The Seven Basic Feelings SHAME

 The seven basic feelings are;

Mad

Sad

Glad

Hurt

Afraid

Shame

Hope

Whenever I state these, people always ask me, well, what about love?  I answer that love is the core of everything.  It is called many things, but feeling connected to others and ourselves is our basic humanness.  The other seven are ancillary and help us negotiate the basic problems of love. 

Love is the most basic need of all.  To feel welcomed, valued, honored and accepted (to name a few) is what every one of us hopes to achieve.

Each feeling has its accompanying need and consequence if not met.

So I am going to take each feeling and expand on it a bit in hopes that people can begin to articulate what they are feeling a little better.  That helps a lot in relationships

It always amuses me that if you ask a man what he feels, he will tell you what he thinks and obversely, if you ask a woman what she thinks, she will likely tell you what she feels.  The integrating of thinking and feelings creates the outcomes we all desire.  Putting who you are back on what you do.

The sixth feeling, SHAME has been the toughest for me personally.  The thing about shame and guilt is that they are the masters of disguise.  Shame is that terrible moment when the inner eye turns on the self, examines the self and finds the self deficient with no hope of redemption – when you just want to crawl under the bed for oh, say three weeks or so.  Shame is a break in the interpersonal bridge and is very painful.

Shame is hard to talk about because- well we are ashamed.  The mystery is what triggers the shame spiral and what to do about it.   It is often triggered by some push away statement or gesture that seems unimportant and innocuous at the time.

You will seldom see shame in another person; it gets disguised as anger, fear sometimes crying.  We will do almost anything to avoid that horrible sense of any more visibility, because that is the crux of embarrassment, to feel overexposed and vulnerable.  More then any other feeling, shame is a break in the interpersonal bridge and when that is triggered we feel suddenly small, naked and somehow less worthy as a human being.

Shame needs repair of that interpersonal bridge mention above; an apology is often all it takes. If that need is not met, it leads to the avoidance of intimacy, self-denigration and hiding out.  On the other hand if the repair happens the person becomes clear, concise and outspoken.

It has been my experience and observation that shame end shame bound identities controls many people's lives.