Early in my clinical career a client of mine was a young truck driver who was dealing with substance abuse.  Shortly after the therapy began, I asked him to share about his family life as a child.  As he complied and described life in a working-class Arkansas family, he recalled his mother one time flashing her boobs at him when he was about four years of age; this event shamed him greatly and he had carried it with him into adulthood.  Not long after, as the work of therapy progressed, he suddenly told me he had recently had a homosexual encounter.  When he shared this, he immediately burst into laughter, uproarious laughter as if a burden had been lifted by the simple disclosure of these two events by which he had been shamed.  He must have intuitively sensed an, “unconditional positive regard” that was available in the clinical framework that I offered;  he felt free to share these two events, and others, without the fear of being judged.

It is shame that binds us into a self-defeating life, often with tragic outcomes.  Suddenly this young man found freedom from this shame bind and could only laugh that he had been tyrannized for most of his twenty-something years.  There is power in saying the unsayable, in admitting that which is too painful to admit.  There is power in putting subjective anguish into speech, “speaking words that give shape to our anguish” as George Eliot described it.  But speaking openly and honestly about what is going on in our heart, especially if we have been raised in a culture where this is verboten.  Many children learn to “shut down” even before they can verbalize, for they have certainly been very aware of the “tyranny of the shoulds” abounding in the household.  The reach of this tyranny is most lethal in early childhood as it shapes attitudes, the ability to trust others and one’s own subjective experience.

Here is relevant wisdom from Lauren van der Post: “There is nothing in your life too terrible or too sad that will not be your friend when you find the right name to call it, and calling it by its own name hastening it will come upright to your side.” As Carl Jung would say, “The shadow is to be embraced, not denied”; or in the words of poet Ranier Rilke, “The heart has its beastly little treasures.”