Unfolding shame.
Today is all about shame. I’ve been exploring the concept from various angles trying to map it to my experience. As I mentioned yesterday, since the start of my honesty marathon, shame comes way too many times. It is surprising and therefore suspicious. I also experience highlighted curiosity and smelling the potential of rescuing more of my freedom. Obviously, the topic is too complex to gain some clarity but there are a few things that I managed to unravel.
Another interesting thing is gifted to us by Christianity. original sin is a sort of essential shame. Shame first appeared when adam and eve m defied god to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and then they became aware of good and evil. the first symptom of their discovered knowledge was a shame. so dualism of good and bad is what creates shame. differentiation and separation, think we mistakenly trying to solve it with alienation and withdrawal but unknowingly making the problem bigger.
For the sake of my own clarity, I was trying to distinguish between shame and guilt. They seem related but not quite the same. I came up with the following framework, shame is the emotion I feel when I am done something wrong, or I feel that I am wrong, or have gotten one of those messages from others. Guilt, in my experience, is not an emotion, but rather the state of being, having done something wrong. I like to reduce it to the basic statements, shame is I am wrong and guilt I did something wrong. I won’t talk about guilt so much here, it is a separate topic to explore. Within shame experientially, I distinguished three states: shame that belongs to me, shame that belongs to others and shame that used to belong to others and now it belongs to me. Usually, it is easy to locate, but they feel differently. I am most affected by the third type it tightly intertwines with the first one.
There is something sneaky about expressing shame though. I think once it is out there, in front of others, it starts having an agenda. I am experiencing an insistent desire for acknowledgement or a response to my shame from people I share it with. This persistence resulted in a few hypotheses of what is happening when I come out with shame:
I am signalling cooperation and want to make sure the message has reached the person. I am giving sacrificing my pride and expressing honesty so that others can trust me.
I am looking for a release of shame, hoping that sharing it would help.
I am victimizing myself and looking for love, care through and connection through contempt, something like exaggerating to make it appear bigger thus giving me more of those things my insecure self is longing for.
It is unclear to me what drives me in expressing shame, probably a combination of all. Another thing that stands out, some shameful things are easier to share than others, even despite the fact that they are all in the category of shame for me. This makes me suspicious. There is some comfort in the activities that I think are shameful and I am not willing to give that comfort away. Maybe there is pleasure in something that is shameful. Something that gives me grounding which is mine and once I share, I lose it. It might be that there is a taste of momentary relief of responsibility and accountability shame seems to provide. Shame is related to humility in that in order to be ashamed of something you have to be willing to acknowledge that you screwed up: If you are unwilling to permit your self-image to be deflated, you will turn a blind eye to shame. Unwillingness to acknowledge some shames points at clinging to them without truly admitting the wrongdoing. The internal shape then is simply a facade for the public, a performance hidden from ourselves. Shame is one of the mechanisms by which we learn from our mistakes, the virtue and a great gift you can give to your future self.
Shame seems to be tightly bound to thinking in dualisms in my opinion. it occurs if there is a comparison or division between things. Mostly between good and bad. The Christian story of original sin came to mind, which is a sort of essential source of all shame. It first appeared when Adam and Eve defied god to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and then they became aware of good and evil. the first symptom of their discovered knowledge was a shame. differentiation and separation nourish shame, think we, general we, are mistakenly trying to solve it with alienation and withdrawal but unknowingly making the problem bigger. I realize the depth of my Christian faith these days, I am sketching a fun hypothesis around the incompletion of my desecration. think I underwent some surface-level transformations but deeply I am pretty much operating similarly to the Christian paradigm. This is a longer story, an ongoing hypothesis and investigation I am undergoing.
A little scattered set of thoughts on shame but think it gives some ideas where I am it. I must admit there is a lot of curiosity about shame, I see it as a potential source of insights into how to expand the degrees of my freedom.