S2 EP294 – Shame as Control Over Yourself and Others

Hi everyone, and welcome to the Inner Bonding Podcast. I’m Dr. Margaret Paul and I’m so glad you’re here with me today. The topic of today’s episode is how you might be using your core shame, the shame that results when you tell yourself you’re not good enough or that others’ behavior is your fault, to feel a sense of control over others.

It can be a little difficult to see how feeling shame is a form of control. Let’s start by reviewing how core shame – the false belief that you are essentially bad – begins. When, as infants and young children, we were neglected, shamed, or physically or sexually abused, we had only two choices about how to see things. We could see the truth, which was that our parents were wounded and did not know how to love us, and that we were helpless to do anything about it. Or we could believe the rejection or abuse was our fault – that we caused it because we were defective, inadequate, unworthy, and unlovable.

Because admitting we were helpless might have filled us with the deepest despair – especially as infants when having some power over getting our needs met was a matter of life and death – most of us chose to avoid the truth. Instead of recognizing our parents’ inability to love, we blamed ourselves. We developed core shame, telling ourselves, “It’s my fault they don’t love me. I’m worthless”, as a brilliant defense against that despair. After all, if we believe that it is our fault we are not loved – that we are so bad we cause others to be unloving to us – then the power to change this, to get love, is in our hands. We can try to be good or do things right. Thus, we hope to control getting the love we need from others. We might do the same thing with God, as I will address later in the episode.

We become addicted to shame because it protects us from the truth that we really have no control over others. We can’t make them love us. While we can influence whether others like us or approve of us, we have no actual control over them. Yet, if we operate from the false belief that our best feelings come from others loving us and giving us what our parents didn’t, we will continue to try to control getting this. Until we know that our best feelings come from giving ourselves the love we need and sharing that love with others, we will continue to try to control getting love from others.

Now this may sound strange at first. How can my own shame be used to control someone else? It can’t, because we don’t have control over others, but our wounded self believes we do control others’ feelings and behavior. But the truth is, many of us unconsciously use our shame in relationships. We collapse into self-judgment, self-rejection, self-abandonment in order to try to change ourselves enough, believing that if we change ourselves and do better, then we can control others, or even control God.

Today, I’m going to explore how this dynamic works, why it’s so damaging for both ourselves and our relationships, and how we can move out of this painful cycle through the practice of Inner Bonding. 

Let’s begin by looking closely at what shame is.

Shame is the deep belief that at our core, we are not enough – that we’re unworthy, bad, or defective. It’s different from guilt. Guilt says, “I did something wrong.” Shame says, “I am wrong.”

Think about it – when others behave in ways that are painful to you, what do you do? Do you take it personally, telling yourself that it’s your fault that another person is acting unlovingly because there is something wrong with you? Do you judge yourself, telling yourself that if only you were good or perfect, then the other person would change and be loving? Do you believe you are like a puppeteer, pulling the strings on others? These are some of the false beliefs from the wounded self. 

Let’s say someone you love is upset with you. Instead of staying open to learn about their feelings and letting your inner child know that their behavior isn’t personal to you but is actually about them and their self-abandonment into their wounded self, you collapse into self-judgment. You might say things like:

• “I’m a jerk.”
• “I can never do anything right.”
• “I’m a loser.”
• “Everything is my fault.”

On the surface, this may look like humility. But often what’s happening underneath is your attempt to control the other person by changing yourself. By shaming yourself, you’re hoping to get yourself to change and do things ‘right’, believing that will get the other person to change.

This is a form of manipulation. Your intent is to control the other person by changing yourself through shaming yourself into changing.

Another way we use shame to control is through victimhood. When we collapse into being the “bad one,” we invite others to rescue us. Their rescuing makes us feel temporarily safer, but it keeps both people stuck in the cycle of shame and control.

Think of a time when you said something like, “I’m just not good enough” or “I’ll never get it right,” in response to conflict. Did you notice how it shifted the dynamic? Did the other person move from being upset to feeling sorry for you? Or did you feel better believing that by changing yourself you could control them?

How often have you given yourself up, coming from the false belief that sacrificing yourself will change others so that they will love you? How do you feel when you give yourself up? As long as you are operating from the core shame false belief that there is something wrong with you – with who you are, what you do, and how you feel – you might continue to try to control others by shaming yourself into giving yourself up.

