1 :: All shame is a kind of lie. It tells us we are insufficient – for being too loud, too dumb, too dirty, too nerdy, too fat, too crazy… We are nothing of the kind. We are distorted – yes. We are in pain – yes. But our value and our worth were never in question.
2 :: It is easy to root out shame because there is so much of it to find. “What music would I be embarrassed to be found listening to? What people would I feel ashamed to be associated with? What would I feel humiliated to tell others is my job, or favourite hobby?”. In essence, the question is: “what do I think undermines my worth as a human being?”
These are all portals to the release of shame and judgement – and thus portals to a wider and deeper love of self and other.
3 :: Psychology is largely clueless as to the healing of shame because shame is rooted ultimately in a philosophical fault in the individual’s belief system, not a psychological one. Namely: worthiness/lovability/deservedness – is not conditional. It is a fabrication of the mind that must be unfabricated to restore wholeness to the psyche.
4 :: Shame keeps people quiet. It is antithetical to boldness. And we could do with a bit more boldness right about now. So we could do with learning to heal a little shame.
5 :: The belief that you do not deserve love hinders the entrance of love: a self-fulfilling prophecy. The deep re-cognition that it is your God-given right will let help release the shame, and let the love back in.
6 :: We fear unconditionally loving ourselves (and therefore others) because we have learned (and become attached to) shame-based defense mechansims that keep us believing it is necessary for our survival to judge ourselves and place conditions around our own worth. Once we have taken a bite out of the forbidden fruit and determined that our worth must be conditional – on our covering our private parts with fig leaves, or becoming charming, hyper-successful, beautiful, etc. – we have signed up to a fragile game indeed. It is a self-reinforcing cycle that is broken only when it is realised that the snake is trying to eat its own tail and that all conditions placed on self-love are fabricated and illusions that are waiting be seen through.
We can thank these illusions – and the parts of our mind that kept them in place – for helping us survive childhood with some self-esteem still intact. And then we can let them go.
7 :: Once you understand shame you see it everywhere. We are obsessed with our worth (proving it, maintaining it, defending it from perceived attack, etc.) – because it evades us so relentlessly. And no one has yet taught us how to recover it.
8 :: Growing up, we are unknowingly filled up with shame by our environment. If we were being cynical we could say that this was a kind of psychological warfare imposed on us by people in power – parents, the church, school teachers – who wish to control us by implanting us with a physusilly painful internal mechanism that keeps us from acting in ways they have deemed improper, shameful.
If we were being a little more parsimonious we might consider that this is a necessary part of the arc of the human life – a closing, and then a reopening – a reflowering. The only issue is no one ever taught us that shame was just the first half of the story. This ‘myth of insufficiency’ awaits a proper ending.
9 ::The deepest insight about shame: there is no such thing as worthiness, no such thing as deserving love. The statement “I am worthy of love” is therefore still a kind of illusion. It is as though one is standing holding a mirror, saying “I have fixed this broken mirror”. The break existed only ever in imagination.
Put another way, love is not something you deserve. It never was and never will be. It is the foundation of our being, and is only obscured by the belief that we have not yet earned the right to make full contact with it.
10 :: The ultimate lesson we’re trying to learn to be shame-free and totally self-accepting is that we are unconditionally worthy of love, that we are enough as we are, we always have been and always will be. We just obscure/cover up the unconditional self-love inside of us with lies that we must meet certain conditions to become worthy of love. This willl take time to see clearly, but it is helped greatly by learning to see that the people who taught you about your own worthiness (of love) – your parents and other family members – did not love themselves unconditionally, and therefore were teaching you based on their own shame, suffering and confusion. This allows you to see them with compassion, and then see that you can unlearn the lessons they taught you and re-establish your sense of self-worth and self-love.
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