Discomfortable

Start the Shame Series from the beginning: here Epilogue   As much as I’ve endeavoured to give you a glimpse behind the curtain of shame, the truth is, more often than not, we simply cannot see the full scope of our own shame and dogma until something literally smashes our comfortable little shame bubble. Like your career tanking and your best friend dying and your relationship crumbling all at once… hypothetically speaking. That’s why we actually need to make mistakes. And why we should be grateful for things like failure, midlife crisis, disaster, heartbreak, disillusionment, disease, and yes, even death. These are the red pills that can help release us from The Matrix of shame. You may have to hit your ideological rock bottom before you finally have a true shame breakthrough, but you’ll know it when you do. First, you get angry, because you realize you’ve been living a lie. But then you feel an almost euphoric wave of relief as you finally let go of the horrible burden of shame you’ve been carrying around for years, if not your whole life. It’s terrifically liberating, but also, all too fleeting. The sense of clarity and peace might last a day or two, or maybe even a week or a month, but eventually you will encounter more shame and have to start the process all over again. The good news is that once you’ve seen behind one aspect of your shame, that epiphany can act as the anchor of truth upon which you judge everything else moving forward. You start to question everything you’re told and weigh it against your own experiences. And when you do find a nugget of truth that aligns with your new perspective, you know it immediately. As you start to accrue these personal truths, you begin reconstructing a new worldview based on experience, not dogma. But it’s an ongoing process, like going to the gym or learning Spanish or approaching the limit of an exponential curve. You need to keep peeling back layers of dogma. Keep challenging yourself, trying new things, seeking out new perspectives, and staying out of your comfort zone in order to find all of the invisible boundaries of shame that are keeping you small, blind, and afraid. And you don’t just do this once. You keep discovering new pockets of shame all the time. Once you’ve worked through your career shame, for example, you may well discover family shame, sex shame, money shame, body shame, and so on. Each requiring its own mini breakthrough. Foreclosure But let me warn you, shame breakthroughs are both incredibly liberating and scary af. Because when you’ve let go of enough dogma, you are left with… nothing. There’s a gaping void of ambiguity where your ideological sense of purpose and meaning used to be. What was cathartic at first, can become disorienting, rootless, and lonely. You slowly realize that you need to redefine virtually everything in your life, a monumental task that could take years! This is the period that psychologist and shame expert Dr. Alan Downs calls “The Wanderer – the man who journeys from his home seeking something better but not certain of what it is he might find.” Sound familiar? In this phase, the urge to fill that uncomfortable void with a superficial shake ‘n’ bake solution like a new religion, new career, new life partner, or new city is almost irresistible. But be careful not to replace your old dogma with new tricks (sorry, I couldn’t help myself). This is what Downs calls, “foreclosure”. He urges caution around any desire for sudden, drastic change, like, say, abandoning your life to travel around the world for a year like I just did. As fun as that was, it may only serve to mask your shame void without actually resolving your quest for true, personal meaning. According to Downs this stage requires a slow and gradual search that ends at a place of “honest and radical authenticity”. Because if shame is all about perception over reality, its kryptonite is genuinely accepting the reality of you, warts and all (I know “warts and all” is a bit of a cliché, but it’s an effective one, because if, hypothetically, I had a wart on my finger right at this very moment, I would probably feel so shame-y about it that I couldn’t even admit to it. Fortunately, I don’t, as this has all been a completely hypothetical aside. I swear. Kthxbai). The goal is always to move towards greater authenticity. Because we are innately social animals, we need to forge connections with other humans to be happy. But the only way we can forge genuine connections is by revealing our true, authentic, imperfect selves. And the only way we can reveal our true, authentic, imperfect selves is to have the courage to embrace vulnerability and shame. Because at some point our true, authentic, imperfect selves will be rejected. And when that happens we will need to rise above the ensuing shame shit show in order to get back out there and do it all over again. I’d like to tell you that it all works out in the end. But the truth is, I don’t know… yet. This is about as far as I’ve gotten. I’m still wandering. Will I find meaning? Will I find a new purpose in life? Will it be as powerful and motivating as running from shame used to be? I don’t know. But I can tell you one thing for certain: it’s already better wandering out here in the void than it ever was living back in The Matrix of shame. Since my breakthrough, I’ve been happier, less anxious, more confident, more adult, more certain about my values, and yet at the same time, somehow way more open-minded. I’m even strangely interested in religion and spirituality now when I never used to touch the stuff. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a saint or superhero (sadly). But somehow I feel more like myself than ever before. I now truly believe that positive change is possible, which was the proof of concept I needed to start moving from Carol Dweck’s dreaded fixed mindset over to her lauded growth mindset. As a result, I’ve become a voracious reader, explorer, and perpetual student of life. Shame has become my gospel of sorts because it’s one of the only absolute truths that I have left. Though shame is no longer a useful instinct, it is still a natural part of what makes us intrinsically human. If we embrace a radical kind of honesty and authenticity that acknowledges both our faults and our shame, we can build greater empathy and connection. To this end, I think we all need to wrestle with our culture’s dominant message of hierarchical human value and “fame-as-worthiness” in order to embrace the healthy logic of equality and universal respect instead. This attitude doesn’t just benefit those people we thought were “beneath” us — the people we’ve judged, shamed, or oppressed — it actively makes our own self-image stronger and more stable too. When we are no longer controlled by shame and dogma, we can figure out who we really are as individuals and what we really want from life. Not what our parents or our culture or some corporation wants us to want. On the path to accomplishing these goals, we need to practice using the guilt/growth mindset in order to separate ourselves from our inevitable fuckups just enough to learn from them, make amends, and keep moving. And the bottom line, if we don’t love ourselves, no one else is going to do it for us. Embracing our unconditional self-love may be the theoretical master internal emotion to rival shame’s master external emotion. The End If any of this resonates with you, I’d highly recommend checking out any of Brené Brown’s books, TED Talks, or courses. As well as Carol Dweck’s TED Talk and book Mindset, Alan Downs’ books The Half-Empty Heart and The Velvet Rage, Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, and James Gilligan’s How to Prevent Violence.

Start the Shame Series from the beginning: here The Fatal Flaw   For shame to really control you, I think you have to believe, somewhere deep down inside, that there is such a thing as a “fatal flaw”. Fatal as in a flaw so terrible, so universally, objectively bad, that it simply cannot be redeemed in any way. A fatal flaw is thus a theoretical action or innate trait that if revealed to the world would supposedly render you innately worthless and unlovable. The message of shame is that you may already contain such a flaw. Or at very least that you are capable of making (or failing to prevent) this kind of irredeemable mistake if you aren’t careful. This is precisely how shame inhibits us. Keeping us small, anxious, and “safe” by enforcing a careful life of conformity, people pleasing, and rule-following. All for fear that we may otherwise reveal or enact this kind of fatal flaw. When I was 13 years old, I remember thinking, “I would rather die than be gay”. This was a very literal “fatal flaw” that I felt certain could not be redeemed and therefore would render me bad and unlovable forever. So my ego did the “safest” thing it could think of, burying the truth deep down in my subconscious until public opinion began to change. It’s worth noting, contrary to what most homophobes believe, that it wasn’t being gay itself that gave me shame. I, like everyone else, am susceptible to feel shame about any issue that is both true of me and perceived to be publicly unpopular. If having dime-sized nipples was as controversial as being gay, I would have felt just as much shame about that too. Thankfully, in time, I realized there was nothing wrong with being gay (or having freakishly small nipples). But the fear that a fatal flaw could still exist continued to haunt me. “I’d rather die than be unsuccessful”, “I’d rather die than be unattractive”, “I’d rather die than be alone”, and so on. If you can think of anything that honestly ends the sentence, “I’d rather die than be…” (that doesn’t involve like, torture or insects laying eggs in your eyeballs), then you probably believe in a fatal flaw too. But what would happen if we accepted that there is, in fact, no such thing as a fatal flaw at all? That there is no inner truth so ugly that it could possibly render you or anyone else entirely unworthy of love. That there is no mistake so bad that it could not be redeemed in some way. This may be a difficult belief to wrap your head around, given the horrible atrocities that we humans are clearly capable of. But it also raises an idea that I think is the theoretical opposite of shame. Unconditional Love This radical idea is simply that as human beings we are all inherently worthy not just of love, but of unconditional love. That means no matter how badly you could possibly screw up or how fucked up you could get inside, you are still, always, and forever unquestionably worthy of that most basic and profound form of human connection. Now, this isn’t to say that you are entitled to unconditional love from any specific person, family member, parent, partner, teacher, celebrity, pet, or deity. Or even that you will necessarily ever find unconditional love for that matter. It is simply the belief that you are at very least always worthy of it. Being loved is an amazing feeling, but it’s arguably not enough if it comes with strings attached. I suspect that every last one of us desperately craves to feel not just loved, but loved unconditionally — to feel that no matter what happens we are always still redeemable, still “good”, still “normal”, still lovable, still human like everyone else. Beyond basic survival, this urge for unconditional love might be one of the most fundamental, primal yearnings we have. And yet so few of us feel that we actually deserve it — which is shame at its very core. Because the fact is, we invented that shit! We invented love. Or anyway, we evolved it. We evolved love because it is an instinct, like shame, that in some way must have helped us survive. And I guess it makes sense when you think about it that we would evolve a feeling of joyous, inextricable connection to other beings and to life itself, not just to survive in cooperative groups, but to make this whole being “alive” thing enjoyable at all. Prior to this lucky mutation allowing our ancestors to feel love, our long lost cousins were probably just like, “Fuck this life shit, this is no fun at all”, before leaping off a cliff or feeding themselves to a Sabertooth tiger. Love and other pleasurable emotions must have a kind of motivating power that helps keep us going. And so, if we created love, I think we all have an undeniable birthright to feel it. I think the real problem is, like that old country song goes, we are “looking for love in all the wrong places”. Given that we are inherently social animals, we assume we need to get our love from other people. But the catch is, despite our best efforts, we can’t really control how other people feel about us. They are fickle creatures, which makes them an especially dicey place to look for unconditional love of all things. Sure, we may find lots of conditional love. As in, they will love us as long as we don’t cheat on them, or hurt them, or make less than 200K a year. But if we want true unconditional love, we need to get more creative. Over the years, we’ve tried many novel solutions to fix this problem. For starters, we tried domesticating wild animals — canines, for example — eugenically interbreeding docile, affectionate traits into them until we had literally created “man’s best friend”. And while dogs really do seem to love us, it’s difficult to say whether it’s actually unconditional or just as long as we feed them (to say nothing of cats, who clearly disdain us). What’s more, we even went so far as to make up entire invisible friends just to love us. Jesus, for example, was arguably one such friend invented to spread unconditional love to the masses. That is until organized religion came along and added all kinds of rules and fees. So it seems that no matter how far and wide we search for this unconditional love thing, we never quite find it. And I’m not just saying this because I’m allergic to dogs (and organized religion), but I think there’s a better way. Maybe it’s not about how much your Labradoodle wants to lick your face or the theoretical affection of God’s only son. Maybe it’s not even about how much your parents loved you. Or how much your partner loves you, or your children. Maybe it’s not about other people at all. Maybe it’s just about you. Brené Brown, in all her wisdom, says that you cannot love anyone more than you love yourself. That goes for your partner, your children, and even puppies and kittens and that adorable baby version of Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy. You can’t even love baby Groot more than you already love yourself! But I think our capacity for love is even more fickle than that. I don’t think you can really appreciate or even feel love from others to a greater extent than you already love yourself. Kind of like that cheesy quote from The Perks of Being a Wallflower, “We accept the love we think we deserve.” If you don’t think you deserve unconditional love, which is essentially the same as not loving yourself unconditionally, then it probably doesn’t matter how much your parents or your partners or anyone else loves you, because you won’t actually believe it or even feel it until you learn to love yourself completely first. I know I’m getting into pretty cheesy territory here, but I don’t think this is just feel good hippie bs. If you think about it logically, we take in the world entirely through our senses — sight, touch, taste, smell, hearing. And that sense information is then completely processed, interpreted, and assembled into a subjective reality by our sophisticated, but biased, brains. So for example, if your brain interprets colour with a warmer, more vivid bias than my own, you will literally see the world through rose-coloured glasses. Whereas, if you are clinically depressed, a chemical imbalance in your brain will force you to look at everything through a glass darkly. Likewise, I think your psychological perspectives, dogmatic beliefs, assumptions, and expectations about the world can also literally colour how you interpret the information that you take in through your senses. Even affecting how you view your relationships and feelings. Neuroscientist Anil Seth talks about this in his mind-blowing TED Talk about cognition. He says: “Instead of perception depending largely on signals coming into the brain from the outside world, it depends as much, if not more, on perceptual predictions flowing in the opposite direction. We don’t just passively perceive the world, we actively generate it.” So if you believe, even unconsciously, that you are not worthy of unconditional love because of some potential “fatal flaw” that may be lurking within you, how could that belief not colour the way your brain interprets the intensity and importance of the love that you allow yourself to feel? Both from yourself and others. I know from vivid personal experience that my attitudes strongly influence the way I perceive the world. My so-called shame breakthrough literally transformed how I felt about life. The pessimism and seeming meaninglessness of my extended adolescence gave way, almost overnight, to a new kind of openness and lightness that made my life noticeably happier and less anxious. In a very real way, I affected my own reality simply by embracing a new ideology about the role shame plays in my life. And though I’ve yet to master this whole unconditional self-love thing, I can feel the profound logic of it already. What’s more, I don’t think there’s actually much difference between loving yourself unconditionally and loving everyone else unconditionally too. Given that I believe all humans are equally valuable, if I can accept that just one of us is worthy of unconditional love (me), then it’s not hard to believe that all of us must be worthy as well. If you can allow that even your darkest animal impulses and most heartbreaking potential mistakes are ultimately still redeemable, then you can see how every last one of us has the potential to be redeemable too. If this sounds inspiring, then as with all things shame related, to fully appreciate the implications of this idea it might help to take it to an extreme. All you have to do is picture the most heinous, violent, corrupt criminal you can think of. Ideally, a real person who actually exists. And then try to find some way — any way — to redeem that person. It’s not so easy after all. When people commit horrible atrocities, we do everything we can to distance ourselves from them and their actions. We say, they must be evil, they must be mentally ill, they must be fundamentally bad people — all the things we hope and assume we are not. And yet here I am suggesting that instead, we should try to give them respect, empathy, equality, redeemability, and unassailable humanity. In short, nothing less than unconditional love. Now I think you see just how difficult this whole unconditional love thing really is. It may in fact be one of the hardest tasks imaginable. Nonetheless, I still think it’s true. We are all human after all. And we are all capable of doing terrible things under the right circumstances. But because we’re all equal and all share that same near-limitless human potential, we are also all capable of doing incredible things as well. Which means we are all capable of redeeming ourselves. Which means we are all valuable. Which means we are all unconditionally worthy of love. To quote psychologist James Gilligan, yet again: “After thirty years of working with the most violent men our society produces, I am convinced that we do not need to give up on anyone. Even the most intractably violent people can learn to live with others in ways that are constructive rather than destructive.” Self Love Leaving the extremes aside for now, all I’m really asking is for you to start thinking about how much you love yourself. Do you think there’s something you need to achieve before you are completely worthy of love? Do you think there’s some mistake you could make that would render you unlovable? Do you think there’s something inherently flawed about you? If so, what would it take for you to embrace that flaw? To love that flaw even? What beliefs, expectations, judgments, criticisms, and fears would you have to let go of to love yourself completely just the way you are? And what’s stopping you? The opinions of other people? How good can any relationship, belief system, or ideology possibly be if it stops you from completely loving yourself or anyone else? Here’s a fun and awkward experiment that I tried recently with hilariously sad results. The next time you’re all alone, go into the bathroom, close the door, lock it, turn on the tap, flush the toilet, run the bath (unless there’s a drought, which there probably is). Basically just do whatever you have to do to feel completely alone, private, and safe. Look at yourself in the mirror, in the eyes. And then say, out loud, in all seriousness, “I love you”. It helps if you add your name too, like “I love you, A.J.” And by “helps”, I mean the first time I tried this it made me cringe with almost as much embarrassment as if I had just said “I love you” to a complete stranger. “I love you, stranger who’s staring at me in the bathroom…” I know this sounds crazy, but actually, take a moment to appreciate how fucked up it is that I couldn’t even say I love you to myself with a straight face! But the good news is, I’m still doing it. And every time I do it, it gets less and less embarrassing and feels more and more true. And who knows, one of these days I might actually believe it! But then again, what if I already love myself way more than I realize? What if the problem is just that we fundamentally misunderstand what self-love is? Like most people, I thought I needed to find unconditional love from an external source — a person, god, or animal, for example. But then I realized I really just needed it from myself — an internal source. Ironically though, instead of naturally loving myself, it felt like all of my love was itself externalized. As in, I only loved other people, animals, places, and things, all of which were outside of me. So it wasn’t that I lacked love, it just felt like my love was pointing in every direction except inward. But then I realized, what if all of that love I have for others… is actually for me? In the same way that we created love as a species and therefore have a birthright to feel it, I created all that love I have for others and I think I have an inherent right to share in it too! All of my love — my unconditional love for my family, my friends, my partners, even for songs, books, movies, places, moments, memories, things — all of that love is a fundamental part of me. I made that shit! It comes from within me and it works through me. So in a very real way, I am that love. In fact, no matter who or what my love is directed at, I am the one who feels it the most anyway. I am as much a beneficiary of my love as the overt “recipient” is, if not more. So maybe I don’t need to “learn” to love myself, because I already do. I just need to own it. In this way, perhaps love was never the external emotion we thought it was. What if all the love we feel, both from others and for others, is really our own love for ourselves? We don’t get it from outside nor do we give it away. We always just have it. Everything we love is inside of us. All of our love is for us. We are love. Just a thought. Read Part 7: The final installment, here!

