Shame

[Morning Glory]

Guilt refers to something done or not done; shame has to do with a person's body and being. In other words, a person thinks there is something wrong with their very being. If, as a child, you has allergies and your mother scolded you, there would be guilt. If,as a child you had allergies and the kids ridiculed and avoided you, then shame would probably result. It is, as is said in Transactional Analysis, a sense that `I'm not OK - You're OK'.


Classically, shame results from a repetitive scene. It could be a father's drunken displays, a mother's enormous obesity as she hung out the clothes on the line, a child's crippled legs, a nose considered ugly, a size thought of as small. Clear cases of shame result from sexual, physical, emotional or even religious abuse. This is not to say that the child should take on the issue of someone else; it is to regretfully admit that many people walk around thinking their very person is evil due to what adults did to them. A relative may have crossed the ethical line and played with the child sexually. A father may have worked out his own frustration at life by beating his children. A child may have been considered illegitimate, weak, stupid, or profane by a parent and humiliated accordingly. A parent may have brain-washed a child by inculcating negative religious thoughts of sinfulness.


No matter the source: shame is in the person. Yes, matter the source! Madder the source. The job of caretakers is to nurture and give options, not abuse and take away rejoicing. One way out of the pit of shame is to name the abuser, be angry at the beater, feel out the rage at the emotional mistreatment, and shun the fundamentalists who taught such rigid self-hate. Anger and even rage, boiling out of the unconscious, needs to be legitimated. If parents install such self-loathing in a person, that parent needs to be hauled to the bar of emotional judgement and dealt with.


Anger, how ever and how deep, though, can take us only so far. What has to be understood is that you, the shame-bearer, are actually carrying the feelings of the abuser. In other words, you are still acting out the failures of a previous generation. You must divorce that generation in order to be free. There is no substitute for this. If you carry the shame, you are carrying someone else's problem! Not yours. Your body is okay, your soul beautiful, and your life your own. No amount of your own pain will assuage the true guilt of those who put off their problems on you. There is no true vicarious option: it is all grandiosity.


In other words, you must refuse at the level of your own being, to carry another's failed life. If that means surrendering your genetic forebears and embracing humanity and other life forms, so be it. If that means moving away from a family that continues emotional abuse, that too must be carried out. The idea is simple and profound at the same time: you must not carry a previous generation's problems.


The grand way to free yourself happens to be modeling of others. After all, if your original copies were invalid, you can use the same mechanism of copying in terms of great examples. This does not mean a simple studying of people you admire. It means that you systematically incorporate their personality into yours. You may spend the day - without others being aware of it - thinking, talking, and acting like your new role model. This procedure must be done repeatedly until the copy has taken, which is to say that your acting has become your reality. You may want to read Hawthorne's The Great Stone Face, a story that reveals the process.




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Morning Glory]

Guilt and Shame


Although what happened to them was not their fault, many survivors experience both guilt and shame after being sexually assaulted. Here is a place to explore the cause of these emotions and hopefully find our way past them.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Let's start with the basics and define both guilt and shame (Webster's College Dictionary):

Guilt: n. 1. the fact or state of having committed an offense, crime, violation, or wrong, esp. against moral or penal law.
2. a feeling of responsibility or remorse for some offense, crime, wrong, etc., whether real or imagined.

Shame: n. 1. the painful feeling of having done or experienced something dishonorable, improper, foolish, etc.

Many people think of guilt and shame as the same thing (and the dictionary defines them this way). They are, however, extremely different. Survivors feel guilty, for the most part, because they feel they did something wrong which caused them to be sexually assaulted ("if I wasn't wearing that dress...if only I hadn't drank so much...I shouldn't have been alone with him," etc). They feel guilty because it seems like their actions caused the assault.

Shame is what prevents many survivors from speaking about what happened to them. Shame is an attack on the survivor as a person ("I am a bad person because this happened to me..."). It is the feeling you get when you are sure that someone will think poorly of you because you were assaulted. Shame is longer lasting, and ultimately more dangerous than guilt.

Nancy Venable Raine, in her book After Silence: Rape and My Journey Back discusses the difference between guilt and shame:



Shame is often confused with guilt, but Lewis notes that whereas shame is "the complete closure of the self-object circle...in guilt, although the self its the subject, the object is external." Guilt is produced when you evaluate your behavior as failure, but the focus is on what you could have done differently-and what you can do to repair the damage. Guilt is less intense than shame and less negative because the focus is an "action of the self rather than the totality of the self." When corrective action is impossible, guilt is converted to shame. Rape, by definition, is a situation where corrective action is impossible.

The feeling of shame is so intense for rape victims that many never tell anyone what happened to them. Even in psychotherapeutic settings, victims of rape often avoid talking about what happened to them. Despite more than two decades of change in social attitudes about rape, I still found it difficult not to feel ashamed when others reacted to me with embarrassment or discomfort. And this feeling of shame silenced me. Lewis notes that an intense feeling of shame can actually cause loss of memory. Shame silences because it encloses the entire self.

Rape shame is hard to escape...Attempts to dissipate the same by giving words to the unspeakable seem only to increase it. The shame is mirrored by the listener, sometimes quite obviously by a blush, an averting of the eyes, or a hunching of the shoulders, sometimes by silence. The telling then feels like a confession, an admission of wrongdoing, and the sense of is deepened. Shame is what the rapist, not the victim, should feel. Yet his shame is transferred to the victim, and her shame renders her mute. And her muteness seems to confirm the moral rightness of this transfer. The feeling of shame seems to make being the victim of rape an act of wrongdoing...

