A Lesson in Cutting Shame Off at the Knees

Yesterday was my Grandma Shumway’s 98^th birthday celebration.

I am proud of my heritage, and being a Shumway has brought many gifts as well as challenges. I judge I am deeply emotional, sensitive, stubbornly committed and keenly passionate about the things I believe in, attributes I believe I inherited from my mother. These gifts enable me to cultivate a spirit of friendship, devotion and loyalty to my friends and the causes I believe in, to persist despite opposition in developing my skills, and to grow into differing roles and goals.

From these many gifts also come challenges. My attributes, in my experience, are like burning gasoline: powerful, but ready to burn my eyebrows off if I’m not careful. I’ve found myself a perfectionist so susceptible to shame that even small faux-pas can prove to be literally physically painful to process, triggering grimace-inducing bouts of guilt and depression even many years later. Particularly difficult triggers laden with opportunity for mistakes (such as social interactions and employment) have left me especially singed.

My guess is that I’m not the only one in my family this way. One keen-eyed relative calls it “the Shumway Shyness,” the tendency for our family members to uncomfortably shut down during social interactions. I'd guess what’s happening is we’re trying to keep the barrel of Shumway sensitivity and emotional-ness from blowing up in our faces. I honestly credit those who have married into our family for preserving our collective sanity.

Now, that’s just my guess, and perhaps I’m wrong; these may well just be individual attributes of mine. Nevertheless, whether mine alone or shared, they were at the forefront of my mind as I navigated a set of family relationships that, for me, have been particularly fraught with the painful emotion at the core of my own perfectionism-driven “Shumway Shyness:”

Shame.

One painful pimple of an example stood out particularly yesterday. At the celebration, I saw a cousin’s wife whom I haven’t seen for quite some time, on account of their living out of state. While a teenager, she attended my congregation. During that time, I was tasked with putting together a musical number and invited her to sing soprano.

At that time, my perfectionism centered around my music-making. Unfortunately, social sensitivity did not automatically translate to social skill, and multiple times during the performance, and in full view of the audience, I gave wide and obvious grimaces and uncomfortable chuckles when I heard mistakes. It was obvious by their expressions th
ey were not impressed with my behavior. I walked away feeling embarrassed and humiliated on multiple fronts by my “failure.”

I recognize this was a minor faux-pas likely quickly forgotten by everyone else involved. But for me, with my long memory and big emotions and perfectionism, it blew up into a longstanding source of torture. Even into my late twenties, the memory would flash into my mind and I would find myself clenching my fists with sudden and intense humiliation and embarrassment, feelings that could take an hour to clear.

It was painful to relive those emotions every single time I thought of that memory, and it was painful to realize that my thought process was not normal. I thought myself crazy trying to rid myself of the pain.

But when I saw her walk into the celebration, and that surge of humiliation and shame hit, I decided to make a different choice. I was done with the emotional hold this memory had on me, so I took a step into the darkness and disclosed this piece of my experience to my cousin’s wife. She then told me the earth shattering news!

She didn’t remember it at all.

Shocker!

I forgot to ask for clarification but it occurred to me that not only did she not remember me grimacing during the musical number, SHE DIDN’T REMEMBER SINGING IT, PERIOD.

In that moment, something that had seemed so large suddenly...lost its weight. As she continued her gracious response, I found myself thinking once again upon that torturous memory. When I realized that everyone else had long forgotten, the sense of being a failure no longer held any power over my mind. With the telling of it, the associated shame finally disappeared.

Brene Brown, a sociologist who researches shame, describes it this way:

“...feelings of shame can quietly marinate over a lifetime. ‘Here’s the bottom line with shame,’ she says. ‘The less you talk about it, the more you got it. Shame needs three things to grow exponentially in our lives: secrecy, silence, and judgment.’

By keeping quiet, Brown says your shame will grow exponentially. ‘It will creep into every corner and crevice of your life,’ she says.
The antidote, Brown says, is empathy. She explains that by talking about your shame with a friend who expresses empathy, the painful feeling cannot survive. ‘Shame depends on me buying into the belief that I’m alone,’ she says.
Here’s the bottom line: ‘Shame cannot survive being spoken,’ Brown says. ‘It cannot survive empathy.’”

Whether it’s over an embarrassing social mistake or a gargantuan sin, I hope to continue the practice of speaking of my shame to others in the context of trustworthy and empathic relationships. Emotional healing is not possible to obtain without it.