14
Guilt and shame are forms of anger that arise when your boundary has been broken from the inside—by something you’ve done wrong or have been convinced is wrong. While anger is the honorable sentry that faces outward and protects your boundary from external damage, guilt and shame are the sentries that face inward and protect your internal boundary (and the boundaries of others) from your own incorrect or ill-conceived behaviors. Guilt and shame are vital and irreplaceable emotions that help you mature into a conscious and well-regulated person. With their assistance, you’ll be able to honorably monitor your behavior, your emotions, your thoughts, your physical desires, your spiritual longings, and your ego structure. If you don’t have conscious access to your free-flowing guilt and shame, you won’t understand yourself, you’ll be haunted by improper behaviors, addictions, and compulsions, and you’ll be unable to stand upright at the center of your psyche.
When the healing influences of free-flowing guilt and shame flow gracefully through your psyche, you won’t be painfully shame-filled or guilt-ridden; instead, you’ll have a compassionate sense of ethics, the courage to judge and supervise your own conduct, and the strength to amend your behaviors without inflating or deflating your ego unnecessarily. When you successfully navigate through your honest guilt and shame, you’ll feel proud of yourself, and you’ll move naturally into happiness and contentment. Unfortunately, since all forms of anger are tragically misunderstood and reviled, guilt and shame have been suppressed mightily (and expressed brutally and insidiously), to the extent that most of us cannot connect shame to happiness in any way whatsoever. Guilt and shame have been labeled useless, false, toxic, addictive, and unnatural, and both have been thrown onto the trash heap. This is a reasonable response, because we’ve all seen and experienced the damage wreaked by raging guilt and shame. Unfortunately, we’ve lost our conscious connection to the healing forms of these vital and restorative emotions. We’ve rejected guilt and shame so completely that we don’t know which is which anymore, why they exist in the first place, or that guilt isn’t even an emotion at all.
In my early teens, I read a popular self-help book that branded guilt and shame as “useless” emotions. The book presented the idea that we’re all perfect and, therefore, shouldn’t ever be guilt-ridden or ashamed of anything we do. That idea seemed very strange to me, so I went to the dictionary and looked up “guiltless” and “shameless” and found that neither state was anything to celebrate. To be guiltless means to be free of mark or experience, as if you’re a blank slate. It’s not a sign of intelligence or growth, because guiltlessness exists only in people who have not yet lived. To be shameless means to be senseless, uncouth, and impudent. It’s a very marked state of being out of control, out of touch, and exceedingly selfabsorbed; therefore, shamelessness lives only in people who don’t have any relational skills. Both states—guiltlessness and shamelessness—helped me understand the intrinsic value of guilt and shame.
Fascinatingly, in a dictionary definition, guilt isn’t even an emotional state at all; it’s simply the knowledge and acknowledgment of wrongdoing. Guilt is a state of circumstance: you’re either guilty or not guilty in relation to the legal or moral code you value. You cannot feel guilty, because guilt is a concrete state, not an emotional one! Your feelings are almost irrelevant; if you did something wrong, you’re guilty, and it doesn’t matter if you’re happy, angry, fearful, or depressed about it. When you don’t do something wrong, you’re not guilty. Feelings don’t enter into the equation at all. The only way you could possibly ever feel guilty is if you don’t quite remember committing an offense (“I feel like I might be guilty, but I’m not sure”). No, what you feel is shame. Guilt is a factual state, while shame is an emotion.
Shame is the natural emotional consequence of guilt and wrongdoing. When your healthy shame is welcomed into your psyche, its powerful heat and intensity will restore your boundary when you’ve broken it yourself. However, most of us don’t welcome shame into our lives; we obscure it by saying “I feel guilty” instead of “I feel ashamed,” which speaks volumes about our current inability to identify and acknowledge our guilt, channel our appropriate shame, and make amends. This is unfortunate because when we don’t welcome and honor our free-flowing and appropriate shame, we cannot moderate our own behavior. We’ll continually do things we know are wrong, and we won’t have the strength to stop ourselves. In our never-ending shamelessness, we’ll offend and offend and offend without pause—we’ll always be guilty—because nothing will wake us to our effect on the world.
