“We do not talk about shame. We experience it, we feel it, we sometimes
live with it for an entire lifetime, but we don’t talk about it.”
(Brene Brown PhD.)
I stood on brown linoleum in the parsonage kitchen in Illinois
“Mom!” I pleaded again.
“What?” she sputtered without turning from sudsy plate in
hand.
“Mom, listen to me! It really hurt my feelings when you said that about me in front of everybody. It
wasn’t nice, what you said.”
Water dripping from plate, shoulders arrow straight, Mom sing-songed:
“Nobody loves you, everybody hates you, guess you better go eat worms!”
Plate in one hand, Mom pulled a holey dishrag off bare counter saying,
Plate in one hand, Mom pulled a holey dishrag off bare counter saying,
“Becky, just get over it! Stop your whining!”
With Mom’s sarcastic song echoing in my brain, I felt weak,
exposed, like I was some kind of big baby. Tears welled, but I willed them
back. I didn’t know how to respond to Mom’s sarcastic song.
So, I said nothing.
And in that dish-washing, song-chanting episode, I felt
shame—like I was a bad person for feeling hurt.
As a kid I understood guilt—that bad feeling you get when
you lie or call your sister a “brat!” But shame? What was that?
Then, twenty-some years later, when my five-year-old son
Micah stood on my brown kitchen tile crying
crystal tears and saying, “You hurt
my feelings!” I remember how I knee-jerk sang Mom’s song, “Nobody loves me,
everybody hates me. . .” and as I sang, I felt like mean-mom and the song died
on my lips.
That night I talked to Jon about singing Mom’s song to Micah,
how it felt wrong, but I didn’t know why.
Jon said: “Because you invalidated Micah’s feelings by making fun of them.” That
made sense to me—the invalidation part. But
what I didn’t understand back then is that song stemmed from a deep well of
SHAME I didn’t know existed.
Edward Welch Mdiv, PhD, defines shame as: “the deep sense that you are unacceptable
because of something you did, something done to you, or something associated
with you. You feel exposed and humiliated . . . . Guilt can be hidden; shame
feels like it is always exposed” (Shame Interrupted, 2, emphasis mine).
In the first few years of motherhood, I found myself
repeating the shame-based parenting habits of Mom and Dad. Just like my
parents, I felt unacceptable and unworthy, and to cover those uncomfortable
feelings, I denied them or projected them onto my children, husband, and
others.
When Micah expressed, “You hurt my feelings!” I felt like a
Mom-failure, like I didn’t measure up, like I wasn’t acceptable. But, rather
than acknowledge my feelings
of shame, I made fun of my son, shamed him
instead.
The truth is,
every parent, every human, feels shame. This battle with shame began in the
garden. After Adam and Eve disobeyed God, they felt guilty, but they also felt naked—ashamed—for
the first time “And [Adam] said, ‘I heard the sound of you [God] in the garden,
and I was afraid, because I was naked,
and I hid myself” (Genesis 3:10, emphasis mine).
Just like Adam
and Eve, when we feel shame—because of something we did or that was done to us—we
go into hiding. Adam and Eve covered their naked shame with clothes, we cover
our shame with denial: “I never did/said that!” or “No, I was never abused/hurt/mistreated!” or “The
past is in the past. I don’t dwell on it!” We also cover shame through blaming others for
our shameful feelings or actions: “I’ve
dealt with my issues. You are the one
who just can’t get over it!”
So, through
denial and blaming—we protect our shame, grow it, and hurt our friends,
spouses, children . . . .
