Unresolved shame only makes things worse

It doesn’t matter if it’s a family or an entire institution, shame is what drives cover-ups and what’s underneath shame is pride and fear, and a bad belief that you can cover up truth.

Well, you can’t.  You can try, but what happens when we’re found out.  We don’t have a leg to stand on.

The trouble with shame is what is makes us do in terms of what we make others do.  Cover-ups are expensive in the terms of the lies that need to be shared.  Lies only dilute our strength.  They ravage our hope.  And then guilt gets to us through the haranguing sense of regret.

Families are a system that harbour lies.  There’s always a skeleton in the closet or five.  It’s one person’s pride that propagates the death of hope where everyone is conspired to hold the line.  And how does one who’s a truth teller deal with the conundrum of being sworn to secrecy.  It leaves such a person in a bind!

Shame changes everything along the trajectory of hope.  It strips whole families of the joy they could have if only the person driving the agenda allowed the truth to materialise.

Unresolved shame only makes things worse.

For organisations and whole institutions, cover-ups occur.  They occur due to cultures that rely on ‘optics’ driven by a strong focus on curating an image that drive those organisations.  Sometimes the images projected are a far cry from certain realities reflected in the culture.  And there’s a cost for those truth-abiders in those organisations.  They bear a trauma to the identity of their integrity.  It’s easy for many to turn a blind eye.  But for some, especially the empathetic, it’s traumatic.

Unresolved shame only makes things worse.

For individuals who bear the pain of shame that cannot be processed because someone else is in control, my prayer is that those dynamics shift for you.  When you get the opportunity, do what you can to properly and adequately process the guilt and shame that has stuck to you that wasn’t even your fault.