1720 || our culture of shame || healing the shame that binds you

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Welcome to the Make Your Dan Bed Podcast. A daily motivation podcast designed to help you

get out of bed every morning with a little company from me, Julie America. If you struggle with

consistency, let's build a little momentum together, whether you make your bed or not.

Good morning sunshine. Welcome to another day of the Make Your Dan Bed Podcast.

Over the last few days, we've been deep diving into John Bradshaw's book Healing the Shame

that Binds You. As always, you can access that original source in the show notes if you're interested.

Throughout the first section of the book, Bradshaw outlines all of the different ways that we

become affected by an internalized shame. Through schooling, through religious expectations,

through our parents, through our social interactions. But today, I want to focus in a little deeper

on the religious shame because I think it's really important to recognize how deeply rooted

some of this stuff is so that we can start pulling apart the parts that aren't our actual identity

and the things that have been implanted or directed to us through teachings and culture and

just the way we were raised. According to Bradshaw, religion has been a major source of shaming through

perfectionism. Moral shoulds, oughts and musts have been sanctioned by subjective interpretations of

religious revelation. The Bible has been used to justify all sorts of blaming judgment.

Religious perfectionism teaches a kind of behavioral righteousness. There's a religious

script that contains the standard of holiness and righteous behavior. These standards dictate

how to talk, how to dress, how to walk, and how to behave in almost every situation.

Departure from this standard is deemed sinful. And so this perfectionistic system creates a

quote, how to get it right, behavioral script. But in such a script, one is taught how to act loving

and righteous, but it's more important to act loving and righteous than it is to be loving and

righteous. As he puts it, this feeling of righteousness and acting sanctimoniously are wonderful

ways to mood alter your toxic shame. They're often ways to interpersonally transfer your shame to

other people. God becomes a drug. You can get addicted to religion.

Quote, mood alteration is an ingredient of compulsive or addictive behaviors. Addiction has been

described as a quote, pathological relationship to any mood altering experience that has life

damaging consequences. Toxic shame has been suggested as the core and fuel of all addictions.

Religious addiction is rooted in toxic shame, which can be readily mood altered through various

religious behaviors. You can get the feeling of righteousness through worship. You can fast, you

can pray, you can meditate, you can serve others, or practice sacramental rituals, speak in tongue,

be slain by the Holy Spirit. Quote the Bible, read Bible passages, say the name of Jesus or Yahweh.

Any of these can be a mood altering experience, and if you are totally toxically shamed,

such an experience can be immensely rewarding. The disciples of any religious system can say

we are good, and others, those not like us, are sinners, and bad. This can be really exhilarating

to the souls of a toxically shamed person. Righteousness is a form of shameless behavior,

since healthy shame says we can and will inevitably make mistakes, then righteousness becomes a

kind of shameless behavior. All in all, the religious system has been a major source of toxic shame

for a lot of people. He later talks about how a lot of our culture, the family society,

itself, in our current culture is based on this type of religion, this master, slave, and equality.

These rules promote obsessive orderliness and obedience, their rigid, they deny our vitality.

Good children are defined as meek, considerate, unselfish, perfectly law abiding, quiet.

Such rules allow no place for vitality, spontaneity, inner freedom, inner independence,

and critical thinking or judgment. These rules cause parents, even the most well-intentioned

parents, to abandon their children. This abandonment creates toxic shame. But even if your family

doesn't revolve around the religious doctrines, our society really pushes us into this toxic shame

spiral. Maybe for your family, it was through things like the success myth. Quote,

someone once said success is different at different stages of development, from not wetting

your pants and infancy, to being well-liked in childhood and adolescence, to getting laid

in young adulthood, to making money and having prestige in later adulthood, to getting laid in

middle age, to being well-liked in old age, to not wetting your pants again and senility.

