The Shame of Shame

Volumes have been written about shame.  I imagine there is some positive spin we could put on what feeling ashamed feels like, but I can’t, at this moment, tell you what that might be.  For me, depending on how deeply shamed I feel, it’s somewhere between discomfort like an itchy bug bite in my brain and having my skin dissolved by acid.

Okay, maybe that’s a little dramatic, but I’ve been thinking a little bit lately about what’s available when I dig out from that discomfort and can get beyond the shame.

Here’s an example: I had a moment once (well, one that really stands out) when I came unglued in a work meeting.  You should know about me that I had it beaten into me as a teenager that if I ever, ever got emotional at work, the world would pretty much end; letting my eyes so much as glisten could halt a conversation in my family and cause calmer heads to exit the room.  So, when I fractured in a budgeting session, and found myself both yelling and (gasp!) crying, I was, at first, a bit shocked.  Who knew I felt so strongly about line items? It didn’t take long for my shame wallow to begin.  How could I lose it like that? What would people think? Did I seriously just do that in front of my boss??

Fill in the blank for your own story: that time you got drunk at a family wedding (maybe really drunk), got overly flirty with someone you weren’t married to, lied, rear-ended the guy ahead of you at the red light, or lost your grace and yelled at someone (maybe even tearfully) (or overly colorfully) who may or may not have deserved it.  For many of us, the first wave of feeling is shame.  It can wash over us in a crippling way, can cause us to be anywhere from unkind to downright nasty in our self-talk, can have physical manifestations in anxiety and stress.

But when my shame ebbed after that meeting (which took a ridiculously long week or so), I started getting a little curious.  What was really going on for me? There was a message turning up the volume through my normally even-keeled work identity. That message, that it was time for a professional reckoning for me, apparently really wanted to be heard.

What if shame was actually just that, the voice of the universe/your deity, the voice of you and what you know, the voice that’s trying to point out something that is dissonant in your life at the moment? What could you learn if you could get out of the wallow, be forgiving with your own clumsiness, and just listen?

Nobody sets out to lose it.  I don’t know about you, but I’ve never once set that as an intention or a goal for myself.  I rarely invite bad behavior – even if I have given in to it.  It generally just sort of shows up on its own.  And I’m learning – and setting an intention to keep it up – that if I can be tender with it, there is something important for me to hear.