Thoughts on Shame

Shame is my least favorite emotion. It’s different than guilt. Guilt I can deal with. Guilt compels me to action. I can confess my sin, ask forgiveness and strive to do better next time.

Shame is the stranger who leads me down a dark road where more shameful things await, things that will surely cause me pain, leave me wounded, and struggling to figure out how it was I got off on the wrong path.

When I was a child shame was a familiar, if unwelcome, companion.

I felt shame when at age 9 I lost my father. It’s only part of a longer story but the night before he shipped out to Vietnam, Daddy had teased me over some candy I had but refused to share with him. The next year, when he died in a battlefield, I felt shame.

I thought it was my fault he had died. I thought God was punishing me for not sharing my candy. That’s how kids process grief. Divorce or death. They think it’s their fault. They think if only they are better, smarter, prettier, nicer, sweeter, more of anything really, then bad things won’t happen to them.

We train them to think that by rewarding them every time they do something they are supposed to do. Giving them applause and attaboys, crisp dollar bills and shiny quarters.

We pay them to get good grades. We pay them to clean their rooms. We pay them to wash the car or that black lab they begged and swore they’d care for f-o-r-e-v-e-r.

Money is the reward by which we motivate, compel, coerce, and sometimes control family, friends and business associates.

Generally-speaking, though, money is a pretty good thing. It enables us to buy books, get an education, get the cancer treatment we need, or adopt the baby for whom our hearts ache. We use it to keep our bellies full and our cars running up and down the roadway. It allows us to keep the heat on at church so we can fellowship and the doors of the homeless shelters open. It helps us help others, if we are so inclined.

I have a lot of friends who have a lot of money but I also have a good deal of friends who live paycheck-to-paycheck. I’ve lived that way for much of my own life, for the most part comfortably so, which is why I was startled recently when shame came a’calling again.

People I admire very much were discussing how hard it would be to live off $40,000 a year.

“Can you imagine it?”

These friends were not being snotty or uppity or anything like that. They were expressing the same sort of mortification I express whenever I consider the homeless. I really can’t wrap my mind around living the nomadic life on the streets of America.

I admire and love these people. I would never want to do anything to disappoint them or hurt them. I wouldn’t want to offend them in any way, which is why I was ashamed. I worried that if they knew the truth of my finances – that I have lived on much less than $40,000 a year and that even now I live paycheck-to-paycheck – they may think less of me. Or worse, they might take pity on me.

That got me to wondering if that’s how I make the homeless feel when I come into their community. Do I unwittingly shame them because I can’t imagine what it’s like to live without a bed or a bathroom to call your own? Do my words and my actions make them feel unworthy to be my friend? Does it sting to be in my presence because they are so aware of the economic gap that divides us? Do they go to bed each night feeling ashamed because they believe that if only they were better, smarter, prettier, nicer, sweeter, more of anything really, then none of these bad things would have happened to them?

You see, it doesn’t really doesn’t matter whether you reside in a house of stone in a gated community or in a trailer without the skirted dust ruffle, or in a sleeping bag damp with morning dew, it’s painful to wake up each morning in a world where you are not envied or admired or worse yet, never respected.

A world where shame is your constant companion.