I have met a client recently that did not have a self-confidence in mem/women relations.

At first a fear against the other person’s aggression may appear. But what if one has not experienced an aggression from another sex? Where from that ‘unreasonable’ fear source then? This time the answer was a feeling of a deep, unconscious, covered by a fear – shame.

A shame pattern may come from one’s own experience of an aggressive parent. Its parent could have expressed its aggression by way of shaming the child, i.e., using bad words against a child, underestimating its skills, making fun of a child, by being unhappy about the child’s choices, criticising and negating child, by not respecting its opinions or by even physical violence, including others presence.

As adults we will experience shame as a wall between us and the world, so we do not show who we truly are. We may not take jobs that are laughed at by our family/culture systems even if we would like to do that job; we may not express verbally our opinions; we may afraid wearing colourful clothing etc. Shame is also living on diets, shame is ‘ I am not showing my face without a makeup’, shame is ‘a little, quiet mouse’ attitude ‘I’d better hide here so others have no occasion to laugh at me’.

Moreover, we culturally hold on to a saying ‘you should be ashamed of yourself’! examples being: ‘your blouse is too short’, ‘have your manners at the table’, ‘again C from maths’ etc. Since a childhood we believe that shame is an answer to all that is not in so called ‘norms’.

And yet, shame is on Hawkins’s map of consciousness at the bottom! Shame is a deep humiliation, it is a stagnation in life, it is a life’s vision ‘I am miserable’. If shaming comes form a parent, yet from youngest years, we root a deep belief that we are worthless, because people that love us most in life – parents – say so, so it must be true…

If fact what shame covers is a fear against exclusion. On a system level, an exclusion is a very strong mechanism that triggers an instinctual fear to survive. For example: ‘Who will employ me if I become a ‘colourful bird’? ‘People will talk that I am a crone dressing like a teen’, ‘Get on diet! You look like a sausage in everything’, ‘No man will want you like that’, ‘You and your opinions! You’d better be quiet because others will never accept you’.

If you feel that shame is your experience, lovingly I invite you to a consultation. Together we will have a look at shame in your system and where it source from, so in effect you can start express yourself freely.

Photo by Katarzyna Magrian