Mark*, a queer man in his mid 30s, has been seeing me fortnightly for a few months now. I have learned that Mark loves his work and lives with his loving partner in a home they love, on a street they love, with a dog they love.
I have also learned that Mark believes he is unloveable.
Chloe*, a student in her early 20s, is a first-generation Indian Australian. She has just started a law degree, on a full scholarship she received after achieving the highest grades ever at her regional high school. In a few sessions with Chloe, I have learned that she volunteers a few nights a week at a local youth centre, cares for her elderly mother and is always the one her friends come to for help.
I have also learned that Chloe believes she is not enough.
While guilt can be viewed as an emotion that tells us we have done something bad, shame tells us there is a core part of us that is bad, and we must do everything we can to hide that part of us.
This is why shame work can be so powerful, as it is not a process of self-care, but self-acceptance. You can’t self-care your way out of shame.
Both Mark and Chloe grew up in a world that taught them there was something wrong with who they were. For Mark, this looked like homophobia at school and a family that was not accepting of his homosexuality. For Chloe, it came in the form of racism, with her earliest memories associated with feelings of being ostracised at school and microaggressions on public transport.
Shame is often an internalisation of stigmatisation and prejudice. We are shamed before we feel shame. Like so many from marginalised communities, Mark and Chloe came to view themselves as the problem, rather than the discrimination that surrounds them. And, like so many who experience shame, Mark and Chloe were taught that the only way to overcome their problem is through achieving success within the same system that shamed them.
This is the false path that we are offered to make our way out of shame. To work. To achieve. To be perfect. To take responsibility for our own life and to make it better.
The system offers a false promise that if we just do enough, we will feel enough.
But it doesn’t work because 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’s also a worldview about how change happens and what it means for a person to lead a meaningful or moral life. But by prioritising the values of perfectionism, individualism, consumerism, wealth and personal responsibility above all other things, Systemic Shame actually trains us to preserve the status quo rather than disrupt it.”
To put this 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 ourselves, individualism teaches us that we alone must do things to make us feel better, and to find a happy life.
Like so many from 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 remedy to being so alone and unseen. Instead of embracing other LGBTQ people, forming queer friendships, building up our communities, and having the sex and relationships we long to have, Systemic Shame tells us what we need is to find personal empowerment and pride in our identities – by buying the correct items and styling ourselves in the right way.”
So if perfectionism, consumerism and wealth are not the path out, what is?
The first step is to build an understanding of the part of you that feels shame and explore why it has developed. For Mark, this meant building an understanding of systemic shame, to help him to challenge the view of himself as faulty, and rather see that shame was a normal outcome of the homophobia and lack of acceptance he experienced early in life.
As shame is grounded in self-blame, the path out must also be grounded in self-acceptance. For Chloe, this process began with challenging internalised beliefs of how she “should” live her life, and replacing it with an understanding of what a meaningful life looks like for her. Through our work together Chloe has come to reconnect with art and music, passions that had become subsumed by expectations of who she “should” be.
Just as the cause of shame is outside you, so too must be the cure. For many, this may involve a focus on relationships and collective action, to act against a culture of systemic shame that tells us to blame individuals for problems of the system. For Mark and Chloe, this process involved building skills in being vulnerable and communicating their own needs in relationships. Over time, this helped them to feel safe to bring their authentic self to their relationship, creating the opportunity to experience a new sense of belonging and self-acceptance.
There was also a question that both Mark and Chloe found useful. It’s one I ask myself often, to act against my own systemic shame: how would you live today, if you already believed you were enough?
Because challenging shame is all about finding the radical belief that you already are.
*All clients discussed are fictional amalgams
Dr Chris Cheers is a psychologist, author and educator. His book The New Rulebook is out now
