Teaching Shame

[ninadi7]

I teach EFT & Reiki to parents & their children to balance the energy centers, etc. Recently, I was creating a worksheet of affirmations & tapping sequences using the 'Feelings Chart' from The Secret. Something felt incomplete about it, until I recognized shame was missing from the chart. Could it be? Had they forgotten this one? The Emotion Code has it. Heartmath has it. So, I added shame to the worksheet and began to write positive affirmations regarding it.

I immediately thought of my daughter who used to be embarrassed for not being able to read as well as some of her classmates. She would soon to be made ashamed of this by her teacher reminding her on a continuous basis that she could not, in fact, read as well as she should be. At this point, she felt like she was doing something 'wrong' and because the teacher implied that she should be doing much better, meaning she wasn't doing good enough.

As I wrote this down, I started to think about other ways people are made to feel ashamed based on our own opinions, preferences, belief systems etc. As I philosophized on some paper, I startled myself with my findings. I shared some of these with my friend, who after 2 minutes said, "there are too many variables" and "if I'm not careful there will soon be steam coming from my brain from thinking too hard."

Here's the scenarios I came up with. If the potential opposite to shame is compassion, how do we express compassion for those that the general public tends to make feel ashamed? For example, the convicted child molester, who is a priest (assuming he's feeling ashamed) that gets transferred to another church. Some church folks know, others don't. Now, transferring him hasn't changed the fact that he's attracted to kids (whether he's acting out something from his childhood, or not.) Some people stop attending that church and switch. Others forgive as they would want to be forgiven, and some can't shake it and resort to resolving their anger towards him with violence.

There is a great book by Byron Katie called The Work and in her Judge Your Neighbor worksheet, she makes a point to let people know that we too, are judging with shoulds and shouldn'ts. Is society wrong for saying adults shouldn't molest children. Shall we say, you could do that, but then you'd break the law. The law, which, most people drive 80 mph on the parkway until they see a police officer and realize they might get caught so they slow down to 55 mph.

So here I am, looking to help those who have been a product of shame, that were made to feel wrong or bad for being different or outside of the "norm".

Any feedback? I'm stumped!

P.S. now I know why 'shame' was left off of the feelings chart