When Shame Runs The Show
Why it still sometimes feels like a battle for my life—and something I'm learning.
Earlier this week, I asked you in our chat to share with me anything you’d like me to write about, and I received so many good ideas; thank you. Add to the conversation here. I’m going to do my best to write regularly here in the next two months, but with my book deadline of September 1 approaching, I will be…doing my best. Thank you for being here.
Writing this third book, about emotional sobriety in romantic relationships (more or less), has been at turns emotionally devastating and cathartic. I’m right in the belly of the beast—my ground zero, the root of my deepest pain. Unbelievably, writing about this stuff has made writing about the darkness of my addiction seem like walking through a field of fucking tulips on a seventy degree day.
Then, earlier this week, an exchange brought on a wave of shame I didn’t see coming.
Since reading Fawning and talking more with
about her work (you can watch/listen to our conversation here), I’ve gained a different understanding of the role shame has played in my life, and I want to share it because I sense it’s not only useful for me.In We Are The Luckiest, I wrote:
“I was ashamed.
Ashamed of my body.
Ashamed of my feelings.
Ashamed of my desire to be loved.
Ashamed of my attempts to ‘get it.’
I was ashamed long before I had any reason to be.
And then, eventually, I had reasons to be.
I was ashamed of my drinking.
I was ashamed of all the places it brought me.
I was ashamed of who I’d become in my marriage.
I was ashamed of who I was as a mother.
I was ashamed of who I was as a friend.
I was ashamed.
Until a few years ago, I would have had no defense against those words from the rumor mill. But when I heard them that day, I did. On that day, I had already looked every one of my worst nightmares straight in the face. I had already turned over every shameful part of me, like rocks on a muddy beach. And I had decided — instead of casting them back into the sea, or smashing them, or trying to bury them out of existence — I would treat them as if they were holy. I would treat every part of me that way.
I had to look at each mistake and ugly part of my past up close; examine every crack and mineral and texture; and then held it in my palms, washed it clean, kissed it, and set it back down. I did this because I realized there was no amount of self-denigration or punishment that would keep those rocks from coming back to shore, anyway. So rather than try to banish half of me or more, I decided to invite it all in.
I decided to make a home for myself, inside myself. In the dirty, cracked mess of me. I decided to love it all.”
Writing that out here now—seeing the words I wrote, and felt, and knew to be true in the deepest part of me when I put them down six years ago—well, I can’t access that place. I wonder where she went.
The lump in my throat. The way my body has been shaking for days now. The way I feel as young as I ever have. The way I’ve needed my friends to remind me of what’s true, over and over and over again. The way I’ve called out for God and can’t feel her. The terror of that.
And yet.
Some part of me knows she’s still there: my wise, grounded, functional adult self; the writer who wrote those words; the creative, whole spirit who knows they are never, ever disconnected from God. She’s still there. She’s just not running the show at the moment.
At the moment, shame is running the show. Trauma is running the show. And it will always feel like a battle for my life when that’s the case.
What I named: I was ashamed long before I had any reason to be. That’s what I’m working through in this book, and in this chapter of my life. I’m facing down the reasons that was true, and what it’s meant for me throughout my life: how it warped my sense of self, caused me to abandon myself in thousands of big and small ways, and how, when triggered, that shame can still—even still—show up and take me down. I’m pulling the thread on what’s true and not true, and on the conflicting things that are true at the same time, and understanding in a new, deeper way that this too is both not my fault and also my responsibility.
When I am in this place, and I’ve been here many times over the years—many times since I wrote those words for my book, and in the early years of sobriety, and certainly less than in my childhood and early adult years when I had to fight against it all the time—when I am in this place now, at a time when I’ve (fortunately, unfortunately?) outgrown all my prior coping mechanisms (alcohol, drugs, starving myself, overworking, over-functioning, sex, fantasy, endless dating, etc.), I am seeing that this is going to burn all the way through me. Of course it is.
There’s no buffer left. No protection.
It feels like a battle for my life because that’s what it was. As a child, because I could not see my caregivers as bad (because I needed them to be good), I had to see myself as bad instead, because at least that’s something I could control.
This protection mechanism (shame) swooped in and took all the blame, wholesale, so that I could survive. So that I could have some sense of control. And it worked! Or it worked well enough.