If we continue to use the incorrect statement, “I feel guilty,” we’ll be unable to right our wrongs, amend our behaviors, or discover where our shame originated—which means we’ll be unable to experience true happiness or contentment (both of which arise when we skillfully navigate through any difficult emotion). If we don’t come out and correctly state, “I’m ashamed of myself,” we’ll never improve. I’ll say it again before we go deeper: guilt is a factual state, not an emotional one. You’re either guilty or not guilty. If you’re not guilty, there’s nothing to be ashamed of. However, if you are guilty, and you want to know what to do about the fact of your guilt, then you’ve got to embrace the information shame brings to you.
Shame is one of the master teachers of emotional channeling. You don’t have to lift a finger or study anything to learn to channel shame through your body and your boundary; shame will pour forth in a tidal wave without your help or permission. It will stop you in your tracks, turn you bright red, and leave you speechless and dumbfounded. Though shame actually strengthens you in the long run, it breaks you down in the immediate moment. If you’ve got no internal skills, you won’t be able to tolerate this necessary fall from grace (or discover why your shame arose in the first place). Shame takes you out of commission in a split second; if you’re dealing with your own shame in a skillful way, this downtime can be a blessing. However, if you’re responding to manufactured or applied shame, this downtime may unnecessarily cripple you.
When shame arises in response to your own authentic and addressable flaws or missteps, it flows appropriately (and often a step or two in front of your behavior). If you welcome your appropriate shame, you’ll stop yourself before you do something crazy, before you say the wrong thing, or before you enter into unhealthy behaviors or relationships. Appropriate shame will help you turn away from your own maliciousness, charlatanism, and thievery—even when no one’s looking. It will keep you punctual, polite, and upstanding, and it will lead you gently but firmly away from the path of temptation. Free-flowing and authentic shame will watch over you and ensure that your behavior is honorable and correct. Shame will also keep your other emotions gently in check by giving you the inner fortitude to navigate through them (instead of squashing them like bugs or hurling them at others). Authentic shame will stand at your inner boundary and monitor everything going out of your soul and everything occurring within it. With its honorable assistance, you’ll become a conscientious and well-moderated asset to yourself and our world. As a result, you’ll experience authentic self-respect, which will lead you time and time again to true contentment and happiness. Interestingly, your appropriate shame will also inoculate you against being victimized by charlatans and schemers, because your willingness to shine a light upon your own shadowy behaviors will make you aware of those behaviors in others instead of trapping you in an enmeshed nightmare with them (in the wise words of W.C. Fields, “You can’t cheat an honest man”).
Most of us were not taught to welcome or work with our authentic shame and remorse (which all of us feel naturally, especially when we’ve hurt someone); instead, most of us were taught about shame by being shamed. Authority figures such as parents, teachers, peers, and the media often attempt to teach and control us by applying shame from the outside, instead of trusting our natural ability to moderate our own behaviors. As a result, most of us repress any natural shame we might feel (which makes us unable to effectively monitor our behavior) or express our shame all over others in unfortunate attempts to disgrace and control them. This sad behavior has disconnected most of us from the strengthening influence of authentic shame, and filled us with staggering amounts of manufactured and applied shame.
When we don’t have a healthy connection to our own shame, we’re often coerced into embodying other people’s ideas of right and wrong (“Good girls don’t act that way; big boys don’t cry; we don’t get angry in this family; no one likes a smarty-pants; no one will love you until...”). In this onslaught, we become overwhelmed by untruths, foreign messages, damaging contracts, and inauthentic shame. In response, our authentic shame often surges forward to fight off the foreign shame. If we could grab on to this natural shame, we could use its intense heat to set our boundaries fiercely, and incinerate the foreign messages and manufactured shame careening through us. Unfortunately, since most of us have no skills and no practice for shame, we tend to crumble in front of all shame, whether it belongs to us or not. Usually when our authentic shame moves forward, we become overwhelmed and essentially dissociate from our emotional selves. We fall into an incoherent shame spiral (where we’re simultaneously drawn toward and repelled by shameful and forbidden behaviors) and wrestle in futility with seemingly senseless amounts of foreign and authentic shame.
