Healing the Wound of Shame
At various points in our lives, we’ll all experience shame—that deep feeling of unworthiness, the core wound of being somehow defective, bad, or otherwise inadequate. These feelings may come and go, and not become a part of our system—but if we’re repeatedly told, in either words or actions, that we’re unworthy of love, respect or healthy attention, the sense of shame will become chronic, infecting our idea of who we are and what we deserve in the world.
When our shame derives from the continued verbal and emotional abuse of others, it becomes a heavy burden and an active wound.
Shame most often results from the lies others have infused into our hearts, lies we’ve taken on as if they were truths. A negative self-dialogue may develop when we internally repeat falsehoods such as “I’m not good enough,” “I don’t matter,” “I’m unlovable,” “I can’t do anything right,” “I’m a bad person,” and more.
In truth, all these perceptions are distortions and lies. The lies likely developed in childhood, especially in cases of neglect, abandonment, overly-controlling parents, and other abuses. For example, in the case of parental neglect, our little minds assume that if our parents don’t pay attention to us, they must not love us. If they don’t love us, there must be something wrong with us—for surely our parents know best. As children we tend to put our mother and father on a pedestal, because that’s the safe thing to do—after all, we rely on them for our emotional, physical and spiritual security. If they can’t be trusted, our world falls apart—and so we trust blindly, convinced our parents are always in the right, so we must be wrong—and bad. Or defective. Or unlovable.
Fast forward two or three decades, and we find ourselves in a serious relationship.