Unshaming
What is Unshaming?
Unshaming is a term and concept coined by the attorney, educator and therapist, David Bedrick, founder of the Santa Fe Institute for Shame-Based Studies. The sentiment around it is that every wound, pain, struggle, insecurity, or error is a bud waiting to blossom in the light of compassionate witnessing. Somewhere in each misalignment or perceived problem there is truth, beauty, and wisdom if only we can unshame it and move through it with compassion.
If an experience is shamed or ignored, it becomes something hidden and festering within someone, something that seeps out, calls out in different ways until it is addressed. We don’t always have safe spaces and safe contexts in which we can express freely the often messy processes our minds, bodies and souls are itching to go through, and this stifles growth as well as hurts the person holding it all in and the people around them.
In the 1937 novel, How Do You Live? Author Genzaburo Yoshino wrote, “Without the pain of guilt, how could we know that we are meant to do the right thing, how would we know what the right thing is unless by making a mistake and feeling remorse?” His argument being that it is a beautiful thing to mess up because that is often how we learn what not to do, and it is the burden of regret and guilt we feel when we do so that indicates that we were meant to do better, that we can do better.
The only apparent beneficial utility of shame for society is the shaming of ideologies and actions that are harmful. In the words of writer and speaker Natalie Wynn, “Bigotry is shameful, and it should be shamed…If you’re testing out some racist ideas in your head, you might feel afraid to express them publicly for fear of being shamed or judged…because racism is dangerous and shameful, you should be ashamed of it, and the people judging you [for it] are right to do so.”
According to the American Public Health Association, discrimination based on social stratification, especially in the form of racism, is well known and well documented to be detrimental to the health and well-being not only of people of color but of entire nations. Inequality causes major issues, from violence and poverty to crime and widespread physical and mental health problems.
Racism is a shameful and dangerous ideology, and should be shamed, just as Wynn states. Thus the only constructive use of shame is to shame harmful ideologies and actions so that people may feel less inclined to spread/enact them. This utility may decline if we begin shaming people rather than their ideas or actions.
Business Mentor and Life Coach, Simone Grace Seol, brings up the counterpoint that there is never a utility for shame. She argues that the role shame plays in society could be just as easily replaced by accountability and responsibility, because as shame subordinates people, accountability and responsibility assumes the equality of all individuals, that everyone is both capable of doing the right thing and of having constructive, intervening processes with those who do or say harmful things.
Guilt vs Shame
An important distinction is identifying guilt versus shame. Guilt says, That was the wrong thing to do, whereas shame says, I am wrong, I do bad things, I am a bad person. When we make our actions about who we are rather than what we’ve done, it’s possible that feelings of guilt may evolve into an unbearable feeling of shame and fear of condemnation and unworthiness as a person.
This identification with or internalization of wrongdoing may cause a person to either:
continue to do bad things because that behavior aligns with their sense of self and/or their manufactured inner logic justifying or rationalizing their ideas/actions
resort to denial, blame, or depression to attempt to repress, deflect, and self-torture respectively
have the instinct to hide the truth and to hide themself, which breaks down healthy systems of communication and relationship and prevents the individual from releasing and moving forward from their error.
Indigenous Wisdom That Supports Unshaming
The ancient Toltec people of Mexico had a central deity they referred to as QuetzalCoatl, the feathered serpent, the divine union between the deity of the snake and the deity of the Eagle. The snake represented the toiling and crawling that people, as organic, physical, animate beings endure and the eagle represented the heavenly ideals that soar above the material plane that we as people reach towards.
The Toltec people referred to their land as “the place where humans become gods” and thought that if they could bring the divine compassion and wisdom of the eagle to the struggling, earthly snake, they could achieve within themselves the union of the snake and the eagle, becoming QuetzalCoatl itself.
They also had a metaphor of the dragon, one of which living inside of each person. This inner dragon is powerful and ferocious, but they said that if one tries to battle this dragon, the dragon will eat them alive or burn them to a crisp. However, if the person befriends their inner dragon, they have an incredibly powerful ally for life living within them. Thus many of their beliefs suggested that the best way to become the greatest version of oneself would be through acceptance and compassion, transmuting struggles and ferocity into self-liberation and power.
I see this as an excellent modeling of the concept of unshaming, for the inner eagle must accept the groundedness and limitations of the snake in order to bring heavenly ideals to Earth, and the snake must love itself in order to allow the eagle to give it the freedom of flight. In other words, we must compassionately witness our own struggles in order to find the liberation of wisdom and beauty living within it.
Unshaming in Action: Compassionate Witnessing
“
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing
“ - Saint Francis and the Sow, by Galway Kinnell
To properly unshame oneself and one another, we need to practice compassionate witnessing. Compassionate witnessing is witnessing someone without judgment, and instead with the constant premise that there is nothing wrong with them, that their perspectives and experiences are valid. It’s allowing someone to be exactly as they are without thinking they should change or that there is something in need of fixing to make them stop being in the way that they are being. Of course, if any being is in immediate danger, intervention is necessary, but beyond that type of circumstance, being held in loving awareness by oneself or another person is an extremely healing container to experience.
