Shame – When We Stop Hiding

Shame is something I don't think we talk about enough.

Most of us have something in our lives that we would rather people didn't know about. Something we've done, something we've allowed, something that happened to us, or simply a period of our lives that we aren't particularly proud of. And sometimes it isn't even the thing itself that troubles us the most. It's the thought of other people knowing about it.

• What will they think of me?

• Will they look at me differently?

• Will they judge me?

• Will they wonder how I could have been so stupid, so weak, so naïve?

  
  

I think that's where shame really gets its power. It convinces us that certain parts of our story have to remain hidden because if people knew the truth, somehow we would become less in their eyes. So we become very good at editing our stories. We tell certain parts and leave others out. We change the subject. We laugh something off. We say, "It's a long story," when actually it's a story we just don't feel comfortable telling. And I understand that. Not everything needs to be shared and certainly not with everyone. Some things are private and should remain private. Some experiences are painful, and we have every right to decide who gets access to them.

But I think there is a difference between privacy and secrecy that comes from shame.

One says, This is personal and I choose not to share it. The other says, I hope nobody ever finds out because I'm afraid of what they will think of me. That's a very different place to live from.

The truth is, people will always have opinions. Even people who know very little about our lives can have surprisingly strong opinions about how we should have lived them.

• You should have left sooner.

• You should have known.

• You shouldn't have trusted them.

• Why did you put up with that?

• Why didn't you say something?

• Why did you make that decision?

  
  

It's very easy to know exactly what someone else should have done when you weren't the person standing in their shoes at the time. And we do it to ourselves too. We look back at an earlier version of ourselves with everything we know today and wonder how we could possibly have made some of the choices we made. But that's hardly fair.

Of course I would handle certain things differently today. I have lived more. I have learned more. I have been hurt, disappointed, surprised and humbled by life. I have learned things about people, relationships and, perhaps most importantly, myself that I simply didn't understand years ago.

There are things I tolerated then that I wouldn't tolerate now. There are things I worried about that wouldn't get five minutes of my attention today. There are people whose approval once mattered enormously to me whose opinion of me today would make very little difference to how I live my life. That's not because I've stopped caring. I have just grown. And growth has an uncomfortable way of making our old mistakes much easier to see. But what are we supposed to do with them? Pretend they never happened? Spend the rest of our lives embarrassed by them? Keep punishing ourselves?

At some point, surely we have to be able to say,

Yes, I got that wrong.

Yes, I stayed too long.

Yes, I made a terrible decision.

Yes, I allowed something I shouldn't have.

Yes, I was afraid.

Yes, I didn't know what I know now.

And then allow ourselves to move forward.

I have also come to believe there can be enormous healing in talking about the things we have felt ashamed of. Not necessarily publicly. Not necessarily on social media. And certainly not with people who haven't earned our trust. Sometimes it starts with one person. You finally say something you've carried around inside you for years and, strangely, hearing yourself say the words out loud changes something. The world doesn't end. You are still you. And very often the response isn't the judgment you had imagined at all. Sometimes it's simply, "I understand."

And occasionally it's, "Me too."

Those two words can be incredibly powerful.

Because shame thrives on the belief that we are the only one.

• The only one who made that mistake.

• The only one who stayed.

• The only one who lied.

• The only one who got into a mess.

• The only one who trusted someone we shouldn't have.

• The only one who ignored the warning signs.

• The only one who has a part of our past we'd rather erase.

We are not.

And perhaps that's one of the reasons speaking about our experiences can be so freeing. When someone is brave enough to talk honestly about something they've struggled with, it often gives someone else permission to stop pretending too. But getting to that place takes time. You might not be able to talk about something today. That's okay.

Maybe the first step is simply being honest with yourself about it. Maybe you write it down. Maybe eventually you tell one person you trust.

And perhaps one day you'll notice that you can talk about it without that familiar feeling of wanting to disappear afterwards. That's when you begin to realise that something has changed.

The story hasn't changed.

You have.

You no longer need everyone to understand it.

You don't need everyone to approve of the choices you made.

You don't even need everyone to believe your version of events.

And that, I think, is a very freeing place to reach.

Because there will always be someone willing to judge a chapter of your life without having read the pages that came before it. Let them. You know what it took to get from there to here. Take responsibility for the things that genuinely belong to you. Apologise where you need to. Make amends where you can. Learn from what happened and try not to repeat the same mistakes. But don't spend the rest of your life trying to prove that you're sorry by refusing to forgive yourself. And don't carry shame that belongs to somebody else.

If someone betrayed you, that is not your shame.

If someone mistreated you, that is not your shame.

If you trusted someone who turned out not to deserve that trust, you don't need to be embarrassed for having had a good heart.

There are some things we survive before we ever understand what we were surviving. Maybe healing from shame isn't about reaching a point where the past no longer matters.

Some things will always matter. Maybe it's simply reaching the point where you can look back and say: Yes, that happened. There are things I wish had been different. There are things I wish I had done differently. But I'm not going to hide from my own story anymore.

There is something incredibly freeing about being able to speak about something that once made you lower your head and no longer feeling the need to do so. Not because you're proud of everything you've done. Not because everything that happened was okay. But because you've finally understood that being imperfect isn't something you need to hide. We all have chapters we wouldn't necessarily choose to read aloud.

The important thing is not to spend the rest of the book ashamed of them.