My programming from childhood still equates blame with shame

By David McElroy · June 12, 2019

I try to be blameless as much as I can. I struggle to do everything perfectly. I work hard to make others happy with me. It’s because I’m still running an old childhood script — one that makes me feel deep shame when anyone blames me for anything. So I’m constantly in fear of anyone thinking I’ve done something wrong.

It happened again Tuesday in a work situation. Something went wrong on a project which I’m overseeing. It wasn’t anything I caused. It wasn’t anything I could have prevented. I had no fault in the matter.

But someone was upset that he was inconvenienced in a small way. Because I was the bearer of the bad news — and because it’s my project — I could feel his blame. I could feel his unhappiness with me.

And I immediately felt a deep sense of shame — like a small boy whose angry father was blaming him for something he couldn’t control.

I haven’t been able to shake that feeling all day. Although it’s bedtime, I can’t let the shame go and just relax and end my day.

It’s not a rational thing. I don’t fear punishment. Nothing bad is going to happen to me as a result of the situation. My project will still be done. Everybody will be happy with it. In fact, nobody will even remember this little glitch when it’s over.

But I will feel tense and shamed along the way, even though I did nothing wrong, because there is an old element of childhood programming which tells me that I have to keep everybody else happy with me — or else I’ve obviously done something wrong.

I don’t want to live with this, but it does serve one useful purpose in my life. It reminds me that we can’t always tell how we’re affecting others.

You see, if you dealt with me in business or in normal social interactions, you would never see this side of me. I hide the way I feel and get on with the job at hand. If anything, I double down on getting things right. I’m willing to take responsibility even if I didn’t cause the problem and I’m prone to pushing harder to please whoever is upset with me. And such a person will never know I’m upset.

So this reminds me that others are running their own scripts that I’m not aware of. They’re getting upset about things I might do or say — and if they haven’t done a lot of work on themselves, they might not even know why they feel as they do. They might transfer all of their inner feelings — anger, shame, embarrassment, whatever — onto other people, maybe even me.

So when people lash out at me irrationally or act in ways which don’t make sense to me, they’re probably just acting out their own unconscious programming, too. I try to remember that.

Understanding this about myself — and about the people around me — makes me even more committed to raising children in emotionally healthy ways. I don’t want the children who I help raise to carry with them the shame and guilt and blame that so many of us carry from unhealthy childhoods.

I don’t think there’s any role we have that’s more important — or more sacred — than guarding the hearts and minds of children to becoming psychologically healthy adults. A lot of people are unconsciously doing to their children exactly what was done to them. And that’s not right.

In the meantime, I’ll feel this terrible shame when I know someone blames me for something, whether I’ve done anything wrong or not. I hope I’ll slowly be able to let more and more of it go. I’ll keep working on it.

But the programming you and I received as children — for both good and bad — is incredibly difficult to eliminate entirely.

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I just went from joy to bitter disappointment in the space of seconds. I had an exciting idea, but it was something I needed feedback and discussion about. I wanted to turn to a trusted partner and say, “What do you think about this?” But I felt deflated because there was no one there. I recently shared with you how much I miss having someone to take care of, but I also strongly miss having a partner who’s there to listen and to help me plot how we can move forward in life together. The best marriages are sort of a “mutual aid society,” an arrangement by which each person is fully committed to helping the other become the best he or she can be. It was actually so late tonight when I had this thought that a partner might very well have been asleep already. But it would have been enough to say to myself, “We can talk about that tomorrow” — if I knew someone cared and wanted to be part of that conversation with me. I miss that kind of relationship. Doesn’t everyone need this?

Here’s more evidence that the modern U.S. school system is badly broken. It was once a reasonable assumption that a high school graduate who was accepted to a major college could read and write competently. For years, colleges have known their incoming freshmen’s writing was mostly dreadful, so they’ve been forced to teach students to write. (They’ve done it very poorly.) Now it has become obvious that basic reading skills among freshmen are so terrible that some colleges must now teach kids how to read. At the University of California at Santa Cruz, all incoming freshmen will now take a mandatory three-course sequence which will teach them how to read and understand what they’re reading, in addition to trying to teach them how to write. If a student has made it this far in life without learning how to read and write, this probably won’t work, but the system will eventually be dumbed down to ignore the failure. Parents who trust the modern school system to educate their children are gambling with their kids’ lives. The system is broken.

Catholic priest Richard Rohr is a well-known writer and teacher on several subjects, one of which is the Enneagram. Most of his work with which I’ve been familiar is related to spiritual and psychological development. I recently discovered that someone has posted a good bit of one of his Enneagram workshops on YouTube and I’d like to recommend that if you have any interest in the Enneagram personality typing system. It was only about six months ago that I discovered I’m actually a Type 1 (instead of a Type 4), so I’ve been watching various teachers talk about that type lately. Rohr happens to be a Type 1 as well, and his description of the type — and especially his self-criticism — struck home with me. Here are links to his teaching about most of the types: Type 1, Type 2, Type 3, Type 4, Type 5, Type 6, Type 9. (Types 7 and 8 are missing.) You might also enjoy an interview that Krista Tippett did with Rohr for the On Being podcast two years ago. It was listening to that interview again this week which prompted me to go find his Enneagram teaching. I don’t always agree with Rohr about everything, but he’s always thought-provoking.

It’s still not a common pattern, but more families are deciding today that it makes sense for a dad to stay home with the kids while a mom is gone to a job. The specifics of such arrangements vary. In some cases, the wife works outside the home all the time and the husband runs the household. In others, the man works from home and the woman works outside the home part of the time. In such an arrangement, the parents switch who’s supervising children depending on who’s home and who’s busy. Society still seems to collectively have a problem with non-traditional parenting arrangements, but they can make a lot of sense for many people. Of course, the far-more-common pattern is a father who works full-time elsewhere and a mother who works full-time as well, but who still has to take care of kids and home when she’s finished with her paying job. Different arrangements are going to work for different families, but it’s clear that the worst of all worlds in the expectation that the woman work a full-time job and then come home and work another full-time job raising children on her own.

Stories about young people running away from home often don’t end well, but I just heard a story of a good outcome. The young woman who shared her story with me isn’t a child, though. She’s in her early 20s, but she ran away from home last year. She lived in Michigan with her dysfunctional family. Her mom was addicted to meth and various prescription drugs. She was the only one in the family who worked — and her family took almost all of the money she earned. The only bright spot in her life was a guy she met online playing a video game. The two grew close and fell in love. About 18 months ago, she secretly packed everything she owned — and he drove from Birmingham to Michigan to pick her up without her family’s knowledge. Today, they’re married and have a new baby. She says leaving her family was the second best thing that ever happened to her — and her husband and baby are the best. “He doesn’t seem to understand what a big deal it was,” she said, “but he saved my life. I took a big risk and he did, too, but I’m happy and loved for the first time in my life.” It might not be common, but some runaway stories do end well.

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