The Indelible Marks of Shame

This article comes with kind permission of my client who I have been working with on the sticky business of shame. I have great admiration for this man's courage in talking to me about his experience and allowing me to share a process that is particular to him yet speaks to everyone.

He tells me about what has happened to him. A catastrophic chain of events changed the course of his life and it’s left him traumatised. He is so troubled by what happened that he finds it almost impossible to make sense of it all. Trauma, I think. This feels like it’s happening now. Piece by painful piece he unpacks some of it but not all and I begin to get the picture.

This seems to be the story of a man shocked by what has happened to him. Shocked into a state of panic, a state of disbelief, the state of an emotional emergency. His panic has nowhere to go. He is quite literally, screwed up, in a ball of acute anxiety. I think to myself, how are we going to do this? I’m a relational psychotherapist and have travelled this road before. It’s about going slowly. Interestingly, he starts to slow down anyway. This feels better. Eventually we get to a place of some understanding and I’m in but is he?

A year into the therapy and we’ve made headway with some powerful conversations about acceptance, imperfection and that illusive thing he longs for, a relationship. I sit there thinking, you’re in one. The therapeutic relationship is here. This is where you can experience a different kind of relationship to the ones you’ve had before, I say and he looks at me with curiosity. It’s about experiencing the required relationship instead of the repeated one, I explain.

The change in him is visible. The long body as he allows himself to take up space now. His spontaneous, authentic expression and creativity in describing his experiences to me are more present now than ever. How long has it taken us to get it like this? I say. No more knots, no more ball of anxiety, no more panic, just a man, examining his life and thinking about what’s next.

In his session this evening, we touch on the subject of his experiences with relationships. A recent foray into the dating scene has left him wondering what to do. The thought of what it would be like to fall in love is here. To find that person who would stand beside him and make everything feel better. Then it goes away again, it’s illusive. If only there wasn’t this thing or that thing in my way. He says. These obstacles are the illusion really not the wanted relationship.

We talk about shame and it’s legacy. The way it seems to creep back in years down the line, all dressed up as this or that reason for not doing things. This is the secret armour we wear to protect ourselves from shame. The trouble is that doing things like falling in love, changing career, moving house or anything that gets us closer to what we want means being seen, known, heard and understood probably for the first time.

It’s a huge challenge to become visible, vocal,

validated, viable after a lifetime in the shadows or behind a mask. It’s scarred me. He says. Your scars are beautiful, I say. The invisible scars that are indeed the indelible marks left by trauma, shame, humiliation are what shape us. What you are is all of your experience up until right now. I say. I wouldn’t be who I am without it. He says.

The more I work with people the more I see the inevitable fall from grace that seems to be part of the human experience. I see it as people come in utter disbelief that this could possibly be happening to them. Their righteous indignation, impotent rage, humiliation, terror, trauma. It all needs to find a narrative, be made sense of, understood and registered in another human being.

Mostly, the work is about our development, growth, maturation and coming to terms with it all in the presence of an attuned other. The details are sometimes not important, it’s the wound that is significant. For some, it’s their first and for others one of many. Battle scarred and weary yet open now more than ever, my is client to coming to terms with his story, still unfolding though it is.

As I finish this, I remember some things that have happened to me. Some ancient history and some current affairs, which seem to have a particular pattern, a process that plays out. This is familiar and I realise that it is less about changing that process than it is about accepting it as part of who I am. When I do this work in my practice, I talk to people about archetypes, the Jungian concept that works brilliantly with all of the above.

The indelible mark of shame can be seen as an archetypal pattern that can be interpreted as an expression of the self. This helps develop a sense of oneself with a coherent narrative, an identity, a story, which can be directed more in alignment with what is trying to happen and is often thwarted by our own defences.

I see real progress when people start to accept themselves as they were and then become who they were meant to be, often it’s not who they thought. Maybe they had an inkling and came to therapy to find out. I find this prospect attractive, exciting, daunting, enlivening, scary, illusive, wonderful and illuminating.

That illusive thing my client wants to find is really himself. His own sense of loyalty, love and creativity. His sense of being with himself in a way that he may never have imagined. These were lost back in the storm when all that stuff happened to him. His human spirit was crushed and his internal world scrambled. Through sitting with me for long enough, he is developing a new narrative, one that fits who really he is. It’s the story we tell ourselves that needs changing. This is a transformative experience, a collaboration, a two person job.

This is his unique story. He knows how it goes and how he wants to respond to it. He’s determined to make whatever life throws at him into a profoundly phenomenal and meaningful experience. Shit really does happen and he will be forearmed with his own mind about things. Now he responds to life’s challenges with quiet authority, style, courage, tenderness and grace but most of all with with love.

Every now and then, when another piece of life’s inevitable shit flies my way, I remind myself that I usually manage to send it away, back to where it came from whether it’s a real or imagined. Other times I’m floored. I’m not impervious to these things. It’s part of life and I’m determined, like my client, to make it all part of a phenomenally profound experience. Let it be deep let it be intense because imagine what joy can be found in life’s pleasure if we dare to plumb the depths of the human experience.