I’ve lost sight of my true form. The aches and ages of reaching for the ones I need only to be met with rules of rigid pageantry, puppeting me into something palatable, digestible, by those who place their worth in our hidden keeping. The veils so long protecting, we’ve forgotten they were just disguise. Time to ask instead, what lies under our lies?
The Lie of Shame
As we unravel webs of imposed identity and rewrite stories of false belonging, shame lies waiting. A signpost on the approach to places tender and tremulous. A reaction of protection. A warning. A curse.
Ancient, ingrained, automatic, shame arises to keep us alive. Trains us to perceive trespasses against social rules or steps outside comfort zones as painful, as wrong. Tries to keep us safe from banishment, tries to make us invisible to death.
Shame can disturb us until we conform to the dominant paradigm, even against our aspirations and deeper long-term wellbeing. It’s only agenda is that we survive, whatever the cost, however hollowed out we become in the process of using such tactics.
We have built entire civilizations on shame. We still use it to affect and attack ourselves and others. Shame is one of the sharpest and most destructive ways of forcing people to change. Parents, teachers, and caregivers use shame to shape children’s behavior. Colonizers use shaming methods to train people into thinking we are intrinsically flawed, and the exploitative nature of the system gets hidden in self-hatred.
Shaming is at the heart of some of the most prominent religions, at least as they have been interpreted by church leaders. In some denominations of Christianity the concept of original sin has been used to degrade people’s connection to their wild suchness for millennia, and some of the other most prominent religions also hold as a central tenet the idea that humans are inherently flawed and must atone or be punished.
In late-stage capitalism, the idea that we can pray our shame away has transformed to the idea that we can buy or work our way out of shamefulness. We are expected to incessantly produce to earn love and consume to buy the feeling of being loved at the cost of our bodies, dreams, wellbeing, relationships, and joy. Our mainstream political, corporate, and social hierarchies are based on shaming each other. False belonging is often forged by shaming through mockery, making fun of people who have different access needs or identities. Shaming is used to force conformity around appearance, profession, relationship status, and every intimate and visible aspect of self.
Putting Down the Hammer
Shame was born of protection, an ancestral adaptation of our psychosocial systems, designed to keep us alive by keeping us close to the resources represented by power, hierarchy, and inclusion. How intelligent, and seemingly essential. How enmeshed, and seemingly inescapable. How utterly soul-crushing, when allowed to rule unchecked. But perhaps the cure is in the poison, perhaps shame can be leveraged into its own antidote.
In my journey of trying to make sense of autoimmunity and learn to love my unwell body, the gravity towards battle mentality is strong. Western medicine says we fight against diseases, and that posture of attack and defense is seductive. Fight is one of our primary nervous system reactions for a reason, it’s effective and can be galvanizing. But it is not sustainable, and it can become a self-perpetuating and deeply draining mechanism.
On the flip side, I shame myself for not being more able-bodied, because a high level of ability is required to truly belong in this overculture. But I am coming to understand that it is that very quest for achievement and the grasping overwhelm it foments that causes, or at least contributes to disease. Even now, I still have to remind myself that I cannot work my way out of being sick, that illness is not a punishment for not working hard enough or a sign of unworthiness.
To remember that when shame calls necessary softness “laziness” it is trying to perform it’s function to protect me from the banishment of poverty and obscurity, but that does not mean I need to follow or battle against it.
What I strive to practice instead of fight, against the autoimmune disease or the shame, is appreciation, respect, and re-direction of the energy underneath. To notice when shame is speaking, because it can disguise its voice; to find gratitude for the millennia of adaptation that has created the patterns in my body, for better or worse, and enabled my survival thus far; then to give shame a more helpful job.
It’s not easy, shame is a self-strengthening pattern that often feels like a hall of mirrors. I sometimes even feel shame about how much shame I feel. The practice of appreciation and re-direction is also not as exciting as fighting myself. Stress has a kind of quickening energy that is highly addictive. The sobriety of patient and persistent re-centering is boring at times, as humbling as that is to admit. But it enables glimpses of quiet, precious moments when I can just softly enjoy being alive.
When we can remember to breathe, pause, turn the frantic searching for external signs of validation and safety inward, and be curious about what needs we are trying to fulfill with those flushes of embarrassment, awkwardness, people-pleasing, or annoyance, then shame becomes a signpost rather than a sledgehammer.
Through slowing down enough to look at it, and asking it to show it’s true face, we teach shame how to become an ally. We let it teach us how much we value belonging and safety. How to be courageous. How to notice when we’ve made a mistake. How to grow compassion. How much we love life, that we are willing to harm ourselves to do what we think is right. But we don’t have to operate that way anymore.
Hidden within shame is humility, repair, teamwork, empathy, evolution, and connection. And beyond and through it, we find our way to celebration.
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There is a companion practice for this piece here:
And Tending Shame Part 2:
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