Operating from shame
I’ve written about shame before, but I don’t think I noticed or understood how much of a hold it can have on a life. To operate from shame is to operate from a place of fear. To operate in a way that seeks validation for the person you think you need to be or prove yourself in one way or another. It’s looking over your shoulder at mistakes, hurts, and wrongdoings hoping you can somehow make it right and prove to everyone or rather, yourself, that you’re worthy of something. The something differs for everyone. It could be your job, your family, your friends, your romantic partner, or even just being here.
Shame is one of those things that can take up your life and blur every good or great thing. But shame doesn’t only come from mistakes as I said before, shame can come from simply being who you are in a space that doesn’t accept or celebrate you. A space that silently or loudly ridicules certain attributes or who you are as a whole. That space may encourage you to speak softer, stay quiet, lean into what other people think you should be, and conform in more ways than you’re comfortable.
It leads you to question who you are, what you’ve done, or what you’re even thinking of doing and require the approval of a community or person. Shame leads to different places for different people; it may lead to people-pleasing, as I’ve described above, negative self-talk because you don’t seem to be doing something the way you’re supposed to. That’s the way I learnt shame controlled how I felt about myself and how I thought other people may feel about me. Pair people-pleasing together with negative self-talk and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.
The shame of my own opinions, mistakes, thoughts, wants, needs, and choices were suffocating but it’s the space I knew best. When you’ve operated in a certain state for most of your life, the shift out of it is always painful. Transitions are hard when you don’t have the tools for them. Transitioning out of shame when your mind fights you at each point is a battle few speak about. You tell your mind your opinion matters, and it trumps with the opinion of a community. Slowly edging you back into the mindset it knows best. Shame creates an environment resistant to change or compassion. It operates from one space that spirals into many but never truly who you are.
When you find yourself, uncovering the layers of shame and its branches of emotions…you’ll mostly feel the first breath of fresh air. The first breath that allows choice. It feels confusing at first because you don’t know how to live a life without that place, without shame. To make choices and feel like they’re entirely yours. To have or say something and it’s purely your voice or wants. Getting there is one thing but trying to figure out what you want or even what you think without others is a grief of its own.
Recovering from shame and its overshadowing branches of emotions is slow, painful, and freeing. Slow due to layers, painful because of the loss of a life you’ve lived and the life you could’ve lived and freeing at the end because now, you can move without the weight of everything that comes with it.
I could write continuously about the process of shame and how hard it is to move from it but I’d just like to let you know, rewiring your operating system can be all these things but it’ll always be worth it.