For those who are familiar with shame If you had asked me some time ago what emotion I find most difficult for myself, I would have answered fear. Well, or anxiety. Now I understand that the most difficult feeling for me personally to live with is shame. Because shame is also fear, but fear of condemnation, rejection, and, ultimately, rejection. Fear is a feeling that is natural for both animals and people. Shame is a very human emotion. It is not born with us, but is acquired in the process of education. It just so happens that man is a social being. And outside of society, a person cannot become a person. So shame becomes a tool of our upbringing. Why is shame so terrible? When we experience shame, we have a fear that we will lose our right to belong. When we experience shame, we experience complex feelings and may be tormented by difficult thoughts: “I’m somehow different,” “there’s something wrong with me.” At the moment of living shame, we can feel our loneliness and detachment, disconnection from other people. Being not accepted, rejected is a huge fear that comes from childhood. When we are ashamed, we judge ourselves. At the moment of experiencing shame, we are completely overwhelmed by this feeling. At this moment, we are not able to take a constructive approach to evaluating our actions. We judge ourselves as a whole, not a specific action. This is somewhat different from guilt. When I'm guilty, I'm guilty of something. When I am ashamed, I am “bad,” “good for nothing,” “incapable of anything.” When we experience shame, we experience a huge whirlwind of all kinds of emotional reactions. There are quite a few expressions about shame that describe how destructive this feeling is: “I want to disappear from shame,” “fail,” “burn out,” “evaporate.” We find ourselves so under the power of shame that we are ready to disappear just to avoid experiencing it.🔹It’s a shame to even feel shame. When we are ashamed and blush with shame, we are ashamed of the fact that we blush. We may start to stutter out of shame, but we are also ashamed to stutter. It’s a shame that someone will guess that we are ashamed.🔹When we are ashamed, we are ready to shrink physically, we try to take up as little space in space as possible. We draw our necks into our shoulders and hide from others. We try to be as unnoticeable as possible.🔹Sometimes this feeling is so strong that it’s easier for us not to feel anything at all. We live in shades of gray, experiencing neither sadness nor joy. Just so as not to meet fire, not to burn with shame. There may be another imbalance. Shamelessness is an attempt to protect ourselves from our own shame. We can talk about our fears, anxieties, and sadness. Shame is not easy to talk about. It’s not easy to listen to another if he talks about something shameful. After all, at this moment we are faced with our own shame. The feeling of shame can be tightly held in our hands. It locks a person in his own loneliness and pushes him to self-destruction. Sometimes it becomes a leading feeling and goes hand in hand with a person, interfering with building relationships, self-realization, suffocating with its presence and separation from others. To escape from the sticky clutches of shame, it is very important to have a person nearby who can treat you with acceptance and compassion. . Since shame is a social feeling, it is another person who can help us get out of our imprisonment. This is both salvation and complexity. The feeling of shame, if it is total and leading, quite often comes from childhood itself. It arose at a time when we were rejected and not accepted. It is traumatic and very painful. Therefore, even as an adult, it is very difficult to dare and decide to tell another about your feelings. This means daring to go into your childhood feelings and relive the horror of rejection. By experiencing shame, you can treat yourself with compassion and acceptance. Separate your actions from your personality as a whole. Tell yourself: “yes, I did the wrong thing at that moment, but this does not mean that I am wrong.” But so mature.