The Subtle Power of Shame

Shame is such a subtle but deeply powerful emotion, and I believe for many of us it sits at the heart of many of the challenges we have in life.

Underneath other emotions like fear or anger, sadness or grief, shame for me feels like gravity. Exerting an invisible but powerful influence over our lives.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the many ways shame has shown up in my life.

And I would say confidently that shame has created the biggest, most dramatic influence over my life and my choices.

Here are some examples of how shame has felt for me –

After a long conversation with a friend once, when I left I noticed I felt really uncomfortable. There was a slight nauseating feeling in my tummy, and my body felt really edgy and jumpy. The sensations inside of me didn’t feel strong like anger or dizzyingly painful like terror, but subtle and pervasive.

I realised, because of what I know about shame, that shame had shown up because I had been inauthentic during my conversation, I had been agreeing with things I didn’t agree with, and shame had shown up to show me how nauseating it feels to be inauthentic.

Another time I recall I was at work being asked if I had completed the project I said I would do.

Oh no! Not yet, I’ll have it done tomorrow! A feeling of chilling horror filled my body, and I blurted out a panicky reply.

When I thought to myself, I have to get this project done, I remember I had instantly opened my browser and started scrolling the web. Every time I thought about doing the project I felt like this giant forcefield around it repelling me. I couldn’t even move close to it.

My mind would go fuzzy, I would feel this compulsive urge to just remove my mind from anything serious and I would go into a low level shutdown state of avoiding, avoiding, avoiding.

Again – this was another example of shame. I realised afterwards that I was so scared of messing up this project, that shame had shown up to stop me from even attempting it. An emotional exploration led me to see that deep down I believed not doing it felt easier than doing it and ending up with what felt like the inevitable result of disappointing everyone.

A few years ago a friend invited me to a dinner to meet some of her friends, and I was super excited to go. On the day I had a really difficult conversation with one of my kids that brought up for me a lot of regret about the past, how I used to be so fearful and panicky and how it affected them.

And it touched such deep wells of shame about who I was as a person, as a mother, that I immediately felt overwhelmed and incapacitated by this shame about who I was. And so I feigned illness and didn’t go.

These are just a few examples – mild examples really – of how shame has shown up for me. But there are many deeper currents of shame that have stopped me from doing things that would have made my life better, less stressful, easier and more satisfying.

But from not understanding how shame worked, I would get stopped so frequently in my tracks by the unseen forces of shame.

Can you relate?

One thing that strikes me as so terribly sad and harsh, is that shame often creates or exacerbates the situations we feel shame about. Like a terrible self-fulfilling prophecy that gets bigger and bigger each year.

Perhaps we feel shame about not having a lot of close friends – but the shame we feel about this stops us from trying to make more friends, or deepening the friendships we currently have.

Perhaps we feel shame about having a lot of debt, but the shame we feel stops us from accessing financial support that would help us deal with it in the most productive way.

Maybe we feel shame about our bodies and so we avoid intimate relationships, creating more disconnection and feelings of shame about ourselves.

The impact of having too much shame is so deep, so powerful and so pervasive. So how do we work with shame to release its grip?

One of the first steps is learning about how shame feels for us, what its qualities are, and how we can identify where shame shows up in our life.

When we can do that we get the chance to work with the sensations that it creates in our bodies and how it inhibits and changes our behavior in life.

Do you have a sense of where shame might be showing up in your life?

Can you identify how it feels for you?

The more we learn about shame, the more empowered we become in being able to work with it. But we also learn the purpose of healthy shame and what it’s trying to communicate.

When we know why it shows up, what it’s trying to do, it can help to powerfully unravel the power it has over our choices and our lives.

Much love,

Diana