Week 110: Using Healthy Shame as a Gift

I had an experience the other day that brought me back into an awareness of how shame can be a healthy spur to change, when it isn’t the toxic kind of experience where we are being humiliated or hurt by someone else. I was out with an elderly friend and lost an opportunity to help her through a door that I thought was one that would open automatically. When I registered that she was struggling with opening the door, I was just far enough away that my hesitation meant she had to get the job done by herself. Once she was inside, I filled up with the kind of shame that says, “I’m not going to let that happen again. I’m going to pay more attention in the future.” The experience got me in touch with the power of the kind of shame that becomes a positive reminder during those moments when we aren’t measuring up to the standards we have set for our behavior in the world.

There’s no question that shame is an uncomfortable feeling, and one that most of us would prefer not to feel. Being ashamed in the way I described above, though, is completely different from the toxic shame that shows up in dysfunctional or abusive relationships. Toxic shame emerges when one person uses shaming to reduce another person to a state of humiliation and vulnerability. Healthy shame, on the other hand, helps us discover those areas of our lives that need to be changed, or need our attention. Hopefully, when we are ashamed in this way, we also feel compassion for our inevitable human imperfections.

In general, I prefer to focus on what we do that is right, on what we do that’s moving in the direction we want to go. With the kind of experience I had recently, though, there is an opportunity to get a glimpse into the mirror of ourselves where we may not yet be aware of limitations that need our attention. It’s like a constant process of polishing ourselves, of being willing to notice how we actually move through the world (compared to how we think or wish we do), and to be able to make the little corrections along the way that add up to feeling increasingly at one with how we want to be.

This week’s experiment is tricky, because there are two very important pieces to it. The first and foremost is that you engage this experiment without judgment, without allowing yourself to be self-punishing or self-critical. I know it may seem strange to focus on shame and, at the same time, focus on non-judgment, but the ability to look at ourselves clearly requires us also to be able to do so with compassion and self-acceptance. The second part of the experiment is to allow yourself to notice the places where you don’t quite measure up to the standards you’d set for yourself. The point isn’t to move through the week looking through a self-critical lens. The focus is, instead, to allow yourself to be aware of things you might otherwise overlook – those little moments where you don’t do something you really believe in doing, or where you don’t help someone you felt an initial urge to help, or where you say something you didn’t intend to say because it was hurtful to someone else.

Since we all have big experiences and memories in our lives that have caused us shame, let’s put those aside for this experiment. The goal here isn’t to dig into your most painful stuff and feel awful. Instead, the experiment invites you to look for small moments where you can offer yourself an opportunity to do something different next time, to notice where you can become more aware of the ways you’d like to be in the world, and then practice them. Allow yourself to experiment with using being ashamed in healthy ways to become the catalyst for changes you want to make in your life.

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