In this way, and over time, shame has unconsciously become my master tool of protection. (I think, to varying degrees, it is every woman’s master tool of protection.) And the protection, as much as it makes us want to die, is the idea that I am/we are simply, inherently, and irrevocably bad. Black and white. Binary. No room for anything else. And if I just take that on, as Ingrid shared with me the other day, I can eat up all the pain and all the discomfort and all the blame so I can be done with it. Again. For the seventeenth thousandth millionth time.
Because what does shame do? It gags me and shuts me up. It makes me disappear. It disconnects me from my worth, my power, my voice—until I’m small enough to feel safe.
I don’t need to explain why this is ruinous.
I didn’t know I could see the message of shame, and the fact that it’s still there after all this time, not as proof of some bottom line truth (that I am ultimately bad) but as a very sneaky, very powerful mechanism of control and protection. Because I don’t know about you, but shame pretty much feels like the opposite of protection and control, no? It feels like a spiraling hellhole swamp where my limbs are slowly being torn off my body and like I deserve it.
So. Huh.
Shame as mechanism of control and protection.
A way to gobble up all the nuance and discomfort and take the blame so I can try to get back to safety. A part I can actually talk to, as Ingrid suggested, and say, “Hi shame … I see you - wanting to take this all on so we can be done with it - eat it all up and move on. But that doesn’t work for me anymore. I don’t want to take what isn’t mine. I can tolerate feeling uncomfortable as I wrestle with this.”
I’m still pulling the thread on this, and I’m still in that very shaky place (I haven’t slept well for a few days; I spent all of yesterday bed rotting under a weighted blanket; my heart is in my throat), but there’s a crack of insight that wasn’t there before. The tiniest opening of something new.
What’s your experience? Does this feel true to you? Fun little topic for a summer Friday? (Sorry. Jesus.)
Love,
Laura
P.S.
’s new podcast, co-regulation, is fantastic if you have had a chance to listen yet. Her latest episode with , titled “Are you betraying the world by being okay?” is incredible. Listen and subscribe. (The episode with our conversation is coming soooon.)You are reading Love Story, a weekly newsletter about relationships, recovery, and writing from Laura McKowen. Laura is the founder of The Luckiest Club, an international sobriety support community, and the bestselling author of two books, We Are The Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life and Push Off from Here: 9 Essential Truths to Get You Through Sobriety (and Everything Else).
You can give a gift subscription here.
As always, if you cannot afford a paid subscription, email admin@lauramckowen.com, and I’ll provide one.
Explore The Archives
Sobriety + Menopause + Book Publishing + Dig Lists + Live Calls
Events & Offerings
Sept 25-28: THRESHOLD - Join me, Elena Brower, and Kemi Nekpavil for a small-group retreat for women navigating transitions at True Nature in Carbondale, Colorado. Register now.
Oct 17-29: Push Off from Here retreat at Kripalu in Stockbridge, MA. This is now SOLD OUT, but you can add yourself to the waitlist (and people do cancel) Join the waitlist.
I sat down (literally) and rolled up my sleeves (metaphorically) as soon as it registered we were gonna be talking about shame here. One of my favorite topics (along with grief, trauma, and addiction for this good time Sally here. lol.) The lump in my throat formed almost immediately because every time I get out my shovel, I hit another layer of inexplicable shame. This runs deep for me—deeper than my memory. And I’ve been digging for a while now.
As someone who has lived much her life as though apologizing to most everyone around her (for no good reason until there were endless ones), it never made sense to me. I can tell you a million ways shame has harmed me, but I’ve never considered viewing it as somehow serving me—my punishment as a form of protection. Three little words you wrote really stuck out to me: “I deserve it.” That activated instant ugly cry face for me, so clearly the shovel is striking something solid, yet below that layer exists a deeper knowing that it’s not true, but I just can’t quite seem to get to it.
I asked you once when you knew you’d reached a place where you were ready to write. Like when did you know that enough healing and understanding and insight and hindsight had occurred that you were ready to plant your flag and own your story in a book. And you told me words that I’ll never forget—that we don’t want to hear some tidily packaged story by someone who claims to have figured it all out. We want it real. We want it to touch us, not tell us. So give me the view from the belly of the beast over some field of tulips any day. This is raw truth, and because of that, far more beautiful. Breathtaking, really. ❤️
“It feels like a battle for my life because that’s what it was. As a child, because I could not see my caregivers as bad (because I needed them to be good), I had to see myself as bad instead, because at least that’s something I could control.”
I had to pause after this paragraph and take a few deep breaths! This! I could never find the words - but you did. Thank you, I feel such a weight lifted!