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Shame is unpleasant. And that’s putting it mildly. Is it worth it to give up this feeling? In no case. And not because it is “not good”, but because the experience of shame is a very resourceful state.
Recently, the opinion of shame as a modern epidemic has been increasingly heard. On the other hand, shame seems to have died out, like pterodactyls and ichthyosaurs. In the 852287th century, a codpiece was a fashionable detail of men’s pantaloons, which recommended the owner of the pantaloons as a man with impressive manhood and a warrior (initially, the metal codpiece was a kind of body armor for the genitals). Today, it has been preserved on underwear, and hardly anyone dares to put it on trousers. But in the XNUMXth century, it would hardly have occurred to anyone to sit naked and nail the scrotum to the square in protest, just as Joan of Arc earlier or later the cavalry maiden Durova did not occur to prance topless like Femen. Or, for example, the evolution of a bathing suit, starting from the XNUMXth century. marinni.livejournal.com/XNUMX.html. The boundaries of the shameful – and not only in relation to physicality – change depending on time and culture.
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- Respect Your Body: 8 Exercises That Will Help You Love Yourself
Brené Brown, who has studied social relations, says: “When I asked people about love, they talked about grief. When asked about affection, they talked about the most painful breakups. When asked about intimacy, I received stories of loss. …I realized that shame is to blame. We all fear we’re not good enough for relationships—not thin enough, rich enough, kind enough.” You can’t argue with the fact that shame is fused with fear. No wonder the ancient Greeks understood shame as “fear of bad news.” However, it is impossible to reduce it only to fear, if only because fear is a natural feeling that goes back to the instinct of self-preservation, and shame is an uncomfortable experience of noticing that oneself or one’s act does not correspond to accepted norms, about a conflict between, on the one hand, desire or action. and, on the other hand, permitted and proper.
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- The body also remembers
I don’t quite agree with Brené Brown, because it’s one thing to be afraid that they won’t accept me because my figure doesn’t meet the standard of beauty, and it’s quite another to be ashamed of my body. In the first case, I can correct the figure, change the style of clothing, say, they say, love the way you are. In the second, going out in public will be almost torture, a short-sleeve shirt will be unacceptable exposure, the prospect of finding a friend / girlfriend is hopeless.
The same is true for action. It is one thing – the fear of punishment: I do not steal, because I am afraid of getting caught, but if I am sure that I will not get caught, I can steal; I stole, got caught and am afraid of punishment, but if I am sure that there will be no punishment, my soul is calm. And it’s a completely different matter – when I want to or do something, and I burn with shame, which the punishment itself is stronger than any worldly punishments. Once upon a time, at the very beginning of the work of the helpline at the Harmony Institute, a young man called: “When I was 15–16, my friends and I caught girls and raped them. It was awful fun back then. And ten years have passed, I suddenly realized what I was doing, and I can’t live with it. It’s a shame – after. But there is also shame – before, protecting from an act. In the Soviet years, Bulat Okudzhava told an official in response to a government proposal: “I see you for the first time, maybe the last time, but I have to live with myself all my life.”
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It is important that shame – a reaction not just to external requirements, but to that part of them that I have learned and appropriated, has become part of my values, my “I”. The main message of shame is: “Don’t destroy yourself.” It plays out in the soul, and to say that it is an unpleasant experience is to say nothing. But at the same time, it is a very resourceful state.
I approach shame very carefully, and not immediately and without fail with a psychological scalpel, as naive hopes of making life all positive have. Although they say that a brazen face is the second happiness, shamelessness is not the ideal to which I should drag the patient on the rope of psychotherapy. We will sit over the mosaic of his life so that he can listen and hear his shame, when he still speaks in a whisper, and does not deafen with a cry, and learn from what the pain of shame was made of, to put together a self-supporting life and be its master, and not exhausted under her weight the porter.