This spiral is unnecessary, and you can halt it by learning to identify your authentic, free-flowing shame, which is actually sensible, momentary, and empowering: your hand goes out for a cookie, you realize you don’t need it, and you walk away. That’s authentic, free-flowing shame working properly. Afterward, you feel strong and aware. In authentic shame, there’s no spiral because you simply live by a moral code. You floss because you like clean teeth, you avoid drugs and crime because they’re uninteresting, and you treat people respectfully because it feels right. Authentic shame places gentle and authentic brakes on your impulses, so much so that you won’t really feel them. Improper behaviors won’t loom over your psyche or call to you with seductive intensities, because your authentic shame will help you stay awake and functional. That’s what your free-flowing shame feels like. Manufactured or applied shame, on the other hand, makes you nearly comatose. You’ll eat all the cookies, even if you’re not hungry. You’ll treat yourself and others shamefully, and you won’t be able to control yourself, because you won’t have access to the brilliant and integrity-restoring messages of your own authentic shame.
When you can identify your authentic shame, you’ll be able to brighten and define your boundary, ground yourself firmly, call your intellect into the situation, and examine (and destroy) the contracts that are attached to any excessive or inauthentic shame you might carry. However, if you have no skills, the intensity of shame may incapacitate you, so much so that you’ll actually stop moving forward or challenging yourself in order to avoid making any new mistakes (which could intensify your shame in even more paralyzing ways). Or you might become shameless in response to the shame roaring inside you. You’ll act like a cranky two-year-old or like an adolescent in full-scale rebellion; you’ll break rules you agree with, just to prove you’re independent; you’ll blurt things out and turn bright red only after the damage has been done; you’ll eat and buy and do the wrong things; you’ll fall for scam after scam; and you’ll have no authentic direction.
If you’re entangled in a losing battle like this, you’ll come back to the same destructive behaviors over and over again, almost as if you’re drugged. There will be nothing awake at the center of your psyche; the village will be deserted; your intellect, your visionary spirit, and your body will be devastated by your shame spiral; and your emotions will rage uncontrolled. You’ll pray for willpower, God’s help, and anything else you can think of, but if you can’t welcome the strengthening influence of your own authentic shame, you won’t have the resolve you need to effect conscious change or restore yourself to wholeness.
We all use shame to raise children, to train each other, and to get our way—it’s how we do things in our boundary-impaired culture. That’s not going to change any time soon. Your task is not to change the culture from the outside in, but to change yourself from the inside out—to strengthen yourself so that you can individuate and create your own true boundary once again. It’s extremely important to oppose and renounce foreign and applied shame and to restore your authentic morality and integrity, but you can do this only by welcoming your authentic shame inside your own soul. When you can take hold of your own shame and consciously halt your spiral, you’ll be able to stand upright and look around you with new eyes. You’ll be able to identify and release the foreign and applied shame inside you, and you’ll be able to identify and avoid any new shaming messages coming from any outside source (you do this by strengthening yourself when your boundary weakens in response to another person’s opinions or criticisms). Most important, you’ll be able to refrain from expressing your shame onto others, which will change the culture around you in profound ways—from the inside out.
Your authentic shame surges forward when something is seriously amiss, either in your behavior or as a result of having had behavioral control forced upon you. If you can honor and welcome your shame, it will give you the strength you need, both to amend your own ill-considered behaviors and to throw off the foreign tyrannies that disrupt your authenticity. If you can use your skills to separate yourself from the shame-inducing messages of others, you’ll free up incredible energy, and with it, you’ll be able to hear your own code of ethics. You’ll also be able to respect and honor the boundaries of others, no matter how much shame you may be dealing with at any given time. With the help of your free-flowing shame, you’ll always have an internal sentry that returns you again and again to the honor code of your individual morality.
The practice for shame involves many skills, but the first task in working with shame is to welcome it with open arms. When your shame arises in the presence of others (it usually appears first as an internal pull in the gut, a flush of heat, a momentary speechlessness, or a sense of internal caution), it’s important to stop, quickly ground yourself, intensify your boundary, and focus on your shame. If your shame stops you before you say or do something shameful, you can thank it and make your necessary preemptive corrections. If you don’t know why your shame has come forward, you can ask yourself or the people around you if you’ve done something incorrect (“Who, or what, has been hurt?”), and apologize or make amends if necessary.
