Shame might well be the most powerful feeling a human being can experience. In my personal experience at least, Shame has never moved me in a heathy direction. I’ve thought a lot about this over the years and have wondered if perhaps Fear is a more intense feeling, it too is certainly powerful but in my experience Fear tends to make me act and even if that action isn’t as effective as I would like nevertheless I move and usually to some kind of safety. Shame however tends to cause me to shut down, the feeling is so intense that it kind of overloads my senses, all of them and when it reaches a peak I have learned that I become dangerously unstable. In The Road Less Travelled, M. Scott Peck wrote that he believed most people fit into to rough kind of handling very intense feelings, especially those that have an historical connection, in other words the overwhelming feelings happening now have their genesis in childhood experiences. Peck said that most of us either turn inward and feel the entire weight, the blame and the responsibility of our feelings and any resulting actions while others do pretty much the opposite. When I blame others and push responsibility away from myself I am far less likely to take hold of my own destiny. Not only have I met both kinds of people, if I’m not mistaken I’ve been both kinds. I think it’s probable that most people have a bit of both perhaps being weighted more to one or the other. Scott Peck also said those of us who tend to take on the responsibility for our own feelings will often improve our chances of getting better. I think that’s because in order to get better, to heal and grow I am going to need to be the one who does the work and for me to do that I will need to take on the responsibility, not for the things others have done but for the emotional and physical rubble those experiences have left behind.
I can remember the exact moment I first experienced crippling Shame.
I was in grade 3 which would have made me around 8 years old. That was a difficult year all round. Home was challenging, I was being bullied at school and at the time my neighbourhood wasn’t a safe place to live. It felt like I was almost constantly in the ‘Fight or Flight’ mode unable to regulate all those feelings.
‘Emotion Regulation is the ability to exert control over one’s own emotional state.’ It’s a critical self care skill but for some of us we seemed to have miss out on developing this ability. These days there is a great deal of awareness of the need to develop this skill including in most if not all primary schools and other child focused services.
To give you an idea of what it’s like for me, right now as I type these words my heart is racing, my breathing is heavier and my hands are a little shaky. This isn’t caused by the typing, it’s caused by what I’m typing about. At 57 I still find it hard to regulate my own emotions and because of that some days I can be exhausted from the intensity. Over the years, with the help of therapy and of course my Sallie, I’ve have a few tools or techniques that at least help me a little. For example, I’ve just restarted typing after taking a short break to read the news on my phone. I checked my messages and felt received to find a text from Sal. The subject was changed, my emotions settled, regulation had began. Unfortunately for me now that I’m back typing about this those techniques aren’t so effective.
Now imagine an 8 year old overwhelmed by such intense emotions that even as an adult I struggle to manage.
RD
How could that boy or girl possibly have the capacity to regulate any of it. In my case I think I know what happened and how I survived. My eldest brother has told me a number of times that when I was little I seemed to always be in a world of my own, never really being fully present I guess. He didn’t think it was a bad thing but it was constant and obvious. I think what probably happened was a survival instinct rather than strategy. My little mind just transported me from wherever I was and from whatever I was feeling off to a better, safer and for some reason I want to say ‘softer’ place. Not sure what that means but softer just feels right.
The Exact Moment
So you may be wondering what that ‘exact moment I first experienced crippling Shame’ was. It’s not that I’m avoiding it, I think it’s just that it probably doesn’t seem to anybody else that it’s a big deal. The thing is it doesn’t have to be a big deal for anybody else, for one reason or many reasons it was for me and I believe it was the starting point for a life long struggle with Shame.
