Recently there was a discussion about forgiveness that helped me to understand
this important and difficult issue a little better. Most contributors agreed
that when someone says "I forgive" from a position of feeling morally superior
it is not helpful. As Otteline Lamet pointed out this is often an attempt to
avoid unpleasant feelings, such as rage and deep hurt.
I am very interested in the role of shame in this process. I assume that
Otteline might include shame, among other things, under the heading of the deep
hurt which she states that people are often trying to avoid feeling when they
forgive. This has made me think about how shame is related to the bowing we
often see in constellations. These are some of my initial thoughts on the
subject. I am sure it can be explored much further.
To make myself clear here, I am not talking about the toxic shame that is a
secondary emotion and paralyses people. Rather I am talking about the much
briefer primary emotion. Shame like guilt is not really about being morally
good or bad. It seems this way, because like guilt, shame is used as a means of
socially controlling people's behaviour. In fact shame arises when there is an
interruption to something that interests or excites us. Remember the sense of
deflation when you mistime trying to join in an interesting conversation. That
feeling is what I am talking about here. It has the survival value of forcing
us to withdraw our energy and then hopefully to reassess the situation
skilfully. When it is mild, it feels like discretion. When it is severe it
feels like disgrace. When it is part of a complicated secondary emotion it can
become positively toxic
A key step in dealing with difficulties with parents is the one of
acknowledging parents' fates and maybe bowing in respect to that fate. That
puts parents' behaviour in context. Then we can become aware of the real
forces, the entanglements, that drive our blind love in these situations. This
forgiving in a state of blind love may have been the best we could do until
now. Nonetheless, we realise that our attempt to carry our parents' pain and
fate has really been misguided and inflated. So we feel embarrassed or ashamed.
We become humble. So our heads spontaneously start to bow. This is genuine
humility not the humility that any intelligent person can fake if they want to.
Sometimes we can see a bow spontaneously beginning like this in a
representative in a constellation.
As we accept the shame and surrender to it, we can become open to receiving
support. It is then the tender connection with another human being that allows
us to rise out of the bow and out of the shame and reengage with the world, &
with ourselves in a new way. So then the shame has done the job that it has
meant to do. We have now become disentangled from the toxic dance of blind
love. Shame/humility has created space for grace to enter, for love to enter
and for life itself to enter.
hasta la vista
Chris Walsh
An Australian Constellation Website:
www.constellationflow.com
