Someone asked me recently: How do I deal with my toxic-shame when it surfaces?
This is a great and necessary question, yet sadly it lacks an easy answer.
I wish a simple formula existed to compute and transform toxic-shame into healthy shame. But because our shame is deeper and darker than the world’s largest cavern, the healing process and our participation in it takes more than a few tips or tricks.
Step one, though, is always to develop shame awareness.
Anyone who has practiced shame awareness will recognize a reactive and well-practiced relationship with toxic-shame: Relational survival instincts have taught us to play hot potato with toxic-shame.
I grew up in the age of Nintendo, so my friends and I never actually played hot potato. According to Wikipedia, the real game does not even involve a heated vegetable. Regardless, let’s go with the idea of taking a burning hot potato out of the oven with bare hands. Ouch! Any sane human would throw it onto the counter as fast as possible, right?
We do the same thing with toxic-shame, but it has nothing to do with our sanity. Rather it has more to do with years of practice and a mixture of wise and selfish motives. For most of our life we have played hot potato with toxic-shame. We feel it, and then we create as much distance with the unwanted emotion as possible.
Here’s the problem: As the saying goes, if you can feel, you can heal it. Inversely, so long as we rid ourselves of the feeling of toxic-shame, it cannot be healed.
What has become second nature to us as a way of surviving harmful relationship now also becomes an obstacle to creating and maintaining healthy connections with ourselves, others, and God.
First toxic-shame must be held. Felt. Burning. Stinging. Painful. This is step one. Shame practice starts with paying attention and then staying present with intention and hope.
The pain is the hard part, but develop vision for the why.
Keep a hot potato in the kitchen long enough and you might have the chance to make a twice baked potato. Now you have my attention. Hold your toxic-shame long enough, and you give your glorious heart the chance to surrender self-protective instincts and instead heal and mature into love. As we are made new, love becomes our instinctive first response to shame. That’s a vision worth some pain.
