You and I Are Too Old For SHAME to Ruin Our Lives
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society
Get over it already, ‘K?
Not so fast.
Let’s talk.
Last Wednesday, my handyman, who is 6’2” tall and looks like a skinny Santa, was busy painting a bedroom in my basement. The basement is carpeted.
Truth, I hate that carpet. I had it removed upstairs, the last of which was forcefully stripped due to two rather significant water events.
So now, happily, the entire upstairs has oak floors. Bear with me, it’s relevant.
Late in the day, Palmer, the handyman, was slapping Aegean Teal onto one of the walls. I was in the kitchen upstairs.
Suddenly I heard,
SHIT
Not a good word to hear from your handyman.
I came downstairs to find out that said wall was now a Jackson Pollack painting. So was the carpet, for that matter.
Palmer had backed off his small ladder and managed to plant his size twelve boot on the lip of the open paint can, sending its contents flying everywhere.
SHIT.
I wasn’t mad.
I felt guilty. Shamed.
Like it was my fault.
For crying out loud, WHY? Palmer had just managed to ruin my carpet, and I feel shamed by something he had done?
Palmer felt horrible. Since then he’s put in yeoman’s work to clean it up, even calling in the city’s best carpet outfit. The pigment had stained the carpet’s fibers, and that was that.
He of course is now going to replace the carpet. I hated the carpet anyway, so if ever there was a perfect time to rip the rest of it out and just get the whole basement done, it was now.
I’m going to end up grateful.
But why on earth did I feel shame and guilt every time I came downstairs carrying yet another bucket of warm water for Palmer to use in his cleanup efforts?
Why did I feel guilty, as though somehow it was my fault?
This of course invited all kinds of inner work.
Naming the Shame Game
A few weeks ago I heard someone spell out a mnemonic device which deconstructed the idea of shame.
SHAME:
Should
Have
Already
Mastered
Everything
Right?
Those of you who grew up in alcoholic families as I did, I’ll bet this hits home. So often in deeply dsyfunctional homes, parents with substance abuse problems and a lack of emotional development will heap their personal shame and guilt on their kids.
Worse, they expect their children to do the adulting for them, or even act as surrogate parents to their own parents. Those kids HAVE to overachieve and make up for every shortcoming of their folks. They’re not allowed to fail.
Worse, damaged parents telegraph to their tiny kids that they are responsible for the parents’ emotional welfare. Worse still, that all the shit that happens in the house is, somehow, their fault. A busted cup. A spilled dinner.
“You made me do this” is a classic shaming instrument.
That was my household. On top of that my big brother was a predator. In retrospect this doesn’t surprise me. My brother was extremely sensitive. I suspect that was just one way he was able to offload the burden.
Parents, rats and research
In researching this article, I came across this blog piece by psychotherapist David Hixon.
Here’s one key quote which addresses what I’m exploring:
We learn to ask for help when we are in pain be it physical, emotional, or existential. Conversely, a dis-regulated parent, that is unavailable or angry about our distress teaches us that our pain is to be kept hidden from others. These lessons from childhood form the backbone of our adult experience, determining whether we live a life of connectivity and vitality or one of solitude and shame. (author bolded)
Hixon presents rat research (don’t be offended, please, it’s valid), and writes:
Bolstering this argument are the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) studies conducted by Kaiser-Permanente. Beginning in 1995, about 17,000 adults in the San Diego area were recruited into a study seeking to measure negative childhood experiences against adulthood issues with mental, physical, and relational health. The researchers were hoping to gather quantifiable data to back-up the assertions of the ‘soft-science’ of psychologists and psychotherapists. To answer the question: does your childhood really determine the quality of your adulthood? Amongst other questions, adults were assessed for their childhood exposure to neglect (emotional or physical), abuse (verbal, physical, sexual), and household challenges (poverty, hunger, homelessness, divorce, death, addiction, etc.). The higher the number of negative experiences, the higher the ACE score.
In a remarkably direct fashion, higher Adverse Childhood Experiences scores have translated into higher rates of depression, anxiety and suicide attempts during adulthood. There is also a direct relationship with higher rates of smoking, obesity, coronary and liver disease. And those with high ACE scores are more likely to have unexplained negative medical symptoms and more likely to have trouble getting and keeping work. (author bolded)
Hixon, who typically works with teens, sees the direct impact that dysfunctional parenting has on kids and how it plays out into their childrens’ adulthood and parenting. I saw my parents in this article, and by way of that, perhaps a way to understand why my folks regularly shamed me.
He writes:
Core shame develops when our body's ability to deal with transitory stress is continually triggered and overburdened.
Imagine doing that to this tiny creature, who has absolutely no defenses whatsoever.
Shame on you for being born a girl
My mother was quick to remind me that she was ashamed and deeply unhappy that I was a girl. That foundational shame, which I likely share with millions of Chinese women (if not most women), is horrifying.
This article addresses the unspeakable outcome of the one-child policy in China. Girl children were aborted and murdered in the millions. If you lived, you were shamed for your sex, something that you most assuredly couldn’t help. Interestingly, the inevitable end product was not enough women to marry too many men, among other unintended and disastrous consequences.
From that NPR piece:
The Nobel economist Amartya Sen estimated there were about 100 million missing women, women that were never born or killed or aborted across Asia.
The prejudice and disregard directed towards girl children boggles the mind. An entire nation managed to shame all its women for having girl children.
