Shake Away Your Shame

There’s only one essential ingredient to being successful in life: Self-love. That’s the primary ingredient to succeeding in anything, including recovery. Since most of us with addictive personalities grew-up with little to no self-love, we often don’t know how to begin to love ourselves. And yes, it’s easier to say than do, but we can do it. We just have to choose to start rebuilding our self-love. I’ve chosen to begin the process of reclaiming my self-love by identifying my shame.

Why begin with shame? Because shame is the one feeling that thoroughly destroys self-love. Shame is so devastating because it centers its warheads on who we are inherently. Shame says “you were born a mistake.” It points its nasty finger in our faces and says “you cannot be lovable because you are gay, or female, or the wrong skin-color, or born out-of-wedlock, or stupid, or ___________.” And we can all fill in the blanks with the many, many other ways in which shame has been telling us we are unacceptable and unlovable.

No child is born feeling shame about itself. Shame is thrust onto us by adults when we are very young. Many parents thoughtlessly use shame as a means of ensuring that their children grow-up as acceptable good boys or girls. Because shame is such a devastatingly negative feeling, it easily stops a child in his or her tracks, and enslaves that child into doing whatever mom or dad wants. 

Shame is the easiest way to silence a child. Shame makes a child feel like it’s totally worthless and powerless to do anything to defend itself. It’s the feeling that’s evoked through words like “Why couldn’t you have been a boy? You’re totally useless to me as a girl.” Or “Don’t you dare talk back to me you worthless little piece of shit! Why I ought to haul off and knock you right through that wall!” Or “You better not be gay! Why I’ll throw you right out of this house-- and God’ll throw you right into hell!”

No child can change his or her gender. No child can even understand, much less change, his or her sexual orientation. And no child is a worthless piece of shit. When children are shamed for being who they are—in ways they cannot change—the shame is so devastating that it strips them of all of their humanity, worth and self-love.

Adults who use shame against children totally destroy all of the self-love, self-value and self-worth that the child was born with. As a result, the child ends up dangling by a thread to survive. It’s as if the child has been thrown out of the Garden of Eden, a place of unconditional love, and his/her only hope of being loveable again is in the hands of the adult who has shamed him/her into hating him or herself. 

So the child comes to believe his/her value in life is in the hands of someone more powerful than he/she is. A child has no concept of being able to own or take-back its personal power through its own inner-abilities. And unless someone eventually teaches us how to take our power back, we end up floundering as we grow into adulthood because we are still believing what adults told us when we were small: That we are somehow worthless in ways we are unable to change.

When I entered recovery, I believed I was the most worthless person on earth. My self-love was totally decimated. I had no concept of self-love at all. My only hope was to find someone somewhere who could magically love me into loving myself. And of course I learned quickly in recovery circles that life doesn’t work that way. I was totally screwed if I held on to the belief that someone else could rescue me. I had to rescue myself. No one else could do it.

Was I terrified at the idea of having to love myself into being OK in this life? Hell yes! It seemed like a totally unfair and unreasonable idea to me. It was totally contrary to everything I’d ever learned. Love was something we searched for outside of ourselves. That’s what I’d learned and that’s all I knew.

Now, I had to go inside of my worthless little self and find the love I’d been missing all of these years. I had to find the love my parents had destroyed by shaming me endlessly. And this is how I started—by identifying the shame.

Once I was able to identify the shame, I started the process of dismantling it. I realized that much my parents, church, society and others had told me about myself was untrue. In fact, it was all lies. These lies were perpetrated against me for the purpose of putting on a good family show for the neighbors, or of alleviating my parents of some ill-perceived guilt or shame of their own. So I challenged all I had previously believed about myself, and with the help of 12 Step spirituality and people I trusted, I declared it all false. I then started taking my personal power back from it. I started shaking away my shame.

As I started to shake away my shame, I started to feel better about who I am. I started to fit more comfortably into my skin. These are signs of an improving self-love and self-esteem. I then opened up more to life and others as I gradually let go of my shame. 

Building self-love is a slow and gradual process. It takes time and effort. Start by asking Higher Love to help you open up the door to self-love inside of you. Then ask Higher Love to help you identify all of the ways in which you feel shame about yourself. Write them down. Make them real to you on paper and then begin the process of proving them to be false. This is how you start taking your power back from shame. Share your feelings of shame with a therapist, 12 Step friends or others you feel safe with. They, too, can help you to shake away your shame. Once you start shaking it away, use self-care to help you replace your shame with self-love.

Start shaking away your shame today!