I am about to go through a lot of information before relating how I have been shamed. I'm not trying to overwhelm anyone with information. I'm just trying to give you an idea of how it relates to most people but specifically the story I am going to tell after the information has been presented. So if most of what you read before getting to my personal story doesn't sound like me it's because it's mostly just me relating a ton of information before finally getting to my point.
So here we go.......
Dr. Mario Martinez has spent his life studying the ways that our thoughts and emotions affect our physical health. He is specifically fixated on the relationship between our physical health and our thoughts and feelings and how one affects the other but particularly the impact our thoughts and emotions have on our physical health.
The idea of tribal shaming is what interests him most. Tribal behavior is easy to understand if we broaden our idea of a tribe beyond those we see grace the cover of National Geographic and understand that we have all been born into a tribe. A tribe can be a nation, a culture, a religion, a family or a race. A tribe tells us who we are, what to believe, and how to feel and behave.
Tribes are important, nay, essential to human survival. For most of the history of our species we survived by pooling our resources and abilities, we survived by the cohesion and protection of being a part of a tribe. And we still do today. We identify as part of a nation, a religion, a culture or counter culture or a race.
Our tribe of origin tells us who we are, what to believe and how to behave. And each tribe has its own rules. These rules are the honor code of the tribe, this is true no matter the tribe. And these rules are sacred. And they must be sacred because without them the tribe dissolves and without the tribe the individual is left out in the cold, possibly doomed.
A tribe gives us meaning and identity.
And for those whose tribe is religious for many thousands of years those rules or edicts or commandments were held so sacred that to violate them resulted in death. And still do in many parts of the world.
During childhood we are taught or indoctrinated with the rules of our tribe. But as we grow we may see contradictions or even outright lies in what we have been taught and we may then begin to identify with another tribe.
Maybe your tribe teaches it is grievously wrong to be gay but.....you are gay.
Maybe in your tribe you were expected to serve in the military but......you want to go to art school.
Maybe in your tribe you were expected to go to law school and work at a certain law firm but....you want to be a writer.
Maybe you were expected to be subservient to men but.....you are a feminist.
And maybe your tribe was OK with you being so different. Maybe they supported you and cheered you on. I say maybe because getting support for deviating from the tribal norms is rare. Incredibly rare.
Because the tool most often used to correct tribal deviations in not violence, it is shame. Shame is how they keep you in line. Shame is how they show you you are not good enough. Shame is how they show you you have abandoned them. Shame is how they show you you deserve to be shamed, you deserve being shunned, you deserve being punished, you deserve being spit on. Shame is how they show you you have no worth because you are different, that you have committed a crime against your God for breaking His laws.
Your tribe will say you are a traitor, you abandoned them, you betrayed them. They will remind you that you weren't there when Dad died, even if you were in the military and couldn't get leave fast enough. They will remind you that he was your step Dad so you don't get to be as upset as they do. They will make fun of you for being mentally ill, when what you need is to get help. They will say they were just joking but you know they were never just joking, they were serious. Dead serious and it can be deadly in fact because shame takes off years of your life, it can make you lingeringly sick, and lingeringly sad.
You're tribe will make sure you no with no doubt that you are no longer one of them. You are no longer welcome. They will criticize you for not calling them but they never call you. They will criticize you for never visiting them but they will never visit you.
It is terrible to be told that "you are no longer one of us." Because we are pack animals and we crave a tribe so when we are told we are no longer wanted, welcomed or loved we feel devastated and crushed. Those words are spoken sometimes, and in other cases they are not spoken but they are always understood.
Shame is volcanic, its burning fiery hell never quite leaves those who have been scarred by it. It is the most damaging and powerful tool in the arsenal of any tribe. Violence is fast and Shame is slow but both are brutal in their own way. Shame can ruin lives and end them. Shame can lead to sickness and even death. Many may die of a broken heart but if someone dies that doesn't wield the weight of a loved one shunning and shaming you and making it clear you are no longer wanted.
Dr.Martinez has been able to show that shame rots the body from within, that it corrodes the mind from within and whats worse is he has shown that shame leads people to abandon their callings, jobs or schooling because shame causes people to hate themselves. Because these shamed people hate themselves they sabotage their own lives refusing to let themselves be happy because they don't feel they deserve it.
These people seem to know that if they fail in their new lives that their old tribe will take them back. And if they fail...then their old tribe will always take them back. They will not praise them as much when they are happy or successful because that is threatening to them but they will always take them back in that case. So long as they come back broken, humbled, weak and apologetic. And having "learned their lesson."
Have you sabotaged your life so that you would be accepted by your tribe?
Did you get fired or quit your job or dream job so you would not be "better" than anyone else in your tribe?
Did you commit a crime so you would be accepted by your tribe?
Did you hide your sexuality so you would not be shunned or banish or kick out onto the streets by your tribe?
