Shame
As a clinician, I deal with a lot of emotions on a daily basis. No emotion is so insidious as is shame. My client last week brought up the idea of “landfill emotions” but he could not exactly explain what he meant by it or where he heard it. Upon some digging, I found this: “Shame is the landfill emotion. It’s not organic, like joy. It was dumped there by someone else” (Burroughs, 2012).
I cannot agree more with this quote. As a mental health therapist trained in the humanistic tradition of psychology, I often talk about the first five years of a person’s life to be the most critical in the development of self. As parents, we have 1,780 days to get it right and that many days to get it wrong. How we conduct ourselves as parents in that almost 1800 days can greatly impact the trajectory of that child’s life. Shame is not a developmental goal we want our children walking out of those five years with. Shame as a person grows and sometimes becomes our shadow self that undermines our ability to become the best versions of ourselves.
Shame as Religious Residue
Guilt is often tied to shame, though developmentally I see it differently. The philosopher Nietzsche declared a war on the Christian association with guilt and sin. If you have ever been part of the Christian tradition, you at some point came across the notion of original sin and if you are a Calvinist in origin, your deplorable nature. The problem is that we are not the broken vessels so often preached to in many of the evangelical spaces’ folks inhabit. The Christian church has a sin fetish and Nietzsche agrees. For Nietzsche, the concepts of guilt and sin are debilitating. Nietzsche rejects original sin and leans into original goodness, though he would not call it this.
I grew up Catholic and we were taught early on about the “seven deadly sins”. It was a rite of passage to be able to recite these sins for our first holy communion along with the Act of Contrition. But are these actions truly bad? Or are they basic human behaviors that are unavoidable? It is felt that the Church has placed too much pressure on our failings and not enough on the eternal love of God and the Christ presence in all of us. Because of this, I see many people on a weekly daily carrying the residue of religious shame.
Spiritual Practices to Combat Shame
There is a cure for shame. The first step is finding a therapist who can engage in talk therapy to work through the feelings of shame. As noted above, shame is often deeply rooted in early childhood experiences. Painful trauma experiences such as instances of sexual violence, ongoing family dysfunction, sudden death of a loved one, and divorce can also be sources of shame during the school aged childhood and adolescent experiences.
Two spiritual prescriptions come to mind when thinking about practices to combat shame, the practice of compassion and the practice of kindness.
Compassion
The spiritual practice of compassion cultivates our ability to care for ourselves and others. Compassion balances our perception of pain and counters our judgment of ourselves and others. In a therapeutic modality that I am trained in, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, we often tell our clients to “go with that” when processing painful memories.
The Stoics are known for saying that we cannot control what happens to us, we can only control how we respond. Cultivating compassion begins us on this quest.
We can cultivate self-compassion by paying attention to the language we use to describe ourselves. Do we look in the mirror and say that we are too fat, too ugly, not smart enough? We begin to counter this by offering to ourselves that we are God’s beloved. Positive self-talk then starts by objectifying the statements we made, who set the standard for how we look or whose standard are we trying to live up to? What defines intelligence? I know plenty of smart dumb people. We then must ask ourselves to consider a time when we felt pretty, handsome or smart.
Kindness
The theologian and philosopher Tripp Fuller is known for saying that God must be as nice as Jesus. I would add to this that we need to be as nice to ourselves as Jesus would be to us. As a practice, kindness enhances generosity and counters or balances selfishness.
Much of our practice here is similar to cultivating compassion. When you notice feelings of anger, fear, or any other intense emotion arising within you, try not to label them as “bad” or “wrong.” Instead, consciously translate your response to recognizing these emotions as “painful” or “suffering.” This subtle shift in perception can help you respond with more compassion and understanding.
My favorite practice when I am not feeling kind to myself is practicing the Lovingkindness Meditation. Silently we repeat phrases that resonate with our deepest wishes and wishes for ourselves. There are many versions out there, but consider this:
May I live in safety.
May I have mental happiness (peace, joy).
May I have physical happiness (health, vitality).
May I live with ease.
The Spiritual Practice of You
We are all works in practice; we are all in the process of becoming. Embedded within us is our Christ presence. This is the embodiment of God’s infinite love found in all creation. When we look into the mirror, we see God looking back. When we smile, God smiles, when we cry, God cries.
I was listening to the philosophy of Albert Camus the other day and without getting too depressing, he points out that life has an absurdity to it, a meaninglessness to it. According to the idea of absurdity, the only thing we can do is embrace the absurd by confronting it.
Confronting the absurd then means sometimes embracing the futility of our actions and leaning into living for ourselves. This is not selfishness, it is if done correctly, self-care. Shame creates a lot of emotional baggage. The spiritual practice of You is taking that baggage and put it down. Not just put it down, but sometimes throw it in the fire and burn it.
The Christ presence dwells in you. You are God’s beloved. May it be so.
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