Part I: A Journey of Awareness

What Holds Us Back: The Unstable Foundation

Day 11: Projecting Shame

“Shame erodes our courage and fuels our disengagement.”

-Brené Brown

Yesterday, we went through a list of ways we live in our shame. Most of them focused mainly on how choices and beliefs of living in our own shame affect how we live our lives. Today, we will go deeper into how shame gets projected to the world.

Shame is everywhere! Anytime advertising aims at people’s disapproval of themselves, they are aiming at the shame within. History proves individuals striving for a better life, way of living, and personal outlook will lead individuals to spend tons of money on trying to fix their insides by buying something to improve themselves or their life outside. Even though time and time again these things fail, we keep buying to try to avoid having to take a closer look inside to see how we are feeling about ourselves and why we are peaceful in this moment with who we are.

Our shame projects out and it gives the media, advertisers, products, programs, lifestyles, and money the power over our internal happiness and contentment. Is this any of these thing’s or people’s faults? NO! Our belief systems about what we are doing, seeing, wanting to change, and longing for are our own responsibility to look at. It is up to us to check-in with ourselves and ask ourselves why we are feeling driven to buy or seek satisfaction from life outside of us. Just think of it as a lesson. Don’t try to make it a personal attack on you as a consumer. We only buy into what we already believe.

If we believe money is bad

Money will keep itself away from us and/or cause us pain. Not because money is bad, but because our thoughts about money are bad. Why do we hate money’s affect on us? What kinds of decisions are we making with money to hate it? Are we expecting money to fill a void inside of us that comes from shame? It’s a choice to have a bad relationship with money. We project out that money is bad and we will be proven right. We actually are shaming money by continuing this relationship.

If we are shaming someone or something, we are shaming ourselves too.

If we believe something outside of us can make us happy

We are projecting out that we incapable of being happy otherwise. If we can’t be happy inside, it doesn’t matter what we have on the outside, we will project our inner shame and sabotage anything we attain from the outside world.

Take relationships as an example. If we believe a relationship can make us happy, or the person we are having the relationship with can make us happy, we are saying we aren’t happy without them. Think about the pressure we can put on a person or a relationship if we believe this belief. We start sabotaging the relationship by getting clingy, jealous, needy, suspicious, demanding, blaming, judgmental, etc. If our own personal worth and value is low enough we will try to get them to love us the way that we want to be loved instead of seeing the love they are capable of giving. We try to force them to be the way we think a happy relationship SHOULD be. We project our vision of happily ever after on them. We don’t even see the person in front of us, we see the illusion of the happily ever after that we created in our heads and we keep getting let down by the outcome. The relationship dies or turns into a nightmare and we use that to fuel our shame. Projecting our shame will destroy a relationship. It doesn’t matter if it’s romantic, friends, co-workers, or family. If we don’t accept ourselves, we won’t accept others, and the cycle of shame continues.

As we’ve grown as a society we’ve accepted programming to shame and be shamed. Shaming is going on every day. The little pieces of us that believe that we are supposed to be perfect eat the shaming up with a spoon. We even project our shame out by spewing it at other people for not living up to our expectation of you name it, a role-model, mother, father, husband, wife, sister, brother, citizen, politician, political party, religious group, ethnic group, gay person, straight person, white person, black person, foreigner, and we can go on and on. If you are spewing fear and hate, you are projecting our global society’s darkest weapon of mass destruction. SHAME!

We are shaming to try to make someone or something else feel small. We only do this when we feel small ourselves and are trying to make ourselves feel better by taking someone or something down with us. The Law of Attraction says we get more of what we project out…Do you see how this can be used as weapon of mass destruction? If our focus is on the worst in people, we bring out more of it. We create more fear and like the woman I talked about personally attacking me on Day 5, she tried shaming me as a parent and taking me down to a small level. For a little bit, her projected shame had a negative affect on me. If I didn’t have the experience I do, that event could have taken me down and kept me down. Carrying that much anger, fear, and rage is only fueling the shame within us, which depletes our loving energy.

We are capable of shifting our own energy away from this vicious shame cycle. We can focus on projecting love instead. This is the difference in representing what we stand for instead of what we are against. It is so easy to fall into the energy of what we are against, we can’t watch the news, political campaigns, social media feeds without seeing what people are against. We have to stay centered in what we are for, and the only way we can do that without trying to make someone else feel small is by embracing our own humanness and accepting and loving ourselves exactly as we are. Otherwise, we will at some point or other fall into the grips of projecting our shame instead of what most of us are truly intending to do, which is projecting our love and compassion.

We aren’t capable of forcing others to face their shame, fear, hate, or any other harmful beliefs. We can choose not to feed our own. It’s a choice each of us has to make EVERY SINGLE DAY. We operate so much on autopilot and have picked up beliefs that we aren’t even aware of by being exposed to the programming over and over again. If we don’t want to keep our own cycle of shame going and contributing to all the shame in the world, we have to face it head on and prove it wrong, not to anyone else, just to you. As you see your self-shaming ways dissipate by simply being aware, you will notice AMAZING shifts around you. You will start spotting more and more to like, appreciate, and enjoy about living your life. Once again, it’s the Law of Attraction, we get more of what we put out. Telling the world we love ourselves, and having expectations of something coming back to us because of it can’t fool the Law of Attraction. We have to truly and deeply feel that love for ourselves, and from there we will attract more to love.

When we get there is when we start focusing our attention on the things that matter, which is what we want to see more of. The heroes are the priority over the people causing others harm. We start seeing the difference in giving a person our love for the good choices they make instead of feeding the shame in the world by bringing the attention to those who are living in their own shame. If we contribute to someone else’s shame, we are making it worse for ourselves, them, and for the world because we are taking part in keeping the shame cycle alive. None of us are perfect and even if we do our best not to contribute, we will sometime fail. It’s in those moments we need to stay open, learn from our failures, and just keep attempting to do better next time. No need for self-abuse, just take responsibility and learn.

Just for Today

Be aware when you see your shame or others being projected. See that if it is someone else’s shame, we don’t have to take it personally. We don’t HAVE to feel attacked by someone else’s choices in how they are choosing to live their life. Just be aware of the choice.

With Love and Gratitude,

Rachael Wolff ©2019

Did you read today’s companion piece? 90-Day A Better Me Letters Series: Day 11 – My Participation in the Shame Cycle

Reading the letter can help us to take in the material in a more personal way. Writing our own letters becomes a contract we make with ourselves as a commitment to be and do better.