Shame Fuels Addictive Acting-Out

As I’ve emphasized before, addiction is an emotional dis-ease, and the primary emotion that fuels addictive behaviors is shame. So let’s define shame. According to Webster’s Dictionary shame is a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety. Merle Fossum and Marilyn Mason say in their book Facing Shame that "While guilt is a painful feeling of regret and responsibility for one's actions, shame is a painful feeling about oneself as a person."

I agree with Fossum and Mason. Guilt is an emotional that arises when we realize we have said or done something hurtful or wrong. Guilt is primarily about our behavior, which we can change. It’s true that we can be ashamed of something we’ve said or done, or failed to say or do, but guilt is the primary feeling that motivates us to be responsible for our bad behavior.

Shame, on the other hand, is a devastating feeling about our own defectiveness or inadequacy as a person. Shame is focused on who we inherently are, which means that shame is focused on those things about ourselves that we CANNOT change: race, gender, ethnicity, sexual-orientation, intelligence or physical beauty, for example.

Understood in this light, shame often leaves us feeling fearful and hopeless. What can we possibly do if we’ve been told that we are inherently defective in some way and that no one will ever love us because of this defect which we cannot change? Well, we can despair and drown ourselves in addictive behaviors to escape our self-hatred and emotional pain; or we can embrace the very defect that we believe is so unacceptable.

When we choose to embrace our defect, we can ask the defect what it has to teach us about ourselves. In the process, we may learn that it isn’t really a defect at all. And once we choose to accept and embrace that defect, we will surely learn that we aren’t the only person on earth who has the same problem. By embracing the defect we may come to decide that if God made us exactly the way we are, then nothing about us can be inherently wrong or bad.  And thus, the door opens to our learning to accept and love our defect.

Like St. Paul in 2^nd Corinthians, we may even reach the day when we will be able to boast about our imperfection, defect or weakness that once held us tightly in the throes of shame. However, if we do not choose to embrace and accept whatever it is about ourselves that we find to be so unacceptable, we set ourselves up for endless feelings of inadequacy and shame. Many of us have already chosen this path, and it has made addicts out of us.

Our intense feelings of shame have driven us to compulsively drown ourselves in alcohol, sugar, gambling, shopping sprees, sex, video-games, etc. And this has become an endless cycle of self-destructive behavior.

The more we addictively act-out, the more shame we feel about ourselves. And so we must emotionally medicate away our shame more and more and more. This path offers us no hope of ever finding comfort and happiness within ourselves. The alternative path is to face all of our shameful feelings, to embrace them and to take our power back from them.

PRAYER: God grant me that ability to face myself and all of my shameful feelings. Help me to embrace those feelings and to learn from them. The have much to teach me about self-acceptance and self-love. With your graces Lord, may I ever grow in love of the way you have wonderfully created me, no matter what anyone else may believe or say about me. Amen.