Understanding the root emotion: shame

In early January, I started reading several books  for a class.  I was deeply surprised to see how much I related to the materials.   I originally wrote this in a private journal:

  There are some connections that are finally making sense to me.  I’ve long wondered what exactly has held me back from stepping into life’s fullest and what keeps pulling me back.  What keeps causing me to withdraw.  It’s shame.I need to think, pray, and ruminate on this since I don’t have a full understanding of if there was one event or if it’s just from all of growing up, in general.  But I have this deep shame that weighs me down, anchoring me to the past.  It’s what makes me want to hide, to not come out and experience newness, relationships, life.

I suspect much of this lingering sense of shame comes from growing up as a child of a hoarder, though there may be other factors too.

My readings for class are about the differences between guilt and shame; understanding what shame actually is from these descriptions have opened my eyes up.  I finally recognize what is haunting me.  I’m going to share several passages from what I’ve been reading to help process this material.  The bold are my own emphases.

Consider this from Christopher Flanders in his book About Face:  “Shame is a global statement about the self.  That is, the focus in shame is not so much on the deed of failure, but rather on the resulting inadequacy that the self experiences, often made painfully real by the exposure of the inadequacy or failure” (p. 60)

Or this from Helen Lynd i On Shame and Search for Identity: “Since shame involves the whole self, it cannot be easily removed.  An action that brings guilt can be separated from the self.  We can say, “I did that, but that action does not reflect the real me.”  Thus, guilt can be mitigated, nullified, expiated.  Shame cannot.  It is not an isolated act that can the attached from the self…It is pervasive as anxiety is pervasive; its focus is not a separate act but a revelation of the whole self.  The thing that has been exposed is what I am” (p. 50).

More from Flanders:  “The command associated with guilt would be something like: ‘Stop.  What you have done is wrong and violates the rule or standard.’  In contrast, the command interpreted from the perspective of shame would be, ‘Stop.  What you have done is wrong.  You are no good.’  As such, the shame command is more severe because it is more profoundly a statement about the self, not simply an action abstracted and isolated from the self:” (p. 62).

Flanders again:  “Shame involves global attribution where the wrong committed is internalized and appropriated at the most fundamental evaluative level of the self.  There may be attention given to the wrong committed but the primary focus is upon the defective nature of the self.   Shame viewed in this light reflects a more fundamental problem.  The self is defective” (p. 62).

Paul Gilbert in Shame: Interpersonal Behavior, Psychopathology, and Culture explains shame as “an inner experience of the self as unattractive social agent” and an experience of “being in the social world, an undesired self, a self that does not wish to be” (p. 22).

Flanders writes more: “That is, the shame experience is linked closely to negative feelings that derive from being who we do not want to be.  Shame is not so much a notion of ‘I failed to be beautiful’ but rather ‘I am ugly.’  At its core, the shamed self is a self that is deficient and falls short of some good goal or a standard of excellence” (p. 63).

Flanders continues: “….one who is shamed attempts to hide and disappear. From the perspective of shame one does not merely view the thing that one has done that is wrong but rather regards thvery self as defective.  In this way, shame points to a much deeper reality.  It is not the action of a person that is wrong.  Rather it is the person itself that is wrong.  Because of this, when the self experiences shame, it recoils, feeling inferior and defective” (p. 63).

As I process what I’ve read, it’s clear to me that the words reflect my own internal feelings I have about my self and my identity.  I prefer, basically, to be left alone, to be withdrawn.  Putting forth effort into relationship is not easy at all.  It takes a greater outside force to motivate me to try.

I have a lot to process, to consider, and work through.  I hope that someday, I can have this burden of shame gone, that I can have a new sense of self.

Snippet: Christmas with a hoarder

My mother’s side of the family’s Christmas celebration was always held at my Grandparents’ home, so there was never a problem with getting the house ready for the holidays ready for them.  But every other year, in the evening on Christmas Day, it was our turn to host my dad’s family at our home.

