On Shame, Guilt, and Grief

Hello, Lovely.

I’ve been thinking a lot about shame these days. Thankfully, a lot of other people are thinking about shame these days too: there are now podcasts, books, YouTube videos, even a Netflix show by Brené Brown about shame; many resources to help us better understand and contend with this emotion so common—and often so costly—to the human experience.

After a recent Breakthrough Session with a beautiful human last week, I jotted the following down in my notebook:

You can’t shame yourself into changing your life, but you can love yourself into freeing the life that longs to express itself through you.

Once again, this lesson came alive for me as I listened to this person’s story, a story that so many of us can relate to: overwhelmed by loss, eyeball-deep in grief, she’s been moving through her life feeling profoundly disconnected, distracted, and indecisive. She’s in survival mode, her precious vitality a distant memory.

Within a few minutes it became clear that part of the crushing weight she’s chronically braced against (and therefore exhausted by) is a deep belief that she’s to blame, that she “should” have done x, y, and z. That is, she’s in shame.

Have you been here yourself? Are you there now?

I spent most of the hour creating a space to help her locate and *feel* the pain that self-blaming & shaming had actually prevented her from feeling.

Shame, and certain forms of guilt, are wily in this way: we criticize and blame ourselves (“I should have called earlier... I should have seen the signs... I shouldn’t have left when I did... I should have loved them better...”), generating an energetic withdrawal that we puppeteer unknowingly as armor against the more wrenching, poignant—and generative—pain of grief: the aching imprint of the vast, untenable love we felt and still feel, a love bound in our bones, threading our veins, every much a part of our bodies as is the pulse that announces its presence. As a dear friend, who recently lost her mother, put it to me (quoting another), grief is the last responsibility of love.

But so often we resort, without even knowing we’re doing it, to guilt and shame when faced with loss. If left unquestioned, self-shaming will keep us emotionally constricted, a state of being from which we’re bound to act in ways that we then use to justify our self-shaming.

I did this in the aftermath of my divorce: for a long time I confused the wrenching feeling I had in my gut, the ache I felt whenever I thought of my “family” as I’d known it, for grief. Grief was there, for sure, but veining that grief was shame, and it wasn’t until I was able to parse the latter from the former that my grief became unstuck, able to move through me, to evolve, and to evolve me in the process.

As long as we’re stuck in shame, grief’s gift—a process of slow tenderizing, of deepening vulnerability that, over time, expands our ability to feel even more fully and therefore love even more deeply—remains agonizingly just out of reach, behind closed doors whose seeming impenetrability makes them loom monstrously large.

In the space of an hour, this beautiful human experienced for the first time the full range of feeling—actual physical sensations in her body—that a long-standing habit of self-blaming has kept at bay at great cost. She felt the love in her body that was longing to be felt. And instead of losing all her bearings in a tsunami of pain, as perhaps she‘d feared, she instead felt immense tenderness towards herself, a wish to embrace herself as she would a child in pain. As she shared this vision, the crushing weight on her chest lifted, and her energy body exhaled. She glimpsed that behind the shame is a pain whose very aliveness will buoy her through her grief.

This turning-towards what aches, with friendly curiosity, is the first act of self-compassion. Self-compassion, in turn , is how we condition our capacity for vulnerability, which is in turn what enables us to feel true compassion (as distinct from mere sympathy) for others. Grief, then, an experience as ubiquitous to human life as is trauma (and sometimes inseparable from it), can be a painful yet profound process through which we waken and evolve our full capacities as creative, loving, joyful beings—as long as we learn to identify and shift the self-shaming and guilt that the pain of loss can provoke.

If you’re ready to create a new way of relating to your pain, to reconnect with your vitality, to move wakefully through grief, to deepen intimacy and connection with others—to shift once and for all from self-shaming to self-compassion, click here to sign up for a free 60-min Breakthrough Session. We can’t do this work alone, and to acknowledge this is an act of love.

Much love,

Kirstin