When I think of shame I remember a time when I was 11 years
old. A friend of mine told me a rumor about my fifth grade teacher and I shared
it with some of my classmates. Somehow the teacher found out and thought that
the best way to handle it was to try to scare me half to death, which she did.
She pulled me aside and told me that she could sue me for slander and that I
was in big trouble. The principal was called in and I was taken into the coat
room, which was part of the classroom, and given five swats completely in
earshot of the other kids. Then, as a fifth grade boy I was made to stand in
front of my class and apologize for spreading these horrible rumors. I broke
down and cried from the humiliation and the crying only added to the feeling
that I just wanted to crawl away and die. Needless to say I could not wait for
the end of my fifth grade year to get away from that teacher and start over
with different classmates.
None of us want to be treated the way I was treated by that
teacher. We can’t wait to escape from those people who seem to be bent on
making us feel horrible about ourselves. And yet, we treat ourselves this way
all the time. We beat ourselves up and tell ourselves lies about how we are so
much less worthy than everyone else because we hate things in our past. Especially
as a child, but even as adults, we tend to take what people say about us and to
us, internalize it and believe it. We begin to think that they are right; that
we are incompetent, not worthy, incapable of achieving things, a failure, and
the list goes on and on. Maybe they were words spoken by a parent, a teacher, a
coach, or someone who we respected and loved, but no matter who it was it cut
to the core of our soul.
This internalized shame leads us to view our regretted past
through very skewed lenses and we end up reinforcing those negative messages
with lies we tell ourselves. For example, if I under perform for a quarter at
work I see myself as incompetent. Because I believe I’m incompetent I have a
much greater chance of under performing the next quarter and the next and so on.
This cycle of shame absolutely has to be broken. We can no longer allow
ourselves be defined by other people’s opinions of us or by the lies that we
have begun to believe about ourselves because they been programmed into our
hearts. The price of alienation from community, losing self-confidence, developing
self-hatred, feeling stressed , living in anxiety and depression, and even
experiencing physical ailments is too high to pay as we live the rest of our
lives.
I do want to distinguish between guilt and shame at this
point. Guilt is an emotion that serves a very positive purpose in our lives. It
tells us that we need to take a look at something that we’ve done, evaluate it,
figure out how we want to handle it differently in the future, and make amends
with anyone that we have hurt along the way. Shame, on the other hand,
personalizes what we have done. Instead of feeling like we made mistakes in our
choices, we believe we are intrinsically flawed. And if we are flawed then
perhaps we are bad people inside and out and unlovable. We can no longer learn
from our past mistakes because we are too embarrassed and humiliated to even
think about them, much less process them. So we develop all kinds of mechanisms
to avoid the pain of our hurt including drinking, shopping, sports, religion, and
any other way we can think of to avoid processing our past. It is so important
to realize that the things we have done do not define who we are. If I made
poor grades in school, I am not dumb. If I botched a project at work, I am not
incompetent. The truth is that we are human and we will make mistakes and we
will do things wrong and it is only by embracing that humanity part of who we
are that we can be free from the shame that accompanies our mistakes. Only then can we be authentic with the people
with whom we share life. You are
valuable because of being you, nothing more and nothing less. Therefore, when
you look back on your regrets please conclude that as a human it is part of the
journey and commit to learning to embrace those mistakes, not because you’re
proud of them, but because you realize that they were necessary for you to
learn valuable lessons. After all, we typically don’t learn what we need to
when everything goes right and we think we’re doing everything perfectly.
My challenge to you is to identify in your life the areas where
you have experienced shame; the areas where you have decided that you are
unworthy and are a bad person, and start retraining your mind to believe that
those messages and lies do not define you as a person. Lean into the pain and process the valuable
lessons of your successes and failures. You are enough! You are valuable! You were created because you are loved wholly
and unconditionally by the Creator! Do
not let yourself or anybody else rob you of this truth.
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