Facing Shame is an Act of Courage and Faith

There are parts of myself that live in the shadow that inside me I don't want to look at, I don't want to expose. Maybe even that I will never expose. I can't tell. Yet in my life, there's parts of myself I'm ashamed of. How do I work with that shame? How do I work with the feeling of fear, of the response I would get if I came out with what I feel so ashamed about?

I think the first thing is really appreciating the paradox that anytime you face, we face what we're ashamed of. It's always an act of courage. It's always an act of faith. And it's the faithful us. It's the faithlessness that avoids our shame. It's the lack of courage that avoids our shame. So whenever we're in touch with shame, we know that we have a contrasting trust that's big enough to face the shadowy parts of ourselves. So just understanding that we deserve acknowledgment and tenderness or warmth towards ourselves when we're facing the shame, because the reason why it's buried is because we're ashamed of it. And there's no contrasting courage or faith. So congratulations is in order every time. So you have a voice inside that says, congratulations, you're going into the dreaded zone.

And that is it. It is dread. It is really. It's even difficult for me to focus on it in my own mind's eye, in my looking at myself, and to just say, relive it in a way where I don't cringe myself, let alone come out with it. I can't imagine until I can stop cringing that it's possible to come out.

And congratulations that you're seeing the cringe. Because the cringe is a form of rejection. It is the shame itself. And say to yourself, congratulations. I can be a broad enough awareness to see the cringe. And the cringe is really an attempt to put a blanket over what you're ashamed of. It's an attempt to bury it again and say, okay, I can see the blanket. Okay, I can now take the blanket off. What is it that I'm really ashamed of? What's really there? And so we start to expose areas where we feel we've betrayed our integrity, where we feel like we've been insensitive, where we feel like we've hurt other people. And it's only by recognizing that that's an act of great integrity itself, to see where we don't have integrity that we have a chance of going deeper inside ourselves. So if you had an example of a place where you generally won't share something because you're afraid of the response, and then I'm going to ask you a second, but then you are already prepared to recognize this is an area that's usually banished from my life. And so this is an area where I'm choosing to give myself a chance to come alive. What would that be?

It's difficult to express, for all the reasons I just said. It's difficult to express to myself. It's difficult to express with you. It's difficult to express with cameras recording it. And maybe the closest I can come to it is that I feel like I violated my own integrity, my own standard of acceptable behavior, that.

I lost.

Innocence and a right to feel ever again that I was or could be innocent, that I've lost that. And there's a. Almost a. And again, it's hard to touch, but almost a grieving for myself that I've lost that innocence. I feel so sad for myself that I hold this and feel bound and limited by it. It's really limiting and very rarely can I take a step in the direction of this without feeling so limited. And even now it's not something I am limiting myself right now about the degree I can express it or feel it.

So right now you're in a stage of pregnancy, but you're not ready to have birth. You're at least exposing it to yourself. What some of the guilt and the shame that is there. And there are many times in our life where we're not going to be ready to tell the other or certain, like you're saying in front of a camera what it is that we're ashamed of, what we're guilty of. But at least we can face the fact that we're trapped, that I cannot feel innocent again because I have been this way. But at least I can see the source of my lack of innocence is that I'm running away at one level from exposing my guilt where it was tarnished and I can't quite out it. So then there hopefully will be something like a prayer that will say, may I have the courage and the faith and the paradoxical innocence to expose where I felt guilty and where I still feel guilty so that it can have some healing.

The question for you, sometimes I feel that would be healthy and sometimes I feel there would be a. A self flagellation aspect to it where I would be harming myself in certain situations doing it. Is it okay to pick and choose where I expose it?

I think it's mandatory. I mean, any area of shame or guilt. You want to be with somebody who's going to support the courage and the innocence regardless of what you've done. It doesn't mean they approve or condone of the act that you've done or not done, but it means they love you, they trust you in your core, regardless of what you've done. And they just are going to be curious for you to expose what really were your thoughts there when you did that, what made you do something that betrayed your integrity? And they're going to inquire, remember the situation as it really was, not as you're telling us what it is now. Most of the times when we really feel guilty or ashamed about a past event, we forget why we even did it, how desperate we were, how much our thinking was distorted at the time, how distraught we were. And so by outing, really gives us a chance to have the healing or the innocence to come in. And we might very well have to confess something. We might have to grieve and likely will. And of course, like I said, you only want to reveal this with people who are going to separate out two things. One is the act or action or lack of action and look at that and really just listen and inquire and let you out. And the other one is you need to know somebody's not going to judge that. That's really the core of you. What you're attempting to do is find your original innocence and your original faith and your original trust and your original courage and your passion for life and your compassion and be able to expose this so that it can heal.