005: Sunday Sacrament
shame shame i know your name/this body is a wasteland/i used to hate myself for the both of us
shame/SHām/
noun
a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior.
"she was hot with shame"
Shame is a marvelous tool of the patriarchy, it teaches us to do the gritty work ourselves. Shame is a self-fulfilling destruction machine. It keeps us quiet, meek, passive, and exploitable. Girls and women are especially indoctrinated into a culture of shame. Often, even before exiting the womb, their impending presence in the world will be spoken of with a tint of prescribed inherent shame meant just for us. Less worthy of autonomy even in utero.
We teach our girls to be ashamed not just of their behaviors, but of the very things that are the most innate to their humaness; their hair and skin and sweat and blood. We are made to be ashamed of the cyclical, nonlinear patterns of our bodies. Remember to hide the pad up your sleeve while walking to the bathroom, so no one knows you’re functioning as intended. Remember also that first and foremost, you exist for a reason, and that reason exists outside of yourself. Your purpose exists in giving yourself to others.
As a child, I felt wholly responsible for limiting anything about my behavior that could amplify the notion that my existence might be construed as “a burden”. I was already labeled “sensitive”, I didn’t also want to be labeled as “difficult”. A textbook case of Good Girl Complex; so focused on doing it “right”. Get straight A’s, make sure the grown-ups know you follow all the rules, try to get the other kids to like you, be clean, look presentable, keep them happy, etc. But with a little gendered twist; also be pretty, be mindful of your clothing, don’t play rough like the boys, and make sure you act “appropriately” when men are around—and in that case, maybe be a little extra mindful of your clothes.
“Good” girls are meant to be quiet, compliant, helpful, orderly, and selfless. This is how girls learn to become caring, nurturing, tolerant, submissive women. This conditioning turns us into people-pleasing, self-abandoning, perfectionists. We learn to live in fulfillment of the expectations others have of us and we lose ourselves in the process. God forbid that girl grow up and direct those conditioned skillsets towards *gasp* herself. God forbid she unsubscribe from the conditioning altogether.
Girls are socialised in ways that are harmful to their sense of self - to reduce themselves, to cater to the egos of men, to think of their bodies as repositories of shame. As adult women, many struggle to overcome, to unlearn, much of that social conditioning.
I have come so far in my journey of deconstructing these societal beliefs; releasing my need to be seen as a “good” girl. It has been endlessly messy, confusing, and scary. To unlearn what you’ve always known to be true is shaky and unsteady. It is a process of continually choosing to trust in the unknown. It is working diligently to teach my nervous system how to find safety in this new way of existence. If there’s something I wish I had recognized sooner it’s that you can’t shame yourself into healing; you have to heal yourself out of the cycles of shame.
I think the thing that hurts the most in the unraveling of traumas is going back even further, to witness how succinctly primed I was to fall victim to the things that have occurred in my life. Those events that make me feel that if I had known better, if someone had just taught me how to protect myself better, maybe never would have happened. Witnessing my girlhood conditioning and thinking, “Huh, no wonder I didn’t know how to establish boundaries.”
It’s painful to see where society has failed us; and continues to fail us. It hurts to reexamine how parents and the adults in our lives had such blindspots and wonder how many of those might have been an active choice to not see the problem. Whether out of willful neglect, their own conditioning, or a fear of confronting the same things in themselves. It’s hard to look the past in the eye, same with our shame, but it is necessary to release ourselves from their grip.
I spent the four transitional years from adolescence to adulthood, the time when a girl becomes a woman, in a relationship with someone who used my body as a testing ground. When I look back, and watch events unfold with this more wise set of eyes, it feels like taking a boxcutter to my sternum and digging around inside with unclean hands. I watch myself so devoted and naive, being treated with reckless abandon, only to be discarded in the end.
From the very beginning of that relationship, there was a constant need for me to assert myself; for me to guard my body. A sense of having to fight him off with a stick. Boys will be boys, after all, right? When the culture has rammed the tropes of “good girl falls for bad boy” and “I can fix him” with a healthy pinch of “he’s mean because he likes you” and a thinly veiled Hollywood notion that “sex equals love” it’s easy to see how even those of us who are pretty smart still fall for the same schtick.
The predator wants your silence. It feeds their power, entitlement, and they want it to feed your shame.
I really wish someone had told me that this body I was so ashamed about all the time didn’t belong to anyone else; not even him. And that when someone has to wear you down into compliance, that final sheepish “okay” isn’t actually consent. I extra wish someone told me that once someone crosses the boundaries of your body and gets away with it, they will continue to do so until the boundaries are so blurred they are essentially a mirage.
But don’t bring it up to your peers because you don’t want to be shamed for being a prude, and also don’t bring it up to your mom cause you don’t want to get shamed for being active. Just keep it to yourself and keep batting his hands off you even though you’ve repeatedly told him to stop touching your breasts in public gatherings—because that also makes you feel ashamed, but also cheap and objectified.
