Shame Will Kill You
Guilt verses shame
This past few years have given me a lot of time to explore the origins and effects of trauma.
After fives years of chemo and radiation treatments my beautiful wife died of cancer. It’s been a little over a year since that day.
During those treatments we also had to close our co-working business because of Covid. And all while raising a new born. I had to take a full time job to cover health care and pay the overwhelming medical bills.
Trauma was a staple meal for us. Served up morning, noon and night. By the end I was so burnt out I didn’t even have the energy to leave the house.
As I slowly recovered we began to untangle the emotions. Therapy sessions focused on the grief but what also emerged was the sense of shame. A heavy feeling of blaming myself for everything that had gone wrong.
When bad things happen we tend to blame ourselves.
“What did I do to deserve this?”
“Why am I such a loser?”
“Why couldn’t I save her?”
Because we didn’t live up to our own, and others expectations, we blame ourselves.
We shame ourselves. We tell ourselves we’re bad people.
So not only was I experiencing massive trauma, but I was adding shame.
Shame is insidious because it gets in the way of understanding your trauma. That little voice in your head makes you feel responsible for the bad things that happen. Decades of research point to shame as a significant factor underlying continued trauma.
Feeling ashamed suppresses our ability to talk about how we feel. The guilt associated with shame has us believing we’re somehow unworthy, broken, and unlovable. Those suppressed feelings can become physical and in many cases leads to disease (dis-ease). That disease can also create more shame. Unrecognized and untreated this cycle can be deadly.
Trauma can be inherited too. Our culture saddles all of us with some kind of shame and guilt.
But there is a difference between guilt and shame. Guilt is feeling like you’ve done something bad. Shame is feeling like you are a bad person.
Shame reduces our sense of self.
This exchange from the movie The Edge starring Anthony Hopkins (playing Charles) and Alec Baldwin (playing Stephen) captures it perfectly. The scene finds them lost in the frozen forests of Alaska after their plane crashes in the wilderness:
Charles: “You know, I once read an interesting book which said that most people lost in the wilds, they, they die of shame.”
Stephen: “What?”
Charles: “Yeah, see, they die of shame. ‘What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this?’ And so they sit there and they… die. Because they didn’t do the one thing that would save their lives.”
“And what is that, Charles?”
“Thinking.”
To help with the grief I have been painting again. Art is now both a therapeutic outlet but also a healthy way for me to contribute to my families financial health.
My latest art piece, Shame Will Kill You, is a reminder to be aware of that shame-inducing voice in your head. What is it preventing you from saying or doing? How does that shame show up in your body? How is the trauma you feel linked to shame?
If you’d like to go deeper into understanding both individual and our collective trauma I recommend “The Myth of Normal” by Gabor Maté and “Trauma” by Paul Conti.
This piece is available to view and purchase on my website.
