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Becoming Strong Enough to Love

Many people on a healing path have found it extremely challenging to heal their shame. Yet when you understand the purpose of shame, you will be able to move beyond it.

Shame is the feeling that there is something basically wrong with you. Whereas the feeling of guilt is about DOING something wrong, shame is about BEING wrong at the core. The feeling of shame comes from the belief that, "I am basically flawed, inadequate, wrong, bad, unimportant, undeserving, or not good enough."

At some early point in our lives, most of us absorbed this false belief that causes the feeling of shame. As a result of not feeling seen, loved, valued, and understood, we developed the belief that we were not being loved because there was something wrong with us. While some children were told outright that they were not okay - that they were stupid, bad, or undeserving - other children concluded that there was something wrong with them by the way they were being treated.

Once we establish our core shame belief, we become addicted to it because it serves us in two primary ways:

1. It gives us a feeling of control over other people's feelings and behavior.

As long as we believe that we are the cause of others' rejecting behavior, then we can believe that there is something we can do about it. It gives us a sense of power to believe that others are rejecting us or behaving in unloving ways because of our inadequacy. If is our fault, then maybe we can do something about it by changing ourselves, by doing things "right." We hang on to the belief that our inadequacy is causing others' behavior because we don't want to accept others' free will to feel and behave however they want. We don't want to accept our helplessness over others' feelings and behavior.