Unconscious Shame

I once attended a workshop
that laid out a model of how shame develops.

The model suggested,
that when children feel overwhelmed with emotion,
—pleasant or unpleasant—
their natural instinct
is often to reach out to others
—like their parents—
to process it.

Yet,
for better or for worse,
parents may unintentionally “reject“ such reaching out.
And with repeated “rejection,”
children may start to subconsciously judge themselves
as unworthy of love and attention,
when overwhelmed with emotion.
Thus planting the seed of shame.

In hindsight,
I spent much of my life coping with shame.
I did it by pursuing a self-image
of someone who never felt overwhelmed.
A stoic who could always “figure it out,”
through sheer intellect and will power.

It wasn’t until I began my work on empathy,
that I learned the choice
to empathize with that part of me,
instead of hyper-empathizing with it.

It was perhaps as Carl Jung once said,
“Until you make the unconscious conscious,
it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Becoming Aware of Our Tension

One way
to sort the behaviors
that arise from too much tension
is into 5 categories.

It can be useful
to simply notice
and to acknowledge these behaviors
as natural human reactions
to our desire to relieve ourselves
of too much tension,
instead of judging them
as good/bad
or right/wrong.

This can give us
the requisite room in our mind
to not only appreciate the tension we experience,
but also the tension experienced by others
when they behave
the same way.

Self-Awareness

The profundity of looking into the mirror
is not merely that we’re looking at our selves,
but that we’re looking at our selves from an other’s perspective.

It is by looking through the eyes of a different perspective
that we learn to become self-aware.

To lose our willingness to realize our empathy with such an other,
an other who sees things differently from us,
is to lose our ability to be self-aware.