Hello dear ones,
I hope that your Sunday is off to a gentle start. I wanted to share a few nice moments from my weekend before diving in:
My ex-partner has come to visit me and the cats and brought my favourite decaf coffee beans that I’m now sipping for the first time in months.
I slept in until 10:30, which is truly quite late for me. And I don’t feel bad about it.
Later today I’ll be going plant shopping to help fill my new home with more greenery.
An exciting update and a reminder:
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THOUGHTS & FEELINGS
I’ve been feeling called to write about shame. Yesterday, I shared a post on my IG with the question:
I’ve always felt a pull towards so-called negative or ugly feelings. Anything that is easily discarded, pathologized, demonized has always been a point of interest. I feel a special kinship with the undesirable. I often wonder: what do we miss out on when we dismiss, reject, and distance ourselves from that which is deemed unacceptable by the status-quo? In the context of this post on shame, I want to ask another question: What harm do we cause — to ourselves, to others — when we label particular feelings as enemies to defeat? How much such a framing actually prevent us from healing?
I ask those last two questions because I’ve been reading Brené Brown’s book Daring Greatly. (As a quick note: I have an ambivalent relationship with Brown/her work for many reasons that I’ll shortly outline here. And I’ve learnt a lot from her work. It can be both/and.) I’m currently making my way through Chapter 3: Understanding and Combatting Shame (aka Gremlin Ninja Warrior Training). Brown defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experinece of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging” (69). I agree with Brown’s definition, and find myself taking issue with the ways that she frames shame as “bad” “little gremlins” that we must defeat and eviscerate.
Here’s one thing I know about shame: shame begets more shame. Have you ever been in a shame spiral? Here’s how it works: you say or do something that you feel ashamed of (e.g. you yell at your partner). Shame enters the scene. And then you shame yourself for being ashamed. This is the spiral. And I believe that one of the core reasons shame spirals happen is because we’ve internalized the belief that shame is a bad feeling. That if we’re spiritually evolved humans, we shouldn’t feel shame because we should know that shame doesn’t make anything better. And the shame spiral continues. I know it well.
Using the language of “defeat” and “combat” positions shame as the enemy. I want to offer a different framing, one that has deeply supported my own healing: shame is a protector, a survival resource that we developed at one point in time in order to feel a sense of control and agency in a world where we had little to no control or agency. If, growing up, we were made to feel like our needs were too much, we had two options: we stand firm in our belief that our needs are worthy of being met and acknowledge that our caregivers are unable to love us in the ways we need; or we internalize the belief that our needs must be too much because otherwise we’d have to grapple with the question: why wouldn’t our caregivers, those who’re supposed to love us, celebrate our needs? As little ones, acknowledging our caregivers limitations was just too much, too devastating for us to handle. And so, in choosing to blame and shame ourselves, we protected ourselves from grief.
In her book, The Politics of Trauma, Staci K. Haines writes: “Like other survival shaping, shame has a protective role—it is taking care of us by hiding what is too overwhelming to face, and by giving us a sense of agency in a context where agency may have been taken away from us. Shame takes care of helplessness” (301). The reality is that we can’t change our caregivers. We can’t change anyone else except ourselves. So if we blame ourselves, I must be the problem, then we can change: If my needs are the problem, then I can change me! I can become less needy. Then I’ll get the love I so desire. In this way, shame is trying to move us towards connection — despite how paltry that offering of connection might be.
I learnt how to subsist off of the scraps of connection I received. I normalized them because to acknowledge that what I was receiving wasn’t enough, and was so far from what I deserved, would, again, be much too devastating for me to bear. Again and again, I’d sacrifice my safety and my dignity for connection. In this way, shame becomes a self-prophetic loop: in accepting less, I was affirming that that was all I deserved.
Here’s another thing I’ve learnt about shame: shame is anger turned inwards. When someone causes us harm, it would make sense to be angry. But so many of us learnt that anger was another unacceptable and dangerous emotion (this is especially true for basically anyone who isn’t a cis white man). And so instead of turning to the person who harmed us and expressing our righteous anger (this would be our fight part coming online) we learnt to turn that anger inwards and blame ourselves instead (fight part inner critic). This cycle occurs when our fight doesn’t get to do its job, causing our submit part to come online and say “we might as well give up. It’s all our fault” (if you wanna learn more about parts work, I’ve got two webinars you can check out here). Whenever I feel shame, I understand that one of two things are happening: I’m being protected from grief that was once too much for me to feel; or I’m actually angry and am repressing that anger.
