Posts tagged ‘Stress’

Jan 22

Shame, embarrassment and guilt are some of our most crippling emotions. Can the centuries’ old British tradition of ‘Shame-Eating’ help you regain your self-worth?

As night falls on Eastville Park, in the Fishponds area of Bristol, children gather around the lakeshore and begin waving glowing pink lanterns at the water. Suddenly, the crowd bursts into song to rouse a mythical monster from the lake, one that’s been slumbering all year long. And then it appears: a giant monstrous fish that looks like a carp dressed in filthy rags.

As the monster shambles along the lakeshore, the children rush towards it and pop handwritten notes detailing their most embarrassing memories into the fish’s mouth. The beast becomes fatter and fatter on the stories of guilt, fear and embarrassment until all of their shame is consumed. It then waddles off towards a firepit where it regurgitates the letters into the roaring flames. One by one, all embarrassing memories are erased and the now smiling children absolved of their shame.

The roots of Bristol’s Shame-Eating Festival probably originate with a chronically embarrassed 13^th century monk known as St Polycarp. Although a 13^th Century monk, Polycarp had a deep understanding of modern human psychology and devised a plan for dealing with his most difficult emotions.

‘St Polycarp,’ says one of the festival’s organisers, ‘was cursed with crippling embarrassment at the stupid things he said, so he began writing them down in his journal. But every time he did, he felt mortified at the thought that someone might read them. So he would walk down to Eastville Park lake at dusk to discard the latest pages.

‘But one evening, the unfortunate Polycarp arrived at the banks with his journal and there waiting for him was a giant, monstrous fish. It had started life as a simple carp, but months of gorging on his delicious shame had made it huge and monstrous.’

When it saw St Polycarp, it demanded to be fed: ‘But Polycarp, horrified and embarrassed, refused to relinquish his journal. The beast swallowed poor Polycarp and his journal whole.’

Shame’s Purpose

Although the details of the story behind the Shame-Eating Lantern Festival are probably apocryphal, its core message remains true. Shame, embarrassment and guilt can be crippling but there are ways in which we can rid ourselves of these troubling emotions. We can learn to be at peace with all of our faults, failings and foibles no matter how embarrassing or shameful they might be.

Shame may be one of our most painful emotions, but like all feelings – both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ – it serves a useful evolutionary purpose. It binds groups together and guides cooperative behaviour. It works like this. Humans survive most effectively when they cooperate with each other but this also creates a short-term incentive to cheat, freeload and to generally leach off each other. This, in turn, creates an incentive for others in the group to punish those caught cheating. So, our early primate ancestors evolved an emotion to make us feel bad when we thought about cheating (or actually cheated) and thereby ward off any punishments that we’d suffer from actually doing so. This became the emotion that we now call ‘shame’. Such shame is part of a constellation of similar emotions that stabilise and reinforce social bonds and cooperative behaviour. It includes such pro-social feelings as guilt, inadequacy, remorse and humiliation, as well as ‘pure’ shame itself. Taken together, these emotions are powerful incentives to cooperate and play by the social norms with which we thrive.

Although shame may once have served a useful evolutionary purpose, in our complex and hyper-connected world it can become a toxic emotion that tinges everything that we think, feel and do. Social media, for example, ensures that even the most minor of transgressions or embarrassing slip-ups can be magnified at warp speed and remain forever public. It can be crippling and even lethal if it leads to suicide or so called ‘honour’ killings.

But these problems are just the tip of the spear. Even the most subtle forms of shame can impinge on our ability to enjoy life by discouraging us from truly expressing ourselves lest we later feel stupid, intemperate, rude or aggressive. It can also stop us from taking risks in art, science or love, but most of all, it encourages us to play safe intellectually, creatively and emotionally. And strange as it may seem, shame can also make us fear success because we may have learnt as children that an embarrassing failure might follow on behind should we become ‘over-confident’ and over-reach ourselves. Shame can easily paralyse us to such a degree that our lives freeze over with an all-pervading angst.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, shame is also a potent weapon wielded by the elite, and tyrants in general, to control us. It is used most aggressively against women to control what they wear, what they eat, how they express themselves and even what they think, feel and do. It’s self-censorship write large and limits our enjoyment of life like no other emotion.

Dissolving the Power of Shame

And this, paradoxically, reveals a way of dissolving the power of shame. For it can only control you if you allow it to do so. And you can regain control by enhancing your innermost feelings of dignity and self-worth – the antithesis of shame. This can be done through mindfulness combined with the acceptance and embracing of your shame. This works because shame, like other emotions, is both a message and a messenger. Once the emotion has been felt, genuinely felt and accepted, then the message will have been delivered and the messenger completed its job. It then begins to dissolve, leaving you free to get on with your life. This process of acceptance and embracing may have to be repeated many times until it becomes a way of life. Paradoxically, acceptance of yourself as you truly are is the most effective way to actually change your life for the better.

One way of doing this is to follow in the footsteps of St Polycarp and write down your most shameful thoughts, feelings and emotions. And if, like Polycarp, you are fearful that this might be discovered you can shred it, burn it, or feed it to the fish. If this makes you squirm, remember that this can remain your little secret forever. If you feel a little bolder, then you can share an embarrassing moment as a joke with friends so that you can all laugh at your wonderful faults, failings and foibles. Humour is peculiarly cathartic. You might also like to get together with friends to share some shameful or embarrassing moments. This could even morph into a ‘Shame-Eating Festival’ where you and others can defuse that which shames you. Again, this can be as public or as anonymous as you choose.

Mindfulness can be especially helpful when it comes to chronic shame because it enhances dignity and self-worth. Mindfulness is, at its heart, about acceptance of yourself with all of your so-called ‘failings’. Eventually you may come to learn that it is not you that is flawed, but rather, it’s society’s standards that are broken because they have been set so impossibly high, arbitrarily so, or perhaps deliberately so – all the better to control you.

You can make a start with the meditation programme in our book Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World. This has been clinically proven in many trials, at Oxford University and elsewhere, to relieve many emotional and mental health difficulties including anxiety, stress, depression and exhaustion. The Befriending Meditation or the Sounds and Thoughts Meditation might offer more immediate relief. You can download or stream them from the link below.