An Exploration of Shame, a Universal Human Issue 

by Lorraine Goldbloom

Originally Published by the NY Open Center, November 2019

I can’t quite recall when I became aware of the feeling that I wasn’t the person I wanted to present to the world.

There were humiliating instances, like when I was forced to admit in front of the kindergarten class that I didn’t know my left side from my right.  (When your pointer finger and your thumb form an ‘L’, that’s the left, by the way). More than a series of events, though, it came into my general understanding in a deep sense that  I just wasn’t good enough. At an early age I settled into the belief that I was not as smart as my older brother. Eventually, this would lead to the belief that I was stupid. Unfortunately, that was just one way I fell short. There were others.  

Growing up, I was aware of the feeling of inadequacy, feeling like I was not enough, and certainly no one encouraged me to explore the pain of my general insecurity. As I grew older, I discovered acting. This became a wonderful outlet for exploring emotionality safely. You could bring the worst of yourself to the stage and be applauded for it. I could just put it out there, and no one would know that I was just tapping into my own sense of suffering. Training for a career in acting, and having a “day job” as a personal trainer and yoga instructor began to show me that I was not alone in having many “issues” or lots of  “stuff” that I wanted to address. As I found myself on a spiritual path, more and more I  questioned why I could not be the person I imagined I should be. Why can’t I fit the picture and love everyone and know joy and harmony with the world? What is this darkness in me? Why is there a sense that, not only am I not good enough, but that I am somehow bad?  

I began to see that I needed to look at these issues that were held in my system, come face to face with them, and the hardest work of all: enter the pain of the ugly stuff. I was graced to find VortexHealing® Divine Energy Therapy which gave me a clear map of how these issues are held, and began to work with them. Now, as a teacher of Vortex Healing®, having worked with thousands of people over the years, I see how universal these issues are. I began to understand how these issues operate. They stand in the way of complete Presence, of being authentic, and of living in our true nature.  

That’s what our issues do, really. They are obstacles to Presence. For example, if I have a  physical issue, like a stomach ache, it keeps me caught up in an experience of myself. I  experience myself and the world around me as someone with a stomach ache. It is the same with our emotional issues. If I have an experience of loneliness, it colors my experience of everyone and everything around me. Pretty soon I identify with that issue and  believe myself to be a “lonely person.” It becomes part of my identity. Our identities keep us in a bubble of experience that does not allow for true interaction.  

So began my study of issues and the way in which they hold us captive in a self-centered experience. In my process of healing I have explored many issues: control, lack of trust,  anger, terror, epic loss, grief and sorrow, not being enough, never being enough; just to name a few. Any of which would make for a great miniseries. In my exploration, as I  traced my issues to the deepest possible source, I kept coming back to a fundamental sense that I was not okay. My basic understanding of myself was that I had to compensate for a fundamental inadequacy that kept me apart from others.

This is the issue of shame. 

What I’ve observed about shame in myself and many others, is that not only is it so pervasive, but that it anchors all of our other issues in place. Whatever it is that we experience, unless it fully meets our expectations (how often does that happen?), we feel shame about it. By its very nature, it hides from our awareness. Shame can look like anything from the outside. It can look like another issue. It can look like anger, coldness, a need to be perfect or a sense of aloofness. It uses other issues to hide itself. Sometimes we recognize the other issues and address them, but we neglect to follow them through to the core. Ultimately, that is what shame wants to do. It wants to keep us separate from the world around us.  

Brené Brown has done some wonderful work around the issue of shame and unworthiness. Her distinction between shame and guilt is clear: Guilt is feeling bad about what we have done while shame is feeling bad about what we are.  

For most of us growing up, there was little distinction between our actions and our being.  If we did something bad, we were bad; pure and simple. If there was any trace of good in you, you would feel guilt about being a bad person and seek to reform. This idea runs deep in our culture and exists beyond the structure of organized religion. It permeates  Western culture and gives us a backdrop of understanding that we have a fundamental flaw if we do not act “perfectly”. 

I have been going through the very difficult and humbling process in which I examine my own behavior and thought patterns. It is not pretty. It is hard to admit that many of my reactions relate back to the fact that I feel I need to hide my own inadequacy. Shame is an issue the carries a tremendous amount of tension with it on every level. Physical tension, emotional tension and its own kind of psychological tension. It is exhausting.  Someone who is genuinely confident is relaxed. Arrogance is another way of hiding our shame. Arrogance and insecurity become two sides of the same coin.  

