It’s warm out this charming November afternoon and the Colorado River glistens as we pedal along on the River Front trail. Sky – light blue, air still. It feels more like a spring day rather than fall. Even the fall foliage doesn’t clue us in that it’s autumn, as there are no golden leaves. Last week, record-breaking temperatures froze the leaves – all trees and shrubs now a mousey brown color. One of the many traumas that trees and shrubs endure, but somehow, they have the fortitude to carry on.
We humans, too, walk around in bodies made up of trauma and unhealed injuries. When those traumas and injuries are triggered, for some reason, we like to add in a little lethal shame to the mix. Like the original trauma or injury wasn’t insulting enough? Tara Brach (American Psychologist and popular podcaster) talks of the first arrow and the second arrow, the first arrow being the trauma itself. The second arrow, shame, compounds the emotions of the original trauma or injury. The first arrow may not be avoidable. The second arrow is another story.
For a long time, I didn’t know the difference between shame and guilt. But now I understand the difference – guilt is feeling remorse for what we have done. Guilt enables us to keep living amongst one another and can even be helpful because it can keep us in line. Guilt says that what we did was wrong. Whereas shame tells us who we are is wrong; that we are bad, unworthy, incompetent, inadequate, etc. Shame is a humiliation about our very core, and it annihilates any self-esteem we might have had. It isolates, alienates and can leave us feeling hopeless.
Many of us are ashamed of our shame – afraid to admit that we even have shame. We live with it and ignore it and all the while the shame grows bigger. If we only knew that most everyone else is also susceptible to self-shaming, that might take away some of that isolation and alienation. If we become mindful of when the shame talk begins, we could begin to manage it. Once we have recognized our shame then we can begin to root out the maladaptive thinking that goes along with it. We might even go a step further and begin to heal the wound(s) associated with it.
I think back to the simple trees – how they take the hit of the first arrow and how they don’t complicate the initial wound with the second arrow. They direct their attention to healing the original wound, un-distracted by shame. If we humans could follow a similar model, this world might be a lot less complicated. Pedaling up the river, I pass more trees and shrubs. I miss the beautiful gold leaves of fall this year, but who’d have thought there would be a lesson from mousey-brown leaves?
