Hello!
I used to be full of shame. Those excruciating feelings of discomfort all over my body. The desire to hide away. I lived it, day after day.
And for many years, I thought it was just another feeling, like sadness.
Even after years of training as a psychotherapist, I thought it was helpful to feel shame, like feeling any other feeling.
And that’s why I’m so incredibly grateful to Marshall Rosenberg and Nonviolent Communication (NVC), which I came across 15 years ago.
NVC taught me the difference between thoughts and feelings, and faux feelings and true feelings.
And now, I don’t create new shame in myself.
Let me explain by giving you an example, and then I’ll talk about the difference between not creating new shame, and healing old shame.
Yesterday, I posted pictures of myself wearing new swimming costumes in the changing rooms of my favourite clothing and lifestyle brand – Spell and the Gypsy Collective – to a FB book of other Spell fans!
I felt excited, but also a tiny bit scared; I don’t often show pictures of myself in a bikini!
I had lots of really loving comments.
And then, at the end of the day, I looked at Spell’s website, and saw that I had the costume done up differently to how they had designed it to be!
At that point, I saw that in the past, that is where a shame-thought would have come in.
I would have judged myself, punished myself, or generally had some inner harsh dialogue which would have led to shame.
But I simply didn’t do that.
I was compassionate with myself. I listened to myself.
No shame.
I see little examples of this all the time.
The other day I was in my favourite smoothie shop – Naked Treaties – and I put what I thought was my loyalty card down on the counter, but when I looked down I saw it was something else entirely!
And again, that would have been a place where I would have judged myself and felt shame.
But I didn’t. I made some funny comment to the woman serving me, and got the real one out!
It really is possible to stop judging ourselves as being wrong, and it really is possible for us to sop telling ourselves that there is something wrong with us.
I am SO passionate about this, especially because I didn’t learn these kinds of things in all my psychotherapy training.
To me, listening to new shame over and over again is like us standing by and letting one child hit another child with a stick, and giving empathy to the child that is being hit, without doing anything to stop the child who is hitting.
You may know that I call these kinds of feelings hitting ourselves with emotional sticks, and the results are emotional bruises.
Shame is one kind of emotional bruise. Guilt is another.
And yes, there are times where feeling shame can be helpful – that’s when we are connecting in with a younger part of us who felt shame, and we are healing from that experience by receiving empathy either from an outer loving crew or an inner loving crew.
But even then, part of the healing will be telling that younger part of us that there is nothing wrong with us and nothing that we’ve done wrong.
I am SO incredibly grateful to not shame myself any more. Life is a whole lot more enjoyable without shame!
And how can we help our children from feeling shame?
Of course, the most helpful thing is to refrain from telling them that they’ve done something bad, or saying or implying that there is something wrong with them.
We can refrain from punishments, and also from telling them that they ‘make’ us feel or do something.
We can avoid telling them that something that they do is “not okay.”
We can avoid using judgments about them and their behaviour.
AND if we ever do do these things, we can repair afterwards.
We can apologise and take responsibility for what we said or did.
We can listen to their feelings that come up after that – sadness, tears, raging, tantrums.
We can invite attachment play, such as power reversal games, or nonsense play using silly words instead of judgments.
And we can be incredibly compassionate with ourselves.
Most of us grew up in the paradigm of behaviourism, which is based on punishments and rewards, which lead to guilt and shame.
And these ways of judging human beings and being harsh to them when they do things we don’t want goes back thousands of years, so changing these ways of thinking and responding takes time and diligence and willingness and self-compassion.
AND it IS possible to change.
It IS possible to stop shaming ourselves and our children.
I wonder how you feel when you read this?
I wonder if there is one step you would like to take around shame?
You might be interested to know that in my Love Being a Mother ebook and meditations, there’s a chapter called Banish Punishing Yourself, which is all about this!
There are a couple of chapters devoted to understanding the difference between stagnant feelings (feelings like shame and guilt) and flowing feelings (feelings like sadness) and how we can respond differently, and why that makes a difference.
There are also matching meditations to help you make changes at a deeper level so that you become more compassionate with yourself.
There are also self-reflections which ask you whether you are afraid of letting go of punishing yourself.
Growing up in the behaviourism paradigm means that we often learnt that being punished was “good for us” or “for our own good” and we often internalised the belief that without those punishments, we would be unruly or unloving or would never want to help others.
Those thoughts can still remain and underly why we keep punishing ourselves now.
The ebook and meditations are $50 and you can find out more HERE.
I am also going to be doing another live round of The Inner Loving Presence Process Course again soon, which is all about creating a compassionate inner dialogue where we listen to and value our needs and feelings, and replace the judgment with compassion.
Here’s to a world free from shame! Imagine what that would be like!
Love,
Marion
xxx