When shame is your parent

For too many of us, shame brings order to the world -- order feels like control and control feels like safety. But it's the type of safety that results from hypervigilance to threat -- an illusory safety in which we give up our enjoyment of the present moment for constant reassurance that we are not being harmed. This reassurance is so fleeting that we must constantly chase it, and that can be exhausting.

The true safety we yearn for does not come from predicting the future, from knowing everything, or from doing things perfectly, but from a warm cradle of acceptance in our darkest moments. It is the softness we feel when we collapse from the weight of the world into the arms of a caregiver and know that despite our mistakes, we are enough. It's the softness that allows us to bear painful emotions and to know that we can go on.

For many reasons, we might not have experienced enough of this as children. Struggling under the weight of our own existence, we did the only thing we could do -- we divided our experience into more manageable sections and ignored or suppressed anything we couldn't carry. This might have included sadness or anger that our needs were not met. When these emotions returned later in life, as feelings always do, we experienced them as unwieldy and overwhelming.

For those of us who were unable to share the burden of existence with patient and compassionate caregivers, we developed an all-knowing, all-powerful inner parent -- shame. Instead of a soft cradle of acceptance, Shame tells us that safety only comes when we are vigilant and work hard. Shame tells us that we can be safe as long as we're "good" and if we experience pain, it is because we've been bad. Shame organizes the world into neat categories and formulas -- acceptance is replaced with predictability, adaptability with control.

In order to escape the cycle of shame and hypervigilance, we must give ourselves what we always needed. At first, we may view acceptance and patience as pointless or even threatening to our false sense of safety. How can we be any good if we relax into acceptance? How can we prove our worth if we're sitting around being patient? The answer is: true safety is not having to prove our worth or avoid painful experiences. In true safety, we give up our sense of omnipotence and control for compassion and humanness.

But how do we give ourselves the love and acceptance we always needed? Breath and gentle movement or stillness can be holding. Warm baths, a hand over our hearts, hot tea, cool sips of water, gentle music can be nurturing arms around us. Exercising patience in our uncertainty and fear help us to accept ourselves in moments of pain and discomfort. Not rushing to "fix" things or our emotions is a profound act of acceptance.

We can even have acceptance for shame. Shame might have played an important role in our survival, so we don't need to banish it forever. But perhaps we repurpose it like old socks we now use as dusting cloths. Perhaps the constant reminders that we're not good enough instead become encouragement. We can practice patience with shame, thank it for trying to protect us or keep us humble, and remind it that it no longer needs to work so hard to keep us safe. We can remind it that we now practice caring for ourselves no matter what, so we no longer need to be perfect to be cared for.

Ileana Arganda-Stevens, LMFT #129032

Therapist, Program Manager, Supervisor

https://thrivetherapyandcounseling.com/ileana-arganda