Shame in marriage is one of the most widespread destructive emotions that people must deal with and it is particularly nuanced in marriage because marriage is one of the few relationships where people cannot easily ‘hide’ and exactly who they really are, warts and all, become ever more transparent.
People walk around with varying degrees of feeling unworthy, tainted, and flawed in some way and they often spend their lives in inauthenticity desperately trying to hide those aspects of themselves they find unworthy. And equally desperately trying to showcase those aspect of their lives they would like to have in place of their taints and flaws.
And the interesting thing is that it doesn’t matter whether people in fact do have wonderful positive and amazing sides to themselves – the fact is they will always be really blind to the reality of these amazing and positive aspects about themselves as long as they are blind to and avoidant of those aspects of themselves for which they feel shame.
In this series of blogs, we will look at shame and what it means and how it is avoided, and how it can be successfully and enthusiastically Incorporated with full openness into ones being.
In a typical marriage, two people fall in love and for a period of up to perhaps 12 months both are in a state of pseudo psychosis, both actually having lost contact with reality in terms both of themselves and of the other. Both people project onto the other their ‘ideal’ mates and, fuelled by powerful hormones, they see only the desirable traits in the other and are blind to those traits which will begin to irritate at a later stage in their relationship.
Not only that but they project onto the other the very qualities
that they wish to have in those partners regardless in fact of whether these qualities actually exist or not.
And so together they build this fantasy which has nothing to do with reality, and some months or years down the line, as reality begins to bite, they begin to notice more and more of the irritating aspects of their partners.
More importantly, they begin to see in their partner’s faces, reflected back at them, the irritating parts of their own psyches.
How this plays out is as follows
The honeymoon period is where each looks at the other through rose-coloured glasses and they experience only love, warmth and acceptance, both of themselves and of the other.
A few years down the line they begin to notice that the other isn’t quite as wonderful as they previously imagined. Somehow, they aren’t as sweet and as accommodating and as warm as they had been.
And a few years further down the line they begin to realise that their partners are actually quite awful – manipulative and selfish beings in their own right.
And finally, they get to look at the other and each wonder who is this monster in front of me?’
The terrible truth is that, absent cases of real pathology, the monster in front of them is actually a reflection of themselves. It is actually a fairly accurate reflection of the person doing the looking.
When I look at my partner, the monster, I should know that I’m really looking at the monster part of me that is being reflected back by my partner, and, more to the point I should be looking at what it is about me that is causing my partner to behave in ways that are so painful to me
What does my partner see in me and how have I behaved to induce this? All of this triggers shame and more shame.
It is then that shame begins to manifest itself so strongly in so many ways and it is then that the real cover ups and hiding take place, triggering off yet more shame and more hiding.
We will deal further with this in the next blog.
