Shame, part 1

Here is a gathering of my thoughts about shame. These thoughts have been gathering for a few months and I don't know whether they will come out coherently, but I'm going to just begin, and let them out however they show up.

1. Here's my memory of one story about how certain cultures in Africa deal with someone in their village who has done something wrong: it starts with what happens before a child is born. When a person becomes pregnant, an elder in the village will get in touch with the unborn child and discover what purpose the child is coming to fulfill, and along with that purpose, the unborn human will transmit their song that expresses their true nature, as a soul coming with a gift for the world. As the child grows up, whenever, (not "if", because mistakes are inevitable) a child does something that hurts others, the village gathers around the erring child and sings the song that the person came with, and this reminds the child of who they really are. In other words, shame is not used to try to correct harmful behavior. Rather, the village knows that we make mistakes as humans, but that we all have a gift to give, and we sometimes need to be reminded of that.

2. Can you even imagine what this might be like? Our society is steeped in the notion that we come here with "original sin." Not that we have a gift to give, and sometimes we go astray.. but that we are inherently bad and need to be disciplined or punished in order to know how to behave properly. Not that we come here with a gift to give that helps other people and the rest of creation, but that we come here as a blank slate with a default towards being bad, a shapeless blob of clay that needs to be shaped into something useful, violently if necessary.

3. We have been conditioned for generations to believe that shame is a useful tool to shape the clay of our children. It's not even intentional, it's just reflexive at this point.

4. We are so steeped in shame of all sorts that we don't even realize it. It is the ocean that we swim in. We are ashamed of crying when we are hurt, we are ashamed of being angry when we get hurt, we are ashamed of our sexuality that has no legitimized outlet when we are adolescents, we are ashamed of our intellect if we don't get good grades, we are ashamed of our appearance if it doesn't meet certain standards, we are ashamed of our social "skills," or lack of them, we are ashamed of not being athletic enough, of not having the cool stuff. We are ashamed of our lack of ability to make enough money to live in this rigged economy. We are steeped in a society that has a host of expectations that our true natures are not designed to fulfill, and we've been so disconnected from what our gifts are, that we don't even know to look for them, and even if we get an inkling of what our gifts are, there is rarely an obvious place where we can give them in this materialism-driven economy.

5. We end up unintentionally taking our own shame out on our children. We pass along the burden of being disconnected from our true selves.

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How this all relates to politics:

When the story broke of the Signal chat, that the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine was accidently added to, where Pete Hegseth disclosed some of the details of an attack our army was carrying out against the Houthis in Yemen, I had an immediate reaction that this was big news. I spent a few hours being distracted and trying to understand what the ramifications might be, who Pete Hegseth is and how he was responding. I was also distracted by a feeling of anxious contracted urgency that wouldn't abate. I can normally get on with my day, but this feeling was gripping me and I couldn't think straight.

I recognize now when my nervous system is on high alert, and this was one of those times. In these sorts of situations, if I can, I go sit with a pair of large oak trees on my land that are spaced just the perfect distance apart for me be held between them, one at my back, and one in front of me.  It's the place I feel absolutely safe and cared for, held in the potent life-force energy and Love of the trees, and after a few minutes of settling in, and focusing on being in my body, my nervous system starts to discharge energy. Usually after a few minutes of feeling my body contracting in waves, I get some deeper sense of what the genesis of the stress in my body actually is.

In the case of the Signal chat, I began to feel that all of the denial and deflection and excuses and dismissing that Pete Hegseth and the rest of the administration was doing was coming from unresolved, unrecognized, buried shame from childhood. How does a child respond when they are being shamed for doing something? They want to shrink from acknowledging that they did anything wrong. Much of the time, a baby or child is just doing something instinctively and has no bad intentions, and shaming someone for their authentic natural reactions to circumstances beyond their control just makes a child shut down and disconnect from themselves, and deny their involvement with wrongdoing. I know that's what happened in myself. It also makes them want to defend themselves in whatever way they can, including lying and blaming other people.

As I sat between the oak trees feeling into the buried childhood shame that Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump et.al. are carrying, I began to weep for the pain of innocent children being blamed for things they weren't responsible for, and being made to conform to unnatural expectations. I felt the huge bolus of grief of our collective loss of not having accepted all the gifts that our children are meant to bring into the world. The pain and grief of being shut down, and for being shamed for being something we came here to be. I wept deeply for a long time, expanding into the collective grief of generations of shut-down souls that are trying to protect themselves in ways that only do more damage.

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Our polarized political landscape is a direct outgrowth of our individual suppressed shame. We all feel it, and we all want someone else to take the blame for our situation. We use shame as a cudgel to try to get people to change. "you're stupid, you're a coward, you're a bad person, you're selfish, you're an idiot, you're uncaring, you're evil, you're ...." 

We sling these insults back and forth at each other, while shoring up our own defenses against the insults of the "other."

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I am going to have to continue this in a second installment. I want to talk about Internal Family Systems, a type of individual therapy that recognizes that we all are born with different parts, and how these parts take on burdens depending on the stresses the child is under, and how some parts become exiled because they aren't safe, and then we have other parts that protect the exile, and manage the way we respond in the world.

I feel like we can apply this paradigm to society as a whole. We as individuals also are playing certain parts, trying to protect our collective exiles. I want to flesh out this idea, but I don't have bandwidth right now to do this. Stay tuned.