Original Mixed Media © Beth Barnett.
BY LOUISA ROGERS
My husband and I were eating lunch in a restaurant in Mexico, where we live part of the year. Suddenly he grabbed a chunk of bread that had come with my order. “What are you doing?” I sputtered. “That is my bread!”
“What do you mean it’s your bread?” Barry countered.
“It came with my order,” I said, my voice rising. I know from long habit that I speak loudly—too loudly—but especially so when I’m feeling emotional.
“Would you keep your voice down?” he muttered.
Suddenly aware of other diners looking at us, I flushed. I never hear Mexicans express strong emotions, especially anger, in public, and I knew we stood out as foreigners.
“Let’s stop,” said Barry, putting his hands in a gassho, a physical gesture of hands in prayer position, which we have used for years as a way to express respect and closure. This wordless gesture has become an essential part of our relationship.
“Okay,” I conceded, gassho-ing back.
The gesture was premature, though, because I wouldn’t stop. “But you shouldn’t have eaten my bread!” I felt compelled to add.
“We just gassho-ed!” Barry protested.
Now I was in tears. I had indeed violated our sacred pact.
An hour later, I was so flooded by an all-pervasive sense of deep, primal shame that I completely lost my bearings. Berkeley, California, therapist Joan Gold describes what I experienced as “a full-scale assault on the self [when] we lose track of our inner guidance.”
At times I’m embarrassed that at 73, the age when we’re supposed to be respected elders passing on our hard-earned wisdom to younger generations, I’m still vulnerable to the occasional shame attack. The good news is I’m learning how to free myself from its powerful grip and get my sturdy self back.
Here are seven actions I stumbled on that helped me move past the shame.
1. I NAMED IT.
The experience of shame is so intense and visceral that I can’t always pinpoint exactly what is going on. That afternoon, though, I was able to figure out what it was and label it.
Naming is a way of framing the experience as separate from me: No matter how powerful it is, I am not the shame that feels like an alien force invading my body. Once I can call it what it is, I’m still shaky, but I can feel solid ground underneath me again. Or as Dan Siegel, M.D., executive director at the Mindsight Institute, has so famously said, “Name it to tame it.”
2. I DESCRIBED WHAT HAPPENED IN MY JOURNAL.
Ever since I started keeping a journal when I was 8, I’ve been an inveterate recorder of the day’s activities. This time, though, I didn’t want to, the shame was so intense. But I believe the psyche heals faster in motion, and my fingers scribbling across the page is a form of movement.
Back at home, I sat down on the sofa and wrote for about 20 minutes. Here’s what I scribbled:
I’m ashamed of the fight I picked with Barry at the café. I started arguing in a very public place, which is humiliating, especially in Mexico. I had just been bragging about how being with Daddy at his care facility had brought out my “best self,” and then what did I do? I turned into a 2-year-old having a tantrum. I got territorial and stupid about him taking “my” bread. I had to have the last word even after we gassho-ed. I bet X and Y [two friends] never go through this shit.
Big sigh. Okay, there it is. It’s all out on the page, the healing, freeing page that accepts, hears, receives.
A few days later, when I reread the passage, I couldn’t figure out why I had felt so ashamed. A petty argument? So what? I had been under an enormous amount of stress that week because my frail 101-year-old father was undergoing kidney surgery. I had just spent several days in flights back and forth, as well as dealing with myriad professionals responsible for his care. I was exhausted and still on edge when we had lunch. Plus, food is a historic trigger for me. No wonder my anxiety leaked out somewhere. And shame isn’t rational.
I've realized that shame isn't an adversary I can fight directly; rather, the only way out is through.
3. I TOOK A SHOWER.
My hair needed to be washed, and I know how good a clean head of hair feels. And I believe water heals. After all, not only are our bodies 60 percent water, but we also began our lives spending nine months floating in our mothers’ amniotic fluid.
