On Dropping Shame and Creating Change that Lasts

Hello, Lovelies.

Here we are, on the last day of what we've collectively agreed to call this "year." Of course, outside of our human minds the particular "year" as we know it—a set of "dates" that mark and contain a shared cycle of life—doesn't exist; our calendar is, yes, tethered to the earth's rhythms, but its rigidity speaks more to our human need for ritualized beginnings and ends—and therefore ritualized growth—than it does a natural order beyond our making.  

I find this reminder not only comforting, but inspiring on this day we call New Year's Eve: it gently insists that our traditions of resolution-setting, intention-making, letting-go and letting-in are ancient acts of conscious growth, rituals by which we take responsibility for how we evolve, practices that in turn affirm intentionality as inherent to human flourishing.

This means that our deeply human drive to pause, to take stock of where we've been, and to commit on purpose to where we're going is not only core to who we are, but a need so vital to our thriving that we nurture and protect it with elaborate ceremony and celebration.

I remind us of this today not only to encourage you to be proactive in the coming days about what it is you want to think, believe, experience and create in the year ahead, but to also offer you ammunition against that other equally-human trait that rears its head in these times: negativity bias, the ingrained habit of seeing the worst (in ourselves, in others, in situations), a vestigial trait we developed over millions of years to keep us safe while living in the middle of the food chain.

At this time of year, and on this day especially, negativity bias shows up in the way we often try to motivate ourselves into new and healthier habits and commitments by focusing on our flaws, as if doing so will keep us "accountable." This approach is so ubiquitous as to seem normal, its methods seemingly harmless: the setting of new goals in order to prove ourselves worthy, to compensate and correct a sense of ourselves as flawed.

This strategy for enacting change in our lives is driven by pain; we’re so sick of feeling bad that we resolve to do things differently. But here's the rub: as a culture, we pathologize pain. Which means that the pain that urges our desire to change begets shame. We then mistake shame for the fuel we need to overcome the habits that hurt.

But shame shuts us down: shame is all about not-good-enough, I’m-broken, something-is-really-wrong-with-me. These thoughts, so normalized as to feel absolutely true, whittle away at confidence: they arrest creativity; they foil ingenuity; they foster delusion in the name of clarity and leave us “stuck" and “confused.”

Shame—that thing we’ve been taught to weaponize so as not to “let ourselves off the hook”—is like the undercover spy that undermines the operation from inside out while appearing to be our greatest ally.

In this way, our healthy, vital need to grow on purpose is derailed by a well-intended but misguided practice that begets, to our utter dismay, yet another cycle of good intention confirming defeat: we resolve that this time we’ll get healthy, eat better, exercise, leave our toxic relationship, start meditating, make more money, stop overdrinking/eating/etc.; we’ll buy this or that program or planner or both to catapult us into commitment; we’ll ride the high of new action for about three weeks; then, almost inexplicably, we’ll slide back to where we were before, with the added weight of disappointing ourselves yet again.

Eventually, this cycle—one we see but despite best efforts can’t seem to break—causes too much pain, so we stop dreaming of change. Low-burn depression sets in. Anxiety hums through our veins.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

The only way to change via shame is through will power. But will power is designed for short-lived heaving over life’s hurdles, not as fuel for sustainable change. Real change, sustainable change, happens by intervening at the level of thought, not action: we need to look clear-eyed at the thoughts we are thinking about ourselves in an effort to propel the changes we want to make. If we’re thinking unkind and critical thoughts about ourselves, we will constantly sabotage the very confidence, creativity, and energy that catalyzes genuine change—that is, the intentional growth, the conscious evolution that we are, after all, honoring and aspiring to on this day.

So, if you've been unwittingly or even purposefully shaming yourself into Doing Better this coming year (you'll know if you have been because you made some version of these commitments last year, and the year before that...), I invite you to simply stop.

Instead, take some time to remind yourself of all the good you summoned in yourself this year to contend with extraordinary challenges: what limits in yourself did you come up against and then overcome, because you had to? What inner resources did you call upon that you didn't even know you had? What skills did you learn and refine as you transformed the impossible into the doable after all? When did you love and show compassion for others, for yourself? What did you create, invent, or discover to help you and your loved ones as you made your way through constant disorientation?

As you inventory these strengths of yours, remember this: your wish to improve your life, to do better, is less a sign of past failure than an affirmation of your aliveness, of being attuned to the energy of life itself—what the poet Walt Whitman called "the procreant urge"—expressing itself through you.

My hope and wish for this New Year are that we'll call on this knowing, and anchor our amazing, indefatigable hunger for growth (which can lead us to rest and action alike) in this river of life, this becoming-on-purpose that connects us all.

I am wishing you the very best in 2021, and am so grateful to you for being part of my community.

Much love,
Kirstin