Start the Shame Series from the beginning: here Shame Resilience As I’ve said before, the goal here is not to avoid or eradicate the feeling of shame completely. That’s probably impossible and anyway potentially unhealthy. Instead, it’s about overcoming our fear and denial of shame, and rejecting the misguided dogma, hierarchy, and fixed mindset that piggyback along with it. We need to finally accept and embrace our shame so that we can get down to the business of truly connecting with one another. I’m not going to lie, the feeling of shame will never be pleasant. But we can learn what Brené Brown calls shame resilience so that when shame inevitably rears its ugly head we have the tools to manage this chronic condition in a healthy and expedient way, not allowing it to isolate or define us. To do this, we first need to recognize shame. This may sound simplistic, but remember that your ego doesn’t even want to acknowledge shame’s existence. When I really look for it, I find that pretty much all of my negative emotions end up being linked to shame in one way or another. So the next time you are feeling shitty about yourself, or “not good enough”, or left out, or worried what people will think — ask yourself, could this be shame related? If the answer is yes (which it probably is), acknowledge that you are feeling shame but without judging yourself for feeling it. This is easier said than done. Shame is recursive. This means that most of us feel shame about our shame, which can create a terrible, self-perpetuating shame spiral. I often fall into the trap of saying, “Ugh, why am I feeling shame again? I’m supposed to be feeling guilt! Some self-styled shame expert I turned out to be.” But then I realize, “Oh right, I’m just shaming my shame again”. So when you feel the burn of shame, the best thing to do is nothing. Shame will fire-up your limbic system, either triggering your fight or flight reflex, or sending you groveling for approval. Instead, just try to name it and accept it. I find it actually really helps to memorize what shame feels like physiologically. For me, anytime my heart starts racing, my face gets flushed, and it feels like I’m about to start crying in public, I know right away that I’m feeling shame. This awareness and acceptance is basically what the Buddhists call ‘mindfulness’: “Oh look, I’m feeling my instinctual reaction to social rejection again… and that’s okay.” It’s more than okay. Shame is an incredible opportunity to learn about yourself from the inside out. Brené Brown encourages us to get curious about our emotions. Try to figure out why you are feeling shame. What triggered it? As always, take notes! Incidentally, this kind of rational thinking will also activate your pre-frontal cortex, the logic center of your mind. This will help lift you out of your purely emotional lizard-brain reaction to shame so that you can start making rational decisions again. Any decision you make from a place of shame is bound to be outside of your values and integrity. Empathy One good decision you can make is to call a friend and tell them your shame story. Brown teaches that shame thrives on “silence, secrecy, and judgment”, and so one of the most powerful antidotes is simply to talk about shame. Brown recommends sharing your story with a trusted friend. Someone who has the strength of character to react with — you guessed it — empathy. “I’ve been there. I’ve felt that. I empathize.” As discussed earlier, this kind of empathetic statement helps to neutralize shame by pure definition. When shame says you are different, bad, and alone, empathy says actually we are the same, we are okay, and we have each other. But be careful who you entrust your shame stories with. Run-of-the-mill sympathy, pity, or even worse, judgment, will just throw gasoline on your shame fire. Most people, myself included, confuse empathy with sympathy, but according to Brené Brown they are very different. Sympathy is feeling badly for someone, but without actually owning that you’ve made the same kind of mistakes yourself. As a result, sympathy unintentionally feels slightly belittling and condescending. As if you are holding yourself just one step above that person on the fictional hierarchy of human value. Pity comes from even higher up on the hierarchy, and judgment is like spitting down on them from the penthouse. Though you may mean well, even trying to solve someone’s problem for them, or trying to cheer them up, or convince them that it’s “not that bad”, all just make them feel further beneath you. Which only adds to their shame. Empathy, on the other hand, is feeling badly with someone. Admitting that you’ve made the same kind of mistakes, more or less, such that you can share in their feelings from an equal standing. In this way, equality is an intrinsic factor of empathy. So the next time one of your friends opens up about their problems, think about how you can react with more empathy and therefore bolster that sense of equality between you. Internal vs External But don’t forget, the empathy you feel from others is still an external feeling. The way most of us attempt to deal with shame is by cultivating opposing external feelings. Usually, we try to ward off shame by “earning” respect or admiration from other people. We do this by achieving things, through career accomplishments, awards, and “success”. Or by acquiring things, like money, cars, houses, iPhones, attractive life partners, and children. Basically by attaining all the trappings of a “normal” life. While this is an effective short-term strategy (for those in the upper or middle socio-economic strata who can afford it), it still keeps you solidly under the umbrella of shame, playing right into the fictional hierarchy of human value. Because at any time, this external sense of “respect” could shatter if you, say, lose your job, your house, or your spouse. And even if you don’t lose those things, you are still setting yourself up for a midlife crisis. You will inevitably discover that the respect you gain from “attaining all the trappings of a normal life” isn’t all that authentically fulfilling. Respect from others, like empathy and shame itself, is external. And because we are not sociopaths, we will always be vulnerable to the external opinions of other people. And that’s okay. That’s life as a deeply social animal. But for that same reason, cultivating an internal sense of self-respect is incredibly powerful. Internal feelings have what psychologists call an “internal locus of control”. Basically, they are under our own command (though actually changing them is easier said than done). According to psychologist James Gilligan, one of the most effective means of achieving self-respect is through education. I think this is true anytime we put effort into something that we truly value and see results. Especially if it is something that we have authentically chosen and not subconsciously fallen into just to impress everybody else. Achieving intentional goals through deliberate effort is how we learn to respect ourselves because we start to fully appreciate our own power, abilities, and incredible potential as human beings. This kind of experience can help bolster a growth mindset — the belief that it is at least possible to accomplish almost anything that we put a lot of learning, practice, and hard work into. But the trick is, once we come to respect ourselves in this way, it is of the utmost importance that we then accord that same respect to everybody else as well. Respect Instead of holding our newly elevated self-image above others, we need to use it to appreciate that in fact, everyone has that same potential, more or less. To quote philosopher Alan Watts, “The oak is not better than the acorn.” We are all equal and we all have the possibility to do incredible things (though not necessarily the same incredible things). So the more you personally accomplish, the more that should affirm what everyone else is capable of (given their particular aptitudes combined with enough learning, effort, support, and blind luck). But that doesn’t mean we need to achieve anything either. There is only one achievement that really matters, and that is existing in the first place (the odds of which are estimated to be 1 in 102,685,000). Remember that we can’t add to our “value” as human beings anyway. One of the biggest fallacies in our culture is the belief that we need to “earn” respect somehow. The truth is, we create respect by giving it, not by demanding it. And so, in a spirit of bolstering equality and combating shame culture, we all need to learn to give unwavering respect to our fellow man — no matter who they are, where they come from, what they’ve accomplished, how many Twitter followers they have, or what horrible mistakes they’ve made. As human beings, we all have the same value, worth, and potential as anyone else, and so we all deserve basic respect. And it’s not even that hard to give. As James Gilligan notes, “The German word for attention — Achtung — also means respect. And that makes sense: the way you truly respect someone is to pay attention to them…” Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh takes it even further, “The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention.” Guilt, Pride & Gratitude There are other internal feelings you can cultivate to help counteract shame as well. For example, you can usually positively reframe shame using guilt, pride, or gratitude. If shame is triggered by a mistake you made, an action that does not align with your values, then you can use a growth mindset and guilt to safely distance yourself from it. Just enough to acknowledge it, make amends, learn from it, and let it go without being defined by it. However, it’s entirely possible to feel shame about an action that is aligned with your values if it is also sufficiently controversial with other people. Furthermore, it is possible to feel shame about an innate part of yourself that you cannot change if it is also culturally unpopular. You can even feel shame about something that happened to you in the past, often out of your control, if it is seen as abnormal. In all of these situations, however, I think you’ll find there is always something that you can actually be proud of or grateful for. I know some shame issues are related to potentially traumatic events and I don’t want to imply that you have to be proud of or grateful for something horrible that happened to you. But to deal with the shame of it, you need to acknowledge this tough situation. And while you’re not happy about it, you can always be proud of your ability to deal with it. Proud of your strength in the face of adversity. Or grateful for all that you have learned or how you’ve grown from this otherwise shitty experience. In these ways, you start to chip away at the cloak of “silence, secrecy, and judgment” that guards shame, in favour of the healthy openness, accountability, pride, and gratitude that supports authenticity. Mindfulness As your resilience builds, you move beyond the fear of shame and start dipping your toes directly into the murky waters of shame itself. This is very uncomfortable, and where “embracing vulnerability” comes in handy yet again. In this case, I like to think of it as getting comfortable with discomfort, or getting discomfortable. It may seem counterintuitive but it’s an incredible skill to learn. I grew up believing that unpleasant emotions should be avoided at all costs. Like the instinctive reflex that pulls your hand off a hot stove, I thought you also needed to immediately run from, shut down, or numb painful emotions to avoid being hurt by them. But that’s not how normal emotions work. Your emotions aren’t trying to hurt you. Not even shame. Your emotions are trying to protect you (though often misguidedly). They are your brain’s best guess as to how you should react to certain stimulus in order to maximize your wellbeing. To run from a painful emotion is to confuse that emotion with the stimulus that caused it. Not only will you miss an important warning from your subconscious about that particular situation, experience, or thought, but trying to avoid an emotion will often extend its effect rather than diminish it. I think the best method for dealing with any emotion is always the “mindfulness” approach: name it, understand it, and accept it. Think X, Y, Z. “I’m feeling X [grief, fear, anxiety… you name it], because of Y [a happy feeling ended, I’m watching a scary movie, I’m running late] and [Z] that’s okay!” What’s more, as Brené Brown so astutely points out, you can’t selectively numb emotions. This means the degree to which you actually succeed at avoiding a negative emotion is the same degree to which you inadvertently distance yourself from all of your other emotions as well, including positive feelings like love and joy. It’s a classic case of throwing the baby out with the emotionally dirty bathwater. So if you find yourself constantly engaging in unhealthy distraction, procrastination, or addictive behaviours — especially on your phone, the internet, video games, apps, movies, and old classics like drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling, sugar, caffeine, or even work — this might be an attempt to avoid an uncomfortable emotion that you actually just need to face. “I’m feeling X, because of Y, and that’s okay (Z).” Remember that emotions only want to be heard. If you actually engage with your feelings, get comfortable with the discomfort of them, and get curious about why they are there and where they came from, you can usually demystify them, learn from them, and move past them. This is a bit of an oversimplification, of course. Emotions aren’t really adorable animated characters voiced by Amy Poehler. There are some instances where you can get trapped fixating on negative thoughts, emotions, or trauma, so exercise caution and, of course, talk to your therapist (you know, the one I told you to get like 13 essays ago). Another thing that makes emotions so scary is that they often feel infinite. When I experience negative emotions like sadness, hopelessness, worthlessness, and so on, it always feels in the moment like that emotion is going to last nothing short of forever. It even feels retroactively true. As if I’ve always secretly been sad, hopeless, and worthless. This is emotional contamination, and it happens when I look into the future as well. I’m reminded of one of my favourite Onion headlines, “Feeling Bad Right Now Most Reliable Predictor Of Feeling Bad Forever”. It’s funny because it feels true. But it’s not. According to neuroanatomist and viral TED sensation Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, emotional reactions actually only last 90-seconds! She explains: “Once triggered, the chemical released by my brain surges through my body and I have a physiological experience. Within 90 seconds from the initial trigger, the chemical component of my anger has completely dissipated from my blood and my automatic response is over. If, however, I remain angry after those 90 seconds have passed, then it is because I have chosen to let that circuit continue to run.” When you’re feeling shame, anger, or worthlessness — or even happiness and joy — remind yourself that those feelings are just temporary. They’re like clouds passing through your psyche, as they say in every meditation class. This is where mindfulness connects with a growth mindset. In the same way that you are not defined by your mistakes, you are not defined by your emotions (in fact, Buddhists would argue that you aren’t even defined by your thoughts). So to wade through shame, we can safely separate our selves from our emotions just enough to normalize feeling discomfortable and vulnerable. We don’t need to feel good all the time and mastering discomfort gives us incredible power. Think about everything you could accomplish if you didn’t fear feeling embarrassed, or exposed, or wrong, or weak, or afraid, or ashamed. That doesn’t mean that you won’t feel those things. You absolutely will. But you don’t need to be afraid of them when you recognize that they are just temporary and don’t define you. I could quote Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous “fear itself” speech, but I’d rather quote Brené Brown again, who says, and I quote, “Those who have the greatest capacity for discomfort rise the fastest”. It’s the closest you can get to a superpower (without becoming a sociopath). By embracing discomfort, you can begin diving ever deeper into shame to unearth the ideologies that lie beneath — what are the dogmatic values driving your shame and where did they come from? In fits and starts, you will begin to uncover the many unconscious beliefs that have been ruling your life. Do you believe that people are not inherently worthy of love and respect, like I did? Are you trying to climb the fictional hierarchy of human value? Do you let other people determine your worth as a person? Are you a human Instagram post? Write down what you discover. Read Part 6: The Fatal Flaw, here!

