Shame # 2 Ever Wish You Could Blow Shame Out of the water?
Do you ever wish you could just blow shame right out of the water?
If shame was a person,
I would beat them up and tell them to never show their face in this town again. ‘We don’t need liars and cheats bringing our community down,’ I’d holler, kicking them on their way out.
But alas, shame isn’t a person, it’s a complex social-psychological phenomenon, the paralyzing pangs of which cannot be relieved through brute force.
If shame was functioning properly in a healthy society,
we wouldn't have to defeat it.
We could simply listen to its signals,
observing and addressing conflicts between our individual desires
and the group’s well-being and expectations.
In this society, however, shame is barely working that way at all.
Instead, it’s running amok,
and we need more sophisticated solutions
than beating it up after school.
Like myself and so many other women,
your experience with shame probably began in early childhood
and has taken on many forms throughout your adolescence and adulthood.
You may have developed a strong sense of self
despite any experiences of shame or confusion in the past,
but recently,
ever since that ‘big event’ you went through,
you haven’t been able to experience
and resource yourself in the same way.
Shame from the past can re-emerge when women have been through a major event that throws them off course,
even if it’s an event of their choosing like caretaking or childbirth.
It also emerges in circumstances that are not of our choosing,
such as instances of neglect, abuse, or other mistreatment.
When we’ve been in a situation where we felt rejected or helpless,
we can end up feeling a lot of shame,
because we couldn’t find belonging
or do what we wanted and needed to do.
Even when we have a lot going for us,
shame can tell us that our situation is hopeless,
and that we are doomed to remain trapped
or blocked in whatever miserable circumstances rule the day.
Then it tells us to crawl in a hole and hide away alone
with these feelings and messages,
because shame is a self-serving creature and it flourishes in isolation.
This is why our sophisticated solution has to involve a
group-based healing space
where the eyes, ears, and empathy
of others who have similar experiences can loosen shame’s grip on our individual psyches.
This is also why the Whole Body Recovery Program employs
developmental psychology, somatic movement,
embodying self-attachment, iFS parts work, and more.
In the program, I guide participants to benefit from these tools
as they show up for themselves and one another.
We hold space for one another’s pain, grief, and growth
while identifying and transforming shame
and other unhelpful patterns.
By working with root causes in the past
and current manifestations in the present,
we remove the limitations these patterns and setbacks place on our futures.
If you feel like you’ve been trying to stage a fist fight with shame
and it’s just not working,
the Whole Body Recovery Program may be right for you.
You don’t have to struggle alone to face down the lies shame tells you.
