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It’s important, especially at first, that you are measured in your risk-taking. When I was screaming at Shay, it was over thirty seconds on a workout ladder—something anyone with two functioning legs should be capable of doing. It’s important that the risk I wanted her to take was something I knew she could do. Setting her up for failure would have been the worst thing at that moment.
It’s the same for you. You have to be smart about what you decide to go for and pick something that’s achievable. For example, if you haven’t jogged in five years, don’t get out there and try to run a mile. Instead, go out and jog for 60 seconds, then walk for 60 seconds to recover; do this for 20 to 30 minutes. Then build on that in baby steps. The next week go for 90-second jogs. Then 120 seconds, and so on. If you can do more than that and advance faster, awesome, but the key is to make sure you give yourself something achievable to do, so you can build your self-confidence.
Success begets success. Once you start really focusing on the sense of accomplishment you get from achieving a result, even a minor one, it will help you to shut down negative emotions like anxiety and self-doubt, and you’ll find yourself up for bigger and bigger challenges. Before you know it, your baby steps have become huge strides forward.
RELEASE GUILT AND SHAME
As long as you are carrying guilt and shame around with you, you will never be able to build a healthy sense of self. These emotions really only serve to indicate that you have taken on someone else’s crap, or that you haven’t taken proper steps to right a wrong you inflicted. Beyond that, all they do is waste your energy and make you feel bad. Who needs that?
This is the same stuff we talked about in Chapter 5, on forgiveness and understanding, but I bring it up again here because recognizing how you have taken on other people’s fears, anxieties, and issues is a crucial step on the road to taking your life back. What do you feel guilty or ashamed about? Usually it is nothing more than a trip someone else has laid on you that you have internalized. By recognizing that other people have shortcomings and issues, too, we avoid making them our own, leaving us to travel light, without the baggage of those around us.
Not buying it? Positive that your guilt and shame belong to you? It’s possible, but unlikely, so let’s go in for a closer look. Guilt is when you feel bad about something you have done, as in I bought myself a flat-screen TV and now I feel guilty because that was so selfish and indulgent of me. Is treating yourself really something you should be feeling guilty about? The actual reasons you feel guilty are usually that someone has told you or implied that what you have done is bad. Suppose you take this scenario to its worst case: you have a compulsive spending problem, you’re strapped for cash, and you didn’t ask your significant other before making the purchase. You still shouldn’t feel guilty, because it’s unproductive. It will only further erode your self-esteem, making your issues that much worse. The answer is to work on your spending problem and to make amends with your spouse or partner.
Shame can get confused with guilt because they often go hand in hand, but they are different. Shame is the humiliation and embarrassment that can come as a result of guilt, but it doesn’t always have to stem from something we have done. Some of us experience shame for just literally being.
I have known people who were raised to be ashamed of their physicality, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, the town they were born in, and so on. Now I ask you, as a sane good-hearted person, where is the shame in any of those things? No matter who you are, what your background is, or where you come from, you have nothing to be ashamed of. Shame is a feeling that is put upon us both directly and indirectly. No child is born ashamed of themselves—it’s ingrained over time. “You oughta be ashamed of yourself”—remember that one? Or it could be as simple as picking up on something your family and friends felt uncomfortable about and then internalizing it and making it about you. Sort of like kids can do with a divorce. The parents are unhappy, so they split up, but the kid might take it on and believe that it was his fault. If only he were a better kid, they would have been happy and stayed together. And the shame of feeling like a failure or a disappointment sets in—even though the divorce had nothing to do with him, and the parents had actually hated each other for years and finally got healthy enough to end the unhealthy relationship.
Anyone who is directly manipulating, judging, and/or shaming you is a person with his or her own issues. They can play on your emotions to get you to do something they want. Ever been guilted by your parents about visiting them for Christmas when you really need a vacation to the Bahamas? Now, whether you choose to go home for Christmas is up to you. Go or don’t go, but there’s no need to place all this emotional baggage on the situation. It’s up to you to opt to take that on or not. You have a choice!
Another possibility is that someone is projecting the things in his life that he is afraid of or feels insecure about onto you. Often we fear things that are different because we don’t understand them, and that’s scary, or it challenges our dearly held beliefs and way of life, which can be even scarier. For that reason we can resent those things and condemn others for being so different. More people have died due to fighting over religious beliefs than any other known cause of death.
When it comes to shame, ask yourself if the things you feel ashamed about are truly unnatural and deplorable. I highly doubt they are! Most likely you picked up these judgments and shameful feelings along the way, whether from our culture or our families and such.
