The purpose of this article is to discuss the subject of shame, its impact on your life and outline steps to release the feeling of shame and the effects these feelings create.
First, let’s look at some definitions:
SHAME: A strong negative emotion that combines feelings of dishonor, unworthiness, and embarrassment.
GUILT: An awareness of having done wrong accompanied by feelings of shame and regret.
REGRET: To feel sorry and sad about something previously done or said that now appears wrong, mistaken, or hurtful to others.
In the Optima Zones, shame is located in the Redzone just above denial, in the Brownzone. You could say that shame is in the middle of the Redzone. Whenever we feel ashamed, we can either work our way through it and move up or deny and suppress it, which takes us into the Brownzone.
While shame may appear to be an undesirable emotion, it is vital to the effective functioning of society and is necessary for our survival. The purpose of shame is to stop us from engaging in harmful or destructive behavior and encourage positive behavior. So when a person has harmful behavior and yet feels no shame, they are very dangerous because there is nothing to stop their destructive behavior. These people have no remorse.
Behavior Control
In all human societies, others use shame to control personal behavior. For example, a person caught stealing or telling a lie feels ashamed, which acts as a deterrent to prevent them from stealing or lying again. When the reward of the stolen item or lie is greater than the potential shame of being caught, many people will continue their harmful behavior. This conscious wrongdoing has a very destructive effect on one’s life by adding shame on top of shame. Shame is invoked by misconduct and compounded by being caught.
The True Cost is Cumulative
Therefore, the actual cost of wrongdoing is the cumulative and compounded feelings of personal shame! The fear of being caught and publicly shamed has one committing more cover-ups and lies. It creates cautiousness, conservatism, low-confront, slowness, and immobility. As a result, a person becomes trapped in the Orangezone (fear) and the Redzone (grief and shame), which prevents them from asking for what they want, acting with confidence, and creating the realities they want.
If you find it difficult to ask for what you want, unresolved shame could be stopping you.
Shame can manifest in one area of life and spare others. For example, a person can have body shame (making them physically obsessed or lazy) while having no shame around money. This dynamic enables them to make lots of money while not taking care of themselves physically.
On the other hand, if a person feels ashamed when giving to themselves, they may have trouble spending the money they make.
When a person has shame in too many areas, they will become unable to succeed in any arena of life. When shame is limited to a few areas, the problems manifest in just a few places, with a small overflow to the other areas of life.
Live Your Life Without Shame
Living your life in a way that creates no new shame and cleaning up all past shame allows you to create the realities you want, be in the right place at the right time, and be at total cause over your life.
You may be wondering, what about the people who feel ashamed yet do not have a conscious memory of wrongdoing? Years of social conditioning of what is good and bad, right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, what we should and should not do leads to accumulated shame.
For example, we will feel shame if our parents believe that pre-marital sex is wrong, while we think it is OK and do it anyway.
If you withdraw from all things you feel shame around, you will end up living a very limited, at effect life. Therefore, the key to healthy and prosperous living is consciously choosing and making up your own mind. You decide what is right from wrong, good from bad, choosing right action instead of wrongdoing, and educating yourself in a way that allows you to make educated choices.
Your Subconscious Contains Your True Feelings
The challenge with most feelings of shame is that they are buried deep in your subconscious. When your results fail to meet expectations or feel inexplicable resistance, you may become conscious and aware of the shame.
Suppose you feel magnetically driven in one area while avoiding and withdrawing from another. In that case, you may find that the hidden driver of your behavior is shame.
For example, if you were a fat child and suffered a lot of ridicule, as an adult, you may be obsessed with fitness or be lazy. Suppose your family struggled for money and were out of control as adults. In that case, you may work obsessively and make money to avoid the shame of feeling out of control.
Avoiding these feelings is one of the benefits people get from obsessively working and being busy all the time.
Shame can remain buried deep in our psyche even after correcting our childhood shame by forcibly going from fat to fit or poor to rich. If you do all the right things, take corrective action, and struggle to sustain consistent improvement, look for the hidden shame inhibiting you!
Here are the steps to healing shame and alleviating its effects:
- Commit to right-action as a way of life.
- Take massive action to correct any past wrongdoing.
- Review any areas of your life that are not flowing; identify any hidden shame.
- Clean slate any areas of shame.
- Commit to living with more flow and less struggle as a way of life.
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Leadership Advocate and Co-Founder of the Goldzone Group. I help leaders to master the new rules of leadership for the new economy. Over the past 30 years, I have visited more than 500 cities in 54 countries to explore, learn from, and help many of the world’s leading companies, leaders, and luminaries in science, technology, health, finance, and entrepreneurship.