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! 

There is an error in judgment that so many of us at the beginning of relationships make. That is, one or both in the relationship get so lined up with the big picture fit, the way the the two fit together from an outside world perspective, that they do not sufficiently pause to feel into the realm of the deeply personal fit of the relationship. The two can be so lined up in terms of education, backgrounds, intentions to have children, values, athletic interests, outdoor activities, shared community of friends, etc. that they overlook how emotionally connected they actually feel with each other. For months, often years, the shared outer-world enthusiasms can carry the couple… but in my experience, the empty feeling of not having established a deeply connected safe inner connection eventually asserts itself in various forms of marital unhappiness. The challenge at these times is either to becomes emotionally acquainted with each other, or risk a chronically painful marriage or a marital ending. Of course, this is the hopeful task of emotions focused couples therapy. 

So many of us seek the solution to our life’s pain and meaning by going off on a personal journey alone. The intention can be a desire to remove ourselves from all that in social life that invites phoniness and superficiality. To boil ourselves down to what is most essentially who we are.

(to be cont.) 

So many of us, in our insecurity and traumas, feel like we are a fraud, waiting to be found out. In this underlying frame of mind, we largely dismiss our genuine accomplishments… that in terms of what is emotionally important, they don’t count. Years of this experience can damage our inherent sense of “being real.” By this, I mean the emotional sense of being real… that one has truly lived and has partook in life, as have others around us. This is an enormously painful human place, a tragic combination of not feeling loved in ones core fused with annihilating shame. (to be cont.)

I remember back four decades to when my cohort of young therapists began training in psychotherapy. Though technically a science, the feeling of it all was more akin to religion than science. We were young and idealistic, and profoundly invested in finding the “right path” to psychological healing. We had countless debates between us as to what was the truly potent form of therapy. In truth, we were all on a quest… looking for a kind of “holy grail.” We wanted to become healers of human suffering, not just to help those who came to us, but somehow to help ourselves with our own terrible suffering.