Your Shame Is Political
In this post, we explore how shame is shaped by oppressive systems and how it affects our connections with others and ourselves. We look at how shame is internalised, especially in marginalised communities, limiting emotional expression and belonging.
The goal is to highlight the roots of shame and encourage us to decolonize it, reclaiming our emotional freedom and challenging the structures that perpetuate it.
What is the first memory you have of a time when the feeling of longing for your pain to be recognised by a parent, teacher, friend, or therapist was mixed with a tangible negative emotion- fear, shame, or loneliness? Can you remember sensing that you were breaking some unspoken rules that would reap disastrous social consequences and made the desired connection between your precious emotion and belonging to the outer world seem riskily fragile? Perhaps this inherited sense was so strong, you decided it was not safe to share that part of yourself, or perhaps the pain was too much to keep inside, so you risked it -but to a sting in your chest, cheeks flushing in embarrassment, or a feeling of floating away from the scene, retracting within at a response that brushed you aside, was cold in nature and uninterested in getting to know your pain like it was important. Did you tell yourself this feeling meant the sense of home you were trying to retrieve, must now be shut away for ever, or did your body just build such a strong memory that it became second nature to you, to limit yourself expression without even necessarily knowing it?
This is the result of growing up in environments where our role models are afflicted by the spiritual disease of shame. Shame is made invisible within relationships by rigorous social conditioning to avoid vulnerability and comply with behaviour in line with systems of control that are steeped in histories of violence. Repeatedly feeling unequipped to respond to the external injustices of our encounters with these systems is what creates the energy of internal tension of shame.
Shame is defined on wikipedia as a feeling of embarrassment from the feeling of having done something immoral, or improper. This definition equates the two as separate feelings, that we feel embarrassed once we feel we have done something immoral, and that this produces shame. But if embarrassment can be both a part of shame and guilt, what would be the difference between these sibling emotions? Shame is not evoked from the knowledge of having done something immoral but being something immoral. Therefore, it is a process that, unless we assume humanity is inherently self- hating, must have originated as an oppressive practice where one party weaponized another’s social, mental, and spiritual vulnerability against the self.
As its verb form suggests, shame is intentionally lodged self-criticism in the centre of our relationship to self so that we internalise the oppressive voice as our own, shutting down our ability to view and relate with ourselves positively. It potentially affects our functioning in all aspects, and especially our socialising ability. As it goes to the heart of our emotional being, our access to other healthy emotions, like pride, happiness, desire, libido, rage, and grief can also be frozen. It comes as no surprise then that shame is majorly linked to depression.
One could assume that the reason why Wikipedia used this definition of shame that made it seem like it works in principle like any other secondary emotion, is because, depending on experience, the meaning of shame would change. People whose identities have historically carried heavily limiting stereotypes and prejudices condemning them to greater consequences of shaming, could begin to mistake shame for the air they breathe - holding the secrets for why they are unsafe in their environment and a danger to themselves. It is more subconscious and persistent in its strongest potency, than a surface layer analysis of it as a fleeting emotion allows. Considering that those defining language are perpetuating the systems of power, it makes sense that they wouldn't talk about how shame is a systemic tool for oppression that creates disease where the sense of self is intentionally colonised.
We know through epigenetics that past behaviours are stored in the DNA of future generations. Through generations of patterns of conditioning, shame is remembered in the body where the nervous system has been repeatedly attacked, so that the oppressive power is exponential. The implications of being othered by shame aims to weaken and disempower the practices and people that challenge the status quo, namely ones that do not fit the narratives preferred by white supremacy and patriarchy. A key factor in resisting and creating change, is not being dragged down into perpetual depression by the realities of the systems we live in, and shame is the barrier that prevents us from lifting each other out of the depths of loneliness. Feeling worthy of community and vulnerability, would allow for us to speak openly and be able to process shame in community. By creating deeper, more committed, and constructive connections that defy the emotional limitations of social norms and fight for social change would break the spell shame casts-- the lie that we are more different than the same- and be the biggest threat to white supremacist systems of power.
Those of us who fall prey to the cycle of shame by accepting shame as a part of our emotional oppression, become so numb, to avoid its vulnerability because we have never been given the tools to make structures around us accountable for our pain inside of ourselves. Those who are structurally shamed the most for their identities are so used to carrying shame for their survival they are potentially unable to have the space to see the tremendous weight of it even privately. Yet when we start to unpack it, we find opportunities to connect our emotional restrictions to the structural narratives that aim to disempower the spaces and bodies we occupy. We can start to see the immediate need to learn to separate our sense of self from the narratives of shame, to preserve our joy and life force.
Ultimately doing this work requires a leap of faith to break free from the patterns of thought that keep you in check, eyes down and believing that not all of us are innately deserving of a better, emotional reality safe from self- suspicion. When we allow ourselves to realise that fighting against the tides of societal pressure is better for us than simply accepting it, we are challenging our desire to hold onto the illusion of the natural way of social structures, with all their ideals of hierarchical success, that let shame run wild. We build the groundwork to move towards our humanity.
There are so many more discussions we need to collectively have about the intentional and structural oppression that are behind persistent feelings of shame, and how the current white colonial hegemonic powers benefit from normalising the silence that shame expects of us at our core.
What if we connected moments of our shame with the bigger picture- that our silence was not born so; that there was a content of violence that predated it long before we were born, whose legacy persists in the present. Just as silence and disconnection is not our nature, we have a right to indignation, and to reclaim the whole human experience. Could we practise actively sharing and learning about other people’s experiences of shame, to liberate our own and let go of the oppressor’s language’s hold over us?
Will we practice decolonising our shame to uncover the expanse of our wildness and help bring justice to all?
By Aras Fernandez Schmidt
This is part 1 of a two part blog post. The second part will be published next week.