Some thoughts on shame

In her work on shame, Brene Brown notes there is nothing more frustrating or even frightening then feeling pain and not being able to describe or explain it to someone. Many times I have either been involved in conversations or overheard someone mention to someone else being bi-polar or manic-depression. It always provokes a response in me that I've never been able to capture or completely comprehend. At time there has been fear on my part of being exposed as someone who has dealt with that illness. At other times, I have become angry at how we talk about people with mental illnesses as other. I harken back to my experience of people treating me differently before and after the diagnosis and hospital in 1987, my senior year of college. I get angry about how we think of people as limited in capability and we offer them tools and strategies that reinforce those limitations. I do believe it all starts with how we talk about mental illness. After many years of being quite open about my situation, I stopped telling people because I did not want own, claim it, or be limited by it. I've come to realize in so doing if increased my shame. Although after reading Brown, I do wonder if my past honesty was, at least in part, what she characterizes as honesty motivated by shame, fear, anger or hurt. I could own that at the very least I was angry at a mental health system that did not seem to serve my needs well.

Last Thursday, I participated in a conversation where I made another person the other by commenting that he seemed a little off. The response I got was he is bi-polar. I pulled in a little a bit and felt guilty for my remark. I always get the impression in the labeling that the person who is labelled becomes less than. I get angry at my own memories of being the less than or the other. A few days later, I overhead someone describe another person as manic -depressive. I had no context for the conversation. The same feeling came into my body.

During a journaling session the next morning, I was writing about all this and I realized that feeling in my body was familiar. I asked myself when was the first time I had that feeling. It dated back to when I was kid in elementary school. My memory does not allow me to pinpoint the exact year, but maybe first, second, or third grade. It was on the playground. It was one some of the kids were tormenting or even bullying another kid, telling her she must have been adopted. She was not. As an adopted kid it was frightening. I concluded that that was something about myself that I must keep secret. (I do not have a moment that I can identify where I learned that I was adopted; it was something that I always knew). Perhaps, that was an early lesson in shame for me. It would be many years before I was comfortable telling people I was adopted. While I can share that now with ease, the shame has shifted to something else... to the mental illness. I'd like for it to be because I do not want people to define me by that aspect of my life, of what to me is not really relevant to how I function in the present. The truth is as I've been able to live without medicines and in a relatively normal range of moods and emotions (at least according to my therapist), I have actually become more ashamed of that part of my past. When someone new comes into my life, I agonize over whether I should or need to tell that person.

It seems to be a shame grounded in the fear of being made other, a fear of being seen as less than capable. In one relationship I really struggled with how to talk about it because I did not say anything early on. That person had a son who was bi-polar, which made it harder. I remember when I finally did reveal it, the response I got was I would have never guessed. It really did not seem to matter. I continue to keep that information locked up. I'm not sure what purpose it serves. Somewhere inside is still that little kid that thinks keeping secrets will keep her safe somehow. Maybe all I did was transfer shame over being adopted to shame over being bi-polar. It is made harder because part of me would like to claim I'm not bi-polar at least I do not manifest symptoms of it anymore, but that is probably a story of another day. I really cannot be truly free of it as long as I carry around all this shame.

The question becomes how can I be genuinely and authentically honest first with myself and then with others ? Tonight, I know I do not have the answer. It seems like a decent enough question to chew on for awhile.