A stopping point for reflection

Shame and the Spectre of Abandonment

Shame is something I've felt much and researched little. I've kinda always hoped that by facing my fears and sharing vulnerably with others eventually it would just go away on its own. And to some extent that really has been an elixir, but now I'm wanting to deep dive into where these patterns really come from and what specifically they tend to look like, so that I can better recognize them in myself. Maybe I'm just finally prepared to take a peek into the darkness, which historically has not been my favorite Wednesday afternoon activity.

Honing awareness of shame (or anything) is useful for empowering yourself to choose something different than the automatic reactive behavior. That awareness comes from watching your own experience and from listening to people who have thought about the topic A LOT. In the spirit of listening to smart people, I'm reading this book called "Shame: the power of caring" by Gershen Kaufman. Its clear and robust language around shame is really helping bring to light some of my own shame patterns. It's also helping to contextualize my childhood development in a totally new way. There's so much great info that I've been getting through like 2 pages per hour and I'm highlighting almost every line. So this might be the first of a series of posts on shame as I continue to explore the ideas.

One idea that really hit home with me was about how we can experience shame as abandonment. Here is the relevant section:

"Breaking the interpersonal bridge is the critical event which induces shame. The experience of shame itself further severs the bridge such that an ever-widening gulf emerges between the two individuals. Their relationship has indeed become ruptured ... such a situation of intolerable yet unremediable isolation can generate the spectre of abandonment."

FYI the "interpersonal bridge" mentioned here is just a fancy way to say "emotional bond between people that enables vulnerability". Immediately upon reading this section it felt like I now have language for an experience I know so well:

  1. I have internalized childhood shame that can emerge from any number of outside triggers.
  2. Once I start to experience that shame I sever the emotional bridge between me and the person I was triggered by.
  3. I feel shame because of the separation, causing me to further separate
  4. I experience the "spectre of abandonment" (Yes I spell spectre the cool way now because that's how Kaufman spells it)

It seems so obvious when I write it out but the abandonment can feel so real! The situation can feel unrecoverable, but in reality it's something I'm doing vs something that's happening to me and I have the power to choose to do something else instead. To stop abandoning myself.