For Christmas when we had to host my dad’s side, there would be several stressful days of cleaning.  The cleaning usually would even still be taking place on the holidays themselves.  We would go to Grandpa Anderson’s and then have to start cleaning as soon as we got home. There were times when stuff was still being worked on when Harold et al came through the doors.  Oh, and here’s another secret:  for holidays or other events, the rooms that were seen were only cleaned.  Usually boxes and other items were thrown into the closed off rooms.  If you opened the room up you’d see boxes and junk piled up high.

So it was never truly clean.

The joke of it all?  After the holidays were over, it was highly unlikely that the family would clean up after the festivities.  Sometimes the tree would start to rot in the house.  Or decorations, like outside lights, would remain there until the next year.

It was all for show.  And nothing more.

I left her.

I needed to be free.  After years of living in her shadow, after a lot of prayer and conversation with my husband and others whose advice I respect, I left my mother, cutting ties.   I needed to for my sanity.

Have you ever had a wound that has reopened after its scabbed over?  That basically sums up the relationship I had with my mother.  No matter what I did, even after I became an adult, she hadn’t changed.   And therefore the pain from her abusive ways would never quite heal.

I knew for years I would probably have to either distance myself from her or remove her from my life completely.  After my Dad died in 2005, her behavior worsened.  It was several months after his passing that it dawned on me:  I needed to leave.  It was not my husband’s decision or even prompting.  All he did along the way was support me.  It took a little over a year after the decision was made before I left.  When I did, my husband and I moved to a new place, leaving no forwarding address.  We took several steps to guard our whereabouts since, at least then, we still were going to live in MN.

For a while, I was a bit paranoid about what I would do if I saw her at a place like Sam’s club, our church, or another public place.  I had escape plans in mind.

It was hard to fully relax since she knew where I worked.  She would sent packages, mail, letters.  She called sometimes.  I was lucky enough to have a supervisor and a manager who wanted to help protect me so they stepped to tell her to back off, to not call.  She even showed up one day and demanded the receptionist to give my contact information. I was out sick, so the drama could have been worse.  I worked in a secure building so it’s not like she could have seen me if I had been there.  I also never used the front door to get inside either.

Until I left that position in April 2008, it was difficult to think I could actually be free from her.  She certainly did not respect the decision I made.

But I knew leaving was the right decision.  In fact, her reaction reiterated to me that she saw me as only another one of her possessions and not a person.

 

Forward

I originally wrote the following in 2007 as I tried to gain perspective on my situation.  At the time, I did not yet know what my mother was.  It would be still a year and a half, well into 2008, that I finally had a description for her:  hoarder.  I started this blog to unpack my experiences and memories.  I’ve edited the following passage a bit, but only to reflect the change in time.  So present tense has been changed to past tense, etc.

My story begins as I finally took a step forward.
I grew up with a really abusive mother who has never seen me an individual, but as an extension of herself. She would, for years, buy whatever she thought I should wear, have, use. Being that after high school I didn’t have much money, I just let her give me furniture, dishes, clothes and other things and figured that I was lucky to not have to spend money. However, I eventually realized that this was an attempt at her defining my identity (as opposed to understanding who I actually am). So I began the process of getting rid of pretty much anything from her.  In 2006, I overhauled my wardrobe and started to figure out the kind of clothes I actually like. When we moved at the end of 2006, we took no furniture with us except what was not from her. We bought a new bed (our bedroom set was from her) and were using some dressers from a friend that we are using until we were able to afford ones that match our bedroom set. We bought our own couch. We were using a card table for almost a year until we obtained an actual kitchen/dining table.  Things like that. I cannot even tell you how much was purged.

