Last Updated on October 14, 2024
The opposite of shame
Shame is one of the most unpleasant emotions we can feel.
It’s not simply the feeling that you’ve done something wrong.
It’s that who you are is wrong somehow.
Shame is the emotion we feel when we believe something is fundamentally wrong with us.
We feel we’re “not good enough,” “broken,” or even “evil.”
It’s becoming popular to talk about healing from shame, which is a good thing.
But what’s the opposite of shame?
It’s not being egocentric, feeling full of yourself, or thinking you’re superior to others.
I think it’s something beyond “better than” and “worse than.”
Animals have it
Whatever it is, animals seem to have it.
Imagine a jungle cat, walking with incredible grace and beauty.
It’s not strutting it’s stuff because it won the animal Olympics.
Or because it just bought a lovely new outfit.
Animals move with confidence and elegance just because they are alive.
For the most part, they don’t seem to suffer from low self-esteem.
They hold their heads high and have a kind of positive pride in their very being.
It is natural for animals to do this.
And we are animals too.
Dignity
Donna Hicks of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard calls this “dignity.”
As she says, “We’re all born with value, but we’re not necessarily born knowing how to act like it.”
As Hicks says, dignity is not the same as respect.
It’s not earned, but a sense of inherent value or worth.
We can see this in an infant.
A baby doesn’t have to earn our respect by contributing to the household or to society before we will take care of it.
At what point does this change?
Hick makes the case that it doesn’t.
At some point we switch to treating ourselves and others as only having value based on what we do.
But that’s because we’ve lost our sense of dignity.
Shame and Punishment
Shame is central to what I call The Punishment Paradigm.
That’s the belief system that says, “the best or only way to motivate is through fear and pain.”
When we punish ourselves or others for failure, we don’t actually learn to do better.
What we primarily learn is “I am bad.”
Punishment teaches us to feel ashamed of who we are.
Luckily there is a radically better alternative, what I call The Progress Paradigm.
That’s the belief system that says, “the best way to motivate is through love and joy.”
When we’re in The Progress Paradigm, we celebrate tiny wins.
And when we “fail,” we acknowledge the truth, forgive ourselves, learn something new, and iterate and improve based on what we’ve learned.
The more we cultivate The Progress Paradigm, the more we realize our inherent value and worth, our dignity.
We start to realize that everyone has this inherent worth.
So we move in the direction of a better world for all.
And the good news is we can switch paradigms instantly by how we respond to what’s happening in the present moment.
What would it feel like if you acted as if you had inherent worth today?
Take care,
~Duff
(they/them)
p.s. If you want to learn The Progress Paradigm for yourself, you can join my coaching group. We meet Sundays at 11am Denver time for an hour.
