Yea long! Makes perfect sense. Thanks for sitting in.
I agree, the fear of shame - the need to escape shaming - has driven a lot of my past 'need to perform' too. Thinking that if I were only good enough at whatever, my poor evil echo-empty mother would finally appreciate me. Or the incompetent, nasty, narcissistic teacher or boss or whatever. Sad, that. Craving mercy from the merciless, love from the unloving, kindness from the cruel. Because they shame us, in defense, making us feel as though WE are the defective ones, keeping us from seeing where the defects really lie.
I think it's what drives the 'crab bucket' too. That thing that keeps people from breaking free of dysfunctional families and groups... the way crabs in a bucket will pull down any crab that manages to get near enough to the edge that it might otherwise escape. Shame. Get back down here in the quicksand with the rest of us, who do you think YOU are?
And heaven help us, we don't know any better because we've never had anything better, so down we slide, in we wade, feeling all the time as though something isn't quite the way it ought to be but never knowing what's wrong.
It's been interesting to see the panorama of responses here. A kaleidoscope... different people refracting the light in their own unique ways... thankfully, reactive shaming - which I thought was probably inevitable with a topic this emotionally loaded, where we're all walking wounded in various ways - seems almost nonexistent.
Interesting thing has happened for me since I articulated this. I've had some really delightful recent encounters - I'm being sarcastic - with total jerks; typical Ns-in-traffic, at work, at the store type stuff. My response is different. I see the shame being thrown, and instead of being angry about it, or reacting in some way to defuse it, I'm just sort of taking one brisk step to the right or the left and watching it whiz past. Feeling a thankfully mild contempt, mingled with a very cool (temperature-wise) sort of pity, and then going on about my business. It's so obviously THEIR problem - and not worth any emotional expenditure on my part - at least, it seems obvious now!
Hmm. So... the point of Ns shaming us is to deprive us of confidence in ourselves. Which, of course, makes us easy to manipulate and deceive. And god bless us, when we reactively shame others, because we don't know any better, we're doing the Ns' work for them.
Makes perfect sense, then, that one of the first things that would happen, when we see and reject shaming, would be an increase in confidence and in resistance to manipulation and deceit.
Wow. I hope this sticks. Nice, it feels. I'm looking forward to reaching the point where the mild contempt and cool pity are replaced by detachment and compassion, too, but right now I need to feel exactly what I'm feeling, in order to get away from what I used to feel. I've extended the wrong kind of compassion to Ns all my life.
This URL is a link to an amazing cartoon series by a person whose faith is as real and reality-based as anything I have ever seen. But
please don't click on it if you are prone to nightmares about Ns being monsters, because this strip shows someone 'exposing' their inner N, and their whole countenance changes into something monstrous. It's as ugly as anything Steven Spielberg could come up with in a special effect. But I swear I've seen something like this happen, in the faces of Ns hurling shame.
http://www.comics.com/comics/levelpath/archive/levelpath-20050813.html [Just in case the URL takes you to today's strip (for whatever day you access it) the strip I meant to direct to is the one for 8/13. If you want to see a fairly amusing sample of his work instead of this amazing depiction of an N's inner core, copy the URL above, paste it into your browser, and change -20050813 to -20050814 before you hit the return key.]
