Retroactive Shame
I used to be horrible toward my loved ones, particularly my siblings.
I didn't know better till I knew better.
Once I knew better I didn't want to show it, for the way it revealed my ongoing crimes with my loved ones.
When I learned emotional intensity is no reason to mistreat my loved ones, everything in me rebelled, even though I knew it was the truth.
When I learned the extent to which I was using emotional intensity (and the fear of the violence that would come when I got to that emotionally intense place) to coerce my loved ones into giving me what I wanted, everything in me wanted to double down on the righteousness I'd once used.
Behind that righteousness was retroactive shame. Having learned better, I felt bad about how I’d acted before I learned better.
It’s also important to understand that it isn’t enough to know your behavior is having an undesirable or harmful impact, it is not enough to know you “should” stop. This is about when you actually LEARN something better, something positive in the sense that it exists and defines some practical success.
My most righteous practice was blame. I knew I “shouldn’t” blame other people, that I “should” stop, but I was able to ignore that, as well as the impact I was having in my righteous reactivity, up until I really learned what TO DO. I learned an actual practice of personal responsibility, of accountability to and for my emotional experience.
That is when I was hit with it, what I call Retroactive Shame.
Once I finally know what TO DO better, I feel the harm, the impact, and the shame of having been doing what I knew how to do, and especially with the shame of knowing it was wrong at the time—it is so easy to forget that I did not have the tool.
Especially when it’s easy, when the personal responsibility actually feels better than the blame, feels obvious, feels second-nature. Then, most of all, do I stand most convicted of my own shameful failings in the past. I think “it could have always been this way.”
This is another suffering delusion. The truth is the shame, it can cleanly come into my heart to show me that I am accounting for my impact on those I loved.
I long for something which is not possible, and my yearning has the flavor of devoted love, interested in atonement and amends, in offering a new and highest-ever standard of love. Clean shame is actually humility, a reminder of how I am limited and how I am responsible to see the asset each limitation represents.
The way my shame reminds me that I couldn’t do better until I knew better gives me patience and compassion for others who have yet to learn what has come to me to be easy. It reminds me to distribute love onto the loved ones I once harmed, it brings me to my knees in devotion to them.
Shame is wasted in self-destruction. It can drive present devotion, it can put us into the energy of distribution, which is the soul of wealth. We cannot ever fix the path of what has been. And any moment, we can be anew.
