SADD

Shame.
Abandonment.
Depression.
Despair.

It is said that "shame is among the most unbearable of human feelings, regardless of our age or station in life."

Guilt reflects on what we do, but shame reflects on who we are. I think we first experience shame in the eyes of our primary attachment figure, such as a parent, and the unexpected disapproval, usually around the age of one or two, shatters our infantile illusion of power and importance. Without warning, we are ejected from paradise, and it can only be because we are bad. We feel bad; therefore, we are bad.

For too many little children, this experience is repeated over and over in the course of socialization, and it is so crushing that they never quite get over it and spend their lives feeling this "unbearable feeling of shame."

Recent research in neurobiology has shown that a child's developing brain is not yet ready to process the intense experience of shame and that the lack of an emotionally attuned parent at this crucial time can actually stunt, for life, the growth of the neural pathways for regulating such profoundly unpleasant emotions. What helps the infant's brain develop properly is for parents or caretakers to provide what the young brain is not yet able to, and that is the soothing or comforting of the very shame that has been inflicted.

"Shame on you!" "You should feel guilty." "You're bad." These messages are common, and, of course, they inflict sometimes life-long damage. If our parents, caretakers, siblings, authority figures, or significant others in our childhood lives wittingly or unwittingly give us these messages, society later does little or nothing to ameliorate them. It's baggage that stays with an individual to work out on her or his own, if ever.

Shame, along with abandonment for "being bad," is a recipe for psychological disaster. It doesn't take much imagination to see the linear relationship between these insalubrious mental states and depression/despair. For some, the only comfort lies in believing that "once you give up hope, everything is easy."

Is there healthiness (like truthiness) in shame and guilt? In some cases, the answer is yes. If one has done something wrong, the conscience (provided one has developed) is there to offer up guilt as a mechanism for changing behavior and "making things right." If one is truly a bad person at times, by normative standards, then shame is also useful. Sometimes we feel bad about who we are because we ARE bad. If that leads to corrective attitudes, an increase in empathy and compassion, and better and more sociable behavior, then shame is useful. But it should be "ad hoc" shame and "ad hoc" guilt. No one can live under the tremendous weight of free-floating or traumatically induced (by others) shame and guilt. Shame and guilt should have a strictly defined purpose. If they have no purpose and don't lead to a spiritual improvement in our lives, they should be abandoned as a psychological or emotional fugue unless we want to voluntarily embrace insanity, self-abandonment, dysfunctionality, depression, and despair.

The kind of shame and guilt I am describing as unhealthy, unproductive, and soul-wrecking is the shame and guilt heaped upon us by others' unfair judgments and pronoucements, where shame and guilt are gratuitously used to allow someone else to feel psychologically or emotionally superior or in control by degrading us. When we internalize that kind of shame and guilt, it goes on autopilot and self-reinforcement, and that leads to the inevitable dark night of the soul. There is no love and no redemption in that unjustified shame or guilt. It must be purged or we never discover who we truly are.