The Shame of it all...

The epiphany of realizing that shame is an imagined obligation freed me from its crushing weight. 

But I want to back up a moment...

You heard it from a parent, grand parent, teacher, minister, or minister's wife. 'Shame on you!' Somebody, somewhere, told you that. If you were like me as a kid, you heard it a lot. It wouldn't be until much later that I would realize the full import of that phrase, or its complete impotence, but I knew when I heard it that I was supposed to feel bad. For the most part, I did.

The dictionary definition of shame is more or less a feeling of guilt or unease when you know you've done something wrong. When placed within the framework of a religion, the shame of sin is based on the investment you have towards the liturgy of your faith. I have to define it as such since, as I've mentioned in previous posts, religion is not just a matter of personal faith, but of social convention. In other words, religion is the commonly agreed upon exercise of a given faith, and therefore it is measured by the public practice of those rites and rituals.

To feel shame for sin, you must agree that the publicly held standard is correct, and that you didn't live up to it. The issue that causes me struggle is that shame over failing to meet the standards of one's religion is not necessarily an affront to God. Even within the Abrahamic religions of the world, there is sect after sect that all claim to be the 'true' religion, but which have no difference in the foundations of their faith over the next. With that in mind, I conclude that religious shame is really shame over having disappointed your fellow man rather than your Creator.

Why does that matter?

It depends on how you feel about the idea of External Control Psychology. The premise states that the 1st Party is subject to the expectations of behavior and/or thought of a 2nd Party. As children, we experience this as the parent/offspring relationship. Our parents have certain rules and standards that they expect us to observe. It is involuntary as they are our caretakers. They feed, house, and educate us. We are entirely dependent on that relationship and are shaped by it until we reach adulthood.

Dr. William Glasser, the developer of Choice Theory and its ties to External Control Psychology, holds that as adults we are no longer bound to this relationship, yet often fail to realize it. We have learned through our entire upbringing that we are expected to behave in a certain way. If we failed to do that, the person in authority could (and often did) react, rightfully, with anger, and punishment may be a result. Without the proper understanding of the hierarchy, this simply looks like it is acceptable to respond with anger when we don't get our way. That is predicated on the idea that we even have the right to expect behaviors of any kind other than voluntary from anyone outside of ourselves.

So what happens when we view that in the religious context? Seems pretty apparent to me. The moral authority has developed some kind of expectation of liturgical conduct, at the very least. More than likely, they also have expectations of private conduct and worship. There are two problems with that.

Firstly, they are self-appointed authorities. They have determined through their own inductive reasoning that they should have the only say to be had over what constitutes righteous conduct.

Secondly, they presume that by right of their religious appointment, anyone is bound to listen to them as an intermediary between the faithful and their God.

It is a very big leap to shrug off any agreement with this thinking. We've been indoctrinated in it since we first recognized positions of authority outside of ourselves. However, it is a mistake to think that anyone has either the right or ability to make us feel anything. We are not obligated to feel compassion, remorse, pride, guilt, or even shame. Emotions of pressed obligation, like shame, are simply self-punishment. To feel it, we must have accepted that someone has the power to dictate what we feel, and when we know that we have failed to appease that power, we hold ourselves accountable to it. No one can absolve us of that guilt until our consciences are clear. And if our conscience has always been clear, no one can cloud it without our permission.

The true shame of it is that social homogeny has duped so many people into thinking that someone else is responsible for their spiritual journey. I am answerable only to the Creator, first cause, or genesis of my existence. If there was purpose inherent in that event, it is my duty to find it and reconcile my fulfillment of that purpose.

The conscience is a remarkable thing. In the faith of my youth, it was explained that it could "accuse or excuse" my actions based on how I trained it. As we've established, most of our training has been to accept that someone else had already made the rules and we were obligated to them. With that understanding, my conscience accused me incessantly for two decades. I was a walking, talking failure of every variety you could name. My greatest shame came in the form of not feeling that my conscience should be accusing me for the things I thought. I regretted, lamented, and cursed my conscience for doing exactly what I had been told it should do.

The day that I accepted that feeling shame over standards defined by someone else was voluntary, and that I no longer volunteered, the burden was lifted. That burden was one that no words could ever describe. It permeated every facet of my life, every thought, every fiber of my being. I wasn't just crushed by it. I was saturated with it. Stained with it.

The epiphany itself was not enough to free my conscience entirely. It took time to accept that I could trust myself. My steps were in fact mine to direct. My thoughts were my own, and only mine. There was no direction that I couldn't move. I am me, and me is okay.

It's a shame it took so long to figure that out.