😔Shame On You😔

Shame lies at the heart of many of the issues that bring people to counseling.

The dictionary definition of shame is “a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior.”

Shame is something that can be so ingrained in our lives from an early age that we don’t get how powerfully it affects us in the present. It can become an essential part of our personality, completely hidden but guiding our lives, until we recognize it and start to talk about it.

Shame is different than guilt. Guilt is the feeling we get when we do something bad, something we know is wrong. It’s something we can fix by doing better next time.

Shame is much more diabolical. Shame makes us feel not that we did something bad, but that we are something bad. Instead of feeling like we did something wrong, we feel like we are something wrong.

Maybe when we were children we were exposed to anger, made to feel worthless, powerless, that instead of doing things that were wrong we were in fact wrong ourselves. Things as simple as spilling a glass of milk at the dinner table that, depending on the parents’ or caregivers’ reaction, can go from making us feel like we did something wrong, to making us feel that we are a bad child who can do nothing right and there is inherently something wrong with us, which is proved by events such as this.

Shame starts early.

And by the time we become adults we’re used to it. We’ve lived with it so long we don’t even notice it anymore. But unconsciously, we’re completely aware of it.

The goal of counseling is to become aware of these feelings and learn to accept them but not let them dictate our lives. We can’t get rid of shame, but we can understand it, accept it, and not let it define us.