Did you attempt suicide because your tribe made you feel so worthless for not being who they wanted you to be?
Did you profess a belief in a God you don't believe in so you would be accepted by your tribe?
Or did you build the new life for yourself that you wanted? But do you feel exhausted, eternally guilty and continue to make yourself miserable even though your new life is everything you ever wanted? Miserable because your tribe has shamed you out of feeling anything positive about what you have worked so hard to create for yourself?
We must stop letting shame affect us like this. But how?
Dr.Martinez has an exercise that is meant to help.
Here is it: Sit in meditation and let your mind settle and breathe then ask yourself this question; Who in your life-living or dead-must you abandon in order to live your life the way you choose and be happy, be enough?
Be honest and when you have the name say this to yourself and in a way them(not in reality. This exercise is for you no one else) Say to them I am abandoning you now. I am betraying you now.
It works, in theory, because it is the opposite of what we have spent our lives in some cases trying to prove. That we are loyal. That we did not abandon them, that we are still one of them. But regardless of what we do they still make us feel like we are traitors, that we have no honor, that we did abandon them and maybe even that we are worthless.
But in a way we have abandoned them and we aren't still one of them. Because we needed to grow, we needed room to breathe and we would have suffocated within the confines of their tribal codes. We have abandoned them and left them behind because that was the only way of becoming the person we were created to be. And we were created to be happy, we deserve it, we are entitled to it and we must lay claim to that.
If no one ever abandoned their tribe of origin we would have no leaps of faith. no reform. no change, no creativity and no beautiful transformations. We should feel no shame in not remaining a pupa when we have transformed into beautiful butterfly. We owe it to ourselves to lay claim to our transformation.
So what comes next is what Dr.Martinez calls your "Field of honor" which is what is attacked when shame is used. Your tribe will either overtly or subtly tell you that you have no honor since you broke their codes of honor. And without honor we have nothing, we are nothing. That's why it cuts us to the core.
So we must rebuild that field of honor within ourselves. Start with your earliest memories. Write down every honorable act you did or every honorable thing you said. It's there, you are honorable, have been honorable your whole life. Honor is within each of us. It's when we are stripped of that that people often become reduced to animal instincts. People often act in the way they are treated.
There is one more way in which we can defend our field of honor. When anyone attempts to attack or challenge our honor we would do well to respond with what Dr.Martinez calls "righteous anger" anger can be detrimental and lead to many physical diseases similar to shame but there is a place for healthy anger. This anger is in response to having our field of honor trampled on. When someone starts in on us we may say "You will NOT shame me! Don't you even dare!" And that's it. That's the information I wanted to share before getting to how this relates to me, and possibly others.
And now I think it best to get into my story.
I met Zach in high school in 1995. He was a year behind me but after I moved to California and then Wisconsin over the span of two years, he was the only friend I had that still wanted to have anything to do with me. We hung out daily and sometimes for days on end. He did back me up even if he belittled me daily.
We met Mary just a couple months after I moved back to Utah in 1999.
We spent the summer always in contact and around each other. We bonded even more over the next couple years. Life was great with such good friends.
Niel, Zach's step brother, moved back to Utah in 1999 as well. And he was great. We spent time hanging out when Zach moved out and was harder to hang out with given his work schedule. Niel was out of work in the fall of 2001 and when I started talking to an Army recruiter I told Niel I would send a recruiter his way if he was too busy playing video games to look for work. I had jobs, lots of them, but I thought the Army would be good for both of us. I just told Niel to, under no circumstances, never 1) sign up for the Infantry and 2) sign up for overseas duty. Niel did both and we went into the Army.
That was in the beginning of 2002 I did go with him because I was under weight. Something Zach and his family shamed me for because the consensus was that I was too weak to be accepted by the Army and that Niel would fight in the wars we knew were going to happen. I went into the Army and made it through basic training on my first attempt. But that did little to calm the storm.
And in the fall of 2002 I attempted suicide. I had been beaten down and belittled for so long by so many close to me that I had no sense of worth, my field of honor was non existent. And the treatment I received in the Army didn't exactly help my self worth.
I felt like I had failed at everything in my entire life and especially everything I cared about, my friends and their families, my family, my superiors and my fellow soldiers. I felt like the only way to end my series of failures was to end my life.
It was more than me feeling hated by those I loved and cherished it was that I hated myself.
So I bought four bottles of over the counter sleeping pills and a 5th of spiced rum, quite tasty, at the same time from a convenience store and went to mu hotel room and took them all and washed them down with the booze. And sat on the bed watching T.V. and waited to die.
I thought about how badly I had failed at life, I thought about how much I hated my life and myself.