As I showered, I remembered a passage in Andrew Solomon’s book, The NoonDay Demon: An Atlas of Depression, where he describes in heartbreaking detail trying to work up the courage to shower. Ever since reading this, I have never taken a shower for granted.
Solomon describes lying in bed crying because he was too frightened to take a shower, while at the same time knowing showers are not scary. He visualized all the steps involved, from getting out of bed, standing, walking to the bathroom and the tub, turning on the tap, standing under the water, soaping and rinsing his body, stepping out of the shower, and drying himself with a towel.
With every fiber in his body, he’d sit up, put his feet on the floor, but then stop. “I would feel so incapacitated and so frightened that I would roll over and lie face down,” he wrote. In light of that, my shower felt like a victory, and the shame began to slip away in the hot water.
4. I ASKED FOR HELP FROM MY LONG-GONE FAMILY MEMBERS.
My mother died in the ’70s, when Gerald Ford was president. I was still figuring out who I was when she died, and our relationship was at times rocky. Nor was my connection with my sister, who died 15 years ago, always smooth. But in the years since their deaths, I have turned to them many times when I’ve felt lost, and I’ve been amazed how I feel helped and comforted afterward in a way that I don’t fully understand—but gratefully accept.
I’ve found the words of Dutch Catholic priest Henri J.M. Nouwen in his book, Bread for the Journey to be true: “Remembering [loved ones] means letting their spirits inspire us in our daily lives. They can … gently help us as we make decisions on our journeys … Sometimes they can become even more intimate to us after death than when they were with us in life.”
I ask for help from my mother and sister not because they were always great models of excellence—far from it—but because they weren’t. Their brokenness seems to be just what I need. I can feel them empathizing with me, understanding when I tell them I feel like such a mess.
5. I WENT ON A WALK.
I walked not for exercise, but because motion is medicine: I know that moving my body outside in fresh air will help my mood. I love the quote by the British historian G.M. Trevelyan: “I have two doctors, my left leg and my right. When body and mind are out of gear (and those twin parts of me live at such close quarters that the one always catches melancholy from the other) I know that I have only to call in my doctors and I shall be well again.”
6. I ADMIRED THE MOON.
Before going to sleep, I looked out the window and saw the moon high in the sky, her crescent shape glowing in the darkness, so creamy and lustrous! I felt in some strange way that she was reaching out and comforting me. Admiring a thing of beauty helped me remember that even if I didn’t like myself at that moment, I could appreciate other things—and that was a start.
7. THE NEXT MORNING, I WROTE MORE.
I wrote,“It’s so weird, the way shame takes over and overwhelms anything and everything else,” I journaled. “After all, much more happened yesterday than our fight at lunch. Yet the shame spread all over the day like an inkblot, covering everything else.”
I went on: “What exactly is shame, and how does it operate? Is it like a bully? Like cancer, crowding out everything else? Is it an invasive species? Is it a virus? Is it a colonial power?” I finally decided shame was a wily, cunning trickster who knew exactly how to convince me I was worthless.
As I puzzled through these images, asking questions and trying to find the right metaphor, I suddenly noticed the shame had disappeared. I had become curious, and shame and curiosity can’t coexist. I was now an explorer, studying this powerful state that could reduce me to shreds.
Bestselling author Brené Brown, Ph.D., maintains what most of us intuitively know: Shame is universal. “We all have it,” she said in a 2013 TED Talk, “but no one wants to talk about it. The less we talk about it, the more we have it.”
She’s right; I sure didn’t want to talk about it. In my broken state, I was ashamed of feeling shame. Layer upon layer! I know I’m not the only person on the planet who experiences that emotion, but when shame consumes me, I feel uniquely worthless. The real problem is not the shame but the isolation.
I’ve realized that shame isn’t an adversary I can fight directly; rather, the only way out is through. Small steps like these help. What I know at 73, which I didn’t know at 7, is that it doesn’t last. Like storm clouds, the shame will pass. &