The spiritual view on how shame operates in our lives

When we are born, we are perfect beings. We come into the world, aware that we are important in the families we come into. For baby boys, there is a sense of pride by the parents which is transmitted to the baby: being the bearer of the family name and the future of that family. For baby girls, there is a sense of preciousness, of fragility and beauty and the baby picks up on these.

Then, somewhat suddenly, all that wonderful energy stops as reality sets in and the child becomes imprinted with whatever shame the parents feel and carry which then activates whatever other ancestral shame exists within that family.

There are many causes of Shame — from abandonment and abuse to being wronged. Shame is also taught to us under the guise of keeping us safe. 

Girls inherit body shame from their mothers while boys inherit power to shame. Where parents are abusive, the child hooks into the shame engendered by being the child of such a person and the fear of becoming such a person. These feelings of shame then begin to distort the child’s self-image and it becomes lodged in their self-identity. This process is called a Psychic Contract.

In childhood, we develop the contracts in response to the shame dumped by parents and others who abandon, judge or abuse us – contracts that say we’ll never be successful, or that we will exonerate the abuse of adults by becoming abusive ourselves – or that we will clone them altogether, and become replicas of the subhuman or superhuman parents who passed their shame along to the next generation.

Shame sometimes causes the development of psychic holes in our energy fields – that may result, on one end, in lowered energy and headaches and, on the other, a shortened life span.

These levels of shame become triggered and activated at various stages of life and contribute to us feeling undeserving and unworthy of being the best version of ourselves. It causes us to withhold success, joy, freedom of expression and altogether suppresses what makes us unique.

We become the adapted self – adapted for those elements which we believed as a child, would gain us acknowledgement and finally acceptance and love. We become adapted into people pleasers if we hold shame from abandonment. We become adapted into being promiscuous or sexually indiscriminate, if we hold shame from sexual or emotional abuse. We become adapted to being violent and aggressive if we hold shame from physical abuse. We become adapted to being psychopathic and sociopathic when we hold shame from psychological abuse. In the case of holding shame from parents who were substance abusers, we become enablers or abusers ourselves in turn. Body shame leads us to becoming repressed emotionally and sexually because we feel shame about our body and its functions.

These can be broken down into further subsections because the adaptations show up in interesting ways.

We also become experts at the self-same abuse towards ourselves which taints the ego voice to becoming the inner critic which constantly judges us and declares us as bad, inferior, or just not good enough.

Shame robs us of our true place in the grand scheme of things because we see ourselves as tainted and not capable of measuring up and being good at all. Seeing yourself as defective means that you also see yourself as unforgivable. Since belief dictates behavior, you will always behave in ways that prove the belief right and discount yourself no matter how hard you try. That leads to a sense that no matter what you do to change, nothing changes or that things just get worse. The internal programs running in the background become complex and difficult to unravel as the years go by. 

The idea of true place refers to finding the passion of your life purpose and living a life that expands your uniqueness for the greater good. Each person has a specific purpose in the symphony of humanity which can never be fulfilled by anyone other than them. 

Shame also kills our personal magic. If one thinks of each person on the planet as a note in a piece of music, then we can understand that shame distorts that note and we can see why there is so much discord and disharmony on the planet. Clearing shame allows your note to return to perfect pitch, bringing harmony back to the music of the soul. Since most of us on the planet are infected and affected by shame, the more of us who figure it out and clear it, the better the planet becomes. Everything is connected and our inner world creates our outer world; when we honor our place in the connection, we give birth to a whole new possibility of a utopian world.

Shame changes our self-awareness into self-consciousness where we are ultra-sensitive to how we are perceived. In some cases, that sensitivity can be so severe that the person feels overly exposed to judgment and criticism to the point of neurosis. In those cases, all the person wants, is to be invisible because everything is so colored by the fear of being wrong or being shamed. This amps up the ego voice to consistently tell you that you’re stupid, clumsy, ugly, whatever, to control your actions. The fear of scrutiny becomes elevated and then the person learns to imitate what they see as correct behavior and bearing. 

A person having this experience is so far from being themselves, they could just as well be a total stranger to what they see when they look in a mirror. In society, this form of shame is exacerbated by the media constantly presenting perfection as the standard. The media perpetuates shame in all its different disguises. It keeps hammering home the message: you suck; your life sucks; being you is unforgivable.

When working with Shame, the most important emotions necessary are Forgiveness and Gratitude, which eventually lead us back to Self-Love. You need forgiveness to arrest the beliefs and to stop the ego voice from insisting that you are not good enough. Forgiveness cleans the slate and gives you another chance to make new choices. Gratitude allows us to value who and what we are and that we are free to choose a new way; and that choice changes the entire world. 

Join The EQ GYM this Sunday for a complimentary session with April Wickström. In this session, April will dig deeper into this topic and take you through a meditation for you to start building up your EQ muscles. Sign up for free here! 

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See you Sunday!

This is a guest post. Any opinions expressed are the writer’s own.