It was grade 3 and I’d have been around 8 years old. All the students were sitting at their desk doing quiet drawing work. The teacher was at her desk and not a sound could be heard. It seemed to go on forever and gradually I felt that uncomfortable feeling you get when your bladder is reaching bursting point. I had only joined that school earlier that year after we had moved house so I was new and had no real friends in the class. All I needed to do was put my hand up and ask to go to the toilet, all would have been ok. That moment reminds me of going to the chemist to get a script filled and your partner calls out ‘pick me up some tampons while you’re there’. I think it’s the law of the universe that whenever you are buying tampons or condoms at a chemist, it is the only time that 1. The chemist is crowded and 2. The sale assistant calls out from across the room, ‘Can I help you?’. That used to be so embarrassing! I cured myself of that fear while going through a crowed security gate at Sydney Airport. There we were, shoes and belts in hand stepping through the metal detector while our carry on was on a conveyer belt passing through the X-ray machine. The guy at the X-ray machine was about 5 metres away and about 6 people stood between he and I and there was a lady, I’m guessing in her forties in front of me. So the guy pulls my bag out and calls out for all to hear, “What that cylinder shaped thing you have in your bag?’. Never once in hundreds of flights around the world has any airport security person ever done that. They always always pull you aside and ask you to open your bag so they can look inside and see. The cylinder shaped thing was actually a microphone but for some reason instead of just saying that I called back to him, “that’s a bit personal, what if it’s a Marital Aide?’ He stared at me, I imagine realising his mistake as far as the privacy rules go but the funniest part was the sudden silence and stare I got from the 5 or 6 people in between us and even funnier was what the women in front of me said. ‘You’ve got me curious now, I think I want to see for myself!’
The Exact Moment
Sitting at that little grade 3 desk with no friends and a bladder about to burst and feeling so self conscious that I couldn’t raise my hand, what if she called out across the room, ‘Can I help you?’ just like those chemist sales people. I just could not summon the courage to put my hand up. Well, you know what happened next and its certainly not an original story. A lot of people can tell you about the puddle of pee sitting under their chair in kindergarten, possibly less from their grade three classroom and I’m guessing even less could remember the students either side of me getting down on all fours and sniffing the puddle, then calling out to the teacher that ‘He’s wet himself!’ Everybody laughed of course and the teacher seemed to annoyed at me to stop them. That’s not the worst bit though. The worst bit was her grabbing my wrist, pulling me out in front of the whole class, turning me around so my wet shorts were on show for everyone. I know she said something Shameful but can’t remember what it was. I couldn’t hear anything other than my heart pounding and feeling so humiliated that I’m almost certain I could actually hear the blood turning my entire head red. I was gone, no longer present, not by choice but something just triggered a kind of out of body experience. I have no doubt at all it was an instinctual survival mechanism. I remember her yelling at me to get my attention and bring my mind back from wherever it went to. I think she’d told me a couple of times to go and dry myself in the toilets but it took a few attempts and a raised voice to break though and drag me back from a much safer place.
I know reading this for some people they may feel amused, who hasn’t got a wetting their pants story and who hasn’t felt some kind of shame because of it. All that might be true and some people may have had a much worse story from their own childhood. None of that matters though. When we feel deep Shame and are Humiliated publicly there’s no comparison to someones else’s experience that will take away the physical and emotional shock, which in my current opinion is pretty much what’s going on. Public Shaming especially when a person is only little, is devastating and for some people that experience can last a lifetime.
That’s exactly when it started for me and even just retelling this story causes the Shame to resurface, not as bad, not as intense but it’s sitting with me now, in this moment. I want to turn the TV on, or the radio, close the laptop screen or any of the ways I’ve learned to protect myself. I believe this is because I am not just ‘Retelling’ that story, I am, in a very real way ‘Reliving it’ and it is the reliving of that memory and many others that continue to kind of re-traumatise me, even now, 49 years later.
As I said in the first sentence, Shame might well be the most powerful emotion a human being can experience but I also believe there’s an action that might even me more powerful than Shame. As trite as it might sound to some, I think it’s possible that the action of Love in the context of Community I have experienced with my family and friends that might be the reason I am still able to say “I’m a Work in Progress.”
Author and Research Professor at the University of Houston Brené Brown got it right I think.
To love ourselves and support each other in the process of becoming real is perhaps the greatest single act of daring greatly.
Brené Brown