“The trick is not how much pain you feel – but how much joy you feel,” says Jong. “Any idiot can feel pain. Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses.”
Shame and guilt are great excuses for denying yourself happiness and a full life! If you’re paralyzed with regrets about your past, I encourage you to find ways to move forward. Click on Healing the Shame that Binds You by John Bradshaw for help, and read on for advice and research about overcoming shame and guilt…
Overcoming Shame and Guilt – Erica Jong
Moving beyond the painful, paralyzing emotions of shame and guilt is not easy – but there is hope, my friends, for making mistakes and moving on! University of Alberta researcher Jessica Van Vliet studied these emotions and found specific things that help with overcoming shame and guilt.
First: realize that shame and guilt can improve your life. “Shame can prompt us to make changes that will help protect our relationships and also preserve the fabric of society. It’s important to emphasize that shame is essential and has value,” said Van Vliet. “The problem is when people get paralyzed with shame and withdraw from others. Not only can this create mental health problems for people, but also they no longer contribute as fully to society.”
How shame and guilt damages your health and well-being. Women who feel debilitated by shame tend to internalize and over-personalize the situation. They also seem resigned to being unable to change their feelings or their fate – and don’t allow themselves to believe that overcoming shame and guilt is possible. They don’t let themselves overcome failure and bounce back.
“When people experience shame, they may say to themselves ‘I’m to blame, it’s all my fault, all of me is bad, and there’s nothing I can do to change the situation,’” said Van Vliet. “They identify so much with shame that it takes over their entire view of themselves. That leads to an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness.”
Overcoming shame and guilt involves going to the dark place. Erica Jong says, “Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.” I think the “dark place” can be found in many situations and is different for all women. When it comes to talent, the dark place can be feeling selfish, or forcing self-discipline to stay motivated to pursue your dreams. When it comes to shame and guilt, the dark place can be sitting with and accepting those terrible feelings.
Step back from the problem. A key to overcoming shame and guilt involves view your problem in a different, objective light. It helps to identify external factors that contributed to your actions or situation (discrimination or peer pressure, for example) and differentiate between being a bad person versus doing something bad.
“When people move from a sense of uncontrollability to the belief that maybe there’s something they can do about their situation, such as apologizing or making amends for their actions, it starts increasing a sense of hope for the future,” says Van Vliet.
Connect with friends, family, a higher power, or humanity as a whole. “Connecting to others helps to increase self-acceptance, and with self-acceptance can come a greater acceptance of other people as well,” says Van Vliet. “People start to realize that it’s not just them. Other people do things that are as bad or even worse sometimes so they’re not the worst person on the planet. They start to say to themselves, ‘This is human, I am human, others are human.’”
Do you find the thought of overcoming shame and guilt scary or risky? Remember…“if you don’t risk anything you risk even more,” says Erica Jong.
I welcome your thoughts and questions on overcoming shame and guilt below…and if you found this article helpful, you might be interested in How to Fail and Bounce Back – Rachel Naomi Remen.
Source: University of Alberta (2009, September 9).” Overcoming Shame: Making Connections Is The Key, Says Researcher.” Van Vliet’s study was published in Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, and Practice.
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Wow, you really choose great topics, Laurie, with so much depth. In terms of emotions and vibrations, I view shame as being about as low as you can go (I would say it’s even lower than despair). I can see how having some regret can motivate change, but to me, shame is a very un-natural way to feel and needs to be acknowledged (going to the dark place) and released.
When I work with clients dealing with shame I often see it coming from someone else, such as someone being shamed by a parent when they were a child. When I look at it energetically, it’s as if someone has thrown dark, black energy into a person’s space. People then grow up and add to it by being concerned about what others think and then shaming themselves even more.
If we could all just be ok about making mistakes and accepting what is, we’d have so much less shame. And if we could stop judging others we’d stop spreading the shame.
I may have to write some articles on this topic myself – thanks for the inspiration.
Gini
Gini Grey´s last blog post..Courage
Thanks for your thoughts on overcoming shame and guilt, Gini – I can totally see how those emotions can be represented by dark, black energy. Ugh.
This was a particularly interesting article to write because of the research component!
I particularly like her finding that connecting with other people is so healthy. We seem to be made to interact with one another, to connect in all sorts of ways.
Laurie PK´s last blog post..Weight Loss for Teens – How to Lose Body Fat