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Mark*, a queer man in his mid-30s, has been coming to see me every other week for the past few months. Mark loves his job and finds himself living with his beloved partner, in his favorite house, on his favorite street, and with his favorite dog.
We also learn that Mark believes he is unloved.
Chloe* is a student in her early 20s and a first-generation Indian-Australian. She has just earned a law degree on a full scholarship after achieving the highest grades ever at her local high school. After a few sessions with Chloe, I learned that she volunteers several nights a week at a local youth center, takes care of her elderly mother, and is always the person her friends come to for help. Ta.
We also see that Chloe believes she is not good enough.
Guilt can be seen as an emotion that tells you that you have done something wrong, whereas shame is when you feel that there is something bad at your core and you are doing everything you can to hide it. It will tell you what you need to do.
This is why shame work is so powerful because it’s not a process of self-care, but a process of self-acceptance. You can’t protect yourself from embarrassment.
Both Mark and Chloe grew up in a world where they were taught that there was something wrong with who they were. For Mark, this looked like homophobia at school and a family that did not accept his homosexuality. For Chloe, it manifested in the form of racism, with her early memories associated with feelings of ostracism at school and microaggressions on public transport.
Shame is often the result of internalized prejudice and prejudice. We feel shame before we feel shame. Like many people from marginalized communities, Mark and Chloe came to see themselves as the problem, not the discrimination that surrounded them. And like many people who experience shame, Mark and Chloe were taught that the only way to overcome their problems was to succeed within the same system that shamed them. I did.
This is the false path we are offered to get out of shame. To work. To achieve. To be perfect. Take responsibility for your own life and make it better.
This system offers a false promise that if you do enough, you will feel good enough.
But that doesn’t work because, as Dr. Devon Price emphasized in his book, Unlearning Shame, shame is best understood as systemic.
“Systemic shame is more than just a debilitating sense of self-blame, it is also a worldview about how change happens and what it means for a person to live a meaningful and moral life. Yes, but by prioritizing the values of perfectionism, individualism, consumerism, wealth, and personal responsibility above all else, organizational shame actually maintains the status quo rather than destroying it. That’s how we train.”
In other words, the harm of shame lies not in the emotion itself, but rather in the toxic lives we build to protect ourselves from this shame. Although the cause of our shame is not ourselves, individualism teaches us that only we have to do something to feel better and find a happy life.
Just as shame is based on self-blame, the way out of it must also be based on self-acceptance.
Like many people in the LGBTQ+ community, a culture of systemic shame provided Mark with a false path out of shame based on work, success, and wealth. As Price writes, systemic shame “provides us with consumption and personal branding as a remedy for feeling alone and unseen. Accepting other LGBTQ people… Instead of building queer friendships, building community, and having the sex and relationships we’ve always wanted, systemic shame means that what we need is personal empowerment by purchasing the right items. It teaches us that it’s about finding pride in our identity and styling ourselves in the right way.”
So if perfectionism, consumerism, and wealth are not the exit, then what is?
The first step is to understand the part of yourself that feels shame and explore why it arises. For Mark, this meant building an understanding of systemic shame, challenging the view that he was flawed, but rather that shame stemmed from the homophobia and lack of acceptance he experienced early in life. It helped me understand that this is a normal result.
Just as shame is based on self-blame, the way out of it must also be based on self-acceptance. For Chloe, this process involved challenging her internalized beliefs about how she “should” live her life and replacing them with an understanding of what a meaningful life looks like for her. It started from. Working together helped Chloe reconnect with art and music, a passion that had been buried under expectations of what she was supposed to be.
Just as the cause of shame is outside of ourselves, so too must the cure be outside of ourselves. For many, this may include focusing on relationships and collective action to counter a system-wide culture of shame that blames individuals for system problems. For Mark and Chloe, this process included developing the skills to be vulnerable and communicate their needs in relationships. Over time, this allowed them to feel safe bringing their true selves to the relationship, creating an opportunity to experience a new sense of belonging and self-acceptance.
There were also questions that both Mark and Chloe found helpful. This is a question I often ask myself. We act to counter our own systemic shame. How would you live today if you believed you were already enough?
Because challenging shame is all about finding the radical belief that you already are.
*All clients featured here are fictitious amalgams