And here are a couple of examples of using victimhood to control.

Jane seeks my help saying she and her partner, Len, fight constantly. When Len tells her he feels disconnected from her, she bursts into tears and says, “I’m such a horrible wife.” He immediately stops sharing and starts comforting her. Over time, Len feels more and more unheard, and resentment builds. Her collapse into shame has controlled him into silence.

Or Jack, who was often criticized as a child, learns to manage relationships by saying, “I know, I’m just worthless.” His friends rush to reassure him. But what he’s really doing is pulling them into rescuing him instead of taking responsibility for his feelings.

In both cases, shame is being used as a way to avoid responsibility and to control others’ reactions.

Using our own shame as control has deep negative consequences.

• It prevents real intimacy, because intimacy is impossible when the intent is to control the other person in some way, such as giving yourself up or being a victim.
  
• It erodes trust, because instead of open communication, the relationship becomes about control rather than about love.
  
• It keeps you stuck in the wounded self, reinforcing the false belief that you are bad or unworthy.
  
• It makes the other person responsible for your worth, instead of taking loving care of your inner child.

Ultimately, this form of control keeps you from growing into your loving adult self and from experiencing genuine connection.

Think about how you feel if someone collapses into shame around you. Do you feel closer to them, or do you feel burdened and pulled into rescuing? If you feel someone pulling on you to validate them, do you give yourself up or go into resistance? Neither leads to true connection.

You might also be using your core shame to control your concept of God.
Frequently I hear clients say to me, regarding their beliefs about God, “God is not going to be here for me because I am not good enough.” In essence, they are saying, “I am in control of whether God is unconditionally loving. My worth, or lack of it, determines whether the spirit of unconditional love that is God is here for me.”

How did we come to believe that we could control God?

Some of us were brought up by parents whose “love” was conditional. We had to earn our parents’ love by our acting the way they wanted us to. In the process, we learned many ways to control getting the “love” – in reality, approval – that we needed. And we might be projecting our parents’ feelings and behavior onto God, believing that God’s love is conditional. It’s not. It can’t be other than a free and unconditional gift because real love has no conditions, and the spirit that is God is love. We believe we can win God’s love by being “good” and doing things “right.” This gets us into even deeper water, since “good” and “right” are usually defined by parents, teachers, religious leaders and others in authority, rather than by our own inner spiritual guidance. In reality, “good” is whatever is truly loving to ourselves and to others.

Children are often systematically taught to try to win love from others and God. We train them in the art of control by controlling them and by rewarding their various attempts to control us – by giving them candy or money or kisses or approval when they are good, for example. Parents try many ways to control their kids: anger, threats, sarcasm, punishment, criticism, judgments, withdrawal, physical violence, treats, money, shame and smothering. Kids, in turn, may try to get parental approval or attention by being nice, by caretaking – giving themselves up and doing what parents want them to do, by overachieving, becoming invisible, becoming ill, acting out or having temper tantrums. Anytime we role-model controlling behavior by trying to control our children or reward their manipulative behavior with our attention, we teach them the soul-deadening art of control.

Many children learn to believe they can manipulate love by being good or doing things right. Until they learn that real love is a free gift and cannot be bought or bargained for, they will find endless ways to try to get it. They will try to be perfect, follow all the rules, be polite, always be right – or righteous. Being good may mean suppressing their sexuality. Being the right way may mean dieting or throwing up to the point of starvation to look right so others will love them.

Being good may include children denying their own feelings and taking responsibility for other’s feelings: Children are routinely told that focusing on themselves is “selfish.” When people with this kind of training grow up, they may continue the pattern by following the rules of a church, being a community do-gooder, or being self-sacrificing, not because they are moved from their hearts to do so, but in the hope of earning others’ and God’s approval.

All of this training in how to control others in order to get the “love” we need ultimately leads to the avoidance of personal responsibility for our needs, feelings, and behavior, and the absence of loving, compassionate behavior toward ourselves and others.

There is a huge difference between loving behavior and controlling behavior.