When being compassionately witnessed, there is no shame or judgment or pathologization of the things one’s mind, body, or soul are expressing in that moment. Thus, there is no reason for one to hide, or to feel secondary emotions of fear, shame, and defensiveness. Instead, there is warm, open space to be exactly as one is in that moment and simply be in one’s experience until there is found within it a true message of love, as exists within all things. Everything is either an expression of or a cry for love, and when that cry is met with love, it can release and transform.
For example, I dealt with depression and suicidal ideation for a long time. I always felt ashamed about it, like I should hide myself from the world and not let the evil thoughts that I tell myself seep out around me into other people's minds. It wasn’t until I attended a workshop that dealt with one’s relationship to death that I could witness my own grief, fear, hopelessness, and desire for death with compassion.
When the shame lifted off of my shoulders, I could see a little child who was given a very scary and unhealthy childhood, who was now afraid of experiencing the violence and disregard I experienced when I was unable to do anything about it, who wanted to die rather than to abide those conditions of mistreatment, neglect, and violence. I suddenly felt an overwhelming rush of love, understanding, acceptance, and power.
I realized that I was an adult now, no longer at the mercy of the struggles of my parents. I realized that I felt so strongly that everyone should be treated with love and respect and that they should always have access to what they need to be healthy, happy and safe in all moments. Those realizations were buried under the shame that prevented me from wanting to look at those difficult emotions within me.
No one had ever held my experience and my emotions in loving attention, they had only invalidated, ignored, or pathologized them. It wasn’t until that experience that I finally felt free, understanding that depression and suicidal ideation was just love within me, all along, and that I have incredible power to transmute any “negative” experience back into love, its original form, as long as I can hold it in not only nonjudgmental awareness, but in loving attention, believing that it is a bud waiting to bloom.
A powerful medicine for society is to unshame people and their experiences, to hold people accountable for harmful ideologies and actions, but also to hold them all in loving attention, to be compassionate witnesses to the struggles we as Earthly, human beings experience. To see the lessons love is communicating to us through our errors and their consequences, to find the roots of love or cries for love in each expression of being in any given moment. To give people safe spaces to sort through the hardships of being alive, of being human, so that they can find their way back to themselves, to their truest selves, through the muck and mire that we wade through in life. Any distortion of, or misalignment with, love is a mirror through which we can see love more clearly, like the negative image in relation to the positive image, or how opposite hues like orange and blue make eachother stand out to be seen more clearly.
Why Unshaming Is So Badly Needed In Society
Shame is about leveraging power over someone else or a group of people by creating an illusion of unworthiness based on a specific real or imaginary trait of theirs. If you can successfully shame someone to the point in which they feel badly about a certain perceived or real expression of their being, you have psychologically subordinated them to your own superiority.
Shame is a tool to reinforce social hierarchies. It takes a great amount of power, wealth, privilege, and entitlement to set the guidelines of what is to be considered shameful within a society. These standards are different from culture to culture, meaning they are arbitrary evaluation systems whose main purpose is to perpetuate a specific power structure. For example, in a patriarchal society, femininity is subordinated to masculinity, and to reinforce this, feminine-presenting traits are shamed and masculine-presenting traits are rewarded.
If a society creates a social context in which certain traits are perceived as being inferior or shameful, those with those real or assumed traits will experience fear and shame within themselves as they are socialized; people around them will treat them differently and make assumptions about them. This process of “othering” individuals and groups of people is incredibly dangerous, like in the example of racism, whether it be against people of color or people with different religious backgrounds.
Shaming creates horrible external situations like bullying, violence, and discrimination in education, housing, and employment, as well as creates horrible internal circumstances for individuals in which they feel fearful to be seen by those in their society that might use this imaginary judgment system to see them as “deserving targets” of various forms of abuse, violence, prejudice, and exclusion.
Human beings are social creatures that find safety, comfort, and greater resources when in community and collaboration with other people. There is a great, deep-rooted fear of death that accompanies the thought that one might be cast out from the tribe, or in a modern context, to be socially excluded. There is a great and valid fear in being dehumanized by the judgment of a tribe, to be perceived as “other” and thus seen as an enemy, threat, or one who would not be treated with hospitality, kindness, understanding, and respect as part of the proverbial tribe.
Many people sacrifice their own authentic self-expression in order to better assimilate to the standards of what is most accepted within their culture. They do this for greater inclusion, opportunity, and better quality of life just to name a few benefits. It’s saddening to know that people feel as though they have to do this, knowing how much pain they must be experiencing hiding parts of themselves because they don’t have the safety and privilege to just be themselves without the possibility of social punishment.
In the vicious cycle of shame, an individual experiences the pain vs pleasure conditioning of being punished for or witnessing the punishment of certain traits and being rewarded for or witnessing the rewarding of others, thus learning the cultural standards of the way in which specific traits are meant to be responded to in their society. Once they learn this from their perpetrators, they very likely may teach the same ideology to their subsequent victims unless the pattern of shame is interrupted.
That’s why it is so integral to the health of our societies that we begin to dismantle damaging hierarchical power structures by unshaming ourselves and each other to create more social equality, safety, peace, and well-being in our communities and for individuals.
