What a Shame

This morning I made a mistake. It’s not a colossal mistake, but it caused someone some extra time and certainly inconvenienced them. Even worse, it’s not the first time I have made the exact same mistake.

And now I am sitting here, scrolling social media instead of doing any of the things I need to be doing. I feel silly and stupid. I am busy making up all kinds of stories about what the person I inconvenienced must be thinking of me. I am calling myself names like “careless,” “lazy,” and “inadequate.” I am mere seconds away from the spiral where I tell myself that I am not enough, that I cannot measure up, and that I am basically failing at life.

Happy Monday morning.

This is shame, and this is what shame does. Shame takes something we have done wrong, something that embarrasses us, or something someone said about us, and uses it to push us down a rabbit hole of self-doubt and defeat. It distracts us from the good and productive work that is in front of us. It separates us from connection with ourselves and others.

Shame is not the same as guilt. There are two kinds of guilt: true guilt and false guilt. True guilt can be a healthy and productive emotion. It tells us when we have done something wrong that we need to do to make right. True guilt is the emotion that is telling me that next time I need to double check my work so that I do not make the same mistake again. It is the emotion that tells me to apologize, to own my mistake, and to ask for forgiveness.

False guilt is actually shame in disguise, encouraging us to take ownership of things that we are not responsible for. Most of the time when we talk about guilt trips and being guilted into things, we are talking about false guilt. When we experience the feeling of guilt over something we have no control over or cannot change, most of the time that is false guilt.

True guilt is about our behavior; shame is about our identity. Shame is the staircase down to despair and isolation, to the place where we question our identity, value, and worth. Shame is the overwhelming flood of self-doubt. Shame makes us selfish, in that we become so overwhelmed by our own insecurity and loss that we cannot see outside the pit shame has pushed us into.

The antidote to shame is connection.

This morning I was texting a friend when I realized my mistake. After seeing how close I was to the shame spiral, I told her what was going on. She normalized my mistake and my reaction to it and reminded me that I was not alone in this whole being-human thing. Being in connection with someone else pulled me away from the shame spiral.

Writing about what happened has also helped. The act of creating can be freeing, in and of itself. But even more so, reminding myself about what I know about shame and guilt shifts my perspective. My focus moves off myself and my fear and insecurity and to the bigger picture and the things I know to be true.

I doubt that I am the only one out there that made a mistake or messed up today. Let’s resist shame together. Let’s learn from true guilt, act accordingly, and let it go. Let’s reach out for connection and fight the spiral of shame and isolation.

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