Loving behavior is personally accountable behavior that nurtures and supports our own and others’ spiritual growth and highest good. It is behavior that is consciously intended to give something helpful – like support, empathy, compassion, or understanding – to ourselves and others. Controlling behavior, which is often unconscious, attempts to get something – like safety, love, or attention – or to avoid something like anger, disapproval, or rejection. Loving behavior is satisfying in itself and is not attached to an outcome, to getting something back. Controlling behavior always has an expectation of a certain outcome attached.

For example, you can give to your children because it gives you joy to do so, or you can give because you want them to love you, take care of when you are older, or have others see you as a good parent. You can have sex with your partner for loving or for controlling reasons, too. You may want to share and express your love, or you may want to get validated, distracted, or released, or avoid your partner’s anger or disappointment. You can donate money to worthy causes purely for the satisfaction it gives you, or to get publicity, a tax break, or a place in heaven. While the action of giving to your children, having sex, or donating money is the same, the energy behind a controlling intent feels totally different to the receiver than the energy of a loving intent. Loving behavior feels nourishing while controlling behavior feels lonely, smothering, or draining to the receiver.

In the same way you attempt to control the outcome with others, you may attempt to control the outcome with God. You might pray, go to church or temple, tithe or do volunteer work in order to make God love and protect you, rather than for the pure joy of doing so and from the deep desire to serve. 

Religious dogma is often based on an attempt to control God. If you belong to the right religion, you will go to heaven. This gives people a sense of control over God: I only have to believe the “right” thing and I am safe.

 Each religion has its rules – don’t work on Saturday, give away a certain percentage of your earnings, don’t divorce, sacrifice yourself for others – to ensure God’s grace. The problem is that none of these rules has anything to do with love and compassion. Worse, they teach you that you do, indeed, have to give yourself up – that is, deny your own inner truth and follow someone else’s teachings – to be loved by God. In fact, they teach that it is only in giving yourself up that you will be loved by God. 

While this may give you a sense of safety, it does not move you along your spiritual path toward becoming more loving and compassionate. And it reinforces the false belief that you are not okay, that there is indeed something wrong with you at the core. Of course, as I’ve often said, since our true soul self is a spark of the Divine, it’s not possible for there to be anything wrong with us as a soul. But there is always a lot wrong with our wounded self, since is it based on false beliefs, and especially the core false belief that you are not good enough.

The doctrines and dogma of religion have nothing to do with opening to God, which is what spirituality is all about. Opening to God does not mean giving yourself up in the sense of ignoring your own needs and your own truth or going along with what other people want or what they tell you God wants. Opening or “surrendering” in the spiritual sense means that you release the will of your wounded, false self and invite in the will of love, compassion, truth, and wisdom that is God. 

You cannot surrender and attempt to control the outcome of things at the same time. Letting go of the outcome does not mean that you do not decide what you want and do everything in your power to get there. It means that you come from the faith that your soul is being supported in your highest good at all times and that you cannot always know which outcome is best for your soul’s growth toward wholeness and oneness with the love that is God.

When compassion has a higher value than control, we do not judge things in terms of right and wrong. Instead, we look at our own and others’ behavior and try to understand the values and preferences behind this behavior. We try to understand the very good reasons we all have for feeling, believing and behaving the way we do. We try to learn and understand rather than judge. To be on a spiritual path is to accept that you need to put aside your concepts of right and wrong, good and bad, and embrace instead compassionate learning, understanding, and acceptance as your way of being. Sadly, control rather than compassion has become the most prevalent way of life.

Until we give up our illusion of control over others and God, we will never understand what we do have control over: our own choices and our own intention. Personal power, which is knowing what we do have control over and taking loving actions, eludes us until we accept that we are helpless over other people and God. The paradox is that we cannot move into personal power until we accept our powerlessness over everything but ourselves.

Giving up control becomes easier when you open to God and discover how irrelevant trying to make God love you is. There is nothing you can do to earn God’s love and nothing you can do to stop it, other than shutting it out of your consciousness. You can abandon God, but God will never abandon you. God’s love for you is as ubiquitous as the air you breathe. When you know you are loved no matter what, control becomes superfluous.