Then I had what may be best described as a near death experience. Which I wrote about here. It gave me lasting peace. I woke up in the hospital in the ICU. My superiors met with me and told me that many of the guys I served with wanted to see me. I said no. I didn't want to see anybody, I wanted to try and get past it like it didn't happen. I couldn't deal with how bad I had gotten. That left a mark on my relationship with many of them. I was able to work that out because I had served with them, they knew me and to most of them I was still one of them.
But what I got back from Niel, Zach, and their family after I was told I would be chaptered out of the Army and not go to Iraq like Niel. He was sent twice. An ever since then I took a landslide worth of crap from Zach, Niel, their family and Mary.
They never came right out and said "You're a failure!" What Mary once said was "Yeah so do you ever wonder about someone who attempts suicide because they can't do anything right wakes up in the hospital and thinks 'well, I guess I can't do anything right?'"
Whenever I referred to myself as a veteran Zach and Mary would remind me that my service didn't count. I never fought in the wars Niel or others did. I wasn't a real soldier like Niel. Because of that I stopped saying I was a vet or a soldier, I simply would say "I was in the Army" But even then I was reminded I wasn't in very long. I stopped thinking abut almost as if it never happened because nothing but shame came from talking about it in front of my "friends."
I wasn't just put down constantly, I was shamed for my suicide attempt constantly.
I wrote a book and paid Zach's wife to edit it. They both seemed supportive of my writing even if they thought the book was bad. But Mary gave me a "present" in the form of a book by Mikhail Bulgakov who also wrote The Master And Margarita. He was an amazing writer but the book was called Black Snow. It was about a man who failed at his suicide attempt and then writes a farce of a book. He fails at life, fails at suicide and then fails a writing a book. She didn't outright say this is what she and Zach and Niel thought of me but that's exactly what she was doing.
And then later I was in a tumultuous relationship that culminated in a train wreck ending. And then I changed my number but the woman later called that number and then started getting really offensive and sick texts so she called a mutual friend and I told them, and later Mary, that "I had done my best to avoid the drama and had remove myself from the situation...so yeah. That's all I got."
Zach called me the next day and ended every sentance with "so yeah" during the entire phone call. He wanted to remind me of what I said to throw it back at me.
Because he and Mary were never direct and it made me think I was crazy which is in clinical terms referred to gas lighting, which means you make someone think they are crazy, that it's just them when it's not. It made me feel shamed at the same time. Like I said it wasn't all shaming much of it was just bullying, condescending, belittling and many things but shaming was a big part of what they were doing. With these remarks these "gifts" they were letting me know that I was not one of them and that maybe I never really was.
When I was diagnosed in 2005 as BiPolar before being diagnosed as Schizo-affective disorder (BiPolar and Schizophrenia at the same time.) I was full blown phsycotic. I left many messages on Zach's phone. What did he do? Played the messages for his wife and sister and laughed and made jokes then told me about it. He then made jokes over and over while he knew I was crazy and needed treatment and he never made any sort of attempt to get me that help. As I would have done for him and anyone I considered to be my friend.
By contrast my friend Keith who I also met in 1999, joined the Army in 2006 and we have continued to talk through his two deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan has never once made me feel like less of a person or less of a soldier over my suicide attempt. He has never judged the quality of my service because he judges me favorably, or righteously as scripture says. He is not Mormon and holds a poor view of Joseph Smith and has given me crap but never to degrade me. He has always been respectful even if he doesn't like my choices or beliefs. He still holds me in high esteem despite of everything. He is a true friend even if we are of different tribes.
In 2014 Mary was reported to DCFS. I knew she was guilty but I was not the one who reported her. Zach and Mary refused to believe me and railed on me in phone call after phone call. And them refusing to take my word, refusing to recognize my sense of honor was the last straw. I blocked them on facebook and refuse to ever call or visit them. I don't need malignant and negative "friends" in my life anymore.
I met my wife in 2010 in the fall. I, because of Zach and Mary, had a very self deprecating sense of humor which my wife didn't like. She has told me, and many of my in-laws have said I am a god writer, some have said I'm a great writer. My wife has had to show me my positive traits, she praises what Zach and Mary belittled. And after a few years I have become better, I have grown in ways I never would had I not removed Zach and Mary from my life. I have become who I was meant to be and who I never could be with Zach and Mary in my life. My wife took me to a Veterans Day concert up at the U of U and when they play the song of your branch of service you are asked to stand. I only stood because my wife pushed me to. I didn't feel like a veteran. I didn't feel worthy. My wife takes me every year and now I finally feel worthy, or at least more so than ever before. My wife has shown me how to rebuild my field of honor and how to defend it long before I came across Dr.Martinez. And now I am blooming in my field.
Jesus gave me peace in my near death experience but my wife helped me get closer to Him than I would have on my own. He has been as crucial in healing my pain from being shamed as much and more than my wife.
I've gone over shame, what it is and how to free ourselves from it. And I have been freed of it thanks largely to my wife, Kieth and others. But I hope most of all that what I have shared here has helped some of you.