[Morning Glory]

Guilt and shame are difficult to escape, and as Nancy Venable Raine notes, you can tell yourself that what happened wasn't your fault, but sometimes it is really hard to believe it. Here are some suggestions for combating guilt and shame:

When you are feeling guilty about being sexually assaulted, take a minute to look up the definition in the dictionary. It sounds silly, but sometimes it is all it takes to help you remember that you are not the one who committed the crime. It is the person who assaulted you who should feel guilty about their actions.

Keep a journal. When you are feeling ashamed or guilty, write down your feelings. Then, write a paragraph about why you are feeling that way ("I feel ashamed because I told my friend what happened to me today, and she seemed embarrassed...), then write a paragraph evaluating the situation ("I should not feel ashamed because I was assaulted and if my friend has a problem with me telling her, it's a problem with her and not with me...").

Talk to someone you trust about how you are feeling. Sometimes it helps to have another person tell you that what happened was not your fault. Talking about your feelings can help you make sense of them.

Buy The Courage to Heal Workbook and do the exercises. Many of them will help relieve your feelings of guilt and shame.

[Morning Glory]

GUILT & SHAME - are two quite different things. Guilt says something is wrong and I need to question where I am responsible. Shame says I am responsible for what is wrong without question.
When you think you are feeling guilty about something and want to determine if you are really feeling shame, ask yourself this: am I REALLY RESPONSIBLE for this?
If you have had a rough time of it, you may have had your self-esteem damaged and therefore will take responsibility for things that have gone wrong that you are not even responsible for. This of course further damages your confidence and stirs resentment. When this happens you know shame is an issue for you and is something you need to work on, as it has no place in a healthy life. There is no personal integrity in shame. Do not shame children.
Guilt however, can sometimes be a good thing. It is an emotion that stirs questions about behavior inconsistent with our beliefs. Guilt wants you to either question what you believe, or change what it is you are doing. It also urges you to ask if you are RESPONSIBLE for behaving in a way inconsistent with those beliefs… and your personal honesty and response reveals unmistakably your level of integrity.

By Cynthia w. Lubow, MFT

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We are facing an epidemic of shame. Shame is the feeling associated with believing ourselves to be undeserving, inadequate, unlovable, disgusting, or bad in some basic way When we grow up with people who repeatedly criticize, deny or ignore our feelings, our needs and who we really are, we develop a "pool of shame." We then carry around that pool of shame all the time, feeling it, protecting it, and reacting to it even when no one is currently shaming us. When someone does shame us, or we feel shame for any reason, the pool overflows, so our reaction to the incident seems extreme, until we realize we are reacting to past shame, as well as current shame.
Guilt is different from shame. When we do something that doesn't fit with our value system, we feel guilty. But when we feel shame, we feel not that we did a bad thing, but that we are a bad thing.

What we do to survive shame, then, is hide what we feel is shameful about us. Of course this includes many essential aspects of who we are and what makes us human beings, including our feelings, and vulnerabilities, and sometimes our identities, thoughts, opinions, bodies, differences, interests, and so forth. Hiding our true selves is essential protection when we are trapped in shaming families. But hiding causes its own pain, and it keeps us from healing. First of all, healing has to include fluid access to our feelings and hiding prevents that. Secondly, hiding what we believe is shameful about us gives the shame more power. If we don't show the parts of us we believe to be unlovable, we don't get a chance to see that others don't find these parts to be repulsive, so we assume that if anyone knew these parts, they would be repulsed.

While we are hiding our shame, we also do things to relieve some of the pain it causes. These methods, called "coping mechanisms," are like hiding in that they help us survive, but also cause their own brand of additional pain. Coping mechanisms include: perfectionism, rage, acting as if one is invisible to others, contemptuousness, a need for power, blaming, abuse of substances, people pleasing, compulsive sex, eating, need for control, or busyness, self-hate, measuring people as better or worse than us, obsessing, pushing people away, and many others.

We are born with the natural ability to heal from emotional trauma. This ability is called "grieving." Grieving heals emotional wounds just as certain chemicals heal physical cuts in our skin. Grieving is basically having access to and expressing feelings about a loss. All traumas are losses. In dysfunctional families, we are shamed for expressing or even having feelings, so we lose our ability to heal. We can regain that ability at any time, but it takes being in an environment where we consistently and over time find that our needs, feelings, and who we really are will be met with understanding, respect, and valuing rather than ridicule, denial, and absence.

When we find people who give us this understanding and accept us fully, including the secret "badness," we can begin experiencing all the rich colors of our feeling. Then, guided by the vulnerability, we can learn to assert our needs and our true selves effectively, while acting in ways that leave us feeling good about ourselves. In this process, shame loses its power over us.

[2stop]

This is really a perferct post for me to read today, I am going to print this out and study it! Thanks MG!!!

[Don W]

Hi Morning Glory, The biggest problem I had to overcome dealing with shame was in properly placing the blame. I use to look back at the sexual abuse and other abuse and blame myself for letting it happen. The problem was I was looking at something that happened at 7 with the mind of a 50 year old. They helped me understand that I was only a child there was nothing I could have done.
I use to think that maybe if I had done a better job mowing the lawn or weeding the garden my father wouldn't have had to strap me until I bled.
Maybe, when my father made us strap each other when he was tired, I should have refused. The fact was I and my brothers and sisters were children. He was 6 Feet 5" 300lbs and a brutal man. I found out just a few years ago that the doctors had him on Thorazine. He would have been abusive even if I had been the best kid ever. We are not responsible
for the abuse others inflect upon us. they are responsible for their behavior. The sooner we understand and believe this, then we can start to recover from the injuries inflected on our minds by others. Don W

Thanks Don.

It is so hard to look back at the age you were instead of the adult you are now. It has helped me to watch my grandchildren and think that I was that age when this or that happened. It makes it easier to understand for me and makes it easier to let myself off the hook.

That's a really good point Don.

Hugs,
MG

to the top