With shame there is a sense of being unworthy, and therefore undeserving of belonging.  Thus there is a need to hide. We put forth some façade to compensate and impress the outside world, and then one of two things happen: that façade either works or it doesn’t.  The consequences for the facade not working involves some kind of humiliation.  

What happens when the façade does work? We get away with it. We somehow convince the world we are okay and deserving of praise, money or stature. Unfortunately, this leads to feeling like a fraud. It also leads to isolation. There is a kind of horror when we realize that people are responding to what we put out to the world, not what we are. This weaves its way back to an experience of hurt and loneliness.  

I have been talking to some friends about this issue of shame. It is interesting to hear their observations. While the fundamental principle of shame is consistent, it seems to manifest itself very differently in different people. In particular, it is interesting to hear the difference in shame as it manifests itself in men and women.  

It seems that our shame correlates to what is expected of us. It can be evaluated as a failure to meet the expectations of the social norms. Those social norms change with the times. They also express differently according to gender, social class and culture.  

The men I have talked to who are in relationship, and who have children, have expressed worry about being a provider. This reflects itself in the form of earning enough money,  providing stability for the family, and a particular kind of stoic strength that is respected in our society. These men in partnership feel that now men are expected, and even encouraged, to express a certain level of vulnerability. It makes them ‘sensitive’. Women appreciate that. But a common comment among the men that I have spoken with, is that there are limits to what is acceptable in this area. They feel that an expression of extreme vulnerability is still perceived as being weak, that women want men to offer enough of an expression of vulnerability to allow permission to express their own feelings, but no more than that. Their sense is that their female partners don’t really want to know the full extent of their fear, unworthiness, and all the rest. That would be too threatening. They believe that their female partners would be much more comfortable with a watered-down version of vulnerability: Enough to be sensitive, but still in complete command of the situation. 

For the women I have spoken to, shame often gets rooted in the inability to be everything to everyone. A woman cannot just be a wife or mother anymore. Nor can she just be an intelligent, ambitious career woman. She needs to be both, and she needs to cook, clean,  be supportive, as well as transform into a sex goddess on a Tuesday night. … and maybe then again on Thursday night. Better rest up for the weekend. Anything less than that is inadequate. Not just by her partner’s standards, but by her own.  

The point being that we compensate for our own sense of unworthiness. Inevitably, we end up not only exhausted but resentful towards our partners and the world around us.  

Even more insidious is the way that shame can hide from our own awareness. By its very nature it doesn’t want to be seen. It shuts us down. The system goes dark and stops breathing in the places that it holds shame. It can hide so well we are not even aware of what drives us in our need for perfection, anger or fear.  

So how do we deal with it?  

The nature of shame is that it wants to hide. It wants to disconnect us from everyone around us and live in secret. The most direct way of dealing with it is to bring it into the light. 

The first suggestion is to find a safe place to share. A good friend, a trusted therapist, a  skilled counselor are all potential resources. Often, the safest places come in support or peer groups where people share the same issue. I am grateful to have found VortexHeal ing®, which is a Divine Energy Therapy that is a systematic endeavor for freedom, and uses energy healing to clear the conditioning where the shame is held in the system. In my observation, the most important piece is to have compassion for yourself.  

At the risk of sounding silly, in difficult moments, I imagine that my issue is not actually my own, but something given to me by a friend to help them carry the burden. It is an odd way of thinking, and yet it immediately brings in a certain level of detachment. I find we are less likely to judge others on any issue than we are to judge ourselves; and it allows for a level of compassion that can be hard to give to our own issues. A friend  asked me once, “Can you give the same level of compassion to yourself that you offer to  a friend, student or client?” To be honest, in that moment the answer was no. I have had to learn that process for myself. In that process, I have discovered that when having compassion for myself, I can offer a deeper and more authentic sense of compassion to others.  

Shame is a universal issue. We all have it to some degree. It is part of the human experience, and the more we can be honest about it and address it in the open, the more we can use this healing process as a way of coming together. Awakening is letting go the experience of separation and returning to Presence. Love and compassion for ourselves and others lead us back to that every time.