Transforming Shame to Strength

In my study of how human beings work, nothing has been more interesting than shame.

The good news is that you don’t feel shame because there is something wrong with you. Human beings are hardwired to feel shame as a social survival mechanism.

Shame is a profound evolutionary advantage. Human beings are alive on the planet today because we are profoundly social. Shame keeps the social group together so that the human race can survive. It keeps the individual with the group so that they can survive.

No wonder shame feels so terrible. It’s like an electric fence, keeping you in the social boundaries so that you don’t get ostracized and left in the forest as lion food.

However, evolution also tends to play toward the group’s advantage rather than the individual’s. It cares much more about group cohesion than losing one individual. Therefore, shame can be a fickle friend. Don’t assume it’s on your side.

In addition, like all of our biological protective hardwiring, shame operates on a ‘better safe than sorry’ basis. It’s like if something moves in the bushes, it’s safer to gear up for a bear rather than to assume it’s a rabbit, until experience proves otherwise.

Shame says, “It’s safer to assume there’s something wrong with me until experience proves otherwise.” It’s not personal. It’s evolutionary. It’s part of why you’re here on the planet.

Shame can activate our biological freeze response that is regulated by our dorsal vagal nerve. The biological message is to lay low and wait for the threat to pass.

Although we can thank shame for helping the human race survive through eons of evolutionary tests, when our freeze response takes over for a prolonged period of time it can result in feelings of isolation, hopelessness, helplessness, depression, overwhelm, and desperation.

This is not a healthy place to be either physically or emotionally.

With all these factors involved, the feeling of shame is best met with a mix of gratitude, analysis and compassion rather than the knee-jerk compliance or defiance that it would have us do.

What to do about it? The trick is to treat the emotion of shame in such a way that it keeps you in the connection (Ventral Vagal) part of your nervous system instead of going into a freeze response.

When I catch myself feeling shame I find the most effective way goes something like this:

• Gratitude. “Thank you. I wouldn’t be on the planet without this emotion.”
• Acknowledgement. “Ouch. And this is painful.”
• Connection. “I’m not alone. Feeling this bad is part of being human.”
• Curiosity. I wonder how this feeling might be trying to protect me?
• Movement. Doing some kind of movement can counteract our freeze response. It can include walking, running, stretching, yoga, etc.

The above steps align somewhat with Kristen Neff’s and Christopher Germer’s work on Mindful Self-Compassion.

When we treat shame as the biological protective phenomena that it is, we can then loosen it’s hold and become more free to live in our strengths.

This reminds me of a master/student story from Mark Nepo’s Book of Awakening. The student is complaining about his life. (This is what student’s do in these stories). The master gives the student a cup of salt water and has him drink it. Of course, the student complains that it is bitter. The master then has the student pour the same amount of salt in a nearby lake and instructs the student to drink from the lake. The student notes that the water now tastes fresh. The moral of the story is to become a bigger vessel (like the lake) for the pain (the salt) that life delivers us. Life’s pain will always be there but we can transcend it by dealing with it in a way that enriches our capacities to connect with ourselves and each other.