This is a big first step in learning to work with shame—to deal with it immediately and openly the moment it appears. Most of us skate right over the top of our momentary shame and continue on with the very act that brought our shame forward in the first place (which ensures our fall into repetitive or rapids-level shame). The way to halt a shame spiral and interrupt its feedback loop is to meet your shame immediately (and use it immediately) to set your boundary, restore your integrity, and make amends (“What must be made right?”). If you can openly welcome your shame, it will recede naturally (and swiftly) once it has helped you make your correcting actions. Then your contentment and happiness will arise naturally, and you’ll move forward as a smarter, stronger, and more honorable person.
If you’re unable to channel your shame in this simple way, and you feel it intensifying, you may need to excuse yourself and find a quiet place where you can channel your shame in private. When you can get away, you should pour your shame into your boundary, because if you allow this confusing shame to stay inside your body, its intensity may throw you off-kilter. Shaming messages may bubble up from every corner, memories or sensations from long-repressed shameful incidents may resurface, and you’ll almost certainly be overwhelmed and incapacitated. Channeling your shame into your boundary will revitalize your sense of self and set sacred space for your shame, but it will also calm your body and give your mind the peace it needs to differentiate between you and your emotions (this differentiation is an absolute necessity when you’re dealing with emotions that have been dishonored and denatured). Functional judgment is a lifesaver when shame arises, so bless your intellect and welcome it into this process. Don’t let your logic shout down or disable your shame; instead, let it take its honorable position as the translator of the vital information your shame is trying to bring forward.
After you move your shame into your boundary and calm your body, please ground yourself strongly. Grounding will help you release any trapped bodily shame you might carry (such as body-image distortions, eating disorders, sexual shame, compulsions, or addictions). As you ground yourself, you may feel uncomfortable sensations arising in your body. This is a wonderful sign; it means that your body has become a conscious and equal partner in your emotion-channeling process. In many cases, the parts of your body that have been shamed will actually carry physical as well as emotional pain. Maintain your focus, and use your skills to ground any areas of discomfort. If your discomfort persists or intensifies, place a contract in front of the troubled area and project the discomfort onto the contract, so you can understand what your body is trying to make conscious (this may take a few channeling sessions).
When you’re grounded and centered within your vibrant, shame-supported boundary, the heat and intensity shame carries will give you the energy you need to shine a spotlight on your own behavior and examine your contracts with whatever has brought your shame forward. In this sacred space, it will be easy to differentiate between authentic shame that belongs to you and manufactured shame that was forced upon you. The difference will become clear almost as soon as you visualize your contract. When your shame is authentic and personal, you’ll only sense your own behaviors flowing onto your contract. You’ll see or feel yourself doing or saying something you know is wrong, and you’ll feel appropriate chagrin coupled with an impetus to correct your behavior and make amends with anyone you’ve hurt (including yourself). When you destroy authentic shame contracts, you’ll feel intensity toward them but not a great deal of violence.
However, when you bring forward a contract filled with applied or enforced shame, you’ll sense a cacophony of images, noise, and static barreling out of you. You’ll hear the voices of shaming authority figures, you’ll sense images of disciplinarians, and you’ll most likely lose your focus, and time-travel back to the moment you picked up the shameful message in the first place. This contract will probably become full very quickly (if so, move it aside and create a new one), and when you burn it, your shame may intensify into an inferno. This intensity is a wonderful asset when you have skills, but it can knock you out if you don’t (which is why most people refuse to deal with their shame). A great deal of intensity gets trapped inside you when shame is applied from the outside. When you can ground yourself strongly, focus yourself, and burn your contracts, this intensity will free you. Roll up these contracts, wherever they came from, fling them out of your personal space, and destroy them with the fierce intensity of your shame.
