Shame Is The Enemy of Joy
Shame blocks your love, crushes your optimism, weighs down your spirit. How do you address it? How do you let it go?
The Thousand and One Nights (1954), Jane Graverol
Shame presents one of the trickiest obstacles to becoming emotionally exuberant and fully alive. Even though the word shame bounces through our everyday conversations, most people don’t understand what it means or what a powerful force it is in their lives.
Shame is that persistent voice that tells you that you can’t take risks and you need to hide who you are. According to shame, your most natural self is inherently embarrassing or inadequate. But shame whispers in quieter tones, too, telling you that you can’t age and also have a beautiful life, you can’t be poor and also be luminous and unstoppable, you can’t make art if no one knows about it, you can’t experiment and play and laugh and dance if no one approves of how you do it, you can’t feel romance under your skin if you’re not loved unconditionally by one person.
Shame tricks you into thinking that life is flat, black and white, scentless, stagnant, just a list of winners and a list of losers and nothing in between. Shame seduces you into believing that you need to cross arbitrary finish lines in order to be whole.
But life is so much more colorful and delicious than shame would have you believe. Joy and love are much easier than you know. Honoring your desires and respecting your limits and daring to try new paths forward are all possible, all within reach, once you push shame out of the picture.
But even if you feel like you’ve escaped shame, it can come back into your life unexpectedly. Big changes, life events, traumas, or just an extended bout of the doldrums will bring shame back into play in bewildering ways. Shame will make you insecure out of the blue, causing you to dismiss others, lash out, isolate yourself, protect yourself, or take a path forward that feels diminished or compromised.
Today, instead of waxing endlessly about shame (YOU KNOW I WANT TO! OH YES I DO!), I’d like to try something different and ask you about what shape shame takes in your life, how you manage to notice and observe it, and how you do battle with it. When has shamed returned unexpectedly when you thought you’d won the war against it?
I’ll use your input in my next post this week! Thank you sincerely for reading and supporting Ask Polly. I’m so grateful to be able to write this column.
Please take a minute to share your experiences with shame in the comments — how shame holds you back, how it creeps up on you when you least expect it, and how you talk yourself through those hard moments. What does shame keep you from doing? In your dreams, how would you behave if shame didn’t weigh you down?
Shame keeps me in routines that no longer serve me because it stops me from making new experiences. Shame holds me up to standards that I don't even logically believe in. Shame buries my desire for love, connection, friendship until I falsely believe that I could live without them. Shame makes my life very dull and then berates me for how dull my life has become.
I had my 40th birthday party coming up recently. In the week leading up, as a few people flaked out due to life stuff, i couldn't help but feel stupid for throwing a party. Ashamed to want to celebrate a big birthday, make a whole day about me... or I began to tell myself that I wasn't really a 'party person'. I decided to tell some of my friends how vulnerable it was making me feel and how much it actually mattered to me that they came. I didn't want to guilt trip them... I just wanted to share how i was feeling. This shifted it a bit for me. I could really feel the warmth of others more as I connected to that younger part of me ... it also helped me feel more connected when the party did eventually roll around as well. Plus a couple of people pulled out the stops and went to greater lengths to attend! It took discussing it in therapy to name the shame though.... the shame I felt for being 'too much' by the mere thought of throwing a party in my own honour!