Shame

Shame is meant to help regulate our behavior. Since it is such an uncomfortable feeling, we would want to avoid repeating actions that cause us to feel it.

In the Hindu Shankya system, shame is listed as one of the eight poisons of the heart, hindering our spiritual growth. Following moral precepts helps us to avoid feeling shame. 

Psychopaths, who are lost to their conscience, are shameless. This is not because they have transcended shame, but rather because they have no access to it.

During abuse, a package of shame, unconnected to any actions of the victim, is transferred from the abuser to the victim. It is necessary for the abuser to become at least momentarily insane, and blame the victim - somehow make them responsible for the abuse, somehow get convinced that the victim is deserving of the abuse - or all motive to do harm would deflate like a balloon, and it would be impossible to act.

Without a strong negative or twisted projection in which the victim becomes a person who deserves or wants the abuse, they would be perceived as what they are: a child or a vulnerable person. The abuse is to the abuser the only apparent means to rid him or herself of their own package of shame, usually delivered via similar abuse once done to them. That kind of shame, which attaches to the ego during abuse, drives a victim to always feel that they need to change and be better, but without any idea how, because the original wrong action can't be identified. Hence self-esteem dwindles.

For most survivors, the shame transferred to them during their childhood abuse drives them to perfectionism in their adult life, or they may attach to their goodness like a life raft, proving to themselves they are good but with the fear that if you peeled off enough layers, you would find their supposedly bad core (the shame that was imposed on them during their abuse.) For some survivors, the sense of being evil (the result of the shame forced to take on during childhood abuse) is dissociated from their consciousness altogether, and they become shameless while they may mindlessly perpetuate the evil that was originally placed with them.

My mother's shamelessness seemed at times purposeful, as if at one point in her life when the discomfort of feeling shame was so great that she made the choice that she was never going to feel that way again. I was most aware of her utter shamelessness in the moment she molested me. She appeared to be having a fun, light time between girls, simply doing, as she said "what pretty girls do together." I was eleven years old. I have never felt as much shame as during this abuse, the blood rushing to my cheeks as my mother casually, blatantly exposed herself. As if we finally got to have a little fun in an otherwise boring day. I was lying down as I had been told, stiff as a board, shoulders up to my ears, fighting the disgust, indescribably confused, and ashamed of feeling arousal in response to her touching me, showing me "how to have fun." The mental torture of this experience is as vivid today as the day it happened. 

The difference between shame and guilt is that shame is the feeling itself, related to what you may or may not have done, which is very uncomfortable and truly hard to live with. Guilt is the related mental process of the mind coping with what you may have done, or what you believe you may have done. Sometimes you can feel guilty and take responsibility for something you did without feeling shame.

As a child and young adult I couldn't smile freely. My mother daily recited a list of my physical imperfections which included that my teeth were yellow. I used to be too ashamed to open my mouth. I wasn't feeling guilty about my teeth, but I was ashamed. 

Repression of shame on a personal level, as in my mother and many of the abusers in the network, happens when the ego is so damaged from being made to carry shame through abuse, that in looking at your own actions, the natural guilt that would prevent you from repeating the action is conflated with the unbearable shame of being made to feel that you deserved the abuse - embedding the lie that you must be innately worthless, or evil. The intensity of the discomfort of shame with the added fear that you are worthless and evil and deserve every bad thing that happens to you really are too much to bear. This is how the entirety of one’s conscience can be frozen with shamelessness as its result.

Conscience comes to us through a small inner voice, and to be heard it requires that we are in touch with our feelings. Shutting down all shame also shuts out the awareness of the original abuse or its impact and any access to that first, intuitive inner voice that a choice you are about to make - an impulse you are about to follow, an action you are about to take, or conversely, something you do not say or do - is not in alignment with your true self. Any resulting feeling that may begin to filter through would alert you or remind you that you are doing or did something wrong, which would instantly threaten to open the floodgates to the unbearable, excessive shame. Thus all guilt and shame are cut off. You reject responsibility by rejecting the shame. And you will fight to protect yourself from ever feeling it again. And that is how you end up abusing, killing, and having no conscience at all.  

Next, in the network, this psychological process of the weak who have lost their inner voice of conscience is justified and rationalized through complex theories, philosophy, historical data and theistic beliefs that fill up and cloud one’s mind to the simple truth of doing wrong. The extreme evil deeds commonly performed in the network are the result of the slippery slope of those who in their zeal to avoid the discomfort of shame have descended into the depths of hell, where murder and lust are celebrated as though they temporarily give life to someone who is dead inside, whose feelings are numbed and replaced with sensation and drug- and violence-induced highs.

From the outside, such a life may look compellingly easy. A network slave may claim that the world is their oyster and feel a sense of freedom (from shame) because they have exclusive access to resources and feel that they can do anything and get away with it. Thus psychopaths are fooled into making themselves believe they are gods.

The psychopaths at the top of the power paradigm, through their own trauma-based repression of their shame, are attempting to cause a global shift into shamelessness and the decline of morals into chaos, which is the outward reflection of their own inner state. If we want to create a different world, we need to sort through our own shame, heal from the shame imposed through trauma that has us fear that we are evil or bad or undeserving, and live our lives with an awake conscience, trying not to do harm - not because of external religious edicts but because of our own inner knowing. Only if we can find true peace inside ourselves can we expect that there can be peace in the world.