Despite having a loving partner, Mark feels unloved. He grew up in a world that shamed him for who he is | Chris Cheers

MArk, a strange man in his mid-thirties, has been visiting me biweekly for a few months now. I learned that Mark loves his job and lives with his loving partner in a house they love, on a street they love, with a dog they love.

I also learned that Mark believes he is unlovable.

Chloe, a student in her early twenties, is a first-generation Indian Australian. She has just started law school, with a full scholarship she received after achieving the highest grades ever at her regional high school. During a few sessions with Chloe, I learned that she volunteers at a local youth center a few nights a week, cares for her elderly mother, and is always the one her friends come to for help.

I also learned that Chloe believes she is not enough.

While guilt can be thought of as an emotion that tells us that we have done something bad, shame tells us that there is a core part of us that is bad, and that we should do everything we can to hide that part of us.

This is why shame work can be so powerful, because it is not a process of self-care, but of self-acceptance. You can’t take care of yourself out of shame.

Both Mark and Chloe grew up in a world that taught them that there was something wrong with who they were. For Mark, this looked like homophobia at school and a family that did not accept his homosexuality. For Chloe, it came in the form of racism, with her earliest memories relating to feeling left out at school and microaggressions on public transport.

Shame is often an internalization of stigma and prejudice. We feel ashamed before we feel shame. Like many from marginalized communities, Mark and Chloe came to see themselves as the problem, rather than the discrimination that surrounded them. And like many who experience shame, Mark and Chloe have learned that the only way to overcome their problem is to achieve success within the same system that shamed them.

This is the false path offered to us to escape from shame. To work. To achieve. To be perfect. To take responsibility for our own lives and make them better.

The system offers a false promise that if we do enough, we will feel enough.

But it doesn’t work because of shame, as highlighted by Dr. Devon Price in his brilliant book Unlearning Shame, is best understood as systemic:

“Systemic shame is more than just a feeling of debilitating self-blame – it is also a worldview about how change happens and what it means for a person to live a meaningful or moral life. But by prioritizing the values ​​of perfectionism, individualism, consumerism, wealth and personal responsibility above all else, Systemic Shame actually trains us to maintain the status quo rather than disrupt it.”

To put it another way, the harm of shame is not the feeling itself, but rather the harmful lives we often build in an attempt to protect ourselves from this shame. Although the cause of our shame is not within ourselves, individualism teaches us that we should only do things to feel better and live a happy life.

Like many in the LGBTQ+ community, the culture of systemic shame offered Mark a false path out of shame based on work, success, and wealth. As Price writes, systemic shame offers us “consumption and personal branding as the cure for being so alone and unseen. Instead of embracing other LGBTQ people, forming queer friendships, building our communities, and having the sex and relationships we desire, Systemic Shame tells us that we must find personal empowerment and pride in our identity – through buy the right items. and style ourselves appropriately.”

So if perfectionism, consumerism and wealth aren’t the way out, what is?

The first step is to understand the part of you that is ashamed and explore why it has developed. For Mark, this meant gaining insight into systemic shame, to help him challenge the image of himself as flawed, and rather see that shame was a normal consequence of the homophobia and lack of acceptance he already experienced. experienced early in his life.

Because shame is based on self-blame, the way out must also be based on self-acceptance. For Chloe, this process began with challenging internalized beliefs about how she “should” live her life, and replacing this with insight into what a meaningful life looks like for her. Working together has reconnected Chloe with art and music, passions that had become submerged in expectations of who she ‘should’ be.

Just as the cause of shame lies outside of yourself, so too must the cure. For many, this may mean a focus on relationships and collective action, to push back against a culture of systemic shame that tells us to blame individuals for the system’s problems. For Mark and Chloe, this process meant developing skills around vulnerability and communicating their own needs in relationships. Over time, this helped them feel safe to bring their authentic selves into their relationship, creating the opportunity to experience a new sense of connection and self-acceptance.

There was also a question that both Mark and Chloe found useful. It’s a question I often ask myself, to act against my own systemic shame: How would you live today, if you already believed you were enough?

Because challenging shame is about finding the radical belief that you already are.