One of the most common shame situations is how we shame ourselves for not accomplishing goals we have set for ourselves. This is where we blame ourselves, and relentlessly undermine our self-esteem, over our failures to accomplish… and do not stop to truly consider the real psychological causes for why we cannot complete our goals. That there are reasons for why things turn out the way they do, that true patterns of causality live within our psychologies that are every bit as “objectively real” as occur in the world of physics.
Actually we fight facing into “the real” about ourselves in terms of goals not reached. It can feel like a kind of giving up. This resistance can be hugely powerful because of the ways that the goals we set for ourselves our tied to our ideal sense of ourselves. The problem here is that our ideal goals are often compensatory of imagined inadequacies that we harbor towards ourselves deeply inside; they do not do justice to the “whole picture” of who we really are inside, or even outside!