Start the Shame Series from the beginning: here Shame vs Connection Once you start to accept that we are all in fact equal, that means you no longer need to prove you have value. You just have it. And it’s not a question of how much value you have either. It’s all the same. It doesn’t fluctuate. There is no hierarchy. You have as much value as any other human life. That means you don’t need to “hustle for worthiness”, and anyway you can’t! You cannot change your intrinsic worth or value. Not through the opinions of other people, not by winning an Olympic medal, or a Pulitzer, or a Nobel Prize, or an Oscar. Not by becoming the president of the United States, nor singing in a rock band, nor marrying Amal Clooney. Not through comparing, or judging, or being perfect. Not even through good deeds, or ab exercises, or making a lot of money. Not even by writing a shame manifesto (oops). I’m not saying we shouldn’t pursue those things. We absolutely should follow our passions. We should endeavour to grow and make the world a better place. As long as we recognize that none of that improves on the fact that we are all the product of stardust and billions of years of evolution and each and every one of us is already a goddamn miracle. Nobody — and I mean nobody — has any say in how valuable you are or are not. Not even you. Especially not you. That isn’t to say that people won’t try to devalue, degrade, judge, or reject you. They absolutely will. But it’s up to each and every one of us to hold onto our intrinsic sense of equality none the less. That said, we still have to be aware that some people are born with a lot more privilege than others, based on their socioeconomic background, gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. So the playing field is definitely not level. Some people are undeniably more powerful than we are and we need to recognize that they could impact our lives. Some people are less powerful, or fortunate, and may need our support. Some people are way more famous or way more skilled at playing Jenga, if you need pointers. Some people are obviously better at sports or math or being “attractive”, which is worth being aware of. And some people really are experts in their field and it’s in our best interests to listen to them. But we are all still equal in terms of human value. We all share the same near-limitless human potential (given our innate abilities, learning, luck, and hard work). And we are equal in terms of who is “good” and “bad”, which is to say we are all capable of both. And for that reason, no one else has any real, objective authority over us. Not our parents, not our heroes, not our religion, not our Gods, not our priests, not our siblings, not our culture, not our society, not our lovers, not the prime minister, not the president, not the king, not the queen, not the police, not corporations, not rich people, not straight people, not white people, not hot people, not successful people, not famous people, not Kanye West, no one. I’m not saying you should throw all common sense out the window and start breaking laws and ignoring science and become an anti-vaxxing flat earth creationist climate change denier. I’m simply saying: we are all de facto equal, valuable, special in our own way, and of course — the bottom line — we are all therefore innately worthy of love. And if you can truly let go of the fictional hierarchy of human value, shame finally becomes a bit of a relic. An uncomfortable ache from the past that with the right perspective could actually help bring us together rather than tear us apart. But how could shame possibly bring us together? Isn’t that like the opposite of shame’s whole deal? Yes, but shame is too effective for its own good. The sheer universality of shame ironically undermines its own alienating message. When you feel different, bad, and alone, just remind yourself that in fact everyone else – literally everyone – feels exactly the same way. The last thing you’re probably expecting from me right now is to get all religious on your ass, but humour me. According to a common interpretation of the Christian bible, it was by eating from the tree of knowledge against God’s will that our symbolic ancestors first developed shame. As a result, they were banished from the Garden of Eden (it’s fitting that this so-called “paradise on earth” was by definition shame free). It is said that Adam and Eve’s shame was inherited by all of mankind as “original sin”. Though this makes all of us intrinsically flawed, in theology this can actually be seen as a good thing. It binds us all together in a shared sense of modesty and humanity. This is where we get the saying, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone”. Of course, thanks to original sin, no one has the moral superiority to cast that first stone, not even babies (as much as I would love to see an army of self-righteous babies roving around stoning people). This parable betrays the positive side of shame. It encourages us to recognize and admit to one another that we are all imperfect. That we all make mistakes. That we all have weaknesses. And that we all feel shame. By acknowledging this, we are building empathy and mutual respect, and affirming our equality. This kind of universal acceptance, understanding, and togetherness is like the holy grail for a social species like ours. In fact, I suspect the euphoric feeling that people call “spirituality” is actually less about connecting with “God” than it is about connecting with a feeling of universal love, respect, empathy, compassion, and equality with all of humanity. vulnerability This is why my boo Brené Brown is always encouraging us to “embrace vulnerability”. When she says “vulnerability” she means purposefully keeping ourselves vulnerable to shame. Brené sees this as the pathway to true human connection. And as social animals, the best feelings we can possibly feel always come from positively connecting with others. Brené says, “We are wired for connection. But the key is that, in any given moment of it, it has to be real.” Real connection only comes from authenticity. Basically opening up and showing your true self, shame and all. Because, if you think about it, you cannot claim to have true connection if no one actually knows who you really are. If you’re just showing people what you think they want to see, that isn’t connection at all. That’s just people pleasing. It’s hiding your true self and essentially lying about who you are. It’s perception over reality once again. And while it used to keep us alive, now it just keeps us miserable. It keeps us feeling disconnected, robbing us of the best feelings that a social animal can feel: connection, belonging, love, joy. But don’t worry, we all do it. I struggle with this all the time. Our misguided desire to hide our imperfect true selves is the plot of most RomComs and every single Shakespeare play ever. And so to varying degrees, we all know that unpleasant feeling of living a lie. It’s an awfully anxious and unsustainable position, nothing like the wonderful experience of being accepted for who you really are. But to be who you really are requires making yourself vulnerable, because there’s a chance certainty that at some point being who you really are will lead to a big, fat, ugly rejection. No doubt about it. Someone will look at your true, authentic self in all its imperfect glory and say, Nah. And what happens next? The unavoidable instinct of shame kicks in, as always. We may have to weather many rejections on the road to finally finding those people who will love and accept us for who we really are. But when we do, it will all have been worth it. To belong, to truly be seen, to be appreciated, accepted, respected, and loved, these are the very best feelings we’ve got. So to be your true self is to court shame. This is the big paradox of shame and connection that you never really stop wrestling with. On the one hand, we are trying to avoid shame because its message of “I’m not good enough” stops us from truly connecting with other people. But on the other hand, in order to truly connect with other people, we need to show our true selves, which inevitably opens us up to more shame. So either we stop trying to connect with people in order to avoid shame altogether, or we embrace shame in order to truly connect. Obviously, this isn’t really a choice at all. As Brené Brown warns, in the absence of connection there is always suffering. For a while, I actually believed I could become a shame-free superhero by forsaking connection and genuinely not caring what anyone else thought of me. It sounds kind of amazing, doesn’t it? To truly “not give a fuck” as they say way too often on the internet. To have the power to do anything you want. No matter what. With no fear of the social repercussions. It’s an appealing thought. But then I realized, if you take this idea to its logical extreme (as I am always want to do), you are actually just becoming a sociopath, not a superhero. To live completely without connection and shame is to be a pathologically selfish, isolated individual with no care or empathy for the feelings of others. Which is not quite as cool as being Batman. And so this got me thinking. If shame truly serves no useful purpose, as Brené Brown asserts, then why does getting rid of it lead to sociopathy instead of salvation? Empathy According to Brené, the antidote to shame is empathy. Which makes perfect sense. If shame is the feeling that you are different, bad, and alone, empathy says, actually we are the same, we are okay, and we are not alone — we have each other. Shame and empathy are like two sides of the same coin. In this way, I suspect that without the instinctual feeling of personal shame we might not be able to develop and maintain a healthy sense of empathy either. Like it’s a kind of balance. Shame being the painful yin to empathy’s soothing yang. Or to quote various cliché fantasy novels, “There can be no good without evil”. And so in this one fundamental way, maybe shame is actually a key ingredient in bringing us together. Part 5: Shame Resilience, here!

Start the Shame Series from the beginning: here Shame vs Equality Recall that I grew up with the dogmatic belief that in order to be worthy of love and respect (which is to say, in order to avoid feeling shame), I thought I needed to prove that I was a human with value. I think this is one of the most insidious and destructive assumptions that our fear of shame spawns. I unconsciously saw people falling along a sort of hierarchy of human value, and I thought I needed to claw my way up the ladder of achievement to get to the top — a theoretical pinnacle beyond shame’s reach. But the problem is, you can never reach the top. It’s an impossible, Sisyphean task. There’s always someone seemingly above you. This is why so many super successful people still seem so driven and unhappy. Even when you’re, say, Jessica Chastain, you wake up in the morning and think, “Ugh, Meryl Streep.” And when you’re Meryl Streep, you wake up and think, “Ugh, Hillary Clinton.” And Hilary Clinton wakes up and thinks, “Ugh, Donald Trump.” And Donald Trump wakes up and thinks, “Ugh, Barack Obama.” And Barack Obama wakes up and thinks, “Ugh, Michelle Obama.” And Michelle Obama wakes up and thinks, “Ugh, Beyonce.” And Beyonce wakes up and thinks, “Ugh, Beyonce! How will I ever top myself!?” But the real danger of this ideological hierarchy of human value isn’t that there are people “above you”, it’s the implication that there are people below you. The assumption that some people can be inferior, or have less value than you, is much more than just a harmless tactic for propping up your ego. It is the key ingredient for all types of disrespect. Everything from ghosting to stereotyping to racism, sexism, homophobia, bigotry, dehumanization, and beyond. It is also the go-to justification for systemic discrimination, violence, slavery, private golf clubs, and genocide. All of which are terrifyingly misguided tactics for dealing with shame. To quote psychologist and violence aficionado, James Gilligan: “Cultures that have social classes, those that have caste systems, and those that practice slavery, all show significantly more of both shame and violence than cultures whose institutions do not divide people in those hierarchical ways. The existence of inequality exposes everyone to the risk of being inferior, which in turn stimulates aggressive competition to inflict the inferior status on others (such as by enslaving, impoverishing, or degrading them). In other words, inequality stimulates shame and shame stimulates the creation of inequality…” And while I’m not a member of an elitist golf club, I’ve definitely avoided people at parties who I thought were “uncool” or “untalented” or “annoying” or just not “worthy” of my time and attention. But after my shame breakthrough, I had perhaps the most important realization of all: there is no hierarchy of human value because all humans must be equally valuable. When you actually think about it logically, there is no science, or math, or empirical method whatsoever to measure the so-called “value” of a specific human being. And absolutely no objective grounds on which to judge the “worth” of one human against another. It’s impossible, foolhardy, and dangerous. This is because the concept of human “value” is purely subjective. We literally just made it up. It only feels real because we have this powerful instinct called shame that pops up whenever our sense of personal “value” is undermined. And while the feeling of shame is definitely real, the dogmatic beliefs we attach to it — the meaning we give it — is not. Shame feels bad because that specific emotional reaction helped keep humans alive for hundreds of thousands of years in cooperative groups, not because it was a sign of any real or objective “badness”. Whether you believe human beings are intrinsically full of value, or whether you think we have no value at all, either way, we all have the exact same amount. We are all human, we are all the same, and we are all equal. But once again, this isn’t something that you can just know in theory. You need to genuinely work at it. You need to truly believe we are equal, which I still struggle with all the time. To fully accept that we are all the same, you need to recognize just how subjective your own politics, beliefs, faith, and ideologies really are. For example, you might think, “Well come on, Gandhi had a positive impact on the world and Hitler was a total dick, so obviously Gandhi’s life had more ‘value’ than Hitler’s.” As much as we truly want to believe this, it’s not a scientific fact that we can actually prove. The only person who could possibly claim to know that for sure would have to be some kind of omniscient God. Religion Speaking of which, no discussion of shame would be complete without a foray into the wonderful world of religion. We’ve all heard of Catholic guilt or Jewish guilt, but often that “guilt” is really shame. And if so many of us struggle to feel worthy in our own religions, it’s no wonder that we can be so judgmental about those who follow a different religion altogether, or no religion at all. In overly simplistic terms, I think it boils down to in-groups and out-groups. If you follow us, you are good. If you don’t, you are bad. This is a classic trait of human psychology seen over and over again throughout history. It is also, of course, shame. In fact, I think the very concept of heaven and hell is pretty much shame incarnate. So it’s easy to see why some religious folks might be tempted to look at the world and see themselves at the top of a religious hierarchy of human value. “I believe my God created everything, which means he must have the authority to determine what is good and what is bad. And since I believe in him, worship him, and follow his rules, I’m pretty sure my God thinks I’m good. And if you don’t believe in him, worship him, or follow his rules, I’m pretty sure my God thinks you are bad. I can therefore surmise that I am literally a better, more valuable, and more worthy human being than you are.” There are several problems with this admitted straw man of an argument. First of all, unless you have spoken directly to God — and I’m not talking about you heard it from a friend of a friend of God’s, or you read it in a book that God co-wrote with 40 other people — I mean, unless you were literally face-to-face with God almighty and he gave you an explicit thumbs up or thumbs down for every single person on the planet, then you cannot possibly know for sure what the omniscient creator of the entire universe thinks about anyone’s beliefs or behaviours. If God is all-powerful, that means he doesn’t need your help with anything — especially not judging or policing other people’s religiosity. In fact, there’s nothing stopping God from being theologically polyamorous. That is to say, having different relationships with different people that each have different expectations and even completely different rules! Maybe you can claim that through a deep feeling of faith and a belief that your bible is the literal word of God that he has, in a way, spoken to you. But if that’s the case, that communication can only be for and about you. To use a deeply mysterious and private feeling like personal faith to judge what God thinks about anyone other than yourself is to basically claim that you are God. You might say, “Well, God has made it very clear to me that I should not have sex before marriage”. Ok, great. Don’t have sex before marriage. But if you turn around and tell your friend Luanda that she can’t have sex before marriage either — then you are suddenly way out of your depth. You have no idea what God has in mind for your friend Luanda. For all you know, God is up in heaven right now shaking his fist, complaining (like a comedian dealing with a heckler), “Hey buddy, I don’t go to your office and tell you how to do your job. I’m an omniscient deity, which means I happen to know some shit about Luanda that you couldn’t possibly fathom with your puny mortal brain. And you know what? Luanda can have sex with whoever she wants. Whenever she wants. The only reason you don’t get to have sex before marriage is because of that one time you uttered my name in vain in elementary school. Not cool man. Not cool.” It goes deeper than that though. Even if there really is a God who for some reason spends all his time deciding who can and cannot have sex… that doesn’t mean he’s right. I don’t care if he created the entire fucking universe. That still doesn’t prove there’s an objective right or wrong. George Lucas may have created the entire Star Wars universe but that doesn’t mean he can make it right for Jar Jar Binks to rape an Ewok. For all we know, God could be living in another universe with a bunch of other Gods who all happen to use their godly knowledge to completely disagree with our God’s sense of morality. That would certainly help explain childhood leukemia or the success of Cats! The Musical. Let’s do a little thought experiment. Imagine that you die and discover that there really is a God. BUT it turns out to be the God that ISIS believes in. And he’s all like, “Dude, you were supposed to be oppressing and murdering women and children this whole time!” Just because he’s God, would you be like, “Oh maaaaan, sorry God, give me another chance! I’ll go drive a truck into a crowd right away.” No, you wouldn’t say that. You’d be like, “With all due respect God, fuck you!” So long bible story short, even if you believe in God, that still doesn’t give you any authority to judge the value of other people. I don’t think God herself even has that authority. The bottom line is, we all have a duty to operate under the belief that everyone is equal. And when I say equal, I don’t mean physically equal, or financially equal, or even mentally equal per se. I simply mean equal in terms of the imaginary concept of “human value” that lives at the core of shame. With that in mind, try to think of the one person in the entire world whose life has the most value to you. Let’s be honest, it’s probably you. But maybe it’s your partner, or your child, your parent, or your sibling. Maybe it’s the Pope. Maybe it’s the president. Maybe it’s Kanye West. Whoever it is, think about how much you value that person’s life. Think about how special and precious that person is to you. Now, take a moment and acknowledge that in fact, every single human being in the entire world is just as valuable and precious as that one person. That shouldn’t diminish the value of your special someone. That should elevate the value of everyone else. And that includes anyone whose life you thought had no value at all. Which, of course, brings us full circle back to Hitler. I know using Hitler in any argument is usually a sign that you’ve already lost that argument, but because shame connects to the very darkest recesses of the human soul, I find it useful to take things to an extreme in order to fully understand it. So bear with me. While it’s easy to look back on Hitler’s life now that it’s over and see it as ultimately bad and worthless, we have to admit that wasn’t always the case. When Hitler was born, he had just as much value and potential as anyone else. Perhaps if he had known that, he wouldn’t have needed to find an “out-group” to feel better than. If he had appreciated his own equality maybe he wouldn’t have tried to prove to himself, or to the world, just how far up the fictional hierarchy of human value he could climb. Or just how low he could try to force Jews, homosexuals, foreigners, and any other group that he found intimidating. Because delusions of supremacy are probably driven by the fear of their opposite. Comparison This clumsy analogy highlights what I think is the real problem: we so often don’t feel valuable ourselves. We all go through those moments of crushing self-doubt. Usually immediately after asking ourselves the question, “What will people think?” Or when engaging in the dangerous art of comparison. To quote Mark Twain, “Comparison is the death of joy.” That’s because comparison functions on the assumption that one comparee needs to come out better than the other (Gandhi over Hitler, for example). So when you compare yourself to another person, you are essentially giving yourself a 50/50 chance of being Hitler lesser than. But even if you come out of a comparison feeling better than, you are still buying back into the fictional hierarchy of human value, which is shame. Comparison is an essential component of shame. It turns every human interaction into a subconscious competition for superiority. To quote James Gilligan once again, in regards to rehabilitating violent offenders: “…they learn to recognize how they have been imposing a hierarchical structure on their relationships with people, in which one person (or sex) has to be regarded as superior, and the other as inferior, the corollary of which is that unless they impose the inferior role on the other person in the relationship, then they are not only in the inferior role themselves, they have lost their masculinity, since masculinity is defined as superiority. This is a recipe for violence, of course, when other people resist being treated as inferior, as they often do.” No matter how good it may feel in the moment to think you are “superior” to someone, it is actually an extremely precarious and dangerous position for your own mental health. Because what goes up, must come down. When you live on a hierarchy, one of the most painful things that can happen to you is a perceived “status shift”. That’s when your younger brother beats you in an arm wrestle. Or your wife starts making more money than you. Or your less attractive friend gets the guy. Or you lose the promotion to your junior colleague. Or a black guy becomes the president (to say nothing of a woman). A status shift is when you are forced to acknowledge that someone you assumed was below you on the hierarchy of human value is suddenly, unequivocally above you. Did they rise in value? Or did you drop? Or were they always above you and everyone else knew it all along? In this way, someone else’s success becomes your shame. Even if their life has nothing to do with yours, the comparison itself can feel deeply real and humiliating. As if everyone in the world can see your stock value as a human being plummet in relation to this other person’s. I think these status shifts also help explain why we love celebrity gossip so much (or any gossip, for that matter). To see faults in our stars (or neighbours) is to see them slip down the hierarchy. As they get closer or even lower than our own status, it seems to raise our standing by comparison. But the truth is, just like human “value”, there is no objective reality to comparison at all. It’s literally just something we invent in our minds. And it’s important to remember, even when you think you’re just judging someone else in isolation, you are in fact always creating a comparison. Judgment may feel like it only goes in one direction, towards Lindsay Lohan for example, but it’s actually just a comparison that you subconsciously assume you’ve already won. Judging people is just another means of clawing your way up the fictional hierarchy of human value. Which is shame. So the next time you find yourself feeling lesser than, remember that the solution is not to feel better than. The solution is to feel equal to. Part 4: Shame vs Connection, here!

