Tag Archives: people pleaser

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.

Related articles

Coping Mechanisms and Shame

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A big section of my book Healing the Hurts of Your Past  focuses on the “fruit” of shame. These are really coping mechanisms that we use to help take the edge off the pain of shame.

The Right Tool for the Job

I compare these coping mechanisms to a person carrying a tool belt full of tools.  We all want to be prepared. We all know that every job requires its own set of tools.  And so it is with shame. We have many tools to deal with it. We might be a perfectionist one day, a people-pleaser the next and an intimidator the next. Whatever it takes.

shame

Coping mechanisms help cover our shame

People often see this range of behavior and it concerns them. They don’t know what’s wrong with them. It makes no sense. It’s like they have multiple personalities.

Shame is the Problem

But once you understand shame it all makes sense. They don’t have multiple personalities or even multiple problems. They have one problem; shame. They just have a variety of ways of dealing with it.

Coping Mechanisms Require Heavy Lifting

But tool belts get heavy. The more tools you carry, the more weight, and the more weight, the harder life is day-to-day. Trying to prevent the pain of shame is a full-time job. It requires a lot of tools and a lot of skill. Shame alone is bad enough. But trying to prevent it or cover it up makes life that much harder. It wears you out.

So why not just deal with it? Just because you have shame doesn’t mean that you are obligated to keep it. Lose the shame and the coping mechanisms are no longer necessary. If you want to learn how to lose the shame take a look at my book.

Question: What coping mechanisms do you use most often to buffer the pain of shame? Leave a comment. Share the post. Subscribe to the blog. Thanks!