Shame: Swampland of the Soul

Part 1

Photo by Krystian Piątek on Unsplash

Shame is not something I want to write about. It is not something most people want to read about. That is good because I’m going to write about it, and I’m hoping that no one will want to read about it.

So why am I going to write about shame? Jungian analysts call shame the swampland of the soul. I want out of my swampland. Truthfully, I really thought that I had slogged my way out of that swamp. I thought if I wasn’t totally out of the swamp, I at least had one foot standing on firm ground and the other lightly planted in the muck. This week I’ve come to accept the reality that I still have some more slogging to do.

How exactly do I know this? There is an eight-year-old girl who keeps showing up in my morning meditations. The girl is me and she is standing outside her second-grade classroom. She is standing there with the school nurse and she is filled with shame.

The shame from this experience is so great that I have never shared this story with anyone. Not even my husband. Even as I write this I can feel my face getting warm. I’m just going to take deep breath and diving in. Here goes.

I’m sitting in my second -grade classroom when nurse Bellavance walks in the door, she calls my name and asks me to come out into the hall. I’ve spent most of my second-grade class year trying to be invisible. Trying to fly under the radar of my teacher who was aptly named Mrs. Cutting, and here I find myself called out into the hall.

She is speaking with me because my teacher has discovered that I have been wiping my boogers on the underside of my desktop. The nurse informs me that the janitor will clean my desk and I’m not to do it again. She commences to “teach” me how to blow my nose; believing that a lack of knowledge is the issue here. It’s not the issue. The problem is that my nose is blocked and I don’t have any tissues. There was a box of tissues on Mrs. Cutting’s desk, but I was too terrified to leave my seat to get one. Only last week she screamed at Michael, the nicest boy in the class, for peeing his pants.

I was embarrassed, I was horrified and I slid down the slippery slope of shame right into the middle of the swamp. For me, this was a short trip. The lecture from the school nurse only served to reinforce what I knew to be true about myself; that something is inherently wrong with me, and I am never ever good enough.

Before I go any further, I need to point out that the groundwork of the slippery slope that allowed me to slide so easily into the swamp of shame was primed by two things. One was that the shaming of children in the 50s and 60s was fairly commonplace. “What will the neighbor’s think?” was a common mantra in many households. Even my dad who often said, “ Who cares what people say?” could be caught pulling out the, “What will the neighbors think?” card from time-to-time. (I took great joy in pointing out the contradiction as soon as the words left his lips.)

The second thing was the bus trip incident. The bus headed to Washington D.C. without me is really where I need to begin.

My parents were going to Washington D.C. for a Young Farmers convention. We woke up early that morning and drove to the southern part of the state. “Luckily,” my mother’s sister and her family lived near the station where they would catch the bus. The plan was that I would stay with my aunt and uncle while my parents went to D.C.

My mom initiated a conversation with a woman while they were waiting to board the bus. This woman was acquainted with my aunt and uncle. She told her that my uncle, the one she left me with, was kicked out of their church for molesting (or bothering as my mom referred to it) young girls in the choir.

My parents boarded the bus headed for D.C., leaving me behind at my aunt and uncle’s house.

Decades later, when my mother told me about this conversation, I asked her why she let me stay at their house. I needed to know why didn’t she get off the bus and come get me. Or, why she didn’t find a phone booth and call someone from my dad’s family, who lived nearby, to come and take me to their house? Why didn’t she do SOMETHING? ANYTHING?

The only explanation my mother offered was that she thought her sister would protect me from him. She didn’t.

Before we went to bed that first night, my three cousins and I actually drew straws to see who would sleep alone in the bedroom with the twin bed. I drew the short straw, and my uncle paid me an unsolicited visit that night.

I never told anyone about this incident until I was an adult with young daughters of my own. I believe the bus story is the easiest of these two stories to share because as Brené Brown points out in her Listening to Shame Ted Talk, shame needs secrecy, silence, and judgement to grow. Until today the second-grade incident still held all three, whereas the bus story didn’t.

I broke the silence and secrecy surrounding the abuse when I was in my thirties. I shared the story of my uncle with therapists, friends, and family members. Kind words and feelings of love from these people let in the first pinprick of light on my self-judgement.

It is fascinating that I find it easier to share the story of the abuse than the story of the second-grade incident. I believe that this is because until today, I never shared the story of the shaming when I was in the second grade. The silence, secrecy and self-judgment surrounding this incident allowed it to grow out of control into something very dark and exceedingly shameful. This is why it is the harder of the two stories to share.

Brené Brown says that empathy is the antidote to shame. As I understand it there are three kinds of empathy: emotional, cognitive and compassionate.

For me, cognitive empathy, with regard to the bus trip incident, is the easiest point of entry. I’m a thinker, an analyzer, by nature. Generally, it is easy for me to see both sides of an issue. It was something that I didn’t appreciate especially during my teenage years. Even as a crazed hormonal teenager I could see my parent’s perspective during a disagreement over something that I wasn’t allowed to do. While I didn’t agree with them, I could see where they were coming from.

Cognitively, I understand why my mother believed that her sister would protect me from her husband. I accept this in spite of the fact that I believe it to be faulty logic on her part.

In the case of my uncle, I knew that something bad must have happened to him at some point in his life. Whatever it was, it was dark enough to drive him to abuse young, innocent girls. Cognitive empathy has helped me to get over the actual physical act of what happen to me.

However, it is the shame that I attached to the act that has been, and still is, a constant companion in my life. It is the swampland lurking beneath the surface of my life. It still colors every choice, every decision that I make. It is insidious. It flies in the face of the outward reality of my life and tells me that no matter how good my life appears on the surface, underneath it all, I’m not enough and I deserved to be abandoned by my parents.

To Be Continued…

With Love & Healing Energy by the Pond,

Laurel