This is going to hurt for a sec.
I say this because today’s topic is not easy: not easy to talk about, not easy to hear about.
We’re talking about heavy stuff: shame and self loathing.
And why are we discussing these agonizing topics?
Two main reasons:
1. They can be solved
2. They must be solved
And I’ll tack on a third:
3. They are difficult to solve, and far too few of us ever actually do.
I have, and I did so methodically.
After we sufficiently explore the seriousness of this topic, I will convey my method.
But you have to walk with me through some scary dark places first.
Speaking of method, you may already be asking yourself, why is this essay formatted in such a strange way?
Because shame is deeply intertwined with concealment, making it difficult to approach and confront.
Extraordinarily difficult.
Strange methods are necessary. Weird but effective: like a dill pickle kettle chip.
Shame hides. It makes you hide. Lots of bad things are downstream from this:
Inauthenticity
Dishonesty
Manipulative behaviors
Self sabotage
Shame is the feeling that there is something wrong with me, and it is the silent killer.
Looking back on my life, I can say with total certainty that shame was the problem. It was quite literally the root of all my suffering and the sole, insurmountable obstacle to my success. If I laid out for you the full extent of the opportunities, privileges, good fortune, and goodwill that I squandered, believe me when I say that you would be in tears. The cost of shame is beyond reckoning.
Conversely, every good thing that has happened to me after a certain point in time, the sudden and swift positive changes, the decisive actions, the ability to attract, retain, and build upon positive opportunities, and the sudden disappearance of myriad problems, has all followed from finally learning how to deal with shame.
Shame made me unable to give and receive love.
It made me defensive.
It forced me to say the wrong things, in the wrong tone of voice.
It made me harsh, hypercritical, and alienating.
It made me rigid, rejecting, self-indulgent, entitled, secretive, and self-involved.
It made me gratify my needs and impulses in non-straightforward ways.
It also made me unable to truly apply myself and to do real, hard work for any sufficient period of time. Lack of belief in my own goodness and potential made me unwilling to take the risks required of real effort.
In short, shame gave me much to be ashamed of. If there was something wrong with me, exposure equaled death. Yes, death. I lived my life as though I was carrying an awful secret that would see me ostracized, humiliated, and destroyed were it to be exposed.
The ways in which I compensated for this are, frankly, entirely inappropriate to discuss publicly. Much of it is heartbreaking and gut wrenching to hear. I have said as much as I’ve said up to this point for one reason:
To whatever degree you also carry this with you, my words are making you uncomfortable. That discomfort is the urge to avoid, the urge to conceal.
And I say to you now, with real solemnity,
That which is concealed will never go away,
That which is concealed will always defeat you.
In the words of Carl Jung, that which you fail to bring out from within yourself will destroy you.
You can no more go about a happy, successful, love-filled life while harboring shame than a flock of sheep can go about their lives whilst harboring wolves.
The wolf, the dragon, the monster, the giant brick of black tar sitting upon your heart
Must be destroyed forever.
There is no other way.
I always knew this, but it was just too damn scary. I was too scared to admit that I was scared. Until one day I, pardon me, got my ass handed to me in the form of a devastating breakup. After everything I’d been through, all the ups and downs of my life, finally, my shame had exacted a price from me that I was unwilling to pay. Finally, an army had to be recruited, trained, and sent into the cave where the dragon lay waiting.
Perhaps it was because I was finally at an age where I saw that life was finite. I was unable to believe that an unending series of second chances were available to me like cans of Coke from a vending machine. I saw that I would never have a good life, I would never achieve anything, and no one would ever stay by me, if I did not solve this once and for all.
And so I began to live my life differently. I began to console myself, rather than medicate myself. I began to write down my feelings, rather than run away from them.
Little by little, one day at a time, one hour at a time, I was learning how to be a loving companion to myself. I started showing up for myself, being there for myself, keeping promises to myself, and investing in myself, really for the first time in my life. And it worked.
While I don’t think it’s entirely appropriate for me to “take a victory lap,” because there is so much work to be done, I’ll just bullet point some highlights, and then we can get into how to systematize this for yourself.
I became a self contained person with nothing to prove. I learned how to identify, explore, and resolve issues. I learned how to apply and sustain effort in order to break patterns, learn better ways, and live by them. I learned to sufficiently raise my standards and demand excellence from myself in order to achieve success in the endeavors I undertook. I learned how to self regulate, how to acknowledge emotions and deal with them constructively. I learned how to actually share myself with others and eventually how to really be there for them. My life became a real life, solid to the core: not a performance, not compensatory, not a sham. Real, solid, and good.
So what did I actually do?
What did I do that you, too, could do? And do now?
I’ll start with some conceptual underpinnings, and quickly move to an actionable, replicable process.
If I could boil it down to one thing,
I began to earn my own approval.
Approval, or healthy pride, is the opposite of shame. If you want to be rid of something, you cannot create a vacuum where it once was. You must cultivate its opposite. The solution to darkness is not the “absence of darkness” but the presence of light. The solution to hunger is the satiety following a meal. The solution to weakness is strength.
This sounds obvious, but so many of us, literally every unsuccessful and unfulfilled person, commits the error of trying to make negative things go away rather than canceling them out with the cultivation of the corresponding positive things. Be positive: create material good to remedy the material bad.