One of my favourite descriptions of shame comes from Jessica Fern’s book Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy:
I’ve come to see our inner critic as a form of emotional autoimmunity. When someone has an autoimmune condition, the immune system goes into overdrive and the body starts attacking itself instead of protecting itself from outside invasion. When we inquire into the motivation of the inner critic, it is usually a part of us that wants to protect us, keep us safe or have us be successful, but its methods are actually self-harming and counterproductive to its protective intention. Shame is like a weakened immune system that will catch an emotional cold through even the smallest insults, neutral feedback or questioning from another” (206).
This metaphor makes a lot of sense to me, especially as someone living with fibromyalgia. Fibromyalgia begins with the sympathetic nervous system, otherwise known as the “fight-or- flight response.” For most people, the fight-or-flight response comes into action when faced with a real danger and the frontal cortex (or the adult brain) needs to know how to respond.
Here’s what should happen: your adult brain sends a signal to your sympathetic nervous system: “There’s danger! I need you to help me out!” And the SNS assesses the situation and chooses the appropriate response. Once the danger has been avoided, the SNS sends a signal to the adult brain that says, “Danger’s over!” And you begin to relax. For those of who have experienced trauma, the signals don’t work as they should. The SNS doesn’t understand that the danger is over. And so it stays on alert in order to protect you, thereby inhibiting deep sleep.
This lack of sleep sets off a chain reaction that prevents adequate growth hormone release, which interferes with muscle tissue repair and leads to muscle pain. As a response to this pain, muscles and their surrounding connective tissues are chronically tightened to respond to danger and become painful. The nervous system becomes overwhelmed and hyper-reactive to pain.
I find myself charmed by the fact that our flight-or-flight response is called the “sympathetic” nervous system. Sympathy, from the Latin sympathia meaning “having a fellow feeling.” But at the root, sympathy also means to suffer. If today, sympathy means to conform ones feelings so that they are aligned with another’s, we can think about the sympathetic nervous system as the body’s desire to be in sympathy with the mind. And so it follows that if chronic pain is caused by an overactive sympathetic nervous system, it’s as though the body is saying, “If your mind is in pain, I’ll be in pain too, so that you’re not alone in your suffering.”
There is something beautiful about how this sympathetic gesture misses the mark. For the pain in the body is unwanted, and can lead to even more psychic pain. In other words, when the body mirrors the pain in my mind, my suffering increases. My submit part truly believes that one of the best ways to protect me from taking action that could result in disappointment (at best) and harm (at worst) is to flare up in pain.
So what do we do about the autoimmune conundrum that is shame? We bring our parts into the present moment and we give them new jobs. I’ll always need my fight parts and my submit part. But they don’t know that I’m not that young person anymore, and so they continue to use the same tactics that once kept me safe and that are now causing me harm. In other words, we befriend the so-called enemies and we tend to their needs. This is not an act of defeat, of us versus them. This is an act of collaboration, compassion, and care, of we’re all in this together.
PRACTICES
I want to share a simple practice from my parts webinar “Carrying Ourselves Home: Tending to and Befriending Our Parts”:
Using Parts Language: Shame and blame shut down the prefrontal cortex, thereby making curiosity quite difficult. Curiosity increases activity in the thinking brain and allows us to move more quickly out of activation. Janina Fisher explains that instead of “I’m a bad person”: “The word ‘part’ introduces new information, generating interest, and often curiosity” (Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors 71). It also activates the medial prefrontal cortex, which reduces amygdala activation.
So whenever a shame story comes up, try to move from “I’m a bad person” to “a part of me believes that I’m a bad person.” This reframe in language enables us to separate ourselves from the feeling, and it’s from that place that we can ask some different questions to get to know that part:
Which part of me believes that I’m a bad person?
How old was I when I first started to believe this story?
What might that part be needing to feel a sense of safety, connection, and dignity?
ACTIONS
I want to share a GoFundMe that is very near and dear to my heart. Evan’s dad’s health took a major turn for the worst and she’s now tasked with being a primary caregiver, providing round the clock care alongside her partner. As someone who was a primary caregiver to my disabled father, and had the privilege of receiving some support through the Canadian healthcare system, I know just how overwhelming it is — emotionally, physically, and materially — to be in this place. And so Evan is asking for help, an act of pushing through the shame of needing support. They’re almost halfway to their goal. If you have the means to contribute to the GFM, you can do so here. You can also support Evan by sharing this instagram post:
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Wow, so many fire nuggets about shame here. I've been moving through some shame with my therapist and with EMDR, and this framing/re-framing is blowing my mind. Thank you as always Margeaux 💞