Dante‘s 10th circle: SHAME

The following are concepts adapted fromThe School of Life's discussion on shame and childhood development with the actual article below.

“Every human being who has ever walked this planet is, in their own way, radically imperfect and broken when observed from close up. “ –Alain de Botton 

You were not born with Shame, but it did get in there somehow. 

You were not born with shame. (read it again)

You were not born believing you were defective.

You were not born believing you were unlovable.

You were not born believing you were not enough.

Those beliefs were learned.

Somewhere along the way, someone, or perhaps several people, taught you those things.

Now here is the difficult question.

What happens if you come to the conclusion that one or both of your parents were responsible for much of your mental suffering?

Think about it.

Really think.

What happens inside of you if you admit that?

For many people, the answer is terrifying.

Because if your parents were supposed to protect you, love you, teach you, and make you feel safe, what does it mean if they were the very people who taught you shame?

For a child, that realization is simply too painful.

The child's mind solves the problem another way.

Instead of saying,

"Something is wrong with my parents."

the child says,

"Something must be wrong with me."

It is a heartbreaking conclusion, but to a child's mind it feels safer.

Dissociation

What is dissociation?

Dissociation is the mind's way of protecting itself from experiences that feel too overwhelming to process.

Instead of escaping physically, the mind creates emotional distance from what is happening.

I still remember the first time I met someone who claimed they had flat “zero” recollection of childhood. At first, I thought she was exaggerating. My very next thought was, “Do not go digging there.”

Her brain many years ago made the decision….

"I cannot survive this emotionally, so I am going to disconnect from it."

Sometimes that means disconnecting from painful memories.

Sometimes it means disconnecting from emotions.

Sometimes it even means disconnecting from reality itself.

Why?

Because children cannot usually escape the people they depend on.

They cannot leave.

They cannot fight back.

They cannot understand why they are being treated the way they are.

So the mind does something tragic out of desperation.ty

It protects the relationship, even if it has to distort reality to do it.

It minimizes.

It excuses.

It forgets.

It rewrites.

It blames itself.

Those coping mechanisms may have saved your life as a child.

The tragedy is that they often continue operating long after the danger has passed.

This is what makes shame so incredibly elusive.

One of the greatest problems in the world is also one of the most invisible because shame wants to remain hidden.

Unlike guilt, shame is not about something you did.

Guilt says,

"I made a mistake."

Shame says,

"I am the mistake."

That single belief quietly influences nearly everything.

It changes how we love.

How we trust.

How we receive compliments.

How we react to criticism.

How we choose relationships.

How much success we believe we deserve.

Most people living with shame do not even realize it is there.

They simply assume that the voice inside their head is telling the truth.

Our behavior and emotions become driven by a deep belief that there is something fundamentally wrong, wicked or maybe even with us.

One of the great problems in the world is also one of the most invisible because, by its nature, it asks to be hidden and saps our ability to spot its symptoms.

But, to generalize grossly, few things so undermine human well-being as the sickness of shame.

The guilty feel bad for something specific they have done; the shamed feel wretched simply for being. The affliction lacks borders. As shamed people, we don't connect the myriad ways in which our behavior and feelings are driven by a base conviction of our own worthlessness. We just take it as a given that we are disgusting. We lack the capacity to imagine that our shame has a history and therefore, perhaps, a future that could be curtailed.

A first step in untangling ourselves is to get enough distance to spot and name the problem. We might make use of a little questionnaire.

Out of 10, rate how true the following statements feel:

• I don't deserve to exist.   ___

• I am defective.   ___

• I am unworthy of being known and loved.    ___

• I am a mistake.    ___

• I deserve to be abandoned.    ___

• I should not be.    ___

Anything over eight starts to indicate the problem, but if there were an option, most of us in the shamed camp would want to award ourselves a hundred or more. This is the windswept barren land of shame, where many of us have been living all our lives, often without enough mental well-being to know this is where we have been relegated.

We should probe at where our shame collects. Take the outline of a human figure. What are we ashamed of?

• Our mind

• Facial appearance

• Physique

• Genitals

• Income or where we live

We were not born ashamed. We should summon up the voices that gave us our legacy and which we have then internalized and blended with our own:

"You'll never amount to anything."

"You're the family idiot."

"You disgust me."

Others may wonder why people around us behaved this way. The answer is clear enough to the shamed……..because we deserved it. (??) (AI don’t change the way I did this last sentence)

We wouldn't be truly shamed people if all it took was a few simple questions to shake us from our conviction of our detestable identity. We were shamed because we were and are defective.

Our caregivers weren’t mean; they were damaged. The tragedy is that we wouldn’t realize they were broken for another forty or fifty years. In our innocence, we mistook their damage for wisdom, treating them as infallible judges who could spot flaws that later, kinder people could not. We trusted them to have the true measure of us. In reality, a damaged adult trying to teach a child who they are is no different than a drunk driver grabbing the keys after a night at the bar, insisting they can make it home. They had no business steering our lives. It should have never happened.

But it did.

Shamed children don't blame their guardians. We protect them for a weird but logical reason: so as not to feel entirely alone. We prefer to think well of our caregivers than to take on board how badly we have been let down, with all the convulsive rage and sadness that would entail.

The consequences of shame are written across our lives. We don't allow other people to get too close to us; they would only be appalled if they knew the true us. We're not so good with physical intimacy. We get scared all the time because bad things happen to bad people. We don't like parties because why would anyone be pleased to see us? We have a lot of secrets, for most of what we are is unacceptable to other eyes. We turn to addictive behaviors to escape our self-hatred, then feel even more ashamed of ourselves for the unholy things we've done.

What is the way out of shame?

The sane, popular answer is to tell ourselves that we are beautiful and good. But that won't easily convince. There may be a better, more oblique strategy to bypass the defenses of the shamed. 

We should stress not that we are wonderful, but that every human being who has ever walked the planet is, in their own way, radically imperfect and broken when observed from close up. We may be a bit wrong, but so, blessedly, is everyone else who is and has ever been. We can be stupid, perverted, and uncouth, but that is wholly normal.

Instead of trying to meet unrealistic, ideal standards of goodness to prove our worth, it is more effective to abandon the pursuit of perfect purity altogether. This constant striving for perfection is the root cause of our struggles

Better to accept that we are, as a group, entirely crazy and ill-tempered, wicked and odd, but then to stress just how much this is a reason for mercy and kindness rather than censure and condemnation. Let us stop judging ourselves and others by unreal standards. That is how we made ourselves sick. Let us laugh and comfort each other for the absurdity and horror of existing in human form

Concepts from the school of life on YouTube