Start the Shame Series from the beginning: here What Shame Isn’t Looking back, my adolescence (all 35 years of it), was kind of like The Truman Show. I was living under an invisible, manmade bubble of dogma founded on a bedrock of shame. But something always seemed off. It was in the background noise of my nagging anxiety. It was the incongruity of my chronic discontent and sophomoric existential angst despite leading a privileged, white, middle-class existence. But after my so-called shame breakthrough, it all started to make sense. I could suddenly see flashes of life beyond the bubble, as if walking out of Plato’s cave for the first time. I started to notice all kinds of “facts” about life that were actually just beliefs, and unfounded beliefs at that. I was appalled to realize that most of my core values were nothing more than opinions I had arbitrarily inherited from other people, who in turn had arbitrarily inherited them from other people as well, and so on. These were tenuous, dogmatic beliefs handed down from generation to generation, reinforced by a deep fear of the shame we all might feel if we contravened any of them. It’s a highly effective system of self-perpetuating social control, an innate behavioural regulator. So how far back does this game of broken shame-o-phone go? To the Garden of Eden perhaps? The fact is we must have shame for a reason. It’s a very powerful vestigial instinct that we presumably evolved over millions of years because it helped our ancestors survive back in hunter-gatherer times (when all of our best instincts were formed). Tim Urban, author of the delightful Wait But Why blog, has already done a great job of explaining this idea in his post “Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think”, so I’m just going to quote him here: “Back then [in hunter-gatherer times], being part of a tribe was critical to survival. A tribe meant food and protection in a time when neither was easy to come by. So for your Great2,000 Grandfather, almost nothing in the world was more important than being accepted by his fellow tribe members, especially those in positions of authority. Fitting in with those around him and pleasing those above him meant he could stay in the tribe, and about the worst nightmare he could imagine would be people in the tribe starting to whisper about how annoying or unproductive or weird he was—because if enough people disapproved of him, his ranking within the tribe would drop, and if it got really bad, he’d be kicked out altogether and left for dead. … Because of this, humans evolved an over-the-top obsession with what others thought of them — a craving for social approval and admiration, and a paralyzing fear of being disliked.” Urban doesn’t explicitly say this, but that “paralyzing fear” is, of course, the fear of shame. And what this really means is that in a way, deep down inside, we all subconsciously equate social rejection with death. And what’s more, we are all primed with a very literal microcosm of what he’s describing during our introductory class on life, or as it’s normally called, “childhood”. This is a time when our very survival really does depend on the love, support, and care of our “tribe”. In this period of development our cult leaders, or “parents”, literally just tell us what is “good” and what is “bad” and we have to believe them. In fact, many parents actively exploit shame to enforce obedience. Historian Peter N. Stearns notes in his book Shame: A Brief History: “There is every reason to believe that parental practices that expose children to an apparent threat of denial of affection, as part of discipline in such areas as toilet training, form a vital precondition to uses and experiences of shame later in life, and in larger social contexts.” So in many ways, shame can be seen as an endless form of childhood. A stage that we should grow out of once we become adults who can reason for themselves. But we so often don’t. Moreover, we are no longer hunting and/or gathering at all. Our instincts simply have not caught up with the incredible advancements of our civilization. We now have built-in protective mechanisms, like medicine, welfare, social security, healthcare, foster care, counseling, vitamin water, etc, so shame no longer serves a useful purpose in keeping humans alive. Let me say that again, because I think it bears repeating. Shame no longer serves its main evolutionary purpose: keeping us alive. But with varying degrees of intensity, we all still have this innate instinct to try to fit in and gain approval from other people, what shame expert Brené Brown calls “hustling for worthiness”. Some people (like me) have a generalized and exhausting form of it, trying to win approval from everyone. Some people are trapped in the endless childhood of seeking the approval of their parents or family. Some people have transferred this approval to a new authority like a political affiliation, a religion, a culture, a profession, or Oprah. Some people channel it into a social “scene” or tribe. Others look for this approval from their romantic partners. Most of us have a mix of several of these, all tangled together. Growing up gay, I developed a pretty bad case of wanting pretty much everyone to like and approve of me at all times, for fear that I would otherwise be rejected just because of my sexuality (in fact, anyone who grew up with any kind of secret is that much more susceptible because hiding the truth plays right into shame’s logic of perception over reality). Of course, there’s nothing wrong with wanting people to like you. We are innately social creatures. We need and desire connections with other people, perhaps no longer for survival, but certainly in order to thrive and be happy. So shame is inexorably intertwined with what is actually a very healthy need, sort of like an old and senselessly ferocious guard dog chained to the gates of social rejection. In this way it may appear that shame encourages healthy socialization, using delightful slogans like, “Don’t be an ass or you might die sad and alone!” But shame could just as easily trap you in a horribly unhealthy toxic relationship with the very same logic. Shame doesn’t intelligently discriminate who it wants you to gain approval from. If, for example, you are gay, or trans, or left-handed, or redheaded and you happen to be born into a family of bigots, shame will try to convince you that you need to hate yourself, hide yourself, and attempt to change yourself in order to “fit in” with your shitty family. And that may have been necessary for your very survival thousands of years ago (or maybe you could have just become a shaman or something). But in this day and age, where you can connect with like-minded people on the internet or escape to the big city and build a “chosen family”, risking rejection in order to lead a life of honesty and authenticity is without a doubt the better, healthier alternative to living a lie. So no, shame is not beneficial for healthy socialization. Growth Mindset But what about in cases of criminal behaviour? What about pedophilia? Or murder? Or internet trolls? Doesn’t shame help steer us away from these morally reprehensible behaviours? To answer this, let’s delve quickly into Dr. Carol Dweck’s fascinating research on the psychology of “mindset”. Dweck studied youth and education and found that among students from unstable backgrounds who would statistically be expected to underperform in school, there was a small minority who would in fact overperform. In studying these miraculous After-School-Special-worthy students, she discovered that they all shared a unique trait, a way of looking at themselves in the world that the other students did not. She calls it a “growth mindset”. These were kids who basically just genuinely believed that they had the ability to change and grow and improve. The other students had what Dweck calls a “fixed mindset”, believing that their talents and abilities were basically innate and fixed. The fixed mindset is essentially just believing, as I did, that you’re either good at math or bad at math, and that’s that. Whereas kids with a growth mindset would think, “Well I may not be good at math yet, but I could be if I just worked really hard at it”. This mindset extends far beyond just math, of course, encompassing any type of self-assessment. Do you view yourself as “good” or “bad”, or do you see yourself as fluid and full of potential to change and evolve? You may even have a fixed mindset in one area and a growth mindset in another. Once again, you’re probably nodding along thinking, “Yeah yeah, of course, I know this”. But just like shame, this isn’t something that you can just know from hearing it. This is another breakthrough that you have to have about your own mindset. For example, through a lot of self-examination, it has become clear to me that I have a very fixed mindset. And to make matters even worse, I’m a millennial (or Xennial to be exact). I grew up with idealistic baby boomer parents who said I could do anything I wanted. This wasn’t a case of underestimating myself, no. I actually assumed that I must have lots of talent. That I must be a special, gifted unicorn. Mixing that millennial entitlement to talent and specialness with a fixed mindset is a shame disaster waiting to happen and a breeding ground for narcissism because you expect and demand all of the rewards of talent, but with none of the effort. To be fair, I actually put a lot of effort into doing things, it’s just that I put little importance on learning things. My mistakes were never viewed as mistakes. So I was prolific but stubbornly unskilled. I can say from experience that attempting to change a fixed mindset is a very slow and difficult process. All this to say, shame is the ultimate form of a fixed mindset. Shame is the belief that you literally are your mistakes. That they are a fixed trait about you. One misstep could therefore stain you permanently, “proving” that you are inherently bad and unlovable forever. You had a drunken one-night stand? You must be a slut. Stole a bag of Skittles? Now you’re a criminal. Flunked a test? You’re a failure, and you always were. Dweck discovered in her research that when children failed to correctly answer a math problem that was beyond their skill level, it actually excited the growth mindset kids to learn and improve, while it discouraged the fixed mindset kids into giving up, or even worse, cheating and lying to hide their mistakes, aka their shame (which is perception over reality, yet again). The same is true for adults, and this is why shame and especially shaming doesn’t help prevent crime. Shame may initially be an effective deterrent against conscious “bad” behaviour. But as soon as someone makes a mistake (as we all inevitably do), shame then backfires completely. It just reinforces a fixed mindset about one’s intrinsic immorality, leaving no hope that you could possibly learn from your mistakes and change, grow, or be rehabilitated. Brené Brown asserts that shame is actually much more likely to cause criminal behaviour than to stop it. Famed violence researcher James Gilligan agrees. In Jon Ronson’s timely book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Gilligan is quoted as saying that violence is “a person’s attempt to replace shame with self-esteem”. After decades of studying inmates at maximum-security prisons, Gilligan noted: “Universal among the violent criminals was the fact that they were keeping a secret. A central secret. And that secret was that they felt ashamed — deeply ashamed, chronically ashamed, acutely ashamed. I have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed or humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed.” Shame vs Guilt So, as you can see, shame is not a useful moral guide. However, Brené Brown and others make an important distinction here between shame and guilt. Brown describes the feeling of shame as, “I am a bad person”. Whereas the feeling of guilt is, “I did a bad thing”. Shame is an external assessment of your self, based on the potential judgment of other people. Whereas guilt is an internal assessment of your actions, based on your own judgment and values. As you can probably see, this definition of guilt represents a healthy growth mindset. It’s a useful step away from shame that recognizes you are so much more than just your faults and failures. This may sound super cheesy, but when I make a mistake I actually find it incredibly helpful just to say out loud, “I did a bad thing, but I am not a bad person”. Thereby shifting the shame I feel into guilt using a growth mindset. This mindset gives me the distance to safely acknowledge the mistake in order to make amends for it and learn from it without being defined by it. In this way, guilt can be extremely motivating in a positive way. In fact, I think making mistakes and going through this growth mindset/guilt process is an essential step in building your integrity and personal values. I firmly believe that we all need to make some big mistakes in order to truly develop our own sense of right and wrong. Because if you haven’t acknowledged and learned from your own mistakes, there’s a very good chance that your “morals” are actually just someone else’s dogmatic hand-me-downs. The most powerful lessons are the ones we learn the hard way. So we’ve determined that shame doesn’t teach us right from wrong. It doesn’t improve our relationships and it doesn’t even help us stay alive. So what is shame good for? According to Brené Brown, absolutely nothing! There is nothing you should be ashamed of. And certainly nothing you should be shaming other people for. I’m not going to lie though. If you’re an asshole who just wants to control people in the short term, then shame is one of the most powerful ways to do so. You can easily employ it to keep your children or your employees or your students or even your lovers under your thumb. But to do so is not only cruel and oppressive, it will ultimately backfire, sometimes violently. Shame creates toxic relationships. Which aren’t really relationships at all. They are one-way power trips that dehumanize everyone involved. It’s the exact opposite of the authentic human connection we all crave as social animals. To build healthy relationships, we absolutely need to avoid using shame in our households, schools, businesses, love lives, and society at large. In fact, the righteous shaming we dole out daily on Twitter, in politics, on late-night talk shows, and in the news isn’t actually accomplishing anything. It’s not changing opinions, it’s entrenching them. And it certainly isn’t helping people, it’s destroying them. But that doesn’t mean we should never feel shame. Shame is still an instinct, after all. Our toxic culture of public shaming is different than the normal feeling of shame that we all naturally experience from time to time. James Gilligan describes it as “…an unavoidable consequence of the fact that we are all imperfect and therefore will all inevitably and appropriately suffer the narcissistic wound of acknowledging our own imperfections”. I suspect that this type of naturally occurring personal shame is more than just the emotional equivalent of male nipples. There may be a healthy side effect to the experience of personal shame, one that cuts to the very core of what it means to be human. Feeling a healthy dose of shame could be a key component in the development and maintenance of positive social emotions, like empathy (I’ll talk more about the important connection between shame and empathy later). Suffice to say, the goal here is not to rid ourselves of shame completely. Not only is that probably impossible, but we may need some shame after all. What I think we can safely do, however — must do, in fact — is disentangle the natural, instinctual feeling of shame from the dogmatic fear of shame that controls us. Part 3: Shame vs Equality, here!