I spent years conflating the exchange of my body for the use of someone’s pleasure, as love. Which I’m sure is why it was a total shock to find out he was more than comfortable sharing this exchange with someone else’s body too. And then a while after that, another someone else’s body, and another. And I’m certain for all of the evidence I found there was plenty I didn’t. I’ll never know the extent of the betrayal, I don’t need to.
It became clear that he didn’t actually like me at all, didn’t actually care about me. But that wasn’t me, it was a withered, fragile, needy, insecure version of me that had been constructed by his own hand. He had plucked away the bits of me that compelled him in the beginning, and saved those for himself, as I became a prop in his life. Of course he didn’t like me anymore, there wasn’t much left to like.
Eventually, I served only as a reminder of his limitations, all the other girls he couldn’t be with. You can be certain he used the absolute dissolution of those body boundaries right up until the very end, and a couple of times after the end, to boot. My guess is to see if he still could, I’m sure in some way it made him feel good to know I was still hardwired to appease. And there I was, so stuck in shame that I couldn’t tell the people who cared about me most in the world what my real life had been like for the last four years.
In the trenches of my secret turmoil there was never a thought of “What would make a person so careless to treat me this way?”, there was only “What can I do? How can I make myself better? How can I make him choose me? Why am I not enough?” I was simply a craggy stone tumbling over and over and over myself trying to buff out the imperfections. And the thing that led me to keep this all locked in secrecy until years after the events was shame. Of course.
Even disclosing, in so few words, the things that were done to my body in the name of “love” feels incredibly embarrassing. It feels embarrassing to have allowed someone to treat me with such disregard and to continuously put myself in the path of that treatment. It’s even more embarrassing to reflect on how I tucked my little box of shame deep away and continued to silently allow him to go out into the world unscathed and unaccountable for his actions. I heard through the grapevine of our college town sometime later on that there had been another girl hurt by his actions, another set of boundaries disrespected. I held a lot of shame for this too, a sense of failed responsibility. I thought maybe if I had shared my story as it unfolded, maybe he would have never got the chance to harm someone else. Maybe the angry cloud of shame I kept buried in my chest to save face would have followed him around instead, acting as a warning.
The underbelly of the human psyche, what is often referred to as our dark side, is the origin of every act of self-sabotage. Birthed out of shame, fear, and denial, it misdirects our good intentions and drives us to unthinkable acts of self-destruction and not-so-unbelievable acts of self-sabotage.
I spent a lot of time in shame-based self-destruction. And I’ve now also spent quite a bit of time learning self-compassion, asking for my needs to be met, and establishing boundaries. I’ve learned how to respect when my body says “no” and ensure it’s treated justly. I have vowed to myself to never allow another person access to me because I feel obligated. I have learned to identify that the shame I hold does not belong to me. Something I’ve come to realize is that shame follows us in our healing, we heal one pattern, eliminate one trigger, just to uncover another one. I am finding new shame all the time.
There’s been this occasional sense of embarrassment about liking myself, feelings of shame around my own transformation, afraid of judgments that place me back in the box I’ve been gnawing my way out of—afraid to find out maybe there is no true escape. There’s a sense of shame about LOVING MYSELF OPENLY, didn’t see that one coming, to be honest.
Something I’m starting to realize is how deep my fear of confidence goes. I grew up with messaging that confident women were “full of themselves”. That they were somehow less worthy of respect because of this. There’s a deeply entrenched belief in our society that to love oneself, to care for oneself, to be confident and bold and to demand our best treatment is selfish. I refuse this, I no longer see selfish as a dirty word. To me the context is no longer this villainous, greedy, stepping on backs to rise myself up notion. Selfish simply means self-supporting. What is there to possibly feel shame about through this lens? Am I supposed to be ashamed of being able to meet my own needs and like myself while doing it? Nah, I worked hard to release the belief that loving myself is selfish; or petty, or conceited.
A healing woman, who is liberated in herself, who is sovereign over her body, is noncongruent with a culture reliant on shame. So the culture pushes back, working as it has been designed, to quell those who dare to test the bounds and unlearn the predicated ways of what womanhood “should” be. The shame machine continues to train our girls into the complicity of their own demise.
Sitting from a safe distance I can gaze back on my past and see it so clearly, the kind of clarity that only time can provide. I see the ways in which I was set up by social conditioning to fail, how I was failed by those I trusted, and the ways I failed myself. I see the thread of shame that ran through every traumatic event that has made me who I am. Shame depends on secrecy to survive; to speak on it voids it of its power. And I’m speaking now.
If you are new here, Sunday Sacrament is my weekly publication of personal essays exploring self-healing and liberation.
If you are not new here, I am so glad to see you again.
Thank you for being here.
XOXO,
Shelby
Such a great essay. I can relate to some of this very well. Thank you for sharing! 🫶🏼
Literally amazing 🩷 truly: an inspiring read, like: wow