All emotions are messengers trying to point our attention back towards what we love, but they are often quite hard to interpret, especially negative emotions. Many negative emotions like anger, fear, disgust, etc, point us towards our self-love, which is valuable, but focusing too much on them can cause us to neglect our connections with others. Shame is one of the most beautiful negative emotions because it points us directly at our love for others. It is impossible to feel shame without there being some love for someone or something outside ourselves that is welling up in us and calling out for our attention. All we have to do is learn to listen and interpret this message properly.
Take for example a situation where one looks in the mirror and feels shame about their appearance. On the surface level, this emotion may say all kinds of horrible things to us about how worthless and broken we are, which is certainly unhelpful to take too seriously. But if we turn our attention away from the specific words and instead towards the motivation this feeling has for calling so aggressively for our attention, we can start to see that the emotion desperately wants us to be in contact with our love of others, our desire to be in deep connection with them, to be deeply seen by them as the beautiful creatures we are on the inside, even though it is tragically fixated on pursuing conventional attractiveness as a strategy to fulfill this love. This recognition helps us to welcome all our emotions in as reminders of love, instead of fighting against their presence and making our situation even worse.
To be clear, this does not justify using judgemental language to control others with shame, in fact quite the opposite. Using someone's love against them to control and manipulate them for one's own ends is a deeply violating form of emotional abuse, and can leave profound wounds on the tenderest parts of our hearts, similar to sexual abuse. However, our evaluation of the act of deliberately creating shame in others can be separated from our evaluation of the shame itself, allowing us to see the deep beauty in the painful message it brings us.
Like many beautiful things, shame is intended to be a transient experience. Just as a party that is initially fun would likely turn exhausting if it went on for days, shame is intended to be felt as a temporary emergence, fully appreciated for only a few moments before it passes away. When it persists for days, weeks, or even years, it is a sign that we lack the proper emotional support to deal with it, and we need to reach out for help. Despite its beauty, we need to be sure we cultivate a balanced, healthy relationship with shame so that it does not consume us.
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