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Making Friends with Shame
Did you know that icky feeling you get is actually a self defense tool?
The last article I published on Medium was a bit unhinged. I was ashamed of it, so I deleted it.
Shame is a funny thing: we classify it as an emotion, and it feels so heavy, so toxic, so burning, so awful that we would do anything to avoid feeling it. The problem is, sometimes we do stuff that causes shame, and when that happens, we do anything to avoid feeling it.
Including taking responsibility for our actions.
What we don’t realize about shame is that it is not an emotion: it is a physical response. And it is a wonderful self-defense tool that gets a very bad rap.
Before I go further into the idea of shame as self defense, I want to quickly touch on the nature of our biological self defense systems. What I mean by “biological self defense” is the systems our bodies have in place, and exercise 24 hours a day, to keep us healthy and alive, in spite of our sometimes stupid decisions. The example I like to use when teaching self defense, is:
Snacks.
