The Shame Industrial Complex

I can't help but notice that there's a creeping assumption that we are ashamed of ourselves, all the time.

Clients will sometimes tell me they feel shame around money. This makes sense on a surface level: it's a topic we don't talk openly about, and it's easy to develop the idea (even if misguided) that you're not handling things as well as others. But I think it's more than that. Going deeper into these conversations often reveals that they don't have a sense of what they're supposed to feel shame about, exactly, just that they definitely need to feel it about something.

There's an expectation that we need to demonstrate shame, and say certain words in a certain order to signal that we don't think too much of ourselves. It's performative bullshit, not shame: "I've sufficiently belittled myself before you, and I intend to take zero steps to change a single thing, but most important is that I've shown that I'm aware of how awful I am".

Shame or guilt is a real emotion, but it gets assigned to you rather than resulting from your actions. Of course you feel shame! You do or do not have children, but not the right number. You ate and enjoyed food that one time. You don't make a living. You do make a living, but not the right kind and not the right amount of money. This is particularly true if you're female: it's how we perform womanhood, and it's DEFINITELY how we perform motherhood. Can you imagine hopping in to your local moms' Facebook group and claiming that you're not perpetually guiltridden? You'd be a pariah.

Who does all of this help? What happens if you say no? I think it's just a way to sell your anxiety back to you. There are endless services you can buy that promise to make you a better person, and they start from the premise that shame is your default state. Why is this the assumption? It could be true that a person is grappling with this, and it's holding them back, but you'd only know that by doing some pretty in-depth work with them.

We're stripping the meaning from a word that is really powerful. It's good that we have shame! It's supposed to stop us from doing the really bad things, the ones that harm other people. Instead we try to sell people snacks described as "guilt-free". Excuse me?

If you're feeling guilt or shame about something, think about: did you actually do anything wrong? This is valuable! It's okay to examine why you're feeling the way you're feeling. But are you just being expected to feel guilty for........something?

When it comes to your planning, let's examine where you're feeling stuck. Whether the emotion is guilt or shame specifically, or just feeling like something's not quite working for you the way you want, it's worth spending time on and understanding it.