Our Saints of Shame

Pain as involuntary canonization

If you believe yourself to be unworthy of love it’s probably because someone you cared about told you so. Maybe not with those exact words, and maybe not even through words at all. Maybe they told you there was something wrong with you and cut you out of their life, or maybe they disappeared without any explanation at all, or maybe it happened slowly through some maddening accumulation of minor disconnects and slights. 

One way or another, shame - the fundamental belief that there’s something wrong with what you are - has a human face, the face of the person who created it with you. 

I say ‘created it with you’ because shame involves some acceptance and commitment on the part of the person who feels it. If someone curses me for being 15 feet tall or being born in the year 3000 then I’m probably not going to take them seriously, but if someone tells me I’m a toxic liar and manipulator who should be banished from society then they suddenly have my attention. On some level, being unworthy of love occurs to me as a legitimate and vivid possibility. 

Shame can have quite a few faces, as we go through our lives and get into relationships and have those relationships break down. They can be relationships of any kind - intimate relationships, professional relationships, relationships with random strangers on the internet. Some of these breakdowns will feel novel in their character, unprecedented and hitherto unknown. Those are the breakdowns we remember, the ones that inform us about what new kinds of shame and pain are possible. 

Through shame, these people become venerated to us as saints. They now have power and authority, and we give them offerings and sacrifice. They are with us always, like if ghosts had become an integral part of us, a voice in our head. You can have one saint of You Are Too Pushy, another saint of You Avoid Problems Until It’s Too Late - they don’t all have to tell the same story about you. At different times and in different circumstances we sacrifice our happiness and our presence on their respective altars. 

People might not want to become our saints of shame - they might just have been angry and desperate for relief, or too preoccupied with their own shame to really be there when we needed them. 

What helps get out from these entanglements is to understand relationships as third things - entities which emerge from the interactions between two people without being reducible to either one of them as individuals. Each new relationship is a new thing, completely unique. Existing one way in one relationship is no guarantee that you’ll exist the same way in another relationship. 

You can feel and cause plenty of pain in one relationship without ever being required to feel and cause that same pain again in another.

It’s hard work, to encounter things newly - our brains love to see things as mere instances of a general category, to leap to extract patterns from our experience to better predict the future. Abstraction is helpful sometimes, but not always. Saying that the future will be like the past is often not a prediction so much as an assertion, practically a guarantee. 

No matter what we’ve felt, no matter what we’ve been through, no matter what we’ve put others through, there is always hope of being better and living a happier life.