Hope and Other Things

I was going through my journal from 2024 as part of a planning activity for 2025, and I came across this one-line entry:

My perfectionism stems from a borderline terror response to shame.

It is true that I have struggled with perfectionism as far back as I can remember. What I find fascinating about this entry is how simply, even beautifully it connects my perfectionism (which I have known about for a long time) to something just a pervasive but which I have only recently become aware: shame.

My experience of shame is as resistance to admitting uncomfortable things about myself, to myself. And given this reality, overcoming shame involves doing just that, which is of course uncomfortable. Discomfort, I have found, often comes from a sense of having fallen short of some sort of expectation, having “missed the mark.” It is interesting, then, that this is also a commonly cited meaning of sin¹, and that sin is also often coupled to shame in the Bible. If we are talking about shame in terms of sin, perhaps we should bring in the related concept of temptation as well.

Temptation To Shame

My point in bringing sin and temptation into a discussion about shame is to point out the reality that shame, in my experience, is not something I am subjected to, but something I choose. In other words, I am tempted to feel shame over something, and subsequently choose or agree with it. I have arrived at this conclusion after spending a lot of time—and not a little money—in therapy dealing with depression and anger. This process took as long as it did because, as the above journal entry implies, I have mostly experienced subconsciously with the result of driving me toward perfectionism. Being subconscious, it was easy to distract myself from it.

But if shame is something that I am tempted to do, then I have the opportunity to reject it, no? Indeed, I believe I do.

Rejecting Temptation To Shame

When feeling tempted to shame, I have found it helps to first identify what is triggering you in that situation. For me the usual triggers are: feeling powerless, out-of-control, or otherwise experiencing a sense of futility; feeling alone, abandoned, or betrayed; or feeling an unusual level of stress.

After identifying the active trigger(s) in a given situation, I next respond to the temptation by exploring it. Part of what is important here is not suppressing or ignoring the discomfort. That path leads to anxiety. I realize this might sound a bit squishy—even woo-woo—but the goal here is very practical: self-understanding. The exploration might bring to light healthy ways to meet an underlying need, assuming the trigger says something true about you.

Understand that the desired outcome of this activity is awareness, not the elimination of the temptation. It is the awareness that empowers you to reject shame. It becomes almost as easy as saying no.

Conclusion

This post has been a personal reflection on my journey from perfectionism, depression and anger, through anxiety, to a place of relative health. The animating force of those negative emotions and experiences has been shame. I am thankful to say that today I can look back with gratitude on the things I have experienced, even when they have been tremendously painful.

If you have made it this far, then I would like to think something above has resonated with you. If it is because you also deal with depression and shame, then I hope you will seek out the help you need. We are social creatures, not meant to go through hard times alone.

May we all find ways to accept the things about ourselves we wish were different.