Start the Shame Series from the beginning: here
As much as I’ve endeavoured to give you a glimpse behind the curtain of shame, the truth is, more often than not, we simply cannot see the full scope of our own shame and dogma until something literally smashes our comfortable little shame bubble. Like your career tanking and your best friend dying and your relationship crumbling all at once… hypothetically speaking. That’s why we actually need to make mistakes. And why we should be grateful for things like failure, midlife crisis, disaster, heartbreak, disillusionment, disease, and yes, even death. These are the red pills that can help release us from The Matrix of shame.
You may have to hit your ideological rock bottom before you finally have a true shame breakthrough, but you’ll know it when you do. First, you get angry, because you realize you’ve been living a lie. But then you feel an almost euphoric wave of relief as you finally let go of the horrible burden of shame you’ve been carrying around for years, if not your whole life. It’s terrifically liberating, but also, all too fleeting. The sense of clarity and peace might last a day or two, or maybe even a week or a month, but eventually you will encounter more shame and have to start the process all over again. The good news is that once you’ve seen behind one aspect of your shame, that epiphany can act as the anchor of truth upon which you judge everything else moving forward. You start to question everything you’re told and weigh it against your own experiences. And when you do find a nugget of truth that aligns with your new perspective, you know it immediately. As you start to accrue these personal truths, you begin reconstructing a new worldview based on experience, not dogma.
But it’s an ongoing process, like going to the gym or learning Spanish or approaching the limit of an exponential curve. You need to keep peeling back layers of dogma. Keep challenging yourself, trying new things, seeking out new perspectives, and staying out of your comfort zone in order to find all of the invisible boundaries of shame that are keeping you small, blind, and afraid. And you don’t just do this once. You keep discovering new pockets of shame all the time. Once you’ve worked through your career shame, for example, you may well discover family shame, sex shame, money shame, body shame, and so on. Each requiring its own mini breakthrough.
But let me warn you, shame breakthroughs are both incredibly liberating and scary af. Because when you’ve let go of enough dogma, you are left with… nothing. There’s a gaping void of ambiguity where your ideological sense of purpose and meaning used to be. What was cathartic at first, can become disorienting, rootless, and lonely. You slowly realize that you need to redefine virtually everything in your life, a monumental task that could take years! This is the period that psychologist and shame expert Dr. Alan Downs calls “The Wanderer – the man who journeys from his home seeking something better but not certain of what it is he might find.” Sound familiar? In this phase, the urge to fill that uncomfortable void with a superficial shake ‘n’ bake solution like a new religion, new career, new life partner, or new city is almost irresistible.
But be careful not to replace your old dogma with new tricks (sorry, I couldn’t help myself). This is what Downs calls, “foreclosure”. He urges caution around any desire for sudden, drastic change, like, say, abandoning your life to travel around the world for a year like I just did. As fun as that was, it may only serve to mask your shame void without actually resolving your quest for true, personal meaning. According to Downs this stage requires a slow and gradual search that ends at a place of “honest and radical authenticity”. Because if shame is all about perception over reality, its kryptonite is genuinely accepting the reality of you, warts and all (I know “warts and all” is a bit of a cliché, but it’s an effective one, because if, hypothetically, I had a wart on my finger right at this very moment, I would probably feel so shame-y about it that I couldn’t even admit to it. Fortunately, I don’t, as this has all been a completely hypothetical aside. I swear. Kthxbai).
The goal is always to move towards greater authenticity. Because we are innately social animals, we need to forge connections with other humans to be happy. But the only way we can forge genuine connections is by revealing our true, authentic, imperfect selves. And the only way we can reveal our true, authentic, imperfect selves is to have the courage to embrace vulnerability and shame. Because at some point our true, authentic, imperfect selves will be rejected. And when that happens we will need to rise above the ensuing shame shit show in order to get back out there and do it all over again.
I’d like to tell you that it all works out in the end. But the truth is, I don’t know… yet. This is about as far as I’ve gotten. I’m still wandering. Will I find meaning? Will I find a new purpose in life? Will it be as powerful and motivating as running from shame used to be? I don’t know. But I can tell you one thing for certain: it’s already better wandering out here in the void than it ever was living back in The Matrix of shame. Since my breakthrough, I’ve been happier, less anxious, more confident, more adult, more certain about my values, and yet at the same time, somehow way more open-minded. I’m even strangely interested in religion and spirituality now when I never used to touch the stuff. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a saint or superhero (sadly). But somehow I feel more like myself than ever before. I now truly believe that positive change is possible, which was the proof of concept I needed to start moving from Carol Dweck’s dreaded fixed mindset over to her lauded growth mindset. As a result, I’ve become a voracious reader, explorer, and perpetual student of life. Shame has become my gospel of sorts because it’s one of the only absolute truths that I have left.
Though shame is no longer a useful instinct, it is still a natural part of what makes us intrinsically human. If we embrace a radical kind of honesty and authenticity that acknowledges both our faults and our shame, we can build greater empathy and connection. To this end, I think we all need to wrestle with our culture’s dominant message of hierarchical human value and “fame-as-worthiness” in order to embrace the healthy logic of equality and universal respect instead. This attitude doesn’t just benefit those people we thought were “beneath” us — the people we’ve judged, shamed, or oppressed — it actively makes our own self-image stronger and more stable too. When we are no longer controlled by shame and dogma, we can figure out who we really are as individuals and what we really want from life. Not what our parents or our culture or some corporation wants us to want. On the path to accomplishing these goals, we need to practice using the guilt/growth mindset in order to separate ourselves from our inevitable fuckups just enough to learn from them, make amends, and keep moving. And the bottom line, if we don’t love ourselves, no one else is going to do it for us. Embracing our unconditional self-love may be the theoretical master internal emotion to rival shame’s master external emotion.
If any of this resonates with you, I’d highly recommend checking out any of Brené Brown’s books, TED Talks, or courses. As well as Carol Dweck’s TED Talk and book Mindset, Alan Downs’ books The Half-Empty Heart and The Velvet Rage, Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, and James Gilligan’s How to Prevent Violence.