She wants to control everyone around her and will dominate to the point of not letting someone have an opinion contrary to hers. I remember not realizing I actually could hold an opinion. In high school I found greater comfort and understanding from my friends than from my family so I really clung to them. When I first started dating an ex in college (who also turned out to be abusive), he started controlling me in many ways and I didn’t realize until years after the relationship that I actually do have choices (just to provide an example of how her influence hurt me in ways outside of my family situation). I hated females for years, too, friends, older women, etc. When a few former friends of mine who were females hurt me, it reinforced the ideas that I can’t trust other women. I began to surround myself with male friends and would only open up to them, rather than females (thankfully this has changed).

She basically forced me to be her slave growing up, mothering my younger brothers since she couldn’t be bothered with it, cleaning her whole house (which was always filthy and cluttered and got way worse after I moved out), and anything else she could think of. I am not over dramatic by saying this and I realize using the word “slave” may seem overdone. However, think of news stories you have occasionally seen where someone discovered a house that was crammed full of stuff and was dirty and rotting and how shocking the story makes it seem.

That was my life growing up.

There was garbage left everywhere. Brothers would spit their gum out on the floor. The dog would defecate on the floor and no one would clean it up or would just wipe it up with a towel (and not disinfect it). We only have Dawn and Windex (sometimes for the later) growing up. No separate cleaning supplies. No real way to clean. Food would rot in the refrigerator and never be cleaned up. Clothes would be everywhere: on her bed (my parents would not sleep in their bed because it was full of clothes, dirty dishes, papers, and other random things). papers would be spread out everywhere. I would find dirty dishes under beds, under couches, in desk drawers. The toilets were never really cleaned much, if at all. I could hardly vacuum if I was able to get a room picked up because we had two vacuum cleaners and neither worked. One there were never any bags for so I was expected to use the one bag that was filled up and empty it out and reuse it. Or to just not use a bag. The other only had a hose with attachments and the attachments were all gone so there was only a round metal part that I was expected to use–sticking the round metal part on the floor and going inch by inch. Or sometimes I was lucky and found the car/hand held dustbuster and could use that (being that the house was cluttered you could never find anything). The stairs and floors were rarely cleaning. You would walk down the stairs and see piles of dust and hair from the dog just sitting all over. Also, there was not really anywhere to walk. Stuff was piled everywhere. To go upstairs you sometimes had to work your way over a mound of stuff sitting on the bottom stairs. I could never actually answer the front door if someone came by because I couldn’t even get into the entry way to open it.

Oh that, and we were trained to NEVER let ANYONE in the house, even grandpa or an aunt. I was not allowed in jr or sr high to have friends over. It was rare if that rule was bent. Usually that would happen right around the times where the place needed to be cleaned (like for a holiday or for a repairman coming by).
I was forced to do my mom’s laundry, my dad’s laundry, and my youngest two brother’s laundry.  And since my youngest two brothers were around the same age, I never knew whose clothes were whose but would get in trouble if I put them in the wrong drawers. My mom had so many clothes it was not possible to put them away. She would buy clothes every WEEK from a discount place called Opitz by the BAGFUL. She has clothes that are new with tags on, bought 10 years prior, that she never wore. The first thing she did after my dad died was to QUICKLY get rid of ALL his clothes so she had more room for hers. We lacked basic things, too. I remember being really upset if I needed a band-aid since we didn’t have them; I had never even heard of first aid ointment until I was out of the house. We never had kleenex. I didn’t know what fabric softener was until college. I know there are more things like this but those are some examples.

I had no normal childhood to speak of and was forced to grow up at a very young age because of it. My father, who changed radically before his death, was an enabler who helped her to keep her world the way she liked it, was not around much (working), and yet told us kids how much he despised her (so both parents were always using us as a means to get to the other). She’s emotionally manipulative and even was physically abusive. She would scream at us all the time over anything and everything, blaming us if she could not find her glasses or keys. I was expected, even living in college, to drop anything to help them out (cleaning the house frantically for Tony’s graduation or christmas, organizing supplies from the restaurant they were selling in the middle of finals for college, giving up my vehicle to drive a HUGE van that would not fit in the tight parking spots at the dorm so Tony could take my car for a road trip in New York, helping them clean a rental property after dirty tenants trashed it, etc etc etc). Tony was always given special treatment and if I ever said anything about it, I would be mocked and told that I always got my way. I was denied doctor’s visits when I needed them growing up. (Years later the problems I had were diagnosed as fibromyalgia. Symptoms started when I was 13 or 14).
She grounded me from reading since books really were my escape. She once told me I needed to make her more important that my faith and that God could not always come first. She grounded me from church.

