However, soon enough, the words we use double back to reinforce the feelings. Alison, by repeatedly telling herself that she is never working hard enough (and therefore needs to work harder) deepens the felt sensation of shame. Hence, an unending loop is created: sensations and feelings beget thoughts that in turn strengthen the felt experience. And so we see that shame is certainly formed in the world of emotion, but it eventually recruits and involves our thinking, imaging and behaving as well.
Thus, from the outset we come to the realization that shame is both ubiquitous in its presence (there is no person or experience it does not taint) and infinitely shape-shifting in its presentation. If it were a member of the Periodic Table of elements, it might be carbon, the element common to all living organisms. That it is so fundamental within our existence also makes it quite challenging to root out. If we approach it as a problem that we can solve merely by changing how or what we think, we are likely to limit our effectiveness in combating it. This is what Matt discovered.
As a marketing executive he had developed a successful business and now had several employees working for him. He was conscientious and cared about his workers, treating them generously and justly. But he worried that at any moment the economy would shift enough that he would have to lay someone off or, worse, that the business would fail outright, which at times kept him up at night. He was insightful enough to recognize that he could not control all the variables that determined whether his company would survive; furthermore, he easily admitted that he worried too much about, well, just about everything. He came for help because he saw his problem primarily as one of anxiety; it was not debilitating but present enough to get his wife's attention. It was not making sense to her (and eventually to him) that despite the steady progression of his business, Matt sometimes would find himself ruminating about how he and his family would one day end up living in a box under a bridge. One noteworthy caveat was how effectively he compartmentalized all of this. Anyone who knew him, apart from his wife, would never have guessed that he had a care in the world, as he had practiced how to effectively manage his concerns when in the presence of just about everyone, ironically, because as he would later tell me, he worried about what people would think of him if they knew about how much he worried. Go figure.
He came to see me to explore the possibility of using cognitive therapy to restructure his thinking about his life. This was a reasonable goal, as cognitive-based interventions have been demonstrated to be effective in treating a number of emotional problems, especially anxiety. But despite Matt's best efforts, he continued to feel wrapped around the axle of an imagined catastrophic future. One of the most glaring troubles for him was the reality that his life with God did not seem to be able to budge his incessant trend toward ruminating about disaster. Despite the fact that his relationship with Jesus was the most important thing in his life, thinking and reflecting on Scripture passages that admonished him to leave anxiety at the door only left him standing at the door's threshold, right along with his worry. For him, it was not until we began to explore the nature of his experience as one that was felt, sensed and imaged as much as it was thought that he began to gain some traction in overcoming his problem.
For instance, we quickly uncovered that what he felt as worry was often correlated with thoughts such as I won't be able to figure out what to do if the work starts to drop off. (This, despite his having navigated effectively more than one downturn in business over the course of his career). Or even more commonly he found himself thinking, Sooner or later I'm going to be found out to be the fraud I am. He agreed that most of his friends would find his way of thinking hard to fathom, given his consistent history of competence. Matt's interest was in confronting these thoughts with alternative thinking processes. This is standard operating procedure for cognitive-behavioral therapy. But in his case we found that despite his best effort at restructuring his thinking, this approach still left him with the residual feeling that undergirded the thought I do not have what it takes. When it will count most, I will not be enough.
On the surface of Matt's complaint, it appeared that his primary problem was one of anxiety, and surely anxiety was a problem. But further exploration revealed that under all of this was a deep sense that he simply did not have what it took to be effective, a sensation that was not reducible to a statement but rather something that seemed to have been woven into his DNA. Although we often try to get our minds around shame by using language (which is not unimportant), its essence precedes language; we therefore often have difficulty regulating it by using words. Telling ourselves we shouldn't be ashamed often only reinforces it.
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