A SHAME-BASED LIFE

Part 4 - A Shame-based Life Shame-based individuals learn to deny, ignore and escape their feelings. The result is that they can't identify their feelings and wouldn't know how to express them if they could.

They go about daily life hoping life will be better, having little resources to make it better, and acting out the pain with physical symptoms and addictions.

Life is serious for a shame-based individual.

Walking around with deep wounds makes it difficult, if not impossible to play and have fun.

Besides to relax might mean that some of the shame of who they are might show through to others and that thought is terrifying.

A shame-based person feels:

• - A distrust of spontaneity
• - A loss of enthusiasm
• - A prepared, on-guard state
• - An uncertainty about how they are coming across
• - A concern that something is wrong with them
• - An inclination to soul-searching and reviewing incidents with the hope of determining what went wrong.
• - A loss of self-confidence
• - A growing self-doubt
• - An internalized critical voice
• - A concern that they aren't happy and ought to be
• - An anxiety or fear of being crazy
• - A sense that time is passing and they're missing something
• - A desire not to be the way they are
• - A hesitancy to accept their perceptions
• - A reluctance to come to conclusions
• - A desire to escape or run away
• - A belief that what they do best may be what they do worst
• - A tendency to live in the future - everything will be great when/after
• - A distrust of relationships

These add up to an exhausting, debilitating, self-defeating, and self-perpetuating shame. But there is a way out.