When you’re channeling rapids-level manufactured or trapped shame, each of your skills will help you remain stable. Your grounding will help you release any shame trapped in your body or your psyche; your inner focus will give you a private place from which to operate when your whole being is aflame; your ability to burn contracts will help you identify and release any and all trapped shame messages (no matter where they originated); and your ability to rejuvenate yourself will revitalize you. Please be sure to take regular rejuvenation breaks (see in section entitled “REJUVENATING YOURSELF”) when you’re working with shame. Massive healing changes will occur when you burn contracts with applied shame, which means your stasis tendencies will be on full alert. When you consciously replenish yourself, your ability to support stasis will be as conscious as your ability to create change.
Shame is a major stumbling block in every psyche, and as a result shame-channeling sessions can be quite lengthy. Don’t let this process take too long, though. Listen to your body, your mind, your spirit, and your other emotions; if any part of you gets tired or antsy, pay attention. Roll up your contracts, burn them fiercely, and go directly to rejuvenation or some form of play. Don’t allow your channeling practice to become grim and perfectionist (especially when you’re working with shame). Let your emotions know you’re always available for shame-channeling sessions in the future, and take care of yourself in the present. Take your place at the center of your village and remember that you have emotions, but you aren’t made of them. Give yourself the freedom to be lazy, to be resistant, and to be unwilling to drop into the deep waters at a moment’s notice. Don’t let your emotions take over; instead, keep thinking, keep sensing, keep dreaming, and keep moving with fluidity and laughter, because shame has most likely been applied to you since the moment you took your first breath. You don’t need to clear all of it out by this afternoon! You have all the time you need, and if you make this clear to your shame, it will calm down and allow you to move at a relaxed and therapeutic pace.
And remember this about shame: when you can successfully channel your authentic shame, you’ll feel proud of yourself (deservedly so), which will bring your authentic contentment and joy forward. You won’t read that in most pop-psychology books, where shame is usually trashed and demonized, but it’s true! Authentic shame is essential to your health and your relationships—and you won’t feel happy without it. Shame says this: “We’re here to help one another, to transform ourselves, and to make amends. This doesn’t mean life should be a chore. This planet is not so much a place of punishment as a place of grace, or the opportunity for grace. In each day, each of us has the chance to do it right and make it right, with the brilliant assistance of our appropriate shame.”
Coming back to consciousness after a long bout with repetitive shame can be rather involved, because shaming messages and labels can form a tremendous amount of your identity. You may have become accustomed to branding yourself with shame-based titles (“I’m a loser, an alcoholic, rage-aholic, post-traumatic compulsive gambler, and I bite my nails!”) that pigeonhole you and intensify your shame. It’s vital to examine your self-talk as you’re coming out of a shame spiral, because those old titles and labels can throw you back into the old identifications. As you’re healing, it’s helpful to substitute empowering phrases in order to break this cycle (not “positive” affirmations, but empowering, choice-based phrases). For instance, if your smoking bothers you, and your habitual phrase is “I can’t stop smoking! I’ve tried a hundred times. I’m just an addict!” you can change your feeble words into forceful words and assert, “I won’t stop smoking! I refuse to. I love smoking!” You can even go on a pro-smoking rant and enumerate all the ways smoking has added to your life. You can celebrate your smoking as a conscious choice.
When you can move your smoking out of the reach of your futile shame spiral, you’ll be able to look at your decision to smoke with new eyes. When smoking is a choice (and a darned good one, yeah!), you can take a look at it from a more empowered place. You can make decisions about your smoking from within your natural moral code, instead of from a shameful feedback loop. You can bring your physical reactions about smoking to bear, you can use your intellect to examine and research smoking, you can explore your emotional attachments to cigarettes and nicotine, and you can ask your visionary spirit to help you understand why you might need a smoke screen around you at all times. Your natural shame can then bring forward its authentic reservations about your smoking, which you’ll now be able to hear as an intelligent, upright person who has thousands of options, instead of as a cowering addict whose entire soul has been overwhelmed and imprisoned by nicotine. Wherever you go from that place, you’ll remain standing. You’ll be able to focus yourself and incinerate any number of contracts with your unwanted behaviors—or with any belittling messages or labels that careen around in your psyche—and you’ll be able to move forward as a whole person, instead of a powerless victim of your environment, your upbringing, or your chemistry.
