Shame, The Great Manipulator And The Trap Of Unworthiness

Shame raised me. It became the thing I knew best. People around me rarely noticed what I managed to do right; they noticed the misses, the places I fell short. Over years I absorbed a belief that I simply couldn't do those things well, and that eventually everyone would run out of patience with me. In my head the world held only a short list of things other people cared about, and I was sure I lacked the ability to do any of them well enough to make anyone proud. What I got attention for was failing to reach a standard. I carried the sense that I embarrassed my family, to the point where certain relatives would rather other people never learn we were connected at all.

Being made to feel ashamed came so easily that it shaped everything. I was bullied. I became suicidal. I was taught that I could never match the one approved way of doing things, and that falling short meant rejection, maybe even being put out on the street if it came to that. There was exactly one person to pin it on, and that was me. I had no reason to think otherwise.

Here is where it gets darker. In situations that were sexually inappropriate, I learned that the person on the receiving end (me) was the one expected to feel ashamed, the one with something to conceal. The logic ran backwards. Getting caught in a compromising moment was mine to bury, to slip away from, to pretend had never taken place, even though I understand now that it was sexual abuse. The instruction was clear: hide it, and if you can manage, forget it.

Brene Brown, who holds a doctorate in social work, describes three shields people raise against shame. The first is silence. We refuse to look at or speak about what we file away as shameful. Men in particular will say they cannot bring themselves to discuss things that happened to them earlier or later in life, including post-traumatic stress, and some have buried those memories so deep they genuinely stopped recalling them.

The second shield Dr. Brown names is appeasement. When someone is unhappy with you or with something you did, you scramble to make it up to them, or you pour so much pleasure or satisfaction into another part of the relationship that they overlook the place you let them down. Some people call this brown nosing.

The third is to move at the person or situation that triggers the shame, to turn and attack it. I find myself wondering whether the reaction among liberal Democrats after Donald Trump won the presidency fits this pattern. Were they ashamed that their candidate lost to such an improbable opponent?

A whole life can run on shame as its fuel. Others learn they can get what they want by shaming us, and they walk away feeling better about themselves for having come out on top. I have often suspected that being a woman, and a woman professional in particular, painted a target on me for exactly this. The reasoning goes: if she could pull it off, it must have been simple, so it can't be worth much. The distance between a master's degree and a Ph.D. must be slight if a woman managed to cross it. When I earned my doctorate, I skipped the graduation ceremony, because, after all, what was the big deal?

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