But Bradshaw calls out that that description puts a lot of emphasis on making money, having

prestige and being well-liked. He then describes the classic tale the death of a salesman,

written by Arthur Miller, in which Miller is able to create a tragic hero out of an ordinary

common man. Quote, Willie Lohman is a symbol of the American success myth. He lives his life based

on the belief that success is being well-liked in making money. But Willie dies lonely and destitute.

And eventually he takes his own life in order to get insurance money that would prove he was

successful. In his poem, Aristotle states that the power of a great tragic hero results from

the combination of his nobleness coupled with some tragic flaw. Willie is noble. He is willing to

die for his faith, but it is his faith that is the tragic flaw. He truly believes that if a man

makes enough money and is well-liked, he will be a success. That is what it means to make it to

Willie Lohman. But this success myth exists in our society still today. It preaches a kind of rugged

individuality. One is to make it on your own, pull yourself up by your bootstraps,

become self-made, and be your own manned man. In this myth, money and its symbols become the

measure of how well you make it. A man in his fifties with a low income has to feel the shaming

pinch of this belief system. And to ignore that ignores what we've all been going through.

Bradshaw then digs into the rigid gender roles that our society espouses that shames

men for being vulnerable and shames women for being assertive or self-actualized. He also talks

about the myth of the perfect ten. How our aesthetic perfectionism has created an internalized

shame for each of us as individuals simply because of the way that we look. But the perfect

ten is a myth. It doesn't exist. What is a perfect ten to somebody will not be a perfect ten

to someone else. And yet we are all striving to be this mythical perfect ten that simply cannot

be. But most of all, I think it's important to highlight that our culture as a whole does not

handle emotions well. Quoting Bradshaw again, he says, we like folks to be happy and fine.

And we learn rituals of pretending we're happy and fine from an early age. When people ask

how you are, you're taught to say, I'm fine, no matter how much the world is giving in on you.

Because any expressions of emotions that are not positive are met with disdain by our culture.

So there is this myth of the good old boy and the nice gal. We must conform to fit into those

boxes. But it creates a real paradox when we put together this conformity to being a good

girl or a nice boy with the expectations of rugged individualism. How does this work?

How can we be a rugged individual while also conforming into the nice guy or the good girl?

As Bradshaw puts it, conforming means not making waves or don't rock the boat. This means we have

to pretend a lot. We're taught to be nice and polite and that these behaviors are better than

telling our truth. Our schools, our churches, our politics, they're all rampant with teaching this

dishonesty, saying things we don't mean and pretending we feel things we don't feel, smiling

through pain or sadness, laughing nervously when dealing with grief, laughing at jokes we don't

think are funny, and telling people things that are fucking lies just because we don't want to hurt

feelings. Playing roles and acting are forms of lying, but our culture has made it so that

if people act like they really feel and it rocks the boat, they become ostracized. We promote

pretense and lying as a cultural way of life. This causes an inner split. It teaches us to hide and

cover up our real emotions, which ties itself to that toxic shame, sending us deeper into isolation

and loneliness. The problem is toxic shame is a true agony. It's a pain felt from the inside

and the core of our being. And because it's so excruciatingly painful, we have to learn different

coping mechanisms. Tomorrow I'll share some of those before digging into how to unload some of

this shame so that we can get better at practicing embracing our full humanity so that we don't

sit in these spirals. That so much of our society has pushed us into. In the meantime, you can

access all of the resources and the show notes if you're interested. Just know I love you so much.

I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day and I will talk to you tomorrow while you make your

damn bed. Goodbye cutie. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of the Make Your

Damn Bad Podcast. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss tomorrow's episode. You can follow

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it also makes a huge difference in the sustainability and my ability to make this something worth

sharing. So if you have questions or want specific advice, you can email me at mydbpodcast

at gmail.com. In the meantime, I've been your host, Julie America. I hope you have a wonderful

rest of your day and I'll talk to you tomorrow while you make your damn bed.

With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the capital one bank guy is so

passionate about banking with capital one. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about

no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most capital one cafes are open seven days a week

to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about.

In a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capital one dot com slash bank capital one

and a member FDIC.

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