Perpetual Feelings of Shame

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This isn't sad enough to belong in this forum, but I am not sure where else to put my thoughts.

Last month, I posted that I have a hard time accepting myself, and that I was ready to try harder (for those interested, click )here. Today, I was thinking that I have insight what is holding me back: shame and fear. I have a self-concept that I am stupid and lazy, and have thought this way as far back as I can remember. These twin fears have propelled me to do quite the opposite, and be an intelligent busybody at times. Now I am faced with my first real failure in life, and there are days where I really do feel I am stupid and lazy.

As far as I can tell, no one thinks I am stupid and lazy. The media thinks I'm sheltered, and I know of people who think I grew up in a generation of p*****s, but I personally do not know anyone who thinks I am lazy and stupid. I still feel that way, though, and feel ashamed. I think I limit my interactions with others because I fear retribution if my secret laziness is revealed. At various other times in my life, I was ashamed of other things. For instance, when I worked in Washington DC, I was ashamed of my Asperger's, and thought I'd be shunned in the workplace if anyone found out (they did find out, and were okay with it). When I'm abroad, I'm ashamed to talk to others because I am an American, and I hear no one likes Americans. The list goes on.

One of the things that woke me to this reality is when I went to an informal high school reunion just before Christmas. Several people went out of their way to say "hello." A friend I went with told me that people in high school respected me, and I saw evidence of it that night. Before that night, I sincerely believed they hated me, and wanted nothing to do with me.

I am just not forthcoming with others. I feel a need to hide aspects of myself out of shame. I don't know why I feel shame, but I do.

Apologies for the length of this post, but that felt cathartic to write. I think I am on to something.

i ripped this out of my book for you. I had the same idea


Aspergers or toxic shame?
“If shame had a face, I think it would kind of look like mine. If it had a home it would be my eyes” Sick Cycle Carousel – Lifehouse

There are many “root emotions,” Anger, fear, sadness, disgust, contempt, surprise, enjoyment, guilt, and shame. All of these have derivatives and are names for longer groups of emotions, and most are seen in all humans from major capital cities to remote tribes. They are an essential part of the human condition and the master of these is shame.
The emotion of shame can take many forms, it is both a healthy emotion when its fluid but crippling condition when it becomes a stuck internalised state. A fluid sense of shame is healthy and important to signal to us that we are not gods and we are merely human and that we have limitations. It tells you that you need help in life, you need love and intimacy and companionship. We need to love and be in caring relationships with others.
The problems come from the emotion no longer being energy in motion. A stuck deeply internalised sense of shame is an insidious condition that’s the root of self-loathing, addictions and a host of neurosis. Amazingly, panic, phobias, drug addictions, depression, irrational guilt, public speaking fears, rape trauma, some obsessions, self-sabotage, post-traumatic stress, anxiety, food addiction, alcoholism, chronic anger, child abuse, sex problems, rejection, smoking, general stress, love pain and physical pain can all be linked, in differing degrees, to shame.
A profound sense of shame is an excruciatingly painful internal experience that never really ends. You feel disowned from your own needs and wants and this sense of shame manifests itself in a number of undermining ways:
•Embarrassment or Blushing. Blushing is an involuntary expression of healthy shame, mistakes are human and a part of our nature. A person is unable to cope with the demands of the environment and a momentary sense of embarrassment keeps us grounded and in touch with basic human limitations. In its fluid form it’s an essential check and balance for living. In its static form, it’s a cause of embarrassment to even cast a shadow.
•Shyness. This is a natural defence mechanism that helps prevent us charging into a dangerous situation or being attacked by a stranger. This has obviously evolutionary roots that although largely irrelevant today do still have a role. Think of approaching a beautiful woman in a club, or a person you have never met before in the street. In these situations, a degree of shyness and anxiety is appropriate, 10,000 years ago if you got this wrong – you got killed. Today, that’s thankfully now the exception. Where this becomes a problem is when shyness is based on shame and it becomes stuck and creates a social phobia that usually draws out negativity from people.
•Shame as hyper individualism. This one for me was massive. I thought I was so strong and so independent that I never needed anyone’s help whatsoever. I would rather fail 1000 times alone than succeed with the help of another. That I need help at all would sully the success beyond all value. People like this either succeed or fail at the extremes, there is no balance. We all have a need for others, there is no such thing as an “emotionally healthy loner”. We all need to love and grown and care for another and need to be needed. Unsurprisingly this links closely with the second stage of development in infancy. The improper development of shame leads us towards righteous indignation and the profound defiance I exhibited in early childhood never changed until I wrote this book.
•Perfectionism. I’ve mentioned this before but it comes from many angles. The need for perfectionism is pervasive. This can take the form of believing you are “always right”. This belief stops you looking, learning and being curious. No one is always right but believing you are stops you looking for more effective answers. There is no moral prize for being “morally right”. Not in the real world. The only value in being right is in its effectiveness.
•Self-mourning. If a person is shamed to their very core, pleasure and pain can be reversed. For me pain, I found self-perpetuated pain to actually be very sweet and feel very alive. Conventional healthy logic would say that is absolutely bizarre but if you believe the pain is deserved it can serve the purpose of relieving guilt and shame.
•Addictions and compulsions. Addictions can take many forms they can be to work, exercise, food, drink, drugs or sex. Whatever your addiction may be, the root is often a sense of shame and an emotional inability. The drive to work excessively or not at all, are both flip sides of the same coin called shame. Damaging but mood altering substances are used because of the inability to alter painful (or even sweet) moods in healthy ways. When lacking these vital skills, the usual recourse is to drink, drugs, food and even work. These behaviours are rooted in shame and worse perpetuate more shame. You feel shame so you drink, you drink and then you feel more shame. This destructive and self-perpetuating cycle is based on the stuck emotion of shame. Hurt, loneliness, self-loathing are all rooted in shame and perpetuated by addiction.
•Character/personality disorders. Everyone seems to recognise at least some parts of themselves on the DSM criteria for personality and character disorders. The more you read about them the more you convince yourself you have one. For that reason I don’t want to go over them but to my mind the root of many of them, including Narcissistic Personality Disorder is the stuck emotion of shame.
•Sexual denialism. Sexuality and sexual energy is the most powerful of all the body’s energy flows, it affects your consciousness, awareness, presence, alertness, CONFIDENCE and ENERGY. To deny it, is profoundly unhealthy. Despite this, for some people, myself once included, there is a very dark fear that “what if someone knew that I have a sexual side”. I link this to a number of things, logic over emotion, childhood sex experiences, hyper-individualism and equal connectivity. The pleasure of sex is emotional and only with emotional range and weighting can that pleasure become intense enough to override disgust. Most of the disgust people feel towards sex is based around shame. Nothing is shamed and as misused by society to perpetuate its own needs as sex is. Society is not really comfortable with sex, sex and sexuality has been hijacked, shamed and sullied to be about everything other than what it is really about – pleasure and babies. There is nothing wrong with two people (or more) having fun. It was nature’s intent and who was I to argue or be “above” that?
This list is far from an exhaustive and many of these aspects are covered far deeper in the follow-up book to this one, but the bottom line and common thread is simply a stuck emotion of shame. Any emotion can become stuck. When this happens they no longer function as an emotion – they become an identity. Think of people who you can characterise emotionally, they may be angry, grumpy or depressive. Either way they have experienced an emotion so much that it has become linked to identity. Notice the language used, they say they ARE angry not they are currently FEELING angry. When this happens unconsciously with shame, you become emotionally frozen and deny yourself to yourself, all feeling’s, drive’s and needs immediately bring forward feelings of shame and contempt.
Ultimately this sense of stuck shame becomes a feeling you are flawed and defective. If you managed to shake off this sense of shame from childhood by blaming your parents, I bet it returned when you were diagnosed with Aspergers, a voice inside goes “Oh $&! It’s true!! !” For me that was the cue for a seven year meltdown and horrendous compensatory behaviours. It created an inability to trust myself which undermined all confidence.
A person who is ashamed is one who is yet to draw out from within himself all his talents and the full level of his skills the he seeks to use. For me shame and Self-Sabotage is a sign that your job is only half to 3/4 of the way done. 50% conviction can be shamed... 100% is positive and vibrates in a way that deflects shame and pulls in love and joy (to oneself and towards others).
So what do you actually do about this? Understanding a problem does not fit it. You have probably been waiting the whole time to find out how to actually heal this. You can take two routes, one is to find someone and talk openly about what shames you and the other is to just let it go.