For the things you must do. Buckle up. We’re not making a souffle here (thank God): we are becoming better human beings.
Become your own loving family
Start to think of yourself as two different people who cannot escape each other. Not a body and a mind, but an inner child and an inner parent. Your nonverbal undercurrent of feeling is the inner child, your constant inner monologue is your inner parent. The latter is always talking to the former.
The inner child is your emotional life, and your source of energy, creativity, “intuition,” and feeling. Your quality of life is totally equivalent to the happiness and fulfillment of your inner child.
The inner parent is the regulatory agency of the inner child. This ranges from harmonious, adventurous partnership to belittling, neglectful abuse.
Happy people have their own version of the former, and unhappy people have the latter.
By simply becoming aware that a conversation between the inner child and inner parent is constantly taking place, you suddenly have the option of taking control of it.
Awareness is key. Awareness is the road to redemption.
Action item: read Self Parenting by John K. Pollard.
This is a quick read, and arms you with necessary conceptual understanding to set yourself on the right path. You can literally read this in an afternoon.
Essentially, your inner child loves to be given activities to do. It loves to win the love and approval of the inner parent.
You can leverage this knowledge and deliberately set yourself challenges to accomplish, encouraging and rewarding yourself along the way. Start doing this, and the inner child will begin to open up more to the inner parent.
You care for your inner child by cultivating a healthy and mature relationship with it. This follows the same rules as any other relationship. I have boiled this down to four components:
trust,
activities,
compensation, and
negotiation.
Step one: trust
Respond in a reassuring way to your feelings of discomfort. You do not need to capitulate, but you do need to respond and acknowledge. You have to be there for you. Ignoring yourself is abusing yourself.
Step two: activities
Provide yourself with fun, challenging things to do. Think about the things you enjoyed doing as a kid or young adult, and gradually dial them back into your life. Go find your favorite TV shows, movies, and books from your childhood. They’re all there on the Internet. This will help more than you can anticipate.
Also, kids love to be active. Run around outside. Take walks in nature. Climb up hills, rocks, whatever. Don’t be imprisoned in your body, but recognize it as a vehicle through which you experience the world. Be daring, adventurous, and expressive. You will like yourself more if you do this.
Step three: compensation
Find ways of rewarding yourself for undertaking and completing the above challenges. This will grow your capacity to take on challenges in the future, as it fills you with enthusiasm to take on difficult things with the expectation of future reward.
Decide in advance what the rewards will be. This prevents you from rewarding yourself with unhealthy behaviors. Your inner child does not want to get drunk, high, or have meaningless sex: these are all acts of self abandonment, and they are never, ever acts of self love.
Rewards can and should always serve your sense of pride and accomplishment. Why are pride and accomplishment so important? Because they negate shame. Doing things you know you shouldn’t do, and pretending it’s okay to do them just because people you respect will never find out, proves that you are not someone you respect. Gotcha there, didn’t I?
You will have to raise your standards. If you do so in the way I’ve described, you will like yourself and trust yourself more and more with each incremental increase in the demands you place upon yourself. Winners are not ashamed of themselves. Give yourself chances to win.
Step four: negotiation
Healthy, happy relationships are a negotiation between equals who each need each other’s willing cooperation. Don’t assume that the inner child and inner parent will always agree! The way you deal with disagreement is by negotiating.
How to negotiate with yourself:
Rather than denying yourself, punishing yourself, or forcing yourself, reason with yourself. Treat yourself as you would someone who you absolutely need to go along with you on something, but could also easily beat you in a fight if you were rude or coercive.
Leverage the power of rewards. Maybe you don’t love the diet you have to follow, or the taxes you have to do, or the bills you have to pay, or the job you are currently in. But you can incentivize yourself to do the difficult, necessary things by scheduling fun and lighthearted things during the evenings, weekends, and so on. Plan them and take them as seriously as you take the hard, tedious tasks that everyone has to do.
If you really are in a spot you know you can’t stay long term, start to spend your free time cultivating alternatives. For example, I’m pursuing the path of a writer, and eventually a consultant and business owner, because I don’t wish to rely on my “day job” as I currently do.
Summary and conclusion:
Face difficulties, and life is easy. Do things the easy way, and life is hard. Facing shame is hard, and scary, but if you’ve read this far, you now possess the necessary tools to overwrite shame with approval and pride.
Approval has to be earned: it cannot be demanded. Use the methods I described above to learn what your criteria for approval actually is, and work with yourself to put your own approval within your reach.
Treat your conscience like an all-seeing god that cannot be deceived, coerced, ignored, or bribed.
Do nothing you do not approve of, and do nothing that makes you feel unsafe.
Really get into the idea that you have a pure, innocent, enthusiastic child inside of you that you can take care of and go on adventures with. This can totally transform your life for the better. When you are lost, cynical, or defeated, come back to this.
Use Pollard’s text as a reference guide. The ideas and the language are simple, clear, and effective.
If you’ve read this and you know you’ll need help implementing these ideas, don’t hesitate to reach out to me by whatever channel you found this article.
Thanks for your time, talk to you soon.
Jas
Make Beautiful Choices 