Shame on You!

Love is revealing to someone else that person's own beauty. ~ Jean Vanier

Today the retreat on healing trauma continued with the topic toxic shame. I had not heard this definition before: shame is a form of self-torment, including feelings of disappointment, embarrassment, humiliation and a long list of other emotions. Something about the word self-torment struck me. If I am the one doing the tormenting, maybe I am the one who needs to stop.

Maureen Conroy of the Upper Room in New Jersey was the facilitator and she began by distinguishing healthy shame from toxic shame. She said people need to recognize we are not perfect and we all have limitations. When we make a mistake, feeling embarrassed is normal, but the berating of oneself is not. One mistake does not mean that someone is a complete failure. People with healthy shame can be humble about it without being self-denigrating.

Toxic shame, contrarily, is an inability to accept limits to a degree where the person believes that he or she is a defective human being. In their mind, the person becomes the mistake instead of having made one.

Half the battle is claiming your own belovedness, in my opinion. I remember reading Rebecca Wells’ Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and resonating deeply with Sidda, the protagonist, and her struggle with her mother. When I read it in university for a project on family relationships, I had an amazing breakthrough. The paper I wrote made my professor teary-eyed. I was not entirely free from that day on, but I was no longer bound by my childhood shame. Something amazing occurs when one arrives at a place one never thought possible of arriving—and arrives more or less intact, to boot.

Vanier is an incredible human being. Of course, he is correct in the above quote and in assuming we all have our own beauty. He once told a story about one of the men at L’Arche who put himself in a garbage dumpster because that was where he thought he belonged. I had happened to meet that man when I was at L'Arche in Trosly, France and so the story was even more poignant to me. Nobody is a piece of garbage. Not all of us know and trust that though. We need to be told, to be affirmed and reaffirmed.

I feel convinced more than ever that I need to be a more affirming voice in this world. We have too many voices that shame and denigrate people. Choices surround us daily. I am going to try to choose the voice of love more often.

Peace,

Suzanne