mark, a strange man in his mid 30s, has been seeing me fortnightly for a few months now. I learned that Mark loves his job and lives with his loving partner in a house they love, on a street they love, with a dog they love.
I also learned that Mark believes he is unlovable.
Chloe, a student in her early 20s, is a first-generation Indian Australian. She has just started a law degree, on a full scholarship she received after achieving the highest grades ever at her regional high school. In a few sessions with Chloe, I learned that she volunteers at a local youth center a few nights a week, cares for her elderly mother, and is always the one her friends come to for help.
I also learned that Chloe believes she is not enough.
While guilt can be seen as an emotion that tells us that we have done something bad, shame tells us that there is a core part of us that is bad, and we need to do everything we can to get rid of that part of us. to stab
This is why shame work can be so powerful, as it is not a process of self-care, but self-acceptance. You can’t self-care your way out of shame.
Both Mark and Chloe grew up in a world that taught them that there was something wrong with who they were. For Mark, it looked like homophobia at school and a family that did not accept his homosexuality. For Chloe, this came in the form of racism, with her earliest memories associated with feelings of ostracism at school and microaggressions on public transport.
Shame is often an internalization of stigmatization and prejudice. We become ashamed before we feel shame. Like so many from marginalized communities, Mark and Chloe saw themselves as the problem, rather than the discrimination that surrounded them. And, like so many who experience shame, Mark and Chloe were taught that the only way to overcome their problem was to succeed within the very system that shamed them.
This is the false path we are offered to make our way out of shame. To work. To achieve. To be perfect. To take responsibility for our own life and make it better.
The system offers a false promise that if we just do enough, we will feel enough.
But it doesn’t work because shame, as highlighted by Dr Devon Price in his brilliant book Unlearning Shame, is best understood as systemic:
“Systemic Shame is more than just a feeling of debilitating self-blame – it’s also a worldview about how change happens and what it means for a person to live a meaningful or moral life. But by prioritizing the values of perfectionism, individualism, consumerism, wealth and personal responsibility above all else, Systemic Shame actually trains us to preserve the status quo rather than disrupt it.”
To put it another way, the harm of shame is not the feeling itself, but rather the harmful lives we often build in an attempt to protect ourselves from this shame. Although the cause of our shame is not ourselves, individualism teaches us that we must do things alone to make ourselves feel better, and to find a happy life.
Like so much of the LGBTQ+ community, the culture of systemic shame offered Mark a false path out of shame based on work, success and wealth. As Price writes, systemic shame provides for our consumption and personal branding as the means to being so alone and invisible. Instead of embracing other LGBTQ people, forming queer friendships, building our communities, and having the sex and relationships we long to have, Systemic Shame tells us what we need is personal empowerment and finding pride in our identity – by buying the right items and styling ourselves in the right way.”
So if perfectionism, consumerism and wealth aren’t the way out, what is?
The first step is to build an understanding of the part of you that feels shame and explore why it developed. For Mark, this meant building an understanding of systemic shame, helping him to challenge the view of himself as flawed, and instead see that shame was a normal outcome of the homophobia and lack of acceptance he experienced. experienced early in his life.
Since shame is rooted in self-blame, the way out must also be rooted in self-acceptance. For Chloe, this process began with challenging internalized beliefs about how she “should” live her life, and replacing them with an understanding of what a meaningful life looks like for her. Through our work together, Chloe reconnected with art and music, passions that had become submerged by expectations of who she “should” be.
Just as the cause of shame is outside of you, so must be the cure. For many, this may involve a focus on relationships and collective action, acting against a culture of systemic shame that tells us to blame individuals for problems of the system. For Mark and Chloe, this process involved building skills to be vulnerable and communicate their own needs in relationships. Over time, this helped them feel safe to bring their authentic selves to their relationship, creating the opportunity to experience a new sense of belonging and self-acceptance.
There was also a question that both Mark and Chloe found helpful. This is one I often ask myself to act against my own systemic shame: how would you live today if you already believed you were enough?
Because challenging shame is all about finding the radical conviction that you already are.