Lol, have you had bad experiences? I'm Dutch and I like Americans, haven't really spoken to someone who did hate them.
What makes people dislike the US is more the aggressive Americanisation and the fact you guys drag us into unwinnable wars

But Americans themselves? Very warm, and open people.
As long as your not one of those USA #1 types, because nobody really gives a s**t.

So don't feel held back by being an American if you go abroad please. In fact, I like going abroad because people assume I'm not weird. Im just a foreigner, maybe you can pull of that trick

I feel very much the same.

For many years I thought it was due to some embarrassing mistake I made as a child for which I was badly humiliated. And maybe that is partly why I carry this weight of shame with me most of the time. But I don't think that's the whole story.

I had drifted away from friends from high school and only reunited 20 years later. I learned much the same thing as you did; that my friends did not look down on me and in fact respected me quite a bit.

I suppose I drift away from my friends because I feel I do not deserve their company... That they find me tiresome and irritating. I don't insist on the value of my ideas at work because I feel my ideas will be seen as stupid and that I am just a dilettante. I take photographs and make films but I dread showing them to people because I feel anyone could do better.

And yet I know much of this is not true. Yet many of my interactions with people are colored by my feelings of shame. I feel I will be found out; that I have just been pretending while everyone else is the true article.

Most artists will recognize a variation on this experience... When I tell a stranger that I am a photographer, I frequently get the response of "oh, I know a REAL photographer." The implication is that I'm just pretending to be a photographer and their acquaintance is the real thing. This reinforces my feeling that my work is worthless and that I should be ashamed for pretending to be good at what I do. My work has been published in magazines and books but I always felt ashamed that I wasn't a real photographer; so much so that I eventually stopped trying to be a commercial photographer.

I don't know that my sense of shame has diminished over the years. I don't care as much as I used to about some things, but I still find it stops me from doing some things. I finished a film this year which most people seem to like and yet I can't bring myself to enter it into festivals.

I don't have any answers, but I will say that it is good you are understanding some of these things about yourself early rather than late.

Come to think of it, the worst experience I had abroad was with a Bavarian who thought Americans were soulless and cared only about money. He had a gigantic ego, though.
Otherwise, no. My friends abroad trade stories about the "ugly Americans" who are loud in public places and such. I can assure you not all Americans are like that. In terms of my experiences abroad, most people I met are simply curious about life in America, just as I'd be curious if I met them in middle America. This isn't true in a city anywhere, but I've spent a great deal of time in rural northern Germany and southern Italy, and those outside the large cities are often more open.
I have never been to the Netherlands, but I've heard great things about the country. Perhaps I can visit one day.