Introduction If there’s one thing in the entire world that I want to share with you, it’s this breakthrough I had about shame. I want to tell you about it for two reasons. The first reason is that it improved my life. And I’m not the only one. Shame is the boogieman with a million different names in most self-help and personal betterment schemes. Overcoming it is the substance of pretty much every inspirational quote. It’s in the words and deeds of anyone who has pioneered anything new, revolutionary, or counterculture. It is so universal in fact, that it’s become the kind of advice you just sort of nod your head along with and think, “Yeah, yeah, I know that”. But the truth is, you probably don’t. Because it’s not something that you can just know in theory, it’s a breakthrough that you have to have. You need to experience it, to really get it. And if that sounds pretentious, then you should know that the second reason I want to tell you all this is because I want you to like me. Incidentally, this second reason is proof of the first. Because in spite of my so-called “breakthrough”, and all that I’ve learned about shame over the last few years of obsessively studying, thinking, and talking people’s ears off about it, so much of what I do is still affected by shame. At this point, I’d like to believe I’ve become a shame expert, but the truth is I have zero credentials to be telling you any of this. I’m not a doctor, or a psychologist, or a psychic, so take everything I say with a big grain of salt. My only real qualification is that I have a lot of experience with shame (unfortunately). For example, even though I am completely aware of it, right at this very moment shame is still pressuring me, not unsuccessfully, to impress you, amuse you, and please you, promising in return nothing less than the sweet sweet validation I might feel from your potential approval of me. That’s how powerful and omnipresent shame is and why we could all benefit from being more conscious of the ways in which it is shaping our lives. *   *   * What is shame? In its most basic form, shame is the unbearable feeling that you are different, bad, and alone. And whether we want to admit it or not, it is something we all experience. Celebrated shame and vulnerability researcher, author, guru, and my personal lady crush, Dr. Brené Brown, says of shame, “No one wants to talk about it. And the less you talk about it, the more you have it.” Why? Because shame is an external feeling that exists only in relation to other people. Our shame is fuelled by their perceived disrespect, scorn, ridicule, or judgment of us. It is based on the subconscious belief that these external opinions create a kind of collective “truth” about us that is actually real. And so we conceal our shame for fear that exposing it will only affirm these potentially negative external opinions. The assumption being that if we feel shame, it must be because we have something we should be ashamed of. But the truth is, everyone naturally has shame. It’s an instinct that cannot be avoided. So all it really reveals is: you are human. That said, it’s literally shame’s job to scare the crap out of you. Shame is a social instinct that pressures us to cooperate with other people, to get along, to “fit in” through negative reinforcement. As such, shame manifests as the excruciating, stomach-churning dread that we just don’t belong, because we’ve either done something or experienced something or just innately are something that is objectively wrong and/or any of the almost endless list of shame words we have in our vocabulary: flawed, disgraceful, inferior, dishonourable, weak, disgusting, inadequate, ugly, incompetent, dirty, pathetic, deficient, sullied, aberrant, impure, perverted, monstrous, inhuman, sick, unholy, evil, worthless and, especially, unlovable. I think the ultimate fear of shame, and perhaps the ultimate fear of our entire lives, is that somehow we inherently don’t deserve to be loved. It’s like we’re just buying time until everyone else figures that out, at which point we assume we will be — perhaps even should be — exiled by our loved ones and cast out of society to die alone — wretched, lesser, bad bad bad. In this respect, shame is one of the most powerful and terrifying emotions we have. Brené Brown calls it “the master emotion”. But in my experience, shame is much more complicated than just an emotion. Most people assume they don’t have a problem with shame because most of us don’t actually feel shame all that often. Shame itself is so abhorrent, that it is the subconscious fear of shame that really motivates us day-to-day. We fear that if we actually do feel shame directly, it will be too late to recover. So we’ve built up all these elaborate unconscious defense mechanisms to avoid acknowledging shame’s very existence, but ironically it is these defenses themselves that do the most damage. In the aftermath of a terrorist attack, when politicians are trying to legalize mass surveillance and warrantless body cavity searches, people often protest, “If we give up our rights, the terrorists win.” Yes, in this analogy shame is now terrorism in that it’s less about the actual shame attacks than it is about all the ways that we limit ourselves for fear of possibly feeling shame. This is how shame wins, by controlling us indirectly and holding us back from our full potential. This control amounts to a kind of ideology that we buy into — a series of troubling beliefs with roots that go so much deeper than the dictionary definition. It’s these unconscious beliefs surrounding shame that really interest me. So where to start? Therapy! That’s where to start. If you’re not sure whether therapy is right for you, consult this handy flowchart: If you aren’t in therapy, go to therapy. If you are in therapy, stay in therapy. What could be a better investment than getting a masters degree in yourself? There’s good affordable therapy out there, there’s online therapy, there are even therapy apps now — so there really is no excuse. As I’ve said before, childhood is a cult. You are literally an empty vessel that gets brainwashed by your parents and society, the chief tool of which is shame. Therapy is a way to start deprogramming yourself from that cult. It doesn’t even necessarily matter how “good” your therapist is either, because you’re the one who has to do all the work anyway. Which isn’t even that hard. Just talk honestly about your shit, have a few mind-blowing realizations, and remember to take notes! It wasn’t until I finally started taking notes in therapy that I had what I call my “shame breakthrough”. As I looked back over my years of low-level discontent, nagging anxiety, desperation for attention, and chronic people pleasing, I began to uncover a consistent thread running through it all. There was something under the surface dragging everything down, like a black hole, and I eventually discovered there was a name for it: shame. I realized that my view of the world was constructed on an invisible foundation of shame and therefore many of my motivations and core beliefs, especially my assumptions about what made one a “good” or “successful” or “lovable” person, were totally wrong. I want to make it clear that these weren’t beliefs that I chose or endorsed. I’m talking about dogma, beliefs that I picked up unconsciously from my culture and my family at a young age and basically just took for granted as “the facts of life”. We usually think of dogma as something reserved for the fundamentalist religious set, but we all have dogmatic beliefs ingrained in us during the cult of childhood that we likely aren’t even aware of. I certainly wasn’t. It took a few years of therapy, introspection, and reverse engineering my own behaviour to finally admit to myself what my core dogmatic beliefs actually were. So what were they? Well, it’s kind of embarrassing and kind of cliché, but from what I can piece together it seems that I believed human beings were not innately worthy of love, or even respect for that matter. I know the word “love” is so generalized and overused that it’s kind of become a meaningless catchall, but in this case, I basically just mean positive human connection. A sense of belonging. The feeling that other people might accept you, approve of you, respect you, like you, and want you around. Incidentally, this need for human connection and love is completely natural and fundamental to our species. Like shame, it’s another social instinct, but one that encourages us to cooperate with other people through positive reinforcement. We are born to seek love, which makes it all the more disturbing that I didn’t think it was something we naturally had a right to. With billions of people on the planet, I thought that to be truly worthy of this kind of love and respect, you had to be a human with value. That is to say, you had to prove that you had something extra that made you worth loving. Something that made you special, or better than all the others. To gain that extra value, I thought you needed to publicly perform some impressive feats in order to earn a degree of “success” or even better, fame. Because fame, it seemed to me, was the ironclad stamp of public approval. A way to feel worthy of love and respect from anyone and everyone. Because even if some random jerks didn’t like you, they couldn’t ignore your fame as if it was objective “proof” of your universal value, worth, and lovability. Fame-as-worthiness But as with all things shame related, it gets even weirder. If you had asked me at the time if I believed in this “fame-as-worthiness” ideology, I would have said, “Absolutely not, that’s totally superficial and actually kind of pathetic.” And the worst part is, I would have thought I was being honest! That’s because in shame, perception trumps reality. To quote Brené Brown again (and not for the last time), “Shame is how we see ourselves through other people’s eyes.” Because shame is external, it’s all about what people think of us, not what’s actually authentic or true. Right now, for example, I want you to like me. But I’m also savvy enough to know that you won’t like me if it’s too obvious that I am trying to make you like me. So instead of outright asking you to like me, I’ve cleverly disguised it as a 7-part shame manifesto that no one wanted (but everyone needed). In shame, much of what you do gets cloaked under the guise of its opposite, even in your own head. Especially in your own head. A perfect example of this is the so-called “humblebrag” on social media, as coined and collected by the late comedian Harris Wittels. @jaredleto tweets: Just won GQ style award in Germany. Obviously they made a mistake. I wonder how long till they come take it back. 😉 #andthewinnerisWHOOPS! — JARED LETO (@JaredLeto) October 28, 2011 Does Jared Leto actually think this award was a mistake? No. So what exactly is the purpose of this tweet? It’s a faux-modest announcement that he won an award for dressing well in the least stylish nation in the world. Granted, we’ve all engaged in slightly less obnoxious versions of this behaviour. While we kind of know we’re bragging, we mostly think we’re joking. But actually deep down we still really do want to communicate that we are important and/or talented but also that we are self-aware and/or funny (or whatever combination of values we subconsciously think will lead to respect and lovability). If you look beyond all the clever, self-effacing captions at the careful image-crafting happening on social media you’ll see that I’m clearly not the only person harbouring this ideology of “fame-as-worthiness”. It’s basically ingrained in Western society. And if you break this dogma down even further, it reveals some disturbing assumptions about the world: First, this belief system implies that some human lives have more value than others. Second, it insinuates that your purpose in life is thus to prove to people that you have the highest value possible. Third, it assumes that your value is therefore determined by the opinions of other people. Their approval, admiration, respect, fondness, etc, literally establish your worth and lovability as a human being. Under this worldview, you are essentially a human Instagram post — your value is based on the number of “likes” that you accrue, and from whom. If you don’t get any likes, or if you lose them, that means you are literally worthless and unlovable. This puts complete power over your life into the hands of other people, be it your parents, your family, your Facebook friends, your real friends, your neighbours, your partner, your pastor, your boss, your coworkers, your Twitter followers, your politicians, your judges, your lawmakers, even strangers. I was unconsciously allowing all these other people to dictate not only my personal worth as a human being but also — by proxy — my opinions, my morals, my values, my successes, my failures, my limits, my everything. These other people were essentially dictating my entire reality! And it was all held together by the terrible fear that these same people might otherwise disapprove of or reject me. And that is the fear of shame. Part 2: What Shame Isn’t, here!

Ayahuasca   “Try not to vomit for at least an hour.” Those are the words running through my head as I huddle under a blanket in a large ceremonial tent in Peru. It’s the early evening. A foreboding thunderstorm is rumbling above us, clambering through the Sacred Valley like a warning sign to turn back. But it’s already too late. A short while ago I downed a cup full of what is known as Ayahuasca. It tasted sort of like Kombucha gone bad. Sacred to the ancient tribes of the Amazon, Ayahuasca is a hallucinogenic brew of roots and plants foraged from the jungle. This isn’t a recreational party drug, devotees call it “the work”. I’ve been forewarned that vomiting is a fundamental part of the process. It’s not a question of if I will vomit so much as when. The soft-spoken Peruvian shaman leading the ceremony, P’aqo, instructed me to keep the “medicine” down for at least an hour and a half, for best results. But suddenly it didn’t feel like I was going to make it passed the gate. I’m not good with nausea at the best of times. As the rain and thunder pummelled the tent, I could feel a wave of queasiness growing inside of me like my own private tsunami. As a precaution, my digestive system had already been thoroughly and violently cleansed the night before with the help of a natural Amazonian laxative. Since I had been fasting more or less all day, I could now literally feel the Ayahuasca creeping around inside of me like a snake curling its way through my intestines. I could tell that the “medicine” was starting to take effect. My heart was racing, my skin tingling in the surprisingly crisp Peruvian night air. My fingers felt like they were melting into one another and I began to wonder if I could really handle where this was heading. I looked around, suddenly remembering there were a handful of other travellers in the tent for the ceremony as well. No one else had yet “purged”, as they call it, and I definitely didn’t want to be the first. When you do Ayahuasca, or at least when I did, nausea takes on a kind of epic, primal quality. It feels like one of the fundamental forces of nature, like gravity. It’s as if nausea has always been there, haunting you. Your sworn enemy and tormentor who, it turns out, you just need to learn to accept and embrace. Or so I was told. I don’t think I ever quite learned to accept or embrace it fully. P’aqo kept urging me to “surrender, surrender, surrender”. But I wasn’t sure how exactly. Earlier in the day, he had said that my body would “know” when the time was right to let go, so not to fight it. But at the same time, he said I should try not to purge for basically as long as I could. It seemed like a contradiction. Do I fight it or surrender? As instructed, I was taking slow, deep breaths, attempting to delay the inevitable. It was almost like I was in labour. And in a weird way, I guess I was. And then suddenly, it was coming! The notion that I could possibly fight back seemed ridiculously naïve now. It’s happening, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. A frenzy of primordial intensity was surging up from inside me. I quickly leaned over my bucket — yes, you get your very own bucket — and before I knew it I was puking my guts out. *  *  * In the weeks leading up to the retreat, my hosts sent me strict instructions to eat only clean, chemical-free vegetarian food. I was to avoid any drugs (prescription or otherwise), as well as alcohol, and believe it or not, sex. Even masturbation was forbidden in the week before and after the ceremony. I tried my best to keep up with these provisions, so by the time I arrived I was hangry, horny, and highly hesitant. I reached the Sacred Valley after a treacherous van ride along cliff-edge switchbacks descending from the tourist mecca Cusco. The valley is a spectacular shark jaw — row after row of mountains, many hiding Incan ruins. If it’s not the perfect place to experiment with psychedelics I don’t know what is. We reached the shaman’s modest compound in the evening the night before the ceremony. His pregnant American wife promptly blew a strange blend of tobacco up my nose with a special wooden tool. They called it Rapé (which, incidentally, was a pretty accurate way to describe what it did to my nostrils). It burned and made my eyes water profusely, creating an intense head rush. As snot poured down my face, I wondered, what have I gotten myself into this time? The lodgings were tiny and dingy. The other inhabitants were a mix of hippies from Europe and a hairless Peruvian dog who looked not unlike one of the Gremlins from the ’80s holiday-family-horror film of the same name. I waved at one of the other guests draped in a blanket outside. No reaction. He was staring off into space like a catatonic. “He had a bit of a rough trip”, I learned from the jovial Brit with the long blonde hair and beard to match. As is my nature, I immediately felt uncomfortable. Who are these strange people? Who exactly is in charge around here? And how much was I paying for all this again? To soothe my growing anxiety, I started pounding back the coca leaf tea they ply you with in Peru to deal with the inevitable altitude sickness (which was giving me a throbbing headache on top of everything else). But my hosts had other plans. They substituted the coca with a special Amazonian herb instead, casually mentioning that it would “take effect” later that night. They also warned me to keep my shoes and a flashlight close to my bed. And by “bed”, they meant an uncomfortable wooden cot. I had to steal a pillow off a chair in the “dining room”. At 3 am, I discovered why having shoes and a flashlight by my bed was so essential. I awoke with intense stomach cramps. I dashed outside and across the lawn to the outhouse as the laxative tea took effect. I spent the next 30 minutes wishing the outhouse was a lot more soundproof. The next day was a waiting game. A weird mix of boredom and nerves. The ceremony would be at night. Until then I was on my own. They said I could hike up a nearby mountain to some Inca ruins, but the scorching Peruvian heat combined with my altitude sickness and delicate stomach didn’t make traversing a cliff sound all that appealing. Instead, I passed the time reading, drinking coca tea, and probing the other guests about what to expect that night. They charmed me with stories of imagined near-death experiences, illusory out of body experiences, and literal shitting their pants experiences. Did I really have to vomit? I asked hopefully. Well, it turns out you don’t have to, per se. But remember the catatonic guy from the night before? That’s what happens when you don’t purge. As the hours crept by, my anxiety grew and grew. I felt a bit like a prisoner awaiting execution. What would my last meal be? Oh right, nothing. We were still fasting. When the sun went down, I retreated to my stiff cot to brood. I would describe my attitude as “grim”. Aside from all of my actual worries, the fact that I was worried at all worried me even more. I had heard from others that your mindset has a big impact on your Ayahuasca trip. In fact, I had been instructed to go into the ceremony with a series of “intentions”, things to explore under the effects of the “medicine”. Instead, here I was carrying nothing but a boatload of negativity, judgment, and anxiety. I realized that this was going to be a very bad idea. I either had to change my attitude or I had to bow out. Given the time, effort, and expense I had already invested at this point — not to mention shitting my brains out all night — I decided to attempt the former. I started by taking notes on my phone. What was really at the core of my bad attitude? As I journaled, I realized that I felt extremely disconnected. I felt a million miles away from all my friends and family and loved ones back home (both literally and figuratively). Not only that, I was about to take some powerful drug I’d never tried at the mercy of a complete stranger in a foreign country. Sure, I’d done my research, checked references, even talked to friends of friends about this specific shaman. But still, I couldn’t help but worry, what am I doing? The whole endeavour suddenly seemed dubious at best. I think what I craved most of all was some sense of approval from someone I trusted. I needed some validation that this adventure I was embarking on, while unknown, was okay. That this wasn’t a completely stupid or dangerous