Written by: Ranya AlHusaini, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Shame is another self-conscious emotion that is characterised by feeling: inadequacy, inferior, unworthy, not good enough, humility, and a misfit. A prolonged episode of shame can withdraw multiple negative feelings along the line like powerlessness, self-disgust, anger, and negative exposure. As you grow with time, you keep layering negative meanings to any experience comes your way reminding you – of how much embarrassed you are. Acknowledging shame can consume a lot of understanding, as you come face to face with your own worth, identity and individuality. Often times, shame can be concealed and kept in secrecy due to the painful heavy feeling of a certain aspect in your life that is pushing you to hide away. Hiding away is your constant struggle due to the urges you keep feeling toward what you should or shouldn’t be like!
Shame, can be imagined or experienced, which takes us back to the power of your imagination. Imagination, rules your mind as it is easy to imagine a certain scenario, which can rollover and become your daily struggle to validate how shameful and embarrassed you feel toward yourself. Embarrassment here could stem from a core belief of weakness, incompetency, and unworthy of respect, or love. Remember, shame can be born from the disrespect you hold toward yourself based on a past experience. You keep on moving into circles of hurt, anger, blame, worry, and anxiety
What could cause shame?
Another valid question here will revolve around what could cause shame? Well, there are a lot of valid reasons a person might label certain situations, or give specific meaning to an experience to be shameful, which could differ from one person to another. However, shame is caused by an internalized negative belief about oneself, which could be triggered by: childhood trauma, social anxiety disorder, rejection from others, failing in maintaining your social or marital relationships, not living up to the social standard, bullying, the fear of being exposed, failure, or a repetitive mental dialogue of why you should be ashamed picked from childhood.
The first step toward healing
Not confronting the shameful feeling could turn into a sudden eruption of anger, deflected into an innocent person. Sudden eruption of anger can take you down a swirl of complication, and self-defeating practices. If you don’t acknowledge shame, you fail to understand the real issue, the main cause, or what is really triggering this feeling into the surface. Remember, the first step toward healing is understanding the cause, the root and the meaning you have placed under certain situations.
Acknowledging your vulnerability
Acknowledging your vulnerability is an important cornerstone to understand how far your triggers can manipulate shame into your internal thought dialogue. To win the battle, you have to equip your mind with so much resilience, self-compassion, self-acceptance, courage, and crafting your own problem-solving strategies. Above this, embracing your vulnerability is a bench mark in turning weakness into strength. Hence, in today’s article we illustrate how the below five tools can dissipate shame and boost your strong sense of self:
1. Build a strong sense of awareness
“One of the greatest tragedies in life is to lose your own sense of self and accept the version of you that is expected by everyone else.” – Unknown.
At this stage, raising your self-awareness, and self-acceptance is a critical component to build on the ruin of a past version, a painful memory, or a remorseful experience. When you accept what happened, and you accept yourself in term of what happened you elaborate more on humility and selflove. Knowing, accepting and becoming aware of who you are? what you want? what you value? and what is important to you? will take you in an authentic self-discovery journey. The more you dive into your own world, discovering a little more than before will build a strong sense of self. Through this journey you will gain more knowledge, perspective and an in-depth rounded vision of your voice, views, opinions in a world bombarded with dominant ideas, and opinions.
2. Build healthy boundaries
If you are aware of your inner world, and you find yourself more inwardly connected broadcasting calmness, and peace you understand the nature of your vibration. Hence, understanding, and knowing yourself can support on detecting the vibration around you. When you build a healthy connection with yourself, you raise your firewall against critical judgement, harsh labelling and social constraints from living your purpose, truth and self. Saying No is a valuable tool toward establishing a healthy boundary, for this will not allow trespassers to mayhem the peace of your boundaries. With healthy boundaries you are protecting, defending and speaking your worth with no shame.
3. Empower your resilience
Battling shame can require a lot of truth, courage, strength, and self-acceptance. In general, shame or feeling ashamed can be part of living life. Hence, such feeling cannot be eliminated from the dictionary of life, but understanding the challenges, triggers, yourself, and the situations can motivate you to step over them. The more you invigorate life with resilience the more capable you are tailoring a personalized coping skill for your own needs and personality type. Remember, the stronger your stand become, the better the vision.
4. Re-write shameful experiences
To reframe a shameful memory, strengthen the fact of flipping shame from every aspect of your past into learning, growing and improving. Reframing here will play immensely on desensitizing the dominant role of your ego, and improving your wellbeing. A winner ticket to win your battle is to walk above any shameful memory, and refuse to become stuck, overburdened and weakened by rumination. If shame was a painful past, step on it and let it be your motivation gear to become a better version of yourself. At this point, you motivate yourself to push forward with ardency for a strong sense of self!
5. Learn to question
In any awkward situation where you were left markedly ashamed of your own is probably a mistake that will cast unwanted shadow of blame, shame, and remorse. Your mind is always ready and prepared to give you labels all based on your upbringing, environment and ideation. Judgemental background that raised a child to strictly fill the template of a certain frame will build inside that child a shameful negative image of themselves every time they fail! When you start to question the fact of what makes you ashamed of yourself? you start analysing the situation from a broader aspect. You see situations from all corners, and you realize your part in that role. The depth of your self-analysing questions can build more capacity for self-tolerance, acceptance and love. Take your time to filtrate what’s your feeling? and what you should be really feeling? In here, you start to realize that somehow in your life society has frozen up an image for you to follow, and to adhere to.
Ranya AlHusaini, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Ranya Alhusaini is a mindset transformation guru. Besides, she is a Hypnotherapist, Rapid Transformation Therapy Practitioner and NLP. Ranya dug her way through self discovery, curiosity and knowledge. Her diverse experience and extensive knowledge in the corporate world made her sculpt a winning strategy for finding success in every endeavour she would tackle. With her experience, knowledge and passion in mindset transformation techniques, Ranya AlHusaini motivates Professional Women to uncover their self-worth to live a balanced life!
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