Shame is just about the worst and most useless emotion I know.* It took me my whole life to figure that out, though. That’s because it’s the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing of emotions, and we dress it up that way. It’s easy to think that it’s somehow moral, when it’s not. When we shame others, we appear to be pointing out their moral shortcomings, when, in fact, we’re judging them. It’s self-righteous, rather than good. When we shame ourselves, it’s even worse. We’re squandering all our spiritual intuition about what’s right and replacing it with some societal notion of it.
Did the Nazis have any concept of morality, even though they got together for rallies? Or, as we say in San Francisco, if everyone jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, would you? Submitting to the bullies around you into internalizing their guilt trips only takes you away from a valid, spiritual understanding of the Good.
Shame is a form of emotional abuse. Most of us naturally want to help our society, community, friends, and family. Seeing beyond ourselves to a greater good provides us with spiritual fulfillment. I believe that that is what most of us want most of all out of life. We can’t take our fancy cars, our expensive outfits, or mansions, or our bank accounts with us when we die, even if we’re fortunate enough to have those things. Life is about legacy. Legacy requires us to contemplate goodness. Goodness means reaching out to others.
But shame turns all that on its head. Shaming someone else is saying that they’re bad on a spiritual dimension. Shaming ourselves does the same thing to ourselves. It tears people up inside and hurts the process of expansion, necessary for spiritual goodness. It causes the recipient to close up, rather than expand, and also to replace their true, spiritual intuition about the Good with an artificial ethos that the shamer wants them to have (or that the self-shamer has internalized).
Shame can, thus, be used to manipulate others. By crushing someone’s spirituality, the shamer can replace that true spirituality with a Masochistic pseudo-spirituality, one which the shamer (or the people they serve) controls.
The cure is responsibility. It’s simply the concept that we should take responsibility for our actions. By taking responsibility to try to avoid wrong-doing and, if that fails, cleaning up our messes and apologizing to those we’ve hurt, and then learning from our mistakes and moving on, we retain our true goodness, without shame.
Responsibility comes from an authentic place of spirituality. When we are truly connected to the Good, our sense of responsibility springs up naturally from our desire to be good. It comes from deep within, rather than from without. When we are filled with a personal sense of responsibility, it bolsters us against shaming from without and within. Responsibility replaces shame in the most healthy way, by setting us back on our expansive course toward the Good.
The really hard part is, once we realize this, we have to remember to avoid shaming ourselves for having shamed ourselves or others. That’s the trap! To avoid it, let’s be merciful with ourselves, be spiritual, expand into our personal goodness, and, from there, develop a strong sense of responsibility.
If we’ve shamed ourselves or others, let’s, instead, take responsibility for that, by learning from our mistakes and stopping the shame now. Stop shaming yourselves. Stop shaming others. Stop shaming yourselves for having shamed yourself or others. By way of taking responsibility, I hereby apologize to myself and to others for all the times I’ve shamed anybody. I see now that it served no useful purpose and commit myself to doing better, in the future. Having taken responsibility, I free myself from that burden, and move forward, continuing my spiritual growth. I invite you to do the same.
* This idea isn’t original to me. It’s circulating around the web, but it’s an idea that has deeply moved me.