Even in movies. In the sequel to Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, the character Snow Vase is explaining a young man’s history to him. She says
“Great is the joy of a child. Greater still is the value of a boy.”"
then,
“…a concubine who had given birth days before switched her worthless girl for you.”
Imagine determining that this tiny creature is worthless.
In America we broker shame as a way to control, most especially women.
Shame is inculcated into our culture, thanks to religion, extreme views, addiction, and widespread emotional immaturity. We can thank our Calvinist roots for that inheritance.
One only need read current headlines to see this in action from the States to the Supreme Court.
Shame worms its way into our own psychological toolbox where we can wield it against our sacred selves, without any help from anyone else, thank you.
That’s why I felt guilty that my handyman stepped onto his paint can and Pollocked my south-facing wall.
I felt guilty for HIS mistake. That’s how deeply this goes. I’m 71, and after decades of personal work, all I could think was WOW.
That’s instructive. But it’s also hilarious.
On redirecting shame and owning our value
The knee-jerk response of guilt and shame was an invitation. As my friend Melissa, who has some of the same issues, loves to say, how curious.
The fact that I also found it hilarious is the result of years of personal work.
The growing superpower of curiosity, as opposed to simply wallowing in self-loathing that shame and guilt can produce, is the first step.
The power of hilarity, to see the ridiculousness of such a feeling so incongruous with the event, is the road forward.
We get to feel the shame, observe it, acknowledge its presence, question its purpose, and ask what it needs. This is a perfectly valid part of us which grew out of a need to protect ourselves. So we can sit with the feeling and interrogate it, with love, and ask its purpose.
How does this feeling signal a need to be heard?
Shame is born both of our upbringing and the incessant pounding of ads, messaging, church and politics and social media- all the “food” we ingest which feeds various parts of us.
Whatever your religion, all of them speak to the power of words, which are ingested the same way we eat Easter Sunday ham.
Shame morphs as we age, and then we feel shame because we age. WHAT?
So while many of us may not necessarily feel shame for being female, we still may feel shame that we didn’t (marry well, get the degree, have perfect children, have it all by thirty, lose the weight).
Shame that we didn’t have the eighteen inch waist on our wedding day IF we got married, the huge house, the easy life, perfect thighs, immaculate teeth, whatever we’re supposed to have, and should be ashamed when we don’t.
Shame that we got grey, got wrinkled, our butt dropped to our ankles and our boobs landed in our laps. Then we grew facial hair and an outdoor rug in our ears. As if we signed up for that, right?
Read this again:
Should Have Already Mastered Everything.
Societal messaging and advertisements weaponize shame at every level, shame about our bodies, our lack of accomplishments, and most especially our AGE.
MOST ESPECIALLY OUR AGE.
Who came up with this idiocy? That’s a whole study in patriarchy and this isn’t that article.
If this still doesn’t quite track, and here I’m addressing my fellow females, how often during the day do you begin a sentence with “I’m sorry?”
How often do you find yourself apologizing? Often for no reason, except existing?
Here’s a piece from Forbes about what that does at work. I believe that the same is true in all our relationships. Constant apologizing undermines our confidence.
I believe that compulsion also has its roots in shame.
Shame was so powerful in my life that I nearly starved myself to invisibility. A living apology for having had the audacity to be born female.
The incident with the paint was such a gift, for it was a reminder that those parts live in me. Anyone who has read No Bad Parts knows what I mean; there are other valid approaches to dealing with the damaged bits of our history with respect and love.
This article invites us to walk towards what makes us anxious, rather than hightail it to a highball or cocktail which might anesthetize and soothe. That’s no answer. When we embrace what causes us guilt or shame, especially where those feelings arise without just cause, we also embrace a different way forward.
Being curious means that I’ve been able to explore my mother’s behavior, beliefs and self-loathing (because she was a girl, and where pray tell did she get that message?). That curiosity, without blame or contempt, has allowed me to feel pain for what she must have undergone in order to calcify such beliefs.
Finding it funny takes away the fangs. A demon simply becomes a sad, deflated sack in need of counseling.
You and I get to choose whether or not we continue to drip damage onto the most vulnerable and saddle them forever, our own children and those we teach and mentor.
Or, by being willing to stride right towards and into those painful (false) narratives, we soothe that damaged child within.
That’s goddess work. It’s available to all of us, that inner mothering, the child who heals the mother who heals the child.
Now that’s a way to celebrate spring, Easter Sunday, or any pagan rite such as Ostara which marks this time of year for you.
We get to remake ourselves all day, every day. We don’t have to carry what doesn’t work for us into our future, and into the futures of those who depend on us.
Let’s play.
Thank you for spending part of your day with me. I hope this challenged you to challenge those feelings which arise in you and which do not serve you. I hope that you came away with ideas and joy and hope. If so, please consider
As always, if you know someone else who could use some ideas and a way forward, please consider
This is my living. If you have the wherewithal and feel like this is worthy, please again consider subscribing to help me keep the lights on.
No matter how you spend your day, your money, your life, do it with joy.
Another wonderful, honest, in-depth and well-researched & thought provoking piece. Thanks Julia, none of us escapes from the feeling of shame but you’ve shone a light on how to work through it. Goddess work indeed.
Thank you, Julia. I'm feeling intense shame and regret right now for a serious blunder I made -- failing to intervene in a situation that deeply hurt a loved one. I've forgotten just what a heavy hairshirt blanket shame can be. It's exhausting -- but I'm determined to keep stumbling along.