If you don’t find a great number of shaming titles in your psyche, yet you still struggle mightily with repetitive shame, you may have boundary trouble. When your boundary is weakened or unsuitably inflated, you may tend to enmesh with others simply because your personal boundary isn’t sufficiently defined. If your shame is constant and unrelenting, or if you find yourself inexplicably unable to speak up or take appropriate action, your shame may be in a feedback loop of another kind.
When your personal boundary isn’t well-defined, your anger may move to its mood state to help you protect and restore yourself. If you constantly repress or explode with this anger (as rage, fury, hatred, or apathy), your boundary trouble will intensify. Then your shame will come forward, too, because now you’re not only dealing with affronts from the exterior world, but you’re actually hurting yourself and others by mismanaging your anger. In this situation, your shame will try to silence and inhibit you simply because your boundary is too weak to protect you (which means you really shouldn’t be out in public), or so large that it inadvertently interferes with the boundaries of everyone around you (which means you’ll be offending against others as a matter of course—even though you don’t mean to).
If your shame is your constant and unwelcome companion, please skip back to the boundary-definition exercises in chapter 10, and pay close attention to maintaining an arm’s-length boundary (no more, and no less) around you at all points. Then pour your shame into your boundary, and let it revitalize your personal space. If you let shame and anger take their rightful places as your sentries and behavioral mentors (instead of your tormentors), you’ll be able to live, act, and react consciously, instead of exploding or deflating simply because your boundary is impaired.
As you learn to define and care for your personal boundary, make sure that you conscientiously channel each of your anger energies (rage, fury, hatred, apathy, and shame), instead of repressing them back into your inner world or expressing them haphazardly at the outer world. When your boundary is refortified, you’ll protect yourself and everyone around you from enmeshment, boundary damage, and repetitive shame spirals.
There is an emotion I watch for in situations where people have done something that is truly wrong: appropriate shame. If a friend offends against me, and I call him or her on it, I wait to see if appropriate shame and remorse come forward. If they do, I know that the offense is over and that I don’t have to harp on it anymore. On the other hand, if a friend offends against me and then refuses to own up to it or apologize, I know that he or she has a problem with shame. If so, I keep a close eye on this person. I usually let friends screw up three times, but if they continue to behave shamelessly, I walk away. Setting a boundary isn’t just an imaginal skill; it’s important to surround yourself with honorable people, and separate yourself from people who can’t manage their behavior ethically.
Appropriate shame is something we should all support in ourselves and others. If we discipline a child, and it’s clear that he or she is truly sorry, the discipline needs to end immediately. What you want to see is appropriate shame arising in response to the original affront—not to your strict discipline. Continuing onward with the shaming after a child has shown remorse is abusive, and it often leads to a hardening in the child’s soul. That hardening, as we’ve all experienced, can lead to shameless behaviors that can make people untrustworthy. When someone behaves shamelessly, they’re trapped in a reaction to bad parenting or bad teaching, which is why I give everyone three chances. We can all learn and grow beyond our childhood wounding, but sometimes people just don’t want to. Bless their hearts is what I say as I walk away.
If you are parenting or working with children, it’s important to help them connect to their authentic shame in healthy ways. A great way to do this is to let them be involved in setting punishments, if any, for their misdeeds. When I suggest this, many parents scoff and imagine that children will choose extra ice cream as a punishment; they won’t take it seriously because they’re all little outlaws. But what I found in parenting, teaching, and coaching is that children are very solemn about their acts of contrition. Most children feel remorse deeply, and the punishments they create for themselves are often comically medieval. As the parent or authority figure, you can easily lighten their suggested punishments and help children find a way to make amends without (as has been suggested by various little ones I know): never eating again; paying $2,000 to the police; or giving all of their toys to homeless kids. When children can be involved in deciding upon their acts of contrition, they can connect to their shame in healthy ways (as long as you stop them from inflicting retributive self-flagellation upon their own souls).
