Lets Talk About Shame

Lets talk about shame my friends. 

Today I had a situation where I felt shame. Not