This morning I decided to do what John Mace and I call the “shame exercise.” You identify an event where you felt shame, and then you go through basically three steps. Shame is a feeling of powerlessness. Forgiveness falls short in dealing with it long term. That sense of powerlessness is the feeling you get when you are penalized for breaking a rule you don’t understand. In other words, you don’t know what you did wrong.
As you can imagine, this happens a lot when we are small children. So we enter our teens pretty much with a lot of it (shame).
I went back to a time when I was applying for a job at an insurance company when I was 18. At the time, I was working, making phone calls, and talking people into going to a show room. One day, a man who thought I was really good offered me a job
making a lot more money. I just needed to come to Dallas (next city over) for an interview and personality test. But he was excited to hire me, and I was excited about the opportunity. The office was huge. He didn’t spend much time talking to me, and ushered me to a room where I took a test. It asked me questions like: “would you prefer $50,000 a year or $150,000 a year.” Being certifiably poor and ignorant, I wrote $50,000. I did not want to appear greedy. So notice that I lied. I really did want the $150,000.
When I was done, I got the bum’s rush out of the office and back onto the elevator. That’s when I looked in the mirrors in the elevator. I saw dirty hair, old tattered clothes. I looked nothing like all of those beautiful people. I wasn’t good enough to work there. That’s how it felt anyhow. Of course I called to find out about my test, and even if my appearance had not been a factor, I would not have been considered “motivated” enough to hire. You see, it was a test about motivation, not about how good a person you are.
So in the shame exercise, we take a close look at all of the factors that resulted in that experience (feeling). Then we look at the feeling with all of our senses, and finally we ask what we learned from the experience – gleaning as much as we can.
In this way, we see how it happened, we show up with our presence (senses), and bring forward with us those tools so that it is very unlikely this will ever happen again. In this way your power is restored. You trust yourself “in that situation” again.
And sometimes you get great insights from this exercise. Sometimes they come later. For me, one of the things I realized is that my long hair is a cliche. It really is about defiance, even if it started out as something else. But it probably goes back to that day when I was 18 when I was told that I was not good enough because of my appearance. And here I sit, fully confident in all areas of my life, which not many can say in this world. And what do I look like? A lot like that 18 year old kid. So I guess I’ll get a hair cut today because one of the takeaways is that you don’t enter any relationship by yourself.
One day, I was meeting with one of my closest clients about a month ago. This particular morning, I let my hair down, put on my unusual hat, and wore my favorite T-shirt. His immediate reaction was, “do you dress like that when you meet with others?”
I said, “no, not up to this point. Do you think the hair is too long?”
“Yeah, maybe it just needs to be neutral,” he replied in his polite way.
Now if I’m honest, I was listening to him and thinking to myself, “this is just about him.”
But being a professional out in the world, he was really thinking about how presentable I was to others, and how that would impact my business and ultimately my ability to connect and help others.
He was thinking about “me.”
At the time, I just felt so confident about my abilities, I refused to accept that it mattered at all (wow, do you see the similarity to the situation when I was 18?)
So that’s why I picked this event. And I’m glad I did. Not only did I get a lot out of the experience, I realized that I have not yet done the exercise for the single, biggest, most painful shame experience I have ever had. I wrote it down on a post it note for next time.
Note: working with people, I have noticed that shame is the single biggest driver in just about everyone’s lives.
But there is something more. Sometime that is pretty easy to understand, I think. When we feel shame, our “minds” tell us, “you can’t be trusted.” This shows up in the form of rules we must follow instead of trusting ourselves to do the right thing. This shows up in complex dramas throughout our lives. The unconscious shame triggers the story, and the story results in more shame.
But when you do the exercise, you see how the event actually came to be. With many events, we have long since developed the skills to avoid that situation ever happening again, and yet we still do not trust ourselves. We still revert to the rules and stories. So when we become fully conscious of how that event actually happened, are present with the feeling (with our senses), and then review all that we learned, our minds can no longer claim that “we can’t be trusted.”
The argument no longer arises, and neither does the judge in our head regarding that event. Pretty magical when you think about it. Much of the entire New Testament is devoted to the subject of forgiveness. It’s one of the three pillars of an Eastern philosophy. In a Course in Miracles, it is written that “when a single person forgives completely, all will be done (something like that. I’m going from memory).”
But clearly forgiveness (which is actually about shame) is considered to be one of the most important subjects of mankind. I agree. But this also gives me the opportunity to point out that, for me, this is simple and practical. There was a time when math was the province of the priesthood. Now it is practical knowledge for everyone. I think it would be helpful to think of forgiveness in the same way. What is forgiveness, really? How can I overcome shame? Is there something simple and practical I can do? Yes, there is.