Let me give you another example of the way we pick up shame indirectly. Let’s say you are overweight and you feel that it’s “gross.” You hate your body. You won’t work out in a gym with thin people because you’re afraid of what they’ll think of you. I have heard women say they are humiliated for their husbands to see them naked. That’s so sad. Where did this attitude come from? Fat is merely stored energy. It is a physical state, nothing more and nothing less. It implies zero about your value as a person in this world. In fact, some cultures glorify being heavy and consider it a sign of affluence. Now, I am not suggesting it’s okay for you to let your health go. (It’s not! Your family and friends want you around for years to come.) But I’m trying to point out that the opinions we form about ourselves are taken on, not intrinsic.
So where did your shameful attitudes come from? Did you pick them up like a common cold? Actually, yeah, sort of. We are social creatures, and we are inclined to pick up the ideals, energies, and attitudes of those around us. Maybe your parents made an issue of your weight as a kid, asked you in front of friends, “Do you really want to eat that?” Or possibly they weighed you every week, making you subconsciously feel that if you didn’t hit the benchmark, you would be unlovable and so on. In most cases this is not malicious on the parents’ part. It’s usually just misguided concern: concern that they should be doing something, and helpless because they don’t know what. They also probably worried that people would believe they didn’t care about their kid’s health if you were overweight, and so they overcompensated by nagging and pestering every time you put anything in your mouth. But even though the comments clearly stem from your parents’ insecurities, of course you’re going to feel you need fixing. Thus the shame of “not being good enough” or letting your parents down sets in.
Maybe your shameful attitude has nothing to do with your parents. Maybe you feel ashamed of your weight because on the schoolyard as a kid your peers tormented you by making cow noises when they walked behind you. (This one comes from my own personal junior high hell.) Still, kids who bully on the playground are kids who feel insecure and powerless, so they pick on others in an attempt to have power over someone else and regain a feeling of control. Yep, we already covered that ground, so I hope you are starting to see the pattern.
Your feelings of shame were originally someone else’s—you picked up on them and internalized them. The simple fact is that obesity can be caused by many things, like lack of knowledge, resources, and finances. It can be an emoti
onal coping mechanism. But none of those issues are gross or unnatural, or even unusual. Quite the contrary, they are painfully human, and overweight people deserve the proper love, care, and attention to improve. Shame is the absolute worst emotion one can bring to this situation, or any other for that matter.
This next anecdote is a more blatant example of one community’s issues becoming another person’s shame. I met a young boy once who was so ashamed of being gay that he would literally cry himself to sleep every night. His parents, friends, and community were passionately antigay, and this poor kid was devastated, humiliated, and filled with self-loathing. Now, had he not grown up being told that homosexuality was “evil and the work of the devil,” he probably would have gone his whole life not thinking a thing of it. After all, he was born that way. It was his natural state, but most of the people in his life were afraid of homosexuality because it was different. They were taught that it was evil and threatened their way of life. This issue was theirs, not his, but because he was young and didn’t have the ability to discern the distinction at that point in his life, he took on their baggage and all the shame, fear, and sadness that came with it.
It was only after I worked with this kid on his self-esteem for months and showed him examples of positive, healthy, happy gay men who are sources of strength and inspiration in the world that he shed the shame put upon him and was able to embrace the possibility of a bright future.
Shame is a dark emotion. I believe in my heart that everything has a purpose—except shame. Nothing—and I do mean nothing—good can come of it. Even if you did something that you feel ashamed about, shame is insidious and pointless and it’s still indirectly a result of taking on someone else’s shit. Think about it. If you tell or show a kid he’s worthless, eventually he will believe it and subsequently he will act like it. Remember what I told you about Hitler and Saddam. Yes, extreme examples, but proof of my point.
While you may feel bad or guilty about something you may have done wrong, shame is not the solution. And guilt, like shame, is often an emotion we are conditioned to feel. Next time you are feeling guilty about something, stop to ask yourself if you actually did anything mean-spirited or malevolent.
When I was a kid, my dad used to tell me constantly that I was a spoiled and ungrateful brat. This was on a daily basis. For years, and even sometimes now, I was unable to accept anything from anyone. I couldn’t even let friends buy me coffee without feeling guilty that I had “taken advantage” of them. Only a greedy person who couldn’t or wouldn’t take care of themselves would let others pay for them. I should be as fully self-sufficient as he was. After years of therapy, though, I understand that my dad called me a brat because of his own insecurities. It’s clear to me now that he had horribly low self-esteem and felt he had nothing to offer those around him but money—which turned into a fear that people only spent time with him because of his money. He then projected those insecurities onto me, accusing me of loving him only when he gave me things.
Kids often don’t have defenses against these kinds of criticisms, so for the longest time I thought that to want or accept something from someone was the worst thing in the world. But with time and self-awareness (and as I said, a lot of therapy), I was able to realize that part of being alive on this planet is give and take. Sometimes we need to accept generosity in order to pass that generosity on in some other form. I now understand where my dad’s issues end and mine begin. And I was able to forgive him and move on to my bigger picture, getting healthy and whole so I could help other people get healthy and whole.