She threatens many, many things over the course of years including that if I didn’t work for her for free over summers, she would take away the car I was using for college, not give me copies of filed taxes (meaning I couldn’t get financial aid for college without those since I was considered “dependant” by the government’s standards), and would kick me out of the house (since I lived there when I was not at the dorm). She and my dad forged my name on my tax return for years when I was in high school and college. They did it to claim they were paying me as an assistant and if they could knock down their own income (they were self-employed) by $30,000.00 or so, then their overall tax bill would be less. They forced me to let them do it and when I finally got my own taxes filed, I was told I betrayed the family.

The house got worse after I moved out. If I thought it was cluttered and dirty before, I was amazed at how worse it was now. After I was gone, rotting food was now often all over the kitchen, the sink was plugged with food and dirty water, and more junk was everywhere.

When I got engaged, she did not want to celebrate with both my fiancée and I. Instead she took me out to dinner with her friend and they bashed marriage. She also used the time during the engagement as some final attempts to control, including–since I was borrowing a car from them during my last semester in school–deciding we could not take it to go to IL for Christmas (even though we took it to IL two months prior), yelling at me about how I needed to clean their place for Christmas so my dad’s father and stepmom could come over (note: at this point I was completely moved out into a townhouse). Threatening me with no longer paying for wedding things if I didn’t help with this or with that.

When I got married, the planning was not a happy thing. My mother saw fit to show me that she was not happy about me going off on my own. She did not like Phil because he did not cower to her. He stood up to her even. She tried on several occasions to manipulate and even ruin the wedding plans. Fortunately, God saw us through and our wedding day was blissful in spite of her attempts to undermine it.

Since my marriage started in 2002, she has made it clear to both of us that she is willing to do anything to come between us and that I should be treating her as more important that Phil. Often she has refused to acknowledge my married name and instead has called me by my maiden name. I got her to stop it once by writing out a check to her–in her maiden name.

She continued to try to get me to be her slave long after there was no control. 2 or 3 months after we got married, we were visiting. My youngest two brothers–both teens at this point–were being jerks to her about something she asked them to help with. She could not get them to listen so she instead starting yelling at me to do it. I had been trying to help her get dinner going, etc, but at this point, it was too far. I calmly told her that my husband I and were both guests in her home and did not deserve to be yelled at and if she was frustrated, she needed to address my brothers, not take it out on me. I told her we were leaving. She said “don’t go.” in a small voice. But I knew if I stayed, she would have her way and would start yelling again. So we left.

We wouldn’t see her much for a while. And when we would see her, she’d be clingy and weird. When we moved into one her their rental properties for $ reasons, boundaries got lost again. She’d show up whenever and would often just walk around our yard to show us she was in control. She would knock on the windows instead of the front door a lot. She would leave stuff and expect us to store it. She would not fix things.

Things were ok when my dad was sick.

However, after he died, she freaked. The house got EVEN WORSE. Since at that point we were living in one of her rental properties, she threatened us with breaking in and wanted to store more. Eventually we told her we were leaving and she screamed at Phil about he was hiding me from her. She came over and I told her about how I had been abused and she got mad.

I no longer wanted to have a relationship with someone who is so abusive.

At the end of 2006, I cut ties with her and haven’t looked back.  This isn’t to say that I hold any grudges against her.  Honestly, I’ve forgiven her.  I wish, more than anything, that she would change because I would love to have my family back in my life.