Two weeks ago, eating disorder specialists Beth Weinstock and Jane Shure posted about “The Power of Shame.” Dealing with shame is so important to eating disorder recovery, today I’m following up Beth and Jane’s excellent post with additional ideas for dealing with the shame monster.
If you have an eating disorder, you may feel shamed about your symptoms. At the same time, your symptoms may represent an attempt to manage longstanding shame experiences. Healing shame will be one of the most important aspects of your recovery.
In Eating Disorders for Dummies, I describe shame in the following way:
Living with shame means living with a chronic sense of personal inadequacy and chronic fear that your inadequacies will be exposed and that you’ll be humiliated and unloved. In an actual moment of shame, you judge your total self and find it worthless. Shame is the state in which you wish the earth would open beneath you so you could disappear. It includes the belief that others will judge you the same way you’ve judged yourself, so in your imagination you have been excluded from society. Shame makes you feel alone and like an outcast (p. 64).
How is it different when shame is on the mend? Two major shifts in the way you see yourself signal healing: 1) You begin to accept your flaws, mistakes and vulnerabilities as part of being human. In other words, imperfection connects you to others, rather than isolating you. 2) You can embrace your strengths and trust when others see you in a positive light. I go over this second aspect of shame healing in this post.
Embracing your strengths and trusting others’ positive views of you are not only signposts of healing, they are necessary ingredients for healing to occur. How can the same thing be both a prescription and a benefit of that prescription? In a recovered state, positive feelings about yourself will become a spontaneous part of your self–image. In contrast, while still on the recovery path, you have to put a more conscious effort into crediting and valuing yourself.
A starting place for the conscious work of building a positive self–image is to call on real experiences that reinforce it. These will probably be experiences that have either fallen off your radar screen because they don’t match shamed beliefs about yourself, or get discredited by shame’s harshly critical eye.
First, two important alerts:
Alert # 1 I’m not talking about anything related to weight, dieting or compulsive exercise!
Alert # 2 For many people, trying to access positive experiences about themselves can be extremely triggering. If this applies to you, don’t continue until you’ve supplied yourself with competent, caring support.
Here are some possible resources for building a positive self–image:
- Qualities that you like about yourself, for instance, you may be reliable, warm, sincere, conscientious, funny, compassionate, smart, energetic, playful, intuitive, generous, loyal, inventive or …
- Actions you’ve taken that you’re proud of, such as supporting or defending a friend, volunteering, speaking out about something you believe in, helping a neighbor, voting, or admitting to a mistake.
- Achievements that you’re proud of: learning to swim, overcoming your fear of speaking in front of a group, passing algebra, getting a promotion, being elected to office in your group or organization, improving in relation to one or more of your eating disorder symptoms, going away to college, raising your bowling score, or receiving an award.
- Experiences in which you’ve felt a valued other’s caring for you, for instance: your aunt knit you a sweater in your favorite color, your sister called every day the week after your break–up, your far–away friend sent a card to say how much she misses you, your partner volunteered to go along to a medical appointment that worried you.
- Experiences in which you’ve felt a valued other’s admiration or appreciation for who you are: for example, your best friend told you no one understands her the way you do, Grandma said you always manage to make her laugh, your boss wrote in your job review that you have a remarkable work ethic, coach said you were the most improved member of the team, or your dad told you how much he respects the way you stick with things, even when they’re hard for you.
- People who care for you irrespective of your achievements or your problems, like your boyfriend who tells you your eating disorder has nothing to do with his feelings for you, members of your eating disorder group who are just as supportive when you’re struggling as when you’re improving, the friend who’s stuck by you in good and bad times, or the cousin who picks you up when you fall but can also cheer for your successes.
Hint: Shame narrows your vision. You lose sight of things unrelated to the shame, or they seem insignificant. When you fall under the sway of shame, it’s too hard to think of the things that make you proud of yourself. You’re overwhelmed. The best time to think of pride resources is when you’re not in a shamed state.
It’s my hope that you’ll develop a whole pantry full of resources like these! Searching them out and giving them their deserved place in your resource pantry will be a great exercise for you. And, once installed, you can call on such resources when you’ve fallen into a pit of shame. Pride resources enable you to rebalance a shame–skewed picture of yourself and help you find your way back to a realistic appreciation of your worth.
