Is there a good kind of shame to have? No. Shame is useless. Shame is also not conscience, though they are often equated. Who are encouraged to have shame more, men or women?
Women, to be kept in their place. Women have powerful intuitive insights and strong instincts, more so than even men. Men’s instincts are sort of simple by comparison, but it’s that very simplicity that makes us less responsive to shame in the first place. It’s why women often feel they are challenged in trying to “reason” with their men, because the majority of women are deeply buried in the shame paradigm. Is this unfair to say?
Why would having instincts and intuitive insights make us more vulnerable? Because having those traits of instinct and intuition, you have an awareness of those things. Having that awareness you can grow in them and identify with them more easily. So you can make more conscious choices regarding how you think and feel about your intuitive/instinctive inner nature, and thus allow others to get a vote in that judgement process.
When we allow others to get a vote in the judgement process, we are opening the door for them to shame us? This is the essence of adopting another’s judgement of anything about our inner selves, is it not?
In general, in our society, those traits are shameful. Logic rules. An emotional person is shameful, because they aren’t being logical. But it’s women’s intuition that allowed us to survive long enough to have an age of reason.
Not to say men know no shame ever, we actually do. I can go into the science/biology of it, or just make it more human. Men can know shame, because they can know empathy. And women inspire empathy in us, which does not mean they are to blame for our shame. That crap from the Bible is just misogynistic propaganda. Most young men first know shame from seeing the distress of their mothers, and like a female child being identified with the mother, they adopt the concept of that wrong.
A young male is at first hesitant to identify with his father, though his instincts tell him he is more like his father than his mother. But during the earliest stages mother was love and life, and the father was “Not the Mama!”, to quote an old TV show. This doesn’t actually change as we grow up.
Was this your experience as a little boy? Father was absent. Oh, even worse. Lonely mother can make a young boy very insecure, and make him feel pressured to be something that was never actually modeled or well defined.
So shame is not necessarily easier for men. To take a phrase from Stephen King, “A mans heart is stony.” Not incapable of change, but slow for good things or bad. But if he has fully embraced a good thing, then yes, that good is carved in stone. So we aren’t hopeless ladies.
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~