Childhood Set-Up-Shame

I often marvel how the words of the wonderful woman who was my therapist for 6 years still ring in my ears today as if it were yesterday. Her words have now become my words and I will give them to you so they can become your words as well. She used to say "Guilt says you made a mistake, shame says you ARE a mistake." Most addicted families fall into the category that says they 'are a mistake.'.

And I guess the only way you can make the distinction between shame and guilt is to look at degree. Shame is very big. It has you retreat into yourself and never speak a word of what you are ashamed of. It has you pretend and hide it is not there. Shame has you not even see- even though your stomach may be tied up in knots- what it is you are ashamed. Again I go back to the reruns of Leave It To Beaver. Can you picture the scene of Beaver and his dad. "Well Beaver, what do you think you could have done so that all of this would not have happened. "Well, gee dad, I guess I coulda told you in the first place and not been such a creep about it."

Now picture that same scene in an addicted/ dysfunctional house. Here's how it goes...Dad "What the hell is your problem? Get up to your room now. I don't even want to see your face for the next two days." Whereupon Beaver slinks to his room and spends two days there alone. There is no talk, the problem is not solved, but Beaver is quite clear there is something wrong with him. And he'll be on the lookout for more things wrong with him in the future.

Now for those of you who have talked to your children like that- and most of us from dysfunctional families have- don't go down your road of shame. What you can do is simply find your child, admit you 'acted like a creep', assure your child there is nothing wrong with him or her, and then have that Beaver Cleaver talk about how to avoid the same thing next time. The good news is that children are very resilient and smart, and if you redo it the right way, you have largely erased your own mistake. The thing that is crucially important is that whatever happened gets addressed, so it does not become a wound that festers in the silence, alone.

But when I look back on my own childhood, those Beaver Cleaver conversations amazed me. First, from where I sat, was it actually possible that people could talk about what went wrong and not have the sky fall down? Second, could you actually admit something went wrong and that it was your fault? And third- now this was the biggie-did people actually go around admitting they were creeps? All of this was completely foreign to me- and certainly nothing that I would ever do.

In fact, these ways of dealing with mistakes are for the most part foreign to every addicted/ dysfunctional family. And if the truth be told, it was only when I began to see as an adult that it could actually be possible to see and admit mistakes that I became amazed. Before that I couldn't even see what I was or wasn't doing around making mistakes. And in fact I never made mistakes- or at least I did not admit to making them because the repercussions were so great.

If you are the product of a dysfunctional family, shame usually lives all around and in you. Whereas other people might be annoyed that they did or didn't do something, you feel a knot in your stomach the size of a gall bladder- and you diligently go about the business of defending yourself and pretending it never happened. In an addicted family everything is a source of shame: from spilling the milk, to getting a C on your report card, to eating the last apple, to having a baby out of wedlock. It's all one, and all are equally debasing.

You can see what shame feels like if you picture a dog with his tail between his legs. Children in addicted families tend to live with their tail between their legs over everything and the term "You should be ashamed of yourself" is about as popular as 'Good Morning.' In fact this statement is so true that for the first five years of doing body work with a chiropractic to erase the physical effects of stress- my doctor spent a large amount of time adjusting my tailbone so that it would poke up instead of down. In essence, I literally lived with my tail between my legs all day, every day.

Now there is a problem that people will never see that they are living in shame because they, like me, are so anesthetized and not even aware that it is shame. So how then does one know one is living in shame. Here are some questions to ponder. How easy is it to admit your mistakes? Do you even see yourself as making mistakes? Do you feel a constant need to justify and defend yourself. When you are 100% clear that you have made a mistake or hurt someone you love, what do you do? Do you put yourself on the whipping post? Do you go to bed until you can feel better? Do you cry for hours or even days? Do you possibly wish you were dead? The answers to all of these questions will pretty much tell you if you live with a lot of shame.

And if you do, you probably had some dysfunction or addiction around you. And you need to get help for yourself, because shame has absolutely never helped anyone...

Shame is, in my opinion, the most detrimental of all the side-effects of addiction.

Here's a good resource for help:
href=http://dailystrength.org/support-groups/Addiction-Recovery