Shame is this feeling of wanting to lie down on the floor, die and disappear, because that would hurt less than enduring people looking at you, as the sort of person who did what you did.
In my particular case, I look at my past, and there is nothing I actually did which causes me more than momentary pain. I look at some situations where I behaved clumsily–and there are many of them–but there are no large crimes which cause me pain, no large betrayals, no being a son of a bitch, at least over the long term (I have been rude to many people, when feeling particularly bad).
This shame really has no root. It is existential, or what I might suggest as a synonym, Developmental. I think when people talk about “life”, they are talking about their early childhoods.
Be that as it may, this is the root of self sabotage, the most basic of which is feeling unworthy of happiness, of feeling unworthy of full participation in the human community. You are a pariah, a leper. You may not look like that on the outside. You may in fact have learned how to pretend to feel like you belong. You may even convince yourself you have convinced yourself, but I think this is rare.
If I might reference again Chris Cornell and Anthony Bourdain, they must have had this sense that they had been fooling people all these years, but they were just tired. I remember Chris Cornell saying something about how he didn’t know how to connect with people. Bourdain’s show, of course, was primarily about connecting with people over food. If he had known how to truly do it, and feel like he deserved it, he would have had the ideal life, which is what he tried to project. If I might surmise, he didn’t want anyone to know how he felt, how utterly undeserving, outcast, and alienated he felt. There was no reason to feel this way. But it never went away, and it killed him. He didn’t kill himself: his shame did. He had the perfect life, and he nonetheless felt like shit. This, itself, probably caused him to feel even more shame.
Anger and fear, relative to shame, are obvious emotions. Shame does qualitatively touch fear, though. It has some similarities. And it is also a sort of self anger. I can feel how they would cluster, be related at the level of neurophysiology.
In my dream, I committed a crime, an accidental crime, one I didn’t mean to do, but panicked about and covered up at the time, hoping I would never get caught. Of course, in the end I did, and I had to admit to everything. It was a double murder, or so I thought, but they had lived all this time, constrained, thin, barely alive, which made me feel even worse. They were there to testify against me.
This does feel like an opening, though. I murdered feelings at one time I did not know how to process, how to integrate. Their discovery and de facto resurrection is likely a good sign. I have to endure the pain of feeling these primal feelings, but I do think they are a gateway to something better.
I will add that my people, the people I want to work with, are the fuckups. They are the people I meet and know and talk with in bars. They are the people who had a knife shoved all the way into their solar plexus at some point in their lives, and they said “fuck that hurt”, then they immediately started pretending it didn’t hurt, that it wasn’t there, that all life needs is a little more effort, you know, and some self help books maybe, and the this or the that that makes the pain go away.
You can meliorate such pains over time, and for those capable of genuine love, perhaps they can in the end heal them. But most people carry some fragment of that wound to their graves.
We can do better.