What about shame?

Shame is a label we use when we feel strong feelings in certain situations. For example, someone asks you about your score in secondary school and you feel ashamed to tell the score thinking its not good enough. Also when you start a new venture and you find yourself not good enough yet, you feel shame.

This becomes even stronger when we don’t do anything with it. When we just accept it, take it as it is, it grows in us and sticks inside us like super glue.

The more problematic thing with this is when we identify ourselves with it. When we believe this is who we are. When we accept it and make it apart of our identity. That is when you lose your real sense of yourself and you just feel shameful and embarrassed all the time.

The context plays an active role here. Just think about it for a moment. You are being put in this industrial age time zone. You see majority are performing and seeking to score and achieve higher and higher in most aspects of life. From schools to colleges and industrial companies. A common question you daily hear is: what you do for a living? If a person is not working or just stays home helping out with kids and home tasks, you see this strange and unaccepting eye look that says: You don’t fit in. You are not like us. You are less than us. You are strange. You should be working to be useful and productive.

I can’t deny the current environment and life set-up we live at the moment is just too harsh and manipulative. Sometimes you just don’t know who you are and what you want to be doing with your short and temporary life.

I don’t say advancements in life is bad. But I am talking about how this has become so ingrained into people mindsets and psychologies until we forgot our unique humanity and separateness.

Also our internal interpretations trigger the impact of shame on us. If we internally say: I am not good enough. I have to prove myself. I need to do this and this. I need to satisfy the other person. I need to complete my daily to-do-list. That is where you see the shame knot grows tighter.

It is good to write and reflect about shame. You can’t realize and understand it unless you put it down there and see it in front of you. It is like an invisible silent beast eating your heart bit by bit until you are doomed.

One last tip as well is to read or watch documentaries of people who suffered with this dilemma. How it affected their lives and what they did to process it and move on with their lives. A lot of learning and detangling of our internal beliefs could happen because of this tip.

So what about you? Do you get times where you experience shame? What is shame for you internally? How it affects your life today? What work you do to process it and work with it?