Tag Archives: overachiever

Ten Ways Shame Manifests in Your Life

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Shame

Ten Ways Shame Manifests in Your Life

This is part three of a six-week on-air overview of my book, Healing the Hurts of Your Past. There are six radio broadcasts that correlate with these posts.   You can listen to each podcast by clicking the links:

  1. Part One: What is Shame?
  2. Part Two: The Roots of Shame
  3. Part Three: The Fruit of Shame

Part three looks at how shame manifests in our lives. I pointed out that shame hurts so much emotionally that your brain works overtime to find a way to either prevent the pain from happening or numb/deny the pain altogether.  We looked at these pain preventers (each is done to prevent people from seeing your worthlessness and you experiencing the overwhelming pain of shame):

Ten Ways Shame Manifests in Your Life

  1. Intimidation- the typical control freak. They keep people away through aggressive behavior.
  2. Perfectionism- you do everything perfectly so no one can criticize you.
  3. Procrastination- you put things off as long as possible to not expose your weaknesses.
  4. All or nothing- you only perform when you know you can win, whatever that means.
  5. Overachievement- similar to perfectionism. You do so much good no one can question you.
  6. Isolation – you avoid people and intimate situations to avoid exposure of the real you.
  7. People pleasing – if you keep everyone happy maybe they won’t notice your flaws.
  8. Defensiveness- you push back when someone points out a concern. Never agree with them.
  9. Humor- you deflect the conversation with humor to avoid talking about revealing issues.
  10. Vows- you always promise yourself to “never let that happen again” or “always” do something to protect yourself from the pain of shame affecting you.

If you look at this list and see a lot of your behavior listed it’s very important to understand that you don’t have ten problems. That will only add to your shame! You have one problem, shame, and it manifests in a variety of ways.

In a recent post I mentioned that to a hurting person these behaviors are solutions to their problem. Not good solutions, but solutions none the less. Don’t work at solving each problem. That’s futile. Work at healing your shame and these behaviors will slowly fall away over time.

So how do you heal your shame?  The source of your healing is the unconditional love of God. Shame says you are worthless and have no right to  belong. But God says you are so valuable that he sent Jesus to die for you. That’s the truth we all need to believe.

Question: What are  other ways that you think shame manifests? Leave your comment below.

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Overachievers and “Winners” Feel Shame Too

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Shame and Lt. Dan

Shame and Lt. Dan

In my book, Healing the Hurts of the Past; a guide to overcoming the pain of shame, I refer to the movie Forrest Gump and specifically Lt. Dan Taylor. If you remember, he was the good-looking highly confident commander in Viet Nam…until he lost his legs in battle. Then everything changed.  He came from a family where every generation had a war hero…someone that had died in battle.  Lt. Dan fully expected that he would either live or die a hero as well.

Overachievers and Shame

With this in mind, consider the other side of shame…the side that is revealed in “successful” people. In Healing the Hurts of Your Past I wrote…

Here’s a key to understanding the pain of shame…Shame has little to do with the bad things that have happened to you or the bad things that you have done. Shame has everything to do with the lies you believe about yourself. For example, answer this question: When did shame come to Lt. Dan? Some people say, “When he was shot”. Others have said, “When his legs were amputated”.

No. It was way before that. Shame entered Lt. Dan’s life when he believed the lie that he was only valuable as a war hero. Or more simply, when he believed that his value was based on how he performed. That may have happened when he was as young as five years old.

We often think of a shamed person as some poorly functioning, depressed person. But shame is often resident in highly motivated, successful people. As long as they are performing well, they feel great. They are meeting their expectations. Their success covers up the pain of their shame. But send some pain or discouragement or failure their way and they crumble into pieces because, in their mind, only losers fail. And if they have failed, then they must be a loser.

It is as if the lie was hiding in the weeds for years just waiting to pounce on them the minute they failed. It grabs them by the throat and takes them down – totally confusing them as to why they are suddenly so depressed or angry or anxious when their whole life has run so smoothly up until now.

That is what happened to Lt. Dan. His shame drove him to be a “winner”. He kept one step ahead of the grip of shame by making sure that he was always successful. But his shame was finally revealed when he lost his legs.  Healing the Hurts of Your Past

This expands the definition of “shame-based person”, doesn’t it?  Some of our most successful people today are driven by shame. They work every day to prove that they are valuable. Can you think of any examples?

Make this a discussion!  How has shame made you an overachiever? Who are some overachievers in the news who have admitted their own shame? Leave your comment below and “share the knowledge” by clicking the link. Thanks.

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