thing to do. I felt like a scared child who just needs a hug from a parent that says, “it’s alright”. But I wasn’t going to call my folks long distance and beg for approval. I needed connection here and now. Then it hit me — a realization that would come to symbolize my entire experience that weekend. What if I just connected with the people who are already here? Sure, they were different and maybe a little kooky. But actually, as I reflected on it, I realized that they had been nothing but welcoming, friendly, supportive, and even excited for me. There was nothing wrong with these people. The problem was me! I was being judgmental. As soon as I let that judgment drop away, I discovered that not only did I already feel connected to these new people, but I already felt that sense of validation and approval I was craving from them. My change in attitude actually seemed to work retroactively. They went from “weirdoes” to friends at the flip of a mental switch. And I went from alienated and anxious to accepted and excited. In fact, now I was really excited. For some reason, I started playing Christmas music on my phone. I felt giddy all of a sudden. It was like Christmas morning. And then it was time. the ceremony We entered a large tent draped with Peruvian textiles. Everyone got their own mat, pillow, blanket, water bottle, and of course bucket. It was cosy but spacious enough that you didn’t feel like you were going to vomit onto someone (hopefully). After some ceremonial chanting, P’aqo made the rounds with small cups of what looked in the dim light like brownish puddle water. It had a tangy, almost fermented taste that overpowered my senses but didn’t make me gag (yet). Then we all lay down and waited. Rain began to patter on the tent, gradually building in intensity almost in tandem with the growing unease in my stomach. As I started to feel sick I sat up. Lying down didn’t seem like the smartest pose for taking quick action. Before long, the rain was battering the tent from all directions. I couldn’t see the lightning but I could hear the thunder crackling above us. I felt like I was in a movie. You couldn’t have designed a more dramatic build-up. I took deep breaths, rocking gently back and forth, anything to distract from the Trojan horse of nausea inside of me. I’d lost all sense of time. Had it been an hour already? Or just a few minutes? It was dark in the tent but no one else betrayed any signs of the impending purge. I could feel the Ayahuasca beginning to take hold physically. My body parts felt like they were fusing together. Electricity rippled through my skin. Forgetting the nausea for a moment, I was starting to worry that I might not be able to handle the effects of the drug itself. Having vomited my fair share during university due to alcohol consumption, I knew the sweet relief that came from just getting it out of your system. I was torn between braving the waves of discomfort and actively hastening the purge. Should I just get it over with? Ultimately, it’s hard to say if I invited it or simply lost control, but suddenly that unmistakable, uncontrollable feeling was bubbling up from my gut. I assumed the position over my bucket. I heard the faint urgings of the shaman to fight it, but I was already beyond the point of no return. It was happening. And it wasn’t one of those miraculous one-and-done heaves either. It was a loud, messy, torrential, multi-stage affair involving what felt like every orifice in my face (but thankfully not every orifice in my body). The tangy Kombucha flavour was back and riper than ever. The shaman’s wife arrived with a roll of toilet paper and I did the best I could to salvage my dignity and nasal cavity. I heard P’aqo say, “Everything is perfect”, as he often did, but I felt like I had wasted my chance. I curled up in my blanket once again, now feeling dead sober. Well, that was that, I guess. I was resigned to the fact that I had blown it. I would try to get some sleep until the ceremony was over… But as the rain continued to fall, something strange began to happen. The sound of the raindrops bled into a sort of fantasy. In my mind’s eye, I found myself curled up in a muddy, primordial puddle — naked — being lashed by the storm. What at first seemed like a perfectly normal daydream began to take on a kind of hyper-reality. I could feel the water against my skin. The silvery moonlight, the mud beneath me, the pebbles surrounding me — it all seemed more real than what I saw when I actually opened my eyes (which continued to be a blandly sober reality). I realized that I hadn’t vomited too early. I hadn’t missed my chance. There was still some medicine inside of me! And then P’aqo started playing music and it all went crazy. It was like hitting the nitro button. I’m not even sure what he was playing exactly. I recall a pan flute for sure, and maybe a guitar. Whatever it was, the music felt all-encompassing and otherworldly. It sounded like he was playing right inside my head. In fact, though the world around me looked totally normal whenever I opened my eyes, the sounds around me were all heightened. As the music built, my daydream blossomed into a full-fledged lucid dream. I was tiny, surrounded by grass, mushrooms, and plants nestled amongst a lush, dewy meadow. From the shadows emerged an army of insects. They were mantis-like, some wearing elaborate metal armour. They stared at me, not threatening, but not necessarily welcoming. They went about their business as if tolerating my presence. To my child-like amazement, I discovered that amongst the grass was a kind of tinker toy metropolis. Flickering fairy lights, miniature steam-punk gears and cranks, an endless secret world that reminded me of Guillermo Del Toro meets Tim Burton. It was almost like stop-motion except that everything felt more real than “real”. It was the most vibrant, detailed, and tangible dream I’ve ever had. And I was completely awake. DMT I knew that Ayahuasca contained DMT, a naturally occurring chemical produced by the brain while we dream. I guess this extra hit of DMT created a kind of waking dream state. It was lucid in that it felt like I had agency within the dream world, but I couldn’t really control the dream itself. I had autonomy — I could go where I wanted — but I wasn’t the God of this realm. I suppose this is why they personify the drug as “Mama Ayahuasca”, a female deity with a mind of her own who decides what it is exactly that you need to see. The other fascinating difference between this waking dream and a regular dream was that my ego was still active. Hyperactive even. In this altered state, my ego felt like a completely separate entity from the primary “me”. And that entity was constantly worrying and chattering. “Are we safe?” my ego chirped every few minutes. Yeah, I think we’re safe. “But what if the rain bursts through the tent?” Then we’ll get a bit wet. “What if a snake slithers inside?” The tent is closed. “But what if… what if… what if…” My ego went on like this throughout the entire experience more or less, a worried child who needed constant coddling. Though annoying, it was actually kind of cute in a way. Like C3PO, my ego was this humourously anxious but ultimately reliable sidekick along for the ride. It was suddenly so clear that my ego was just trying to keep me safe. Sometimes his idea of “safe” was entirely too safe, conservative, even judgmental or narrow-minded, but fortunately, he wasn’t in control. Mama Ayahuasca had relegated my ego to a mere backseat driver. One who easily could be, and often needed to be, overruled. Which is good, because at some points even the primary “me” wasn’t so sure I could handle what was happening. As the music reached a crescendo, the imperious insects surrounding me did something completely unexpected. They started dancing! There were tiny campfires, delicate insect instruments, flashes of shimmering wings and jaunty mandibles. It was a magical mantis minstrel. And it was fucking hilarious! I started giggling out loud under my blanket. And then I heard another laugh, a very familiar one. I looked up to the starry night sky (in my mind, that is) and saw an old friend floating above me laughing his head off. His name was Pat. He had passed away from complications related to leukemia two years before but I could never forget his laugh. In that moment I remember thinking, “Of course!” Of course Pat would be here, floating among the fairies and insects at their magical midnight jamboree. Pat was a musician after all. It felt so right. And yet so totally unexpected. I heard after the fact that it’s actually fairly common to see dead people during an Ayahuasca vision, but I had no idea at the time. Pat hadn’t even been on my mind recently, so it was a completely delightful surprise that my unconscious so vividly incarnated him for me in that joyous moment. Though he didn’t speak to me, I got the clear sense that he was laughing with shared excitement and vicarious joy. Like, “A.J. I knew you were going to love this place! I’m so glad you’re finally here. Isn’t it amazing?” After some time Pat faded away and with him went my sense of joy. The nausea was back. Building again. Another wave. And with it came a pack of wild dogs. They looked feral and vicious. Black, rabid Dobermans snapping their jaws at me like a cascade of mousetraps. Oh God — this is exactly not what I wanted to see. Not now. Not while on a powerful drug with a bunch of strangers in the middle of Peru. I tried to look away (which is impossible when your eyes are already closed). I tried to think of other things, but Mama Ayahuasca didn’t budge. As a last-ditch attempt to gain control I opened my eyes. The world looked completely, mercifully normal. But the nausea remained. I was afraid to close my eyes again until I remembered the one word the shaman had repeated over and over again in our preparation meeting, “surrender”. Whatever happens, whatever you see, whatever you feel, you’re not supposed to run from it — you’re supposed to surrender to it. Ok, I thought. I can do this. Surrender I closed my eyes. The dogs were now biting each other, tearing off each other’s flesh. Nausea flooded the pit of my stomach. The skin around the dogs’ muzzles began to splay apart, curling off their faces like fleshy flowers blossoming around stems of teeth and bone. It was truly horrifying. A visceral, putrescent waking nightmare. Surrender. I remember crying out in my mind, “I want to see Pat again. Show me Pat!” but Mama Ayahuasca wasn’t moved. It was clear that I had no choice in the matter. So I did the one thing I didn’t want to do. I started walking towards the dogs. Surrender. The nausea kept on coming. I felt like I was walking against the current of a powerful swell. At any moment I might get sucked away by the riptide of queasiness. I wasn’t sure I could handle it. Surrender. The best way I can describe what I was seeing is to reference John Carpenter’s classic body horror film The Thing (or pretty much any film by the master of flesh, David Cronenberg). Writhing skin, chattering bones, animated veins, pyrotechnics of blood. It was a living, bleeding embodiment of the nausea that was threatening to overtake me once again. But I kept approaching. Surrender. Surrender. Surrender. And as I got closer I discovered, to my amazement, that though they were hideous, these inverted dogs were actually completely docile and friendly. I petted their wet faces and they licked my hand affectionately. I realized there was nothing to fear. And the nausea drained away. What followed was 20-minutes of absolute, unadulterated bliss. I had confronted my fear and won. I had conquered the nausea. In fact, maybe they were one and the same. This pattern would repeat itself over and over again throughout the night. Tidal waves of nausea and mortal terror would crash over me, followed by interludes of pure joy. It was like a parade of ghastly visions, monsters, and viscera, all of which, when confronted, turned out to be nothing to fear at all. A killer clown (no really) turned out to be a stuffed doll. A snake biting my face turned out to be… well, actually that one was pretty scary but eventually faded away. I even spotted cannibal serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer at one point. Time and time again, I learned to move toward the fear. Move toward the discomfort, toward the pain. And by moving through the fear, I saw that it was never as bad as it looked. This act of courage was always rewarded with an extended period of incredible relief and bliss. It almost felt like two sides of the same coin. Joy/fear. Pleasure/pain. Positive/negative. Light/dark. When later recounting this experience to my sister, she noted that these alternating waves of pain and peace were eerily reminiscent of her experience giving birth to my niece and nephews (all five of them). We agreed that this was probably a good life philosophy in general: to always move toward fear and pain instead of running away from it. To move through it. “Did you pass through the ‘ring of fire’ at the end?”, my sister asked, using a birthing term that apparently means pretty much exactly what it sounds like. “I don’t think so,” I admitted. “Maybe I vomited too soon.” At one point I remember seeing vivid technicolour patterns shifting and spinning around me, like fractals spiralling through the infinite blackness of space. It was not unlike the infamous “trip” sequence from the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even more beguiling, these neon patterns looked remarkably similar to the art you see all over Peru, on textiles, traditional clothing, in paintings and carvings. This was their sacred geometry. But why was I seeing it? Was it just because I was in Peru, like a kind of subconscious suggestion? Or was I seeing this classic vision because that’s what the chemicals in Ayahuasca naturally produce in the human brain? Like a shared vision that spans people and generations. In short: which came first, the visions or the art? Either way, I was fascinated. This was the moment when the word “trippy” finally made sense to me. Eventually, P’aqo reappeared by my side and asked if I wanted more medicine. Given that I had purged so quickly the first time, I nervously agreed. The second batch hit me fast and hard. Whereas the first round I had envisioned myself miniature among insects, like a regular Alice in Wonderland I was now gigantic! I found myself surrounded by monolithic Incan structures and stylized gods and goddesses (and more mantises, but giant ones). Everything took on a massive, epic quality now. Even the nausea. It was all too much to handle and once again I threw up way too quickly. As if inspired by the vomiting, I eventually found myself in a vision inside my own stomach. I was wading through a layer of excrement and bile, up to my knees (so much of what I saw on Ayahuasca was viscerally organic in nature). By now I knew exactly what I had to do. Somehow “surrender” in this case meant diving in headfirst. I implicitly understood that I would need to find the sphincter in the “floor” of my stomach and swim out through my own intestine. I held my breath and dove into the foul pond. Surrender. I pulled myself headfirst into the claustrophobic intestinal tract. Surrender. I struggled, completely submerged in my own shit, unable to breathe. I was trapped. Surrender. Surrender. Surrender. Perhaps this was the “ring of fire” after all. But then, as if on a waterslide, I glided out into open space. Bliss. *  *  * I remember coming to later in the night as the effects of the medicine were finally beginning to wane. I was still in the tent. It felt like days had passed, but in reality, less than 3 hours had elapsed. In my limited experience, Ayahuasca leaves you with an incredible afterglow. A kind of love-in with everyone and everything. At this late stage in the ceremony, I finally felt like I had complete control over my thoughts again. It was a strange relief to be reunited with my ego, even after all his annoying behaviour. Now my ego felt like that close friend who’s always jumpy and a bit of a buzzkill, but who soberly springs to action in a crisis and saves the day. He’s good to have around. And in the loving headspace of Ayahuasca, I was so grateful for him. unconditional love I found that I was feeling grateful for a lot of things. I could call to mind any person, situation, event, or concern and bathe it in Ayahuasca’s warm glow. In this mindset, the solution to everything seemed so obvious: unconditional love was always the answer. I thought of frenemies from the past and forgave them. I brought to mind old grudges and let them go. I remembered people I had wronged and pledged to apologize. I was amazed by this newfound capacity to just love everyone. No matter what had transpired between us, no matter how they had wronged me, no matter what mistakes I had made, it was all good. Everything seemed so clear and joyous and loving. Even all of my previous complaints about the retreat melted away. The eccentric people now seemed like family. The cramped lodgings now felt cosy. The altitude sickness was just an ache. The diarrhea was just preparation. The vomiting was necessary. The nausea was enlightening. All of it seemed not just “worth it”, but actually completely irrelevant in the light of Mama Ayahuasca’s loving embrace. Now I finally understood why the shaman was always saying, “Everything is perfect.” But then a worrisome thought crept into my head. A flip back to the dark side of the coin. One last hint of nausea. With all the love I was doling out so freely to everyone else, where was the love for me? It struck me that I didn’t feel that same sense of love myself. More to the point, I realized that it wasn’t just love that I craved, but unconditional love. I felt a profound sense that what everyone really wanted and needed deep down — but I was somehow lacking — was to feel loved without any conditions. Loved without limits. Loved without rules. To feel loved no matter what. To live without fear that you could ever do something (fail or make some kind of mistake) or be something (have some kind of inner flaw) that could possibly render you entirely unworthy of love. I puzzled over this lack of love within me. Why did I feel this way? Where was this coming from? As I was losing consciousness that night, I decided that someone must be to blame. I went for the most obvious choice: nurture over nature. It was my parents’ fault! They must not have given me the unconditional love that I so needed and desired… *  *  * The next morning, things looked different. As I lay in a hammock under the hot Peruvian sun surrounded by mountains on all sides, I started furiously typing notes on my phone about what had transpired the night before. This turned out to be perhaps the most remarkable part of the whole experience — after I thought it was over. In the light of day, as if out of nowhere, all the crazy visions from the night before seemed to resolve into some kind of deep meaning. I had a flood of new insights and epiphanies about my life. It was as if all of that nonsense about dancing bugs, monsters, fairies, fractals, and swimming through my own shit actually held some profound subconscious significance for me. I suddenly appreciated Carl Jung’s theories about symbolism in a whole new way. Jung believed that our subconscious speaks to us in symbolic images and feelings — through dreams, not words. With some analysis, he claimed their meanings and wisdom could be made conscious for our own insight and growth. This is exactly how it felt. Though I couldn’t say exactly which insect connected to which epiphany I had that day, there was clearly an underlying connection. My big take away was this conundrum about unconditional love. Thinking about it more rationally that morning, I immediately recognized that I was wrong about my parents. Hard as I tried, I actually couldn’t imagine anything I could ever do that would cause my parents to stop loving me completely. Even if I murdered people and ate their brains and didn’t recycle, for better or worse my parents would probably still love me. So why then did I feel this deep sense of lack? Aha, it must be my boyfriend! He didn’t love me unconditionally. But no, that didn’t add up either (mostly because I don’t have a boyfriend). My friends? No, that wasn’t it. My dog? Nope. You can probably guess where this is going but I was legitimately stumped… As I stared at my phone, I saw my reflection staring back at me in the glass. And then it hit me. Of course: it’s me! I didn’t feel unconditional love because I didn’t love myself unconditionally. I knew it was true because I immediately burst into tears. I realized in that moment that I was carrying around all of these subconscious prerequisites for what would and would not make me “lovable”. I needed to be “successful”, that was a big one. I needed to be “attractive”, that was for sure. I needed to be “good”, whatever that means. I needed to be “special”, “important”, “smart”. And so on. An arbitrary list of qualifications that I thought I required just to be a worthy human being. Though I realized I had no idea how exactly to start loving myself, especially unconditionally, I was galvanized just to recognize what my real problem was. It put a fire under me. I had a new purpose. I had to know: what would it take to love myself unconditionally just the way I am? Six months later, I have some ideas. But that’s another story altogether… *  *  * Dedicated to Pat Placzek (1980-2015) Podcast Music Credits: Discomfortable themes by Chris von Szombathy WFMU – Pan Flute Ensemble Tomoko Sauvage & Gilles Aubry – Halftone Dots Filmy Ghost – Smog Cemetery Astra Autisma – The Sky No More Shines Rest You Sleeping Giant – Old Tape Loops The Pangolins – Beneath Dark Clouds elconEstharoe – Planetary Echoes p3 Said and Done by Zach Fanta (aka Pat Placzek) Pat’s laugh was recorded by David Amito in 2012

