Do you live from places of shame?

According to Merriam-webster.com, Cancel Culture is “the practice or tendency of engaging in mass canceling as a way of expressing disapproval and exerting social pressure.”

We, as a culture/society, are in process of canceling things that hurt people! Racism, genderism, ageism, sexism, and much more!

Great things to cancel.

Canceling these things will certainly make our world a better place. (And despite what we might think, they do exist!)

But there are also things we must cancel in our lives that keep us from being our best selves.

How better could our lives be if we’d cancel our feelings of shame?

“Oh, I don’t have any shame . . .”

Yesterday after 10 am worship, someone remarked to me re the message, and they shared they were unaware some of their behaviors came from feelings of shame they did not know they had.

Shame is the intensely painful experience of believing we are flawed and unworthy of love and belonging.

“I am unworthy.”

“I am not enough.”

“I am not wanted.”

We end up taking something that we’ve “done” or even something that happened to us, and then it ends up attaching to who we are, and we  start living with hame-based thinking.

It isn’t guilt, a feeling about something we did or did not do.

This is a feeling regarding ourselves as a whole.

When something bad happens to us, or we make a mistake, we think it is “because” of us.

Those thoughts and feelings are born from shame.

Let’s do a self-check. Let’s see if you deal with any feelings of shame.

Do you ever find yourself thinking you are:

Defective

Damaged

Flawed

Dirty

Impure

Disgusting

These thoughts are from feelings of shame.

The good news? We don’t have to live in this place of shame. We can cancel it!

Let’s prepare to do that this week!