Of course, none of us grew up this way; therefore, we and most of the people we know struggle mightily with shame. It’s not a topic anyone really wants to bring up, so it can be difficult to create sacred space for shame in people who have no skills. Our scandalous abuse of shame has endangered us all; therefore, when shame arises, most people just dissociate and lose their way. Even verbal expression, which is usually a good idea with other emotions, may throw people directly into a shame spiral, because if the shame is foreign in origin (or dishonored by repression or incompetent expression), it will increase in intensity as soon as it is brought into the open. Shame is so vital to the sanctity of the soul that when it is released, it will work unceasingly to expose inferiorities and restore integrity. If people have skills, they can grab on to their shame and raft through the rapids to safety; however, if they don’t have skills, they’ll just go under.
My appropriate shame tells me that working with shame-filled people is either a job for trained therapists who can provide a skill set and support for people going through the rapids, or that it’s an inside job for people who have accumulated the skills on their own (through this book or in any other way). I would caution you strongly against attempting to deal with a shame cycle in a person who has no support structure. I applaud you for wanting to create sacred space for shame in others, but sometimes the most sacred act is to let people know that they are in the rapids and that there’s no shame in reaching out for more help than a friend can provide.
Trauma survivors are often overwhelmed by shame, sometimes because they blame themselves (they often feel “guilty” for having caused their traumas somehow), but usually because they were actively shamed during or after their traumas. Some abusers (or other emotionally incompetent people) blame survivors for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Many trauma survivors are incapacitated by repetitive and unresolving shame, or are undermined by their own futile and rebellious attempts to defy the powerful shame they feel. This disruptive post-traumatic shame spiral has been labeled “toxic” by many mental health providers. While this intense and repetitive shame certainly has toxic effects when it is expressed or repressed, it is not toxic at all when it can be channeled. In fact, this rapids-level shame can lead trauma survivors directly to the blessed third stage of healing.
Channeling shame of this magnitude can only be done in a sacred context, so if you’re not quite up on your skills yet, you should reach out for support. Many therapists can create sacred space in their consulting rooms, and many trauma support groups can be healing, as well, because when you can see your supposedly shameful behaviors reflected identically in the souls of your fellow survivors (or explained by a therapist), you’ll be able to remove the stigma of pathology from your soul. You’ll see that post-traumatic shame spirals are common and not specific to you, and you’ll understand that powerful shame exists not to break you down and incapacitate you, but to halt your forward movement as a precaution when your movements are certain to be incorrect or shameful.
If you’re dealing with unhealed and unresolved trauma (where you’re distracted, boundary-impaired, and dissociated), you’ll be cycling through stages one and two, and you’ll most likely seek traumatizing situations or relationships in order to intensify your cycling in the desperate, unconscious hope that you’ll finally shoot forward to stage three. In this dire situation, your psyche won’t want you to move at all, and it will stop you in any way it can while it tries to rebuild your ravaged boundary and put out the fires that keep erupting in your soul.
It is very easy to crumble in the face of this sort of turmoil, which is why skills, support, and sacred space are absolutely necessary. Whether you choose to take this journey on your own or with the help of a therapist, your ability to ground and focus yourself will enable you to halt any distraction or dissociation you might experience, just as defining your personal space will begin to relieve your boundary impairment. When you’re grounded and reintegrated inside your sacred space, you can channel (or be helped to channel) any emotion that comes forward while you incinerate your contracts with any shameful memories, labels, or foreign messages that disable you. Empathic skills help you consciously enter the territory of the first two stages of your initiation with resources, focus, and the knowledge that this too shall pass. Your shame can then help you stand upright and face any memories or behaviors that have tripped you up or shamed you; it can provide the heat and focus you need to forgive yourself and make amends to people you may have hurt unintentionally—and it can restore your dignity and honor.
When intense shame appears, it contributes the focus and impetus you need to perform serious soul-work. If you don’t have the skills you need just yet, please seek out competent therapeutic help, but remember to bless your shame and welcome it into your healing process. Authentic shame is not here to punish you; it’s here to strengthen your inner boundary and your determination so that you can halt your shame spiral, rid yourself of applied and manufactured shame, restore your integrity, and heal your soul.
If you can welcome your shame, you can begin to identify the different forms shame takes, rather than just falling into shame spirals. Welcome your free-flowing ability to effortlessly support ethical behaviors in yourself and others; welcome your mood state when you’ve done something wrong; and welcome the raging rapids that surge forward when something shameful has not been addressed consciously or honorably. Welcome and thank your shame.