’t fit? When shame might tell us that regardless of our efforts, the chances of getting it wrong are just that bit too unmanageable? Shame can be weighty indeed. And I wonder if shame might feed anxiety in a particularly potent way.
 
And there is what can happen around being “done to”, what can happen having lived through experiences where any reasonable personal boundaries have been overwhelmed or disregarded: abuse, neglect, sexual abuse… it feels really important to acknowledge that this might bring its own “weight”, felt in its own way, perhaps with a sense of shame underpinning it. How do we manage this? How can we manage this? How might we manage this? We might develop patterns of behaviour and emotional self-protection that help us survive for years. How might they be working for us now?

Regardless of how a sense of shame originates, it can be a particularly challenging and complex internal companion. If travelling with shame, alone, is just not as easy as it might once have been, then, it might be an idea to think about exploring these issues with a trusted counsellor. Loosening the hand-hold that shame might have, accompanied compassionately, and with understanding, might be the next, helpful step along the journey.