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“If you don’t give your mind and body a break, you’ll break. Stop pushing yourself through pain and exhaustion and take care of your needs.” ~Lori Deschene
When I collapsed that evening while fishing, I was fortunate not to land head-first into the water.
It was April 2018, a few weeks before my fiftieth birthday, and after work, I decided to walk to the local pond and spend the remaining hours of light fishing.
After a short time, though, I started to feel hot, a little lightheaded, and dizzy, and then the lights went out. I only blacked out for …
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“Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.” ~Brené Brown
I was walking to my office one day when one of my colleagues gave me a compliment about what I was wearing. I was a little surprised and, without thinking, said something disparaging about my dress and darted off into my office.
As I sat down, I noticed an intense wave of discomfort all over my body, and dark churning thoughts started attacking me.
What is wrong with me? I asked myself. Why did I say such a stupid thing? Why couldn’t I just be normal and say thank you, take the compliment, and move on? Why am I always so awkward?
As I sat by my desk, I felt like I just wanted to shrivel up and disappear. If the ground had opened up for me right there, I would have willingly jumped into it.
The reply I had given my colleague started to replay in my mind, each time bringing fresh waves of nausea in my stomach and icy chills running down my back.
What was happening to me, and why was such a seemingly innocent event feeling so uncomfortable, so painful even?
When I started to learn about emotions and the role they play in our lives, I noticed a standout feeling that seemed to be quieter, subtler, more invisible than other emotions, but that had possibly the most powerful force of them all. It felt like this emotion’s impact, and how it affected my life and that of many others, was stronger than gravity.
That feeling was shame.
When I talk to people about shame now, many people don’t even recognize they feel it. That’s why I consider it an invisible emotion. It exerts a powerful force in our lives, affecting how we behave and what we think of ourselves, and it leads many of us to get lost in loops of self-blame, punishment, and vicious, nasty, self-hating thoughts.
When we don’t recognize that we are feeling shame, not only does it erode our self-confidence, but it’s very hard to do anything about it. It’s hard for us to release ourselves from that vicious voice of an inner critic.
Shame was what I was feeling in the office that day. Shame that I hadn’t been able to make an effortlessly charming reply to my colleague. Shame that I might have sounded stupid. Shame that I was getting it wrong socially, again.
When I learned about shame, I realized how natural it was that it arose in a situation like this. How so many people feel shame in social situations—in different ways than perhaps me, but shame around other human beings nonetheless.
Shame isn’t a useless emotion whose job is solely to torment us; it actually has a positive purpose. Shame can be an incredible guide and ally for us when we learn how it operates and why it shows up in our lives, then learn how to work it.
The first barrier that we face in working with shame is that most of us are carrying too much of it.
We have accumulated shame throughout our lives—shame that has perhaps been passed on to us by our families; shame that people have thrown at us because they couldn’t deal with their own; and the continuous drip that many of us experienced of being shamed as children, as our parents and caregivers might have used it as an easy and effective way to get us to do what they needed.
There are myriad ways we accumulate shame, but we know that we have too much when we have this belief that we just aren’t good enough as human beings.
When we accumulate too much shame but don’t know how to release it, it stays hidden within us, growing as we hide more of ourselves, judge more of ourselves, and continue to believe in the wrongness of who we are.
We don’t ‘let shame out’ because shame is perhaps one of the most socially unacceptable emotions. If you are talking to friends and someone says, “Oh, I feel so guilty I missed that text you sent,” it would most likely be considered okay.
But if you said, “I feel so ashamed of myself that I missed your text,” it would likely make the conversation awkward.
People don’t talk about shame because that in itself can feel inherently shameful. It can activate other people’s shame, and it can add to our own expanse of shame when not properly handled.
There were many areas of my life where shame showed up. In my relationship, how I responded to my kids. I even started to notice intense shame when a childhood back injury would flare up, and I would
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