Thought this article was very interesting on many levels, but particularly thinking about shame as a structural issue, rather than an individual, personal emotion. Takes some of the self-blame out of working on my shame circuit to think about the fact that certain industries rely on shame and benefit from my feeling it.
And, it helps to think about the context where I feel shame and realize that not everyone shares in those values or feelings.
“Shame, canonically, is the sinking sentiment that attends deviation from widely endorsed mores, whatever they happen to be. You can be sad or elated for any reason or for no reason, but shame requires a shared social context. The emotion in question arises not because you violated a standard that you set for yourself but because you violated a standard that your milieu (perhaps policed by Twitter) imposes on you. Because shame is a means of enforcing whatever values are operative in a given society, whether it proves salutary hinges on the merits of the moral system in which it is deployed…”
And this -
“The idea is to get away from thinking that emotions are only or primarily ‘inner things,’ ” he writes. “Instead, it would be better to think of an emotion as an event” or, better yet, as “a sequence of events,” with characteristic causes and consequences. In particular, emotions follow “scripts.”
Scripts - like a tapping script! I’m thinking of @Jun_Rong’s post about - It’s ok to run away. Tapping helps me see shame “scripts” and consider my option to RUN AWAY from the source trauma.