If in fact you have a real reason to feel guilty about something—you hurt someone, screwed something up, what have you—feelings of guilt still aren’t going to get you anywhere. They’re utterly destructive and only make things worse. Human beings make mistakes, sometimes horrible ones, but the only way to handle them is to learn from them, make amends, and make changes. Period.
“Whoever has done harmful actions but later covers them up with good is like the moon which, freed from clouds, lights up the world.”
—THE BUDDHA
WORKING IT OUT
Let’s put all this advice into practice and work on some exercises to release shame and guilt. Forever. This might make your skin crawl a bit. It will require revisiting some dark moments and getting close to some scary feelings of hurt, inadequacy, and humiliation—you may want to curl up in a ball just thinking about it. But it’s important to pull these things out by the root. Once you do, you’ll clear the way for a new, strong, loving sense of self-worth that no one will be able to destroy. Just say no to guilt and shame.
1. Start a “Shame and Blame” list. Not so that you can dwell on it and feel even worse about yourself, but so that you can identify where other people have piled their crap onto yours and where you have piled your crap onto others. For each item on the list, ask yourself the following questions:
a) Was this my fault? If so, how can I take responsibility for it, make amends, and fix it?
b) If it wasn’t my fault, whose issue is it really? Am I taking on someone else’s stuff or trying to keep someone else from being angry, upset, or disappointed?
c) What do I contribute to making the issue worse? Do I beat myself up over it? Speak negatively about myself? Deprive myself of love and nurturing?
d) If I could get rid of my feelings of guilt or shame, what would the issue look like and how would it affect my life?
2. Make amends. If you have actually done something hurtful to someone else that you feel guilt and shame about, there is a way forward: making amends. This will not be a comfortable task, but it’s the only path to your emotional freedom. You go to the other person and accept responsibility for the part you played. Offer a sincere apology. Vow to change your behavior and never to make the same mistake. (Talk is cheap. Action is what counts most. “Sorry” alone doesn’t cut it.) And last, see if there’s anything you can do to right the wrong or make reparation. If you can’t fix it—we can’t fix everything—what can you learn from the mistake, and how can you make amends so that everyone involved can move on?
3. Forgive yourself. By now you know that the F-word (forgiveness—get your mind out of the gutter) is essential. It applies to all scenarios and circumstances, including forgiving yourself. This is an order. By this point you have cleaned up your side of the street, and no matter what, it’s okay—and, in fact, it’s imperative—for you to release any shame or guilt you might be carrying. Whether the other person accepts your atonement and finds peace is now up to them. I want you to take some time to reflect on who you are inside and what was really going on with you when you did the things you regret. You’re not a bad person. We all make mistakes, react angrily, screw up, and so on, and that’s part of being human. Show yourself the same compassion and love you would show any other person who’s in pain, and let the rest of it go. For good.
DWELL ON THE POSITIVE:
THE ART OF SELF-AFFIRMATIONS
I know you’re thinking right now of that old Saturday Night Live sketch with Al Franken, and you’re giggling, right? “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!” Although that sketch was absurd and hilarious, the things we think about ourselves, the things we say to ourselves in that constant inner monologue, really do affect our external lives. Remember, thoughts are things with dynamic power. How many times a day do you call yourself an idiot, lazy, fat, or ugly? Negative attitudes and abusive self-talk will sabotage your journey toward your goals. Every thought you think is a reflection of your inner truth. So this exercise is all about reprogramming: learning to replace those sniping comments with positive, loving affirmations.
And before you get giggly about the word affirmation, it’s simply a short positive statement meant to challenge, undermine, and replace negative beliefs with a healthy, optimistic attitude that steers you toward success. What’s so funny about that? It’s important to construct your affirmations in just the right way. Here are
the two big rules:
Focus on only positive words and phrases. As we talked about in Chapter 2, focus on coming from a place of abundance, as you do when you are praying for something or trying to create a different outcome. Use positive words. If you use negative words, your subconscious mind will hear and place the focus on them.
Also be sure to use the present, not the future, tense. Saying “I will be” this or “I will accomplish” that places your ideal reality in an indefinite future. Instead, tell yourself that you are this or are accomplishing that now. Sure, there’s a little self-trickery involved, but that’s the point. The goal is to get your subconscious mind to adapt and accept your affirmations as reality, so that they can become reality.
Here are some examples of what I’m talking about:
Don’t say
“I will not get tired or sick during my workout today.” All your brain hears is tired, sick, and workout, so that is the reality you will create: a workout that makes you tired and sick.
Do say
“I am strong and healthy, with the energy I need to get through my workout.” This statement, using self-assured, positive language, exudes confidence that will create the outcome you desire: a strong workout that delivers results and makes you feel great.
Don’t say
“I will not be afraid of making this presentation at work.” Your mind picks up on the word afraid and focuses on it. The second you start your presentation, the fear will kick right in.