I see that I have not written for this blog for a very long time now. Despite there being a lot of life that has happened in those two years that brings up shame. Shame makes me want to hide away in case anyone sees how bad I am for this neglect of my own intentions.
Prickly and sticky shame
Shame is a prickly and hot feeling in my face and it’s the holding of my breath and a strong desire to disappear. It is sticky and really uncomfortable, and the strong temptation is to attempt to avoid it and not to admit to it.
It’s about survival and other people’s rules
In evolutionary terms shame serves an important survival purpose. If we are perceived as unacceptable to our community we run the risk of being excluded which, in some other times and places, would be life threatening. So the feeling of shame operates as an internal guide to when we are acting against the accepted norms of our community. The thing is that those norms are just other people’s rules that feel like they are concretely ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ and have the power to make us ‘good’ or ‘bad’. They often don’t even really matter but just feel as if they do.
Therapists don’t have to be ‘sorted’
As a therapist, the story I can tell myself is that I am supposed to be ‘sorted’, to have my life organised and perfectly balanced in terms of my physical and mental and spiritual wellbeing and my relationships. And further to that, it can feel as if I can’t let anyone see when it really isn’t. But that wouldn’t be real – I know this!
So even with comparatively small things we can feel as if we are completely bad and unacceptable but what’s actually happening is that we feel bad and are still inherently good, so we can feel the feelings and relate to them with compassion.
The mistakes I made as a mother deserve my compassion
And then I thought about the visceral shame I have sometimes felt when thinking back to the mistakes I made as a mother in the past. The times when I put myself and what I wanted ahead of my children, or failed them in some way. When a child dies, of course, this self-examination is relentless and frankly cruel. We can all find moments like this when we remember and some of them feel like enormous, devastating mistakes or moments of neglect. And all of these, whatever the size they seem to be, deserve our deep compassion. When they come into our consciousness and trigger shame we need to allow the shame feelings and sensations to call our attention, and then to stay with them with all the compassion we can muster until they dissolve.
Allowing your heart to open with compassion
What is really happening is this: I am feeling bad right now and I can hold this with compassion. I do this by remembering to breathe, paying attention to the places in my body where I experience this feeling and simply allowing the sensations to be what they are then allowing my heart to open to myself with compassion.
Tara Brach tells a story of a woman who was completely overwhelmed with shame after her daughter told her what had happened to her as a child while her mother was caught up in drinking. A monk held the mother’s hand and drew a circle on her palm telling her that is the shame. The he held her hand gently in his warm hand, enclosing it with love and compassion. He told her that the holding is what you must do from your compassionate heart for yourself whenever you feel the shame in your body.
Hold your shame close like a mother holding her precious child and ask:
'My love, do you need to be healed today?'
And listen, listen carefully, listen from the depths of your soul now; listen to his or her timeless response as it emerges out of the thundering silence of meditation:
'Not healed, today, mother; only held.”' Jeff Foster