Despite what some religions say, knowing God and feeling shame are mutually exclusive. When you know God, you also know that the perfect love that is God exists within you, that the essence of your soul is God, is love. When you know that you are love, you move beyond shame and beyond the need to try to manipulate anyone or anything into loving you.

For years I attempted to help people heal their core shame, yet over and over I found they could not get free of their awful feelings. Affirmations didn’t help. Therapy didn’t help. Nothing seemed to help. One day when one of my clients was expressing her feelings of shame, I got the sense that shame was not the root feeling. Then I heard my spiritual guidance telling me that the woman’s shame was a protection against far more painful feelings: helplessness and loneliness.

Shame is simple to heal, but it is not necessarily easy. Your shame will vanish when:

• You have the courage to feel your loneliness when someone’s heart is closed toward you rather than attempting to control feeling the depth of that loneliness by deciding it is your fault that the other is closed to you.
  
• You have the courage to feel and accept your helplessness over whether someone opens or closes his or her heart to you.
• You are willing to take responsibility for compassionately managing – with the help of your spiritual guidance and the help of others – your feelings of loneliness and helplessness and to gratefully accept this opportunity to evolve your soul.

Practicing Inner Bonding and learning to lovingly manage your feelings of loneliness with others and your helplessness over others is the key to healing your core shame. Until you are willing to feel these feelings instead of protecting against them, you might continue to use your shame as a form of control.

Here is how, with Inner Bonding, you can heal the shame-control cycle:

Step one is awareness. Begin to notice when you collapse into shame. What do you feel in your body? What words do you say?

Step two is intention. Consciously open to learning about the intent of your shame.

Step three is dialoguing with your inner child and your wounded self. Ask your inner child, “Little one, what am I telling you that is causing you shame? What am I telling you about being able to control others or God?” 

Once you understand what you are telling yourself and how you are treating yourself, open to learning with your wounded self and ask, “What are you trying to control by shaming the inner child?” Open to becoming aware of your false beliefs about yourself and about controlling others or God. Ask yourself: “Am I collapsing right now to control this person? Am I hoping they’ll rescue me or stop being upset?”

Step four is opening to your guidance. Ask your guidance: “What is the truth about me? What is the truth about what I can control regarding others and God? What is the most loving action I can take right now?” Your guidance will never shame you. Your guidance will always remind you of your worth.

Step five is taking loving action. Instead of collapsing, take responsibility by letting your inner child know that the other’s unloving behavior isn’t about you and isn’t your fault, and reflect to your inner child who he or she really is as a beautiful individual expression of the Divine. 

Step six is evaluation. After taking action, notice: do I feel more peaceful and connected? Did my action bring me closer to my true self and to the other person?

Close your eyes for a moment. Imagine a situation where you usually collapse into shame. Picture yourself instead as a loving adult – standing tall, open, compassionate. Hear yourself saying to your inner child: “You are not bad. You are lovable. We are learning. And I will take care of you. Others’ behavior isn’t personal to you – it’s not about you. God is love and you don’t have to earn the love that is God.” Notice how that feels in your body.

From a spiritual perspective, shame is never the truth. Spirit never says, “You are bad.” Spirit says, “You are my beloved.”

When we use shame to control others, we’re forgetting who we really are. When we reconnect with our true soul self and spirit, we remember our worth. And when we know our worth, we no longer need to control others. We can meet them with openness, compassion, and love.

So remember: shame is one of the most painful feelings we carry. And sometimes, without realizing it, we use our own shame to control others – to make them stop being upset, to make them feel responsible for us, or to get them to love and reassure us.

But the truth is, this keeps us stuck in our wounded self and blocks true intimacy.

Take a moment now to reflect:

• Do I sometimes collapse into shame to get others to care about me?
  
• How might I take responsibility for my feelings instead of handing them to others?
  
• Am I willing to practice Inner Bonding to learn how to care for my inner child, and to bring my shame to my guidance for healing?

Thank you for being with me today. Remember: you are not bad, you are not broken, and you are not unworthy. You are deeply lovable. As you practice healing, you will discover that you no longer need to control through shame – you can connect through love.

You can learn more about healing shame and learning to love yourself with my 30-Day home study Course that teaches Inner Bonding: “Love Yourself. I hope you join me there.

I’m sending you my love and blessings on your healing journey.