About seventy members of my extended family get together every year to celebrate my Grandmother’s birthday. We usually book out a restaurant and have a Sunday lunch together.
The first year this happened I had just started on my food plan and at that time if I ate out, I brought my food with me.
I cried tears of shame all the way to the restaurant. I did not want to have to tell people that I was a food addict. I did not want to have to eat differently to them. I did not want to draw any attention to myself. I wanted to keep my food issues secret. I thought that I was weird, crazy and mad and I was terrified everyone else would think that about me too. Everyone else seemed to be so normal and I believed I was different… not different in a good way, I was different in a bad way.
Halfway to the restaurant, I decided I couldn’t go through the humiliation of people asking me why I wasn’t eating what everyone else was, so I ate my lunch in my car. After I’d eaten, I reluctantly went on to the restaurant and had some tea while everyone else ate their lunch.
The feeling of shame stayed with me for the day. I felt painfully uncomfortable and I couldn’t wait to get away.
Fast forward to today, we are due to go the same lunch in a few weeks and twelve years on it’s a very different picture. I now eat what is served but I’ll bring my scales along (not everyone with food issues needs to go to these lengths). I still have thoughts of shame… What will people think? Do they think I’m crazy? But these thoughts don’t have the same power over me. I can lovingly remind myself that I have a different brain when it comes to food. This is what I need to do to have peace in my life and if people don’t understand, that is okay.
Shame stops us from being authentic. Shame tells us that we are not worthy of acceptance, love and connection. It gets in the way of being happy, joyous and free.
So how do we start to outgrow shame?
Brené Brown, author of I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t), Making The Journey from “What Will People Think” to “I Am Enough”, defines shame as:
“… the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance and belonging. Women often experience shame when they are entangled in a web of layered conflicting and competing social-community expectations. Shame creates feelings of fear, blame and disconnect.” (p.29)
Brown says shame needs three things to grow exponentially – secrets, silence, and judgment.
So, the antidote to shame is empathy and speaking about it.
She has found from her research that there are three things we can do to prevent shame from jeopardising our authenticity.
- When we feel shame or unworthiness, talk to ourselves like we would talk to someone we love.
- Reach out to someone we trust.
- Tell our story
As well as these, I have used prayer. Some of you may shudder at the thought of prayer. I don’t know what I pray to, it certainly isn’t a God in the traditional sense, I like to think of it as a deeper universal intelligence. My prayers have been simple – ‘Please give me the strength to be okay being me today,’ or ‘Please help me to accept who I am today,’ or ‘Please let it be okay for others not to understand me.’
This is what I have been doing for the past 12 years, and continue to do, to outgrow shame. I don’t know that I will ever be free of it entirely, but certainly, I am not crippled with it like I used to be.
The more I out-grow shame the more authentic I am and the more authentic I am the freer I feel. The freer I feel the less I want to eat to escape.