Repeat after me: I made a mistake, but I am not the mistake.
I found out recently that my cat scratched some furniture that doesn’t belong to me. Mea culpa, mea culpa, sorry, please forgive me—my bad. I can’t be sorry enough. And yes, I have been beating myself up about it. For a variety of reasons, I missed her surreptitious manicures. (That minx! Did she do it while I was sleeping?) Obviously, the fact that I had covered the seat didn’t matter to a 19-pound ball of fur on a mission.
Upon hearing this news, I was horrified, mortified, and embarrassed. I was also ... ashamed. But isn’t shame when you feel something’s wrong with you? It’s different than guilt. Guilt is what you feel when you do something wrong. Well, I don’t feel guilty because I didn’t do anything wrong; it was an accident. But I know I missed the mark and need to be accountable for the damage. However, strapping myself to a whipping post in the middle of the town square (figuratively speaking, of course)?!?! A bit extreme, right? Clearly, toxic shame is running me ragged right now.
If you grew up in a home with domestic violence, alcoholism, or any other type of serious dysfunction, or if you’ve spent a good portion of your adult life enmeshed with toxic people that leave you feeling like up is down and down is up, more than likely shame is one of your constant companions. A wise friend summed up my case succinctly: "What was wrong with your parents became what was wrong with you."
Bingo!
As a child, I could not separate myself from the violence taking place in front of me. (Nine years old and I was already a willing candidate for emancipation of a minor!) The unspoken agreement in our family was I am you and you are me and we are we. And we had a big ole dirty secret, one which kept us chained to each other. But I knew it wasn’t a good secret like a surprise party or a Secret Santa. No, it was a bad secret: dark, scary, and—hush!—never to be spoken of. Ever. Enter…shame.
My mother was shamed. Being beaten when she'd done nothing to deserve it sent only one message: Something was wrong with her. And if there was something wrong with her, the woman who gave birth to me, what did that say about me? Enter … shame.
And let's not forget the sound of "stupid kid" ringing in my ear, or in my mother's case, "stupid Southerner." Shame, shame, shame.
This insidious emotion can sneak into your life as an adult, too. You know that twisted romance, the one that had you mesmerized in the beginning but now has you self-annihilating and otherwise blowing your self-worth to smithereens. Yeah, that one. Remember how she blasted you night after night, just for being you?
And then there was that crazy, kooky, oh-so-charming, and very drunk guy that you hooked up with one night when you were crazy, kooky, oh-so-charming, and very drunk. Remember how you eventually became his caretaker and scapegoat once the magic wore off?
And so you started traveling with a suitcase full of pure, unadulterated shame.
So how do we rid ourselves of this scourge on our soul? Can we become shame-free?
There’s a great line in the movie Where the Heart Is when one of the characters tries to convince the heroine that she is worthy and deserving of love. People she trusted cheated and abandoned her, but her friend reminds her that “that’s what makes them trash, not you.”
Exactly. We go so far into other people that we almost become them. We take on their whole being. And when they chastise us, abuse us, and hurt us in ways that tear at and shatter our spirit, we feel shame.
The pervasive feeling that we are damaged goods is always there, like that little speck of tomato sauce that you can never seem to remove from your crisp white shirt. Shame remains—until the weight of it becomes too much for us to carry, and we simply have to put it down.
At six years old, I had no options. But now? Now I can put Mom and Dad down. I can drop Susie, Timmy, and Bobby, and I can take those dysfunctional romances and stack them in a neat little pile in the corner of the garage. I have the option of letting go of everything these people said or did. It will no longer be on me; it’ll be on them, where it belongs. And the next time I make a mistake, I’ll know that it’s just a mistake and not a condemnation of me and my character. Yes, I have options. Will I choose any of them?
That remains to be seen.