Read the first part of this post here. Science Getting Discomfortable with Science The ideology of science (which, full disclosure, happens to be one of my favourite ideologies) is based on the belief that we can observe and mathematically quantify our shared external reality in order to predict and control its patterns of cause and effect. When scientists make observations and measurements of consistent, repeatable causes and effects, it is considered evidence. And when this evidence is verified by a bunch of other scientists through their own experiments, it is then deemed a “fact” about the world we live in. For example, every time scientists have checked so far, water has always frozen at a specific temperature they call zero degrees Celsius (or 32 degrees Fahrenheit or 273.15 Kelvins). This cause and effect has been observed, measured, and recorded so many times, by so many different people, that the ideology of science assumes it is a “fact”. Which means it will be true for every case of water freezing, past, present, and future. But the real power of a “fact” is that it can then be exploited as a technology. Now, whenever we want ice, for example, we can put water in a freezer at zero degrees Celsius, and voila. I should note, however, despite the man-made ice cubes currently floating in my glass of Merlot, that we can’t actually measure every instance of water freezing everywhere all the time forever. Therefore the ideology of science, by its own admission, can’t actually prove that this “fact” is objectively true. In this way, scientific “knowledge” is always considered conditional. The scientific method is merely an ongoing attempt to get better and better at predicting cause and effect. But at any given time, so-called scientific “facts” can change or even be disproven outright if more convincing evidence is discovered. This epistemological modesty is one of my favourite aspects of the ideology of science. Ultimately science doesn’t claim to know anything with absolute objective certainty. Nevertheless, science has succeeded in demonstrating that for the most part our shared external reality really does appear to operate in a consistent, almost elegant way, as if governed by immutable natural laws. And what’s more, by uncovering and mastering these laws, we have gained many tangible and incredible new powers. To put it simply, science works. Through science, we, as a species, have been able to increasingly guide our own fate and control our own reality with the help of medicine, power, motion, communication, and bombs that could destroy us all. But despite these incredible achievements, science arguably has its limitations too. For example, there’s no way to know for certain that these “laws” we are observing actually exist. They could just be a ridiculous series of coincidences or temporary patterns in a universe that at its core is utterly inconsistent and batshit crazy. Any given scientific fact could also be part of a massive global conspiracy in which so-called “experts” conspire with the Illuminati to release false claims about, say, global warming, in order to like, ruin the oil industry or something. Or, each and every cause and effect we observe could, in fact, be occurring at the whim of an all-powerful God, one who could change or contradict these “laws” at any given moment in order to like, teach us a really elaborate lesson about hubris. Furthermore, some scientists themselves actually believe it is not only plausible but probable that science is merely measuring the arbitrary settings of a simulation we are all living in, existing only inside a powerful computer game played by a 13-year-old girl in the not-so-distant future. Or worse still, this could all just be a dream or hallucination in the mind of a single observer (you, apparently), rendering science nothing but your own personal fantasy. I know most of these arguments aren’t particularly convincing or even all that damaging, but my point is merely that it is possible that the ideology of science is wrong. Though to be fair, most people aren’t actually questioning what science knows. The issue is really about what science doesn’t know. Science in effect rejects the validity of any so-called “knowledge” that falls below its ideological threshold for “evidence”. This is where science gets into trouble because, for better or worse, the vast majority of the world either outright rejects the ideology of science or at very least places it on a lower tier of importance to another ideology altogether. Faith Getting Discomfortable with Faith Unlike science, the ideology of faith is based on the belief that some fundamental truths can be acquired through one’s own personal experience alone. Faith dictates that certain truths are based on what you feel is true deep inside, even if it lacks any physical or observable evidence. Basically, faith is the subjective belief that your subjective beliefs can, in fact, be objective. As you can see from this circular reasoning, faith and logic don’t always get along. But to its credit, the ideology of faith has, through various religious institutions, succeeded in bringing together massive groups of disparate people like never before, creating and toppling entire empires, influencing the political, moral, and judicial systems of most of the world, even today, and basically ruining sex for everyone. To be fair, as you may have already noticed, whether we want to admit it or not, all of us are operating on an ideology of faith to some extent. We have faith that the information we receive through our senses, like sight, touch, and telepathy, is indicative of an actual external reality and not some kind of illusion. And assuming that is true, we have faith that our brains are interpreting this sense information in a logical and consistent way that actually vaguely resembles that external reality. Furthermore, we have faith that our memories about this external reality from the past are also real and accurate and not implanted or invented. And so to be religious is just to add yet another leap of faith on top of all this that says, you know that feeling you have deep down inside that there’s just gotta be some higher power out there? Well, that feeling is, in and of itself, evidence that there actually is a higher power out there! This higher power usually takes the form of an almighty God who is said to have created us and our external reality, scientific laws included (or anyway whichever scientific laws don’t directly contradict that particular religion). Whether we like it or not, I think all of us are naturally predisposed to have faith in faith. When we are born, from what I can recall, we initially see a bunch of weird blobs and blurry shapes that seem to represent something that is not us. Around 6 months old we develop object permanence, recognizing a continuity to what we see that suggests a consistent external reality, ruining all the surprise of the game peek-a-boo forever after. It is around this time that we naturally develop faith that the things we are seeing and the people we are interacting with are actually, you know, real. This innate childish form of faith in reality can’t even be considered a learned belief or ideology as yet. To a certain degree, faith must be natural — instinctual even. This suggests that we owe our faith to a genetic mutation that helped one of our ancient ancestors stay alive, spreading to the rest of us over a million years of natural selection. Ironically, this means that our sense of faith, which is sometimes exploited to deny the theory of evolution, is probably a direct result of evolution itself. Whereas our belief in science, which gave birth to the theory of evolution, is not. Because science is not an instinct. It is just one of many ideologies that we humans have learned to adapt to thanks to our highly flexible brains. But in the same way, our highly flexible brains can imbue the natural instinct of faith with learned ideology as well, like religion. For example, as children, once we ascertain that our parents are actually real, it’s just a matter of time before we do something they disapprove of, something they consider “bad”. This is when we discover how truly awful the feeling of shame is. I think this childhood discovery of the ideology of “badness” (which is basically just a precursor to morality and religion), sparks an unconscious fear deep down that we could do something so bad that our parents might reject or abandon us completely, which we naturally equate with death. This fear intensifies our increasingly ideological faith that what our elders tell is not only true but now also “good”. Further motivating us to follow their arbitrary rules or else we must be “bad”. Which leads to that unbearable feeling of shame once again. As we grow up, this faith in the ideology of “good” and “bad” gradually evolves and expands beyond just the family to include, more or less, faith in the rules of our teachers, our preachers, our pundits, our culture, and our society at large. Basically faith in general consensus. This is how our instinctual faith in reality gets saddled with all kinds of learned ideology. Indoctrinating us into dubious man-made concepts like race, capitalism, law, and religion. All motivated by our powerful instinct to conform: shame. Ideology is born at the intersection of faith and shame, leading us to naturally mistake general consensus for reality. And when we have children of our own, the cycle starts all over again. It’s a feedback loop. A self-perpetuating ideological circle jerk. On the bright side, these instincts provided us with the strong social bonds and shared ideologies we needed to survive for hundreds of thousands of years in cooperative groups. The downside is that these beliefs that hold us together aren’t as real as we think they are. We essentially traded truth for survival. And aside from some pesky philosophers, no one had reason to question this type of “knowledge” for the last two hundred thousand years. Beliefs based in faith and guarded by shame passed down culturally from generation to generation like one giant game of broken telephone, basically what Yuval Noah Harari would describe as “shared fictions”. For new ideas to emerge, like Christianity, they actually had to start as a radical fringe, overcoming shame and boldly rejecting conformity in order to spread via subversive new stories about miracles. Which eventually gathered enough steam to grow into family traditions, which eventually grew into culture at large, which eventually turned into Roman fucking Law. Ironically, any rebellion against conformity, if successful enough, eventually reaches a tipping point where it becomes the dominant force of conformity itself. And over the last thousand years or so, convincing stories began to spread about a new ideology, one that could perform many miracles of its own. Actually, this whole “science” thing didn’t seem that radical at first. Faith-based institutions like the Catholic Church even sponsored scientific research. That is until science began to uncover increasingly hard to ignore evidence that directly contradicted many of their basic faith-based beliefs, like the earth being the centre of the universe or red hair being the mark of the devil. Perhaps most startling of all though, science failed to find any evidence up to its ideological standards that supported a belief in God whatsoever. In fact, according to Wikipedia (which is never wrong), until science came along, religion wasn’t even called “religion”. It was deemed so fundamentally “true” that it had no name at all — which is, of course, the epitome of unconscious ideology. And to further add insult to injury, science also began to bring radically different cultures with radically different faiths crashing together like never before through advancements in exploration, transportation, warfare, and later photography, radio, telephones, video, TV, the internet, and soon to arrive mind-melding. These incredible inventions helped fuel the popular explosion of the ideology of science, which in turn sent faith-based ideologies, like religion, scrambling to justify their own circular logic. And so in the age of science — pretty much right now — the newly minted ideology of “religious” faith has been on the defensive. Asserting that not only is it possible to uncover objective truths from within ourselves, but certain truths can only be found from within. The idea is that God cannot be detected through either science or logic because he is supernatural, that is to say literally outside of nature. And so for us mortal beings trapped inside nature, internal faith is our only possible connection to God. Faith has thus been valourized as a kind of religious test. This clever ideological loophole means that you simply cannot apply the rigors of science to religious faith, because the logic of faith explicitly exempts itself from the logic of science. And it’s not hard to see why most people would buy into this. Not only does it protect their long-held cultural traditions, aka their identity, but it is essentially the same innate faith-based logic we all grew up using to make sense of the world anyway. And so we have a stalemate on our hands, between faith and science. And also between all other ideologies. And all other religions. And also between Coke and Pepsi. And Dr. Pepper. And Root Beer, and Orange Crush, and Fanta, and Sprite, and 7-Up, and Cream Soda, and also Mountain Dew. Which is the best? It’s impossible to say. It’s all subjective. The Ideology of Ideology Getting Discomfortable with the Ideology of Ideology In our increasingly interconnected global village, the “shared fictions” that used to hold us together in small groups are now driving us apart on a global scale. Given that there is no definitive “right” ideology anyway, or soda preference for that matter, I think tolerance becomes more important than certainty. And so in the interest of increasing human connection and the open proliferation of ideas, I think all of our disparate ideologies, especially the ideologies of faith and science, have a duty to shake hands and make up. For starters, to my fellow believers in the ideology of science, we can afford to embrace the fact that faith-based belief is not only a bigger part of our own lives than we’d like to admit, but a completely natural part of being human in general. That doesn’t mean you have to like it, but before you judge anyone for their faith, recognize that you can’t just switch off an instinct. This means you probably have a lot more blind faith lurking inside of you than you even realize. At best, we can accept this innate impulse and learn to manage it like any chronic condition. What’s more, I think we have to acknowledge — out loud, to other people — that it is at least possible that faith could be a conduit to a kind of personal knowledge that is inherently beyond the reach of science. If there is an all-powerful omniscient deity that created everything, it makes sense that she would have to be super natural, aka outside of our universe. And to expect proof of a supernatural being to show up under our microscopes is probably illogical. Furthermore, who says the universe couldn’t be big enough and weird enough to contain multiple, even contradictory objective truths all at once? At the end of the day, given that the ideology of science always wisely leaves room for a sliver of doubt about any given theory or “fact”, it is only right to conscientiously apply that same sliver of doubt to the ideology of science itself. And to the believers of the ideology of faith, for your part, you can afford to embrace the very same principle that viewing all so-called “knowledge” with a healthy sliver of doubt more accurately reflects the subjectivity of human experience. Furthermore, assuming God is real, and your faith provides a direct, objective connection to God, I think you still have to admit that that connection — and any knowledge, power or teaching obtained therefrom — can only be true for you and you alone. There is no way for you to know what God’s relationship with anyone else is all about because you aren’t them and you certainly aren’t the supreme creator of everything (unless God is reading this right now, hiiiiiiii!). What’s more, there is nothing stopping God from having a completely different set of expectations, teachings, and rules for each and every individual person. The fact is, we humans simply cannot possibly fathom what is going through the omniscient mind of an all-powerful deity in regards to anything or anyone outside of perhaps ourselves. Even if your God were to insist that he is the one and only true savior, that would still only apply to you. He may well be your true saviour, but that in no way prevents other Gods from both existing and saving other people. Nor does it absolutely negate the possibility that other faiths, philosophies, or ideologies could be just as true and real for someone else as yours is for you. Faith is great for uncovering personal truths. Faith only becomes problematic when you try to apply those personal truths universally to everyone, like a science. Science, on the other hand, is great for discovering patterns about the universe that really do seem to be true for everyone. But science becomes problematic when it is used to deny the possibility of personal truths. And while I’m all about uncovering personal truths, I’m still allied with science. It’s the ideology that makes the most sense to me right now based on my upbringing, my culture, and my life experiences. But I have to admit that other people have their own life experiences and those experiences are just as valid as mine. Other people’s opinions have just as much subjective weight as my own, even if I vehemently disagree with them. It’s about respecting the fact that people will naturally have different viewpoints based on their circumstances, their upbringing, and their culture. In the service of bringing people together, we need to acknowledge that we all have just as much right to our opinions as anyone else. It’s ironic that my own liberal culture is ideologically inclined to embrace diversity in all things, except ideology itself. I think this is a hypocritical blind spot that holds us back from truly connecting with everyone. To evolve, I think we need to resist the growing popularity of smackdown culture. One that relishes ideological certainty, fuelling endless internet flame wars, scathing editorial takedowns, and late-night political roasts (even though, admittedly, I enjoy and emulate them as much as anyone else). The dismissive, sardonic rants and opening monologues that dominate our facebook feeds aren’t really communication at all if they don’t actually influence or even reach the groups they are criticizing. We are merely preaching to the choir. At best bringing people together who are already together. Which is just another ideological circle-jerk, a faith-based feedback loop protected by shame. And though I have definitely been guilty of all of this, the degree to which we scoff, laugh, and mock the “preposterous” perspectives of the other, is the degree to which we betray our own ignorance about the vast multitude of different belief systems in the world, each subjectively as legitimate as our own. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a call for passivity or neutrality. This just about how we communicate. When we are confronted with a situation that requires immediate action, of course we are still going to follow our gut. When it comes to voting, of course we are still going to support our values. When it comes to law, of course we are still going to argue for what we think is right. When it comes to science, of course we are still going to trust the experts. But in our day-to-day exchanges, I think we can all strive to be way more open. In our conversations, on social media, in our reading habits, our media intake, our travel, in our schools and our offices, in all those little low-level moments of human interaction that actually help to shape and sharpen our beliefs, that is where we can all benefit from embracing the ideology of ideology. We can admit that all of our opinions and beliefs, scientific, religious, political, or otherwise, are all inherently subjective. And therefore could be wrong or could just be true for us and us alone. I strongly, personally, ideologically believe that embracing subjectivity is the best way to communicate. The best way to be heard. The best way to learn. And the best way to teach. Remember that shaming people doesn’t actually help convince them of anything. If you really want to persuade someone that you are right, start by admitting that they could be right too. This will open you both up to a much more fair, composed, and intelligent debate. One in which some new ideas might actually get through to both of you. Because at the end of the day, it’s not really about who’s right or wrong. It’s about bringing us all together through shared understanding, so that we can all discover that we are all the same. Except people who like Dr. Pepper. Those people are crazy.

Subjectivity Most people believe that Coke tastes better than Pepsi. But a discerning minority of sugar water revolutionaries insist that Pepsi is actually superior to Coke. They claim that Coke’s popularity is merely a product of Coke’s higher advertising budget. And in fact, in most blind taste tests, Pepsi actually wins. But the Coke diehards claim this is only because Pepsi is sweeter than Coke, which is pleasing in the first sip, but nauseating by the last. So which side is correct? Neither, Dr. Pepper is the best! (Just kidding, I hate Dr. Pepper). The truth is, there is no right answer to this stupid question because there is no objective, universal truth to taste or personal preference or even to the exact definition of the word “better” in this case. It is all purely subjective. That is, entirely a matter of personal opinion. In fact, most of what we believe is purely subjective. Is democracy better than fascism? Depends who you are, it’s subjective. Is capitalism better than communism? Depends how rich you are, it’s subjective. Liberal vs conservative? Subjective. Vegan vs Carnivore? Subjective. Batman vs Superman. Batman. It is possible, however, that some of our beliefs aren’t just a matter of personal opinion. Some beliefs could potentially relate to an actual objective truth about the external reality we live in, like the belief that the sun will rise again tomorrow. Unfortunately though, even if what we believe is objectively true, we can never know that it is objectively true because we can never observe our external reality in its entirety. We can’t see into the future, for example. And so, we are trapped in our own bubble of personal subjectivity. In fact, I don’t think we can know anything with objective certainty, except perhaps that we exist right now and maybe 1 + 1 = 2. Then again, that’s just what I believe, which is of course purely subjective. But more important than what I believe — I think — is why I believe it. Conformity Getting Discomfortable with Conformity What if I told you that some of your most cherished and deeply held beliefs about the world were actually implanted by a cult that secretly brainwashed you when you were just an impressionable child? This is the story of my life… and of yours! This is the story of pretty much every human life. The cult is called The Family, and they brainwash us to be just like them. I wouldn’t be surprised if you find this claim rather hard to believe. After all, the Western world is founded on a proud culture of “individualism”, where we take for granted that our individual beliefs, attitudes, and values are in fact uniquely our own. That they are hard-won, logically deduced positions we have acquired through intentional learning and personal experience. We think that we have consciously chosen our beliefs based on how clearly and rationally superior they must be to every other alternative. If someone disagrees with us, we naturally assume they just aren’t as “smart” as we are. And the fact that most other members of our tribe — our family and friends, our cultural group, and to some extent our entire country — all seem to view the world in more or less the exact same way, is taken as validation that what we believe must be objectively true. But I think there’s actually a much simpler explanation. We only believe in individualism because everybody else does, which isn’t very individualistic of us after all. Think about it. As babies, children, and even teenagers, we basically have no clue what’s going on ever, and we require the constant help of our guardians just to stay alive. As infants, we are little more than learning machines, naturally programmed to imitate and emulate our parents, immigrant nannies, siblings, and foul-mouthed uncles. As adolescents, we have to ask “why” like ten hundred thousand times in order to construct our concept of the world. As teens, we have to drink way too much Smirnoff Ice just because our friends tell us to in order to learn what not to do. Basically, we are social sponges in a profound way that other animals simply are not. Most animals are born with a wide array of powerful genetic instincts. A preprogrammed instruction manual of primal urges that make it possible for horses to stand within 30 minutes of being born, fish to swim immediately out of the bag, and cats to be jerks like right away. But we humans start with little more than a blank slate. Aside from a handful of basic instincts to breathe, cry, and suck titties, we rely almost entirely on the care and direction of adult humans. Or in a pinch, a pack of wolves. Apparently, the unique plasticity of our brains affords us incredible mental flexibility, with a greater capacity to learn and change than any other animal. But it also means that in the absence of a comprehensive set of instincts, we need to fill in the blanks by internalizing the behaviours, beliefs, and attitudes of whoever happens to be around. To quote one of my favourite thinkers, Yuval Noah Harari, from Sapiens (his not so brief ‘brief history of humankind’): “It takes a tribe to raise a human. Evolution thus favoured those capable of forming strong social ties. In addition, since humans are born underdeveloped, they can be educated and socialized to a far greater extent than any other animal.” In this way, the subjective ideologies of our caregivers become the building blocks of our reality. So on the bright side, we aren’t completely controlled by the rigid ancient instincts that keep most animals doing the same boring ass thing every Saturday night. Apparently, between random mutation and natural selection it takes literally one million years to meaningfully alter the instincts, behaviours, and weekend plans of most animals. Yet within a mere generation, humans as a species have the elasticity to adapt to all manner of different environments, situations, cultural or technological revolutions, and Batman reboots. This incredible ability is probably what allowed us to rapidly spread, advance, and dominate the planet. This means that as a species we are uniquely independent. But, ironically, this also implies that as individuals we are way less independent than we think. While most animals conform to their instincts, we humans have an instinct to conform. This is why advertising is so effective on humans and so ineffective on lions. You can’t convince a lion to willingly go vegan no matter how persuasive your leaflet on animal cruelty is. Lions have been doing the exact same lion shit for as long as we’ve known them. We, on the other hand, have been up to all kinds of crazy different adventures in the exact same time period. In order for human culture and society to have changed so rapidly and broadly, most of us by necessity needed to “keep up with the Joneses” or revolutions like the spread of Christianity, capitalism, or the internet simply would not have caught on. Our incredible human ability to adapt would probably lead to chaos were it not for a strong instinct to conform. This instinct is called shame. Shame is the rabid guard dog of conformity that says, if you don’t fit in, there must be something wrong with you. You must be different, bad and alone. At risk of being abandoned by society altogether and left for dead. Which feels terrifying in contrast with our other primal instincts, like the deep yearning for human connection, acceptance, validation, and love. And though we all go through that phase in junior high where we swear never to turn into our stupid, stupid parents, even those oppositional attitudes are still just a reaction to our parents’ ideologies. We naively assume that we are completely independent people because we totally voted for a different politician than our dad. But we don’t realize that the very constructs of our sense of reality are forged in the exact same cultural furnace. We are all still disciples of The Family. I’m not saying it’s impossible to break through these dogmatic beliefs. I absolutely think it is and I encourage everyone to try. Most of us have already succeeded to some degree — I hope — by exposing ourselves to new cultures, people, and experiences. By pushing our boundaries, scaring ourselves, and trying radical new things, like marijuana and non-monogamy. That said, it would be misguided to think that you could completely overturn every last unconsciously ingrained belief such that you are an entirely self-made man or woman. This in spite of the fact that I personally am trying to do exactly that. But even if I were to succeed at fulfilling this dream of pure self-actualized individualism, my new beliefs would still be based on my own limited, subjective experience. Which in no way takes into account every possible viewpoint or truth out there in the big wide world. And so no matter how self-aware we think we are, we all have a duty to acknowledge the uncomfortable, yet fundamental truth that our personal belief systems are completely subjective to our cultures and ourselves, and in no way true for everyone else. Given that we are all naturally, profoundly, and unconsciously brainwashed by the subjective beliefs of our family, culture, and society. And given that there are innumerable different families, cultures, and societies each with different subjective beliefs all forced to interact with one another in our ever-shrinking global village. I think it is high time we acknowledge to one another that none of us really know for sure if what we believe is actually true. Everything we think we know for certain, everything we base our decision-making and most fundamental beliefs on is nothing more than an ideology. A subjective system of ideas and values that we were born into, or we at very least bought into. And while some of us have put a lot more thought into choosing our own ideology than others, which is great, it’s still just an ideology. And given that it’s just one of many ideologies to choose from and everything is subjective anyway (except maybe math), we cannot claim that our ideology is definitively better or truer than anyone else’s. Ideology Getting Discomfortable with Ideology Here are some of the subjective ideologies that I took for granted as totally true for most of my life. Being Canadian, I adopted various beliefs connected to my national identity, the main one being that I am not American (despite the fact that Canada is situated in North America). Incidentally, we Canadians are the only nationality that resent being labeled by our continent. This is because we define ourselves largely by what we are not, despite the fact that at this point, ideologically, we probably have more in common with our so-called “American” neighbours than we do with our British ex-landlords. To further muddy the waters, I personally haven’t lived in Canada for over a year and it’s entirely possible that I might fall in love with a cute Russian boy and never return. This in spite of my ingrained ideology that I am a “typical” Canadian. Being a Millennial working in the arts (or “Xennial” to be exact), my political ideologies skew decidedly left. But coming from a rather uptight waspy family from Alberta, I also have a lot of conservatism and prudishness ingrained in me as well. For example, I’m kind of judgy about guys who post tasteful nudes on Instagram. However, being gay, I will also look at those nudes and secretly enjoy them. The conflicted ideology of my sexuality, based on my own experience, is that I think there is nothing objectively wrong with being gay and therefore believe we deserve equal rights and protections like everyone else. But at the same time, based on the ingrained ideology of junior high, I unfortunately still feel kind of embarrassed walking down the street holding hands with another guy. Which sucks, but is true nonetheless. Furthermore, the fact that I believe anyone deserves “equal rights and protections” at all is itself an ideology of human rights based on my Christian cultural heritage. This in spite of the fact that my personal religious ideology is agnostic at best. I do however have a great deal of faith in the ideology of science. Even though I have no real scientific training, experience, or knowledge to draw from whatsoever. So, clearly, I have a complex mix of ideologies that sometimes even contradict each other. This is because our beliefs are a highly imperfect blend of conscious decision-making, powerful social pressures, subjectivity, faith, and a whole lot of brainwashing from our youth. And while we are all fairly well versed in our conscious ideologies — those being our chosen or proclaimed belief systems (usually closely tied to our sense of “identity”, like our nationality, politics, religion, and career) — we also have a ton of unconscious ideologies to contend with as well. These are the innumerable beliefs that we didn’t really choose and aren’t even necessarily aware of. These can also include “facts” that we are aware of, but don’t realize are actually just ideological because we take them so for granted as objective truths. Our unconscious ideologies are therefore the hardest to spot because we don’t realize they are even up for debate. If you want to know what your unconscious ideologies are, which I highly recommend, you can try asking your bitter ex-lover. Or look at the embarrassing behaviour of your family. Or better yet, just interact with anyone from a radically different culture, political group, faith, or nationality — someone who thinks and lives very differently than you do. In short, someone who is not part of your tribe. I think you know who I’m talking about here. It’s those people. The ones you absolutely don’t want to talk to. The people whose views seem so backward and wrong that they sound almost alien or outright insane. Which actually makes perfect sense coming from your perspective as someone raised in a completely different cultural reality. But the same people who rile us up into heated arguments because we disagree with them so fundamentally are also some of the only people, outside of a therapist, who can help us, even if inadvertently, to recognize exactly what it is that we actually believe — be it conscious, unconscious, logical, illogical, dogmatic, or otherwise. The problem is, we are usually too angry and judgmental in the moment to appreciate how unique, informative, and valuable these cross-cultural exchanges really are. It’s like the exact opposite of your Facebook feed. A chance to understand how the other side actually thinks and reasons. What could be more fascinating? So why is it also so infuriating and intimidating!? Because shame. If there’s one thing we all seem to agree on, it’s that we want to uncover the “truth”. The problem is, no one can agree on what the “truth” really is. Despite the sheer subjectivity of our beliefs, we all still attach an incredibly strong value on the ideology of one single, beautiful, golden, shining, flawless, objective truth above all others. We believe this single “truth” is “good”. Therefore anything less must be ignorance or outright lies, which is “bad”. And of course, we all assume that what we believe is obviously closest to the truth, because like, why else would we believe it? Therefore anyone who disagrees with us has to be, by default, ignorant and bad. But perhaps even worse, we know there’s always a chance that we could, in fact, be the ones who are wrong. Which would mean we are the ones who are ignorant and bad. Which is the very definition of shame, the excruciating fear that we are different, bad, and alone. By adhering to this stubborn binary between “true” and “false”, or “good” and “bad”, we are creating a hierarchical viewpoint, ideologically blinding ourselves to that idea that people could disagree and still be equals. But someone needs to be “right”, we think. And of course, it needs to be us! In this way, any disagreement about our beliefs becomes very dangerous territory. It is nothing less than a subconscious shame battle, a competition to prove that we are “good” and they are “bad”. And what’s worse, contrary to what Twitter seems to think, shame doesn’t actually help people change their minds. Quite the opposite. Shame expert Brené Brown asserts that shame actually just entrenches people deeper into their ideological bunkers. We attach so much of our identity to what we believe in that even exposing ourselves to the possibility of being “wrong” puts our very worth as a human being at risk. And so we invest in our ideologies to the point where we can’t even admit they are ideologies at all. But the truth is, we are not our beliefs. In fact, I think all of us need to take a healthy step away from our ideologies and start regarding them with a modest dose of skepticism. To assume—for our own benefit — that anything we believe, no matter how passionately, could be wrong. Imagine how that would change our discourse, especially around politics, religion, and movie reviews. For starters, it cuts shame off at the knees. There’s nothing wrong with being wrong if you admit all along that you could be wrong. It’s a limerick. This acknowledgement naturally creates a distance between your identity and your beliefs, which drains the emotion so that you can assess and discuss your opinions dispassionately. Which in turn makes you that much more open-minded. By embracing the fact that you could be wrong, you inoculate yourself against the fear of hearing new ideas. A discussion with someone else thus becomes an opportunity to learn. The goal of an argument changes from winning the shame battle, to genuinely trying to understand the other person’s point of view so that you can determine if it actually convinces you. At the same time, you are motivated to articulate your own stance as clearly as possible so that you can accurately compare the two, for the benefit of yourself as much as your “opponent”. It’s conversational utopia! Imagine going into an argument saying, “First of all, mom, I believe your experiences are just as valid as mine. But your opinion about, say, climate change, seems quite different than my own and I don’t fully understand your thinking. Please explain.” And after you’ve really gotten to the core of what that person believes and why, you can still totally disagree! “Ok mom*, I think I understand where you’re coming from now. And while I appreciate your perspective, based on my own experiences I disagree completely for the following reasons… science.” I know this dialogue sounds cheesy, but I really do believe that some kind of open, respectful, and equal treatment of people’s ideologies is a far more fair, accurate, and advantageous way to approach communication and knowledge in general. Now, at this moment you might be thinking, wait, what!? Are you saying the opinions of a climate change denier deserve to be treated with the same credibility as, like, a meteorology expert? Well, no, of course not. But also… kind of? Though I am loath to admit it, I have to confess that even my belief in science is subjective. But before you lose your shit and start publicly shaming me for unpopular thinking, please give me a chance to explain myself in the second half of this post, where we get discomfortable with science and faith. Getting Discomfortable with Subjectivity: Part 2 *For the record, my mother’s not actually a climate change denier, that was just to illustrate a point. But we do often disagree on other crucial issues, like… what music to listen to at family dinners.