What is our accountability for developing shame triggers and starting the war? Last post talked about the potential for the environment around us influencing our development of shame. Let’s shift to the part we often like talking about less, us, how we influence our development of shame. People are more open to talking about how things outside of them might be accountable for their shame or other suffering in their lives, and less open to discussing how they are at least partially accountable for it. This seems to be human nature. I think that is because if someone accepts accountability for their own suffering, they might also have a tendency to not just be accountable but assign blame. This is tricky for people fighting a really huge shame war. They are already so deep into feeling ashamed and like they are horrible people that if someone suggests that their shame is being influenced by something they are doing, it just seems to make them feel more shame and the war ramps up, not diminishes. I have seen this response to learning we have accountability in our own suffering many, many times. When it happens, the healing halts because shame wins again. Shame does not motivate change. Feeling accountable often does, but if that flips instantly into shame, then we tend to just spin in place. I mention this because I’d like to caution you that what I am about to say might trigger this spiral, and I urge you try to stay open to hearing it without spinning into shame, if you can. If not, if you do start to spin, stop reading and come back and try again another time. Sometimes it is beneficial to focus only on outside influences and tackle this from that direction first before starting to address what we are doing to influence it. Eventually you will have to address personal accountability, but it is okay to start in another area first.
If you are ready to tackle identifying your personal accountability, let’s get started.
No matter what is happening around us, we are accountable for how we respond to it. The most important thing to remember when considering our accountability is that we can only respond with what we know at the time we respond. What this means is when we are five years old, we can respond like a five year old, with that level of maturity, knowledge, emotional development, etc. Some of what that means is, our development of shame somewhat depends on where we are at in our internal skills and sense of self when events are happening to us. How we respond is dependent on what skills we have and how strong our sense of self is when the potentially shaming event occurs. The older we are, the more skills we have, the more confident we are in who we are, the less likely that a humiliating and shaming event will trigger the development of internal lasting shame. On the other hand, the younger we are, the fewer skills we have, and the less developed our sense of confidence is in our self, the more likely it is that an event that may or may not actually include shaming content will trigger the development of shame.
Examples might be, in first grade having a teacher who tends to be a bit strict and critical of their students. They might raise their voice, use demeaning and shaming language when giving feedback and use public call outs for mistakes with statements about how mistakes are because people are fundamentally flawed. In this environment, most first graders would struggle to maintain a sense of confidence in themselves. This is partially due to their developmental stage in life and where their development of self is naturally. Many of them may develop a shame war due to how this teacher treats them AND due to having minimal skills to cope with this teacher’s treatment. On the other hand, if a college professor responds to their students in the same way, the students have a greater chance to have developed the skills and confidence to take the professor’s actions with a grain of salt. In this case, healthy students with good coping skills will learn in the class and sort of write of the professor’s treatment as their issue. They might not take it on as personal or internalize it into a shame war about themselves. Alternately, if a first grader has awesome supports outside of that teacher who uses the teacher as an opportunity to build up the first grader’s skills at coping with difficult people, who helps the kid to be resilient and overcome the challenge, then no shame war. In the college situation, a student who does not have outside supports, or who maybe didn’t have those supports even earlier in life, might not have developed resiliency skills and can’t separate the professor’s actions from their own sense of self and assign the appropriate meaning to what the professor is saying. In this case, the student might take on all of the professor’s criticism as about them as true, and so, develop a shame war.
This is why I really caution people from taking the idea of accountability for your own suffering on as blaming yourself and using it as more evidence that you should be ashamed of yourself. You did the best you could in coping with any environment that might have produced a shame response. You are currently also doing your best to combat the world and how it treats you. Not having the skills to form a resilient, strong, confidence in yourself is not anyone’s fault, and we are each accountable for what we have done and continue to do to either reduce or increase our suffering in life, i.e. bringing about a shame war or not. It’s not about blame or fault. It is accountability. In accountability we can own our responses as coming from us. We can understand why we did what we did based on our skills and experiences, and we can try to learn new skills so our future experiences are different. If we use accountability to shame ourselves, then we remain stuck in a losing war telling us we cannot change and life being awful is not only inevitable, it is our fault. Then we lose the war and are back in the closet curled up crying. Don’t do that. Be accountable not just for what you have done, but what you can learn to do to be different. The world may never change how it responds to you. Your past is certainly never going to change, but you have potential to take on the future and make different choices and in those choices, you can respond differently to the most shaming of environments with confidence and strength, not shame. The next part of this series we will start to dig into how we change our responses to the world around us.
-Namaste