Shame and the feeling of being unlovable

I have been profoundly struck, lately, by the core importance of feeling like a lovable being.

At bottom, most of us have difficulty in feeling lovable. Why? We can look at our background for some reasons. Many of us had far from ideal childhoods. Maybe parents, with the best of intentions, did not convey to us a deep sense of being loved, and therefore being lovable, just as we were. Some parents never felt loved themselves, so they could hardly pass that feeling on to us. They saw parenting as the job of keeping us within social bounds - so we would not bring shame upon them, or on ourselves. On this view, your children are an advertisement for you - your qualities, your decency, your worth! Children, I find, have no difficulty in spotting the difference here between being socially acceptable and being loved! It makes them angry when they realise that someone has offered them one thing when it was actually the other! - that they have sold them short in the business of life from early on! And not only that but confused them into the bargain about what love is.

This example brings us right upon against what shame is, and why it differs from guilt. Guilt is a sense of having done something wrong - something real, though its 'wrongness' can be open to discussion. Shame is more about feeling you are a bad person all through. You can never be a good person - never be lovable.

Being kept within social norms or customs has two aspects:  1. my sense of worth when measured against society, and 2. my sense of worth as the unique individual I am. Take the second aspect first. Even babies have an inherent sense of dignity. They dislike being fooled - toyed with, where the motive is far from kindly. It offends their human dignity. As they get older, children become angry and upset when they feel we have played them for a fool. Notice the way children will refuse after a while to play a game which they feel they have no chance of winning. Where the real job is to display their elder siblings' cleverness! Some parents like using their children to show how clever and competent they are. Which is not rocket science - it's a dead cert if you are twenty or thirty years older! Their children know this well enough, and they will rebel after a while and become 'naughty.' 

If you are skeptical about how far back shame goes, please believe there is research evidence of shame being observed in infants of 6-8 months of age. Yes, it's subjective research - but what other measure do we have of human behaviour, unless you want to put your faith entirely in the behaviour of pigeons and rats in laboratories? 

'What will the neighbours think?' addresses the first variety of shame, which is feeling unable to measure up to the social norms and customs around you. This is a tough society we live in and make no mistake about that. There are clear goals which mark out achievement in western liberal cultures - academic distinction, a career (as opposed to a 'job'), a way of life which exhibits financial solidity, an 'appropriate' marriage or partnership, and so on. We may say we don't care, but it is hard to live that maxim in practice. You might say how much you care depends on how deep the second kind of shame has already been embedded - so in fact it closely connects them. Without a sense of a basic good (lovable) self, established from early on, we are more open to the whims and pressures of the surrounding culture.

Shame, I want to suggest, is not just inculcated by our early life experiences, however. It is innate in us all. In a Judeo-Christian culture like ours, it imbues us with a sense of our sinfulness from the earliest days. We express this in the myth of the Garden of Eden, and our 'fall from grace.' But since, as I wrote some while ago, grace is defined (by the church) as 'the free and unmerited favour of God', it is an odd idea that we are still born sinful. Whether it was true then, it cannot be true now, can it? Did not Christ himself announce that he had overturned the doctrines of the past? Yet everything in religious doctrine follows from this basic assumption that we are still born bad - sinful! There's no help for it. Christ can keep on dying, but we can only beg for mercy daily. Have we missed the point somewhere?

You may say, well I don't believe all that gobbledygook anyway. I am sure, with your rational mind. But it is in the psychological ether, I would contend:  the air we breathe. We all, to a degree, experience ourselves as part of sinful humanity. Tell me you don't experience twinges of nameless 'guilt' - which is in fact shame, as I have just defined it. You know it's shame when you can't put your finger on what you've done! Guilt is about what we have done. Shame is about what is wrong and can never be put right. It shows itself in perpetual apologies about trivialities: something and nothing. Nobody apologies like the British! They need to apologise for breathing sometimes. I try saying, "It's ok - you haven't done anything yet!" And people look astonished. Such an idea does not occur to them!

Actually, human nature is nothing like a being born into immutable sin. We didn't get the memo, perhaps. On the contrary. We start from our earliest days with a sense of instinctive self-importance. 'I, the baby, am here! Look at me! Aren't I wonderful?' Baby displays herself, with enthusiasm, for all those around to admire. 'Don't get above yourself!' is often the crushing parental response! From the mother or father who was not convinced he or she was lovable. If I am not lovable, they think, why should you feel so darn special? This could be dangerous! (To whom they do not spell out.) This inner dialogue takes place covertly. It is unconscious. We would be ashamed, after all, of admitting that we could envy the baby's love of itself - its confidence, its joy in being here! They advise caution. And so the dynamics of shame become quietly established, and this baby also grows up with a sense of caution. I should not get above myself. I am not that wonderful. And if I am not that wonderful, is it because I am not ok at all?

Perhaps you want to protest that, after all, social norms are important, and children do have to be inducted into norms of civilised behaviour, otherwise there would be no society. Yes, that's true. But we are taking about the covert induction I've described, often at an excessively young age. It's not the straightforward grounding, say, for the adolescent who had skipped important homework or stayed out late and endangered herself. Here, the fault is clear and open, and the punishment appropriate to the deed. This differs from the unconsciously crushing emotional response from the parent who has not quite acknowledged how much he or she is angered by the good experience of their child. This is a more subtle kind of squashing process, where one generation passes on to the next the idea that, "You aren't entitled to any more happiness than I had!" An idea which, once established, will mark the child for the rest of his life, in a way that puzzles him and everyone around him. Why doesn't s/he feel lovable? She ponders this but cannot connect to the early experience he or she had without a fair bit of help. And parental crushing may be far more brutal than this. It may involve exposure to abusive parents, maybe for years, in painful circumstances. I am inclined to think that it's the more subtle crushing that does the worst damage. We can survive a remarkable lot of suffering if we have a basic sense of being a good self - a loveable self. 

I'm struck, here by the sense of size as being linked to self-importance. (Notice how negative a word 'self-importance' is? Definitely not allowed!) By 'size' I do not mean suit size! I mean the degree to which we feel it ok to be expansive as a self - able to take up space, ok enough to be seen in a funny hat or a bright red dress, able to raise our voice when necessary and claim attention. ('They'll hear us," said a friend in a coffee bar, looking round nervously. Be assured, we were not discussing how best to undermine the state, or set up a human trafficking business! It was not ok enough for him to be heard at all!) Sometimes the body deals with this fear of being seen, being noticeable, being 'big', by rebelling and producing corroborating symptoms. If I feel tiny (squashed), I may grow a large body to compensate - become 'in your face' with my size! - and it will probably not shift no matter how many diets I follow. Part of us is registering a protest. 'I'm tired of being kept so small!' Or, on the other hand, the body becomes tiny to show how well we can keep ourselves within bounds. Being visibly out of bounds would be too shaming. "Look at me - I'm a good girl/boy - I can control myself!" This is one aspect of anorexia.

Shame is a generalised feeling of being bad, of feeling unlovable. It's a 'holding back' kind of feeling:  a holding of oneself down, and a squashing of oneself in. It's a 'take no risks' kind of feeling. Don't laugh loudly, someone may notice you and shame you! When shame is severe it may show as permanent low level depression, tearfulness for no apparent reason, low self-confidence when faced with ordinary challenges in life such as making a phone call or asking someone you like out for coffee. If you don't try you may not succeed, but equally you have no risk of failure and its shaming consequences! It's a 'keep out of trouble' kind of thing. A 'keep my head down,' 'leave me alone' kind of thing.

How can we overcome this toxic shame feeling, which has such profound consequences for our lives?  My next blog will try to address this. For now, think about your own individual pathway in the light of the above analysis. Each person's route to shame has been different. It all depends on what parts of ourselves were shamed. Not everyone has body shame but they may have mind shame - 'I am not clever enough to expose myself in a circle of intelligent people having a conversation.' 'I should not apply for this job as I will shame myself by failing.' The shame-based thought does not enter the mind fully formed. Rather, it lurks at the back, in the shadows, and we do not ask ourselves why we are doing this, often until the opportunity has passed.

It's likely to be shame you are struggling with, if it always seems to boil down to, 'I am not ok. I am not lovable. Nobody could really love me. I cannot love myself.'  I regret to say that early religious training, and the legacy of a culture indoctrinated with the idea of 'sinful man/woman' are significant factors behind these painful feelings. We become vulnerable with such half-conscious training to the indoctrinations of others, whether religious or political. We then lose the voice that you yourself can produce for your community, and it is ruled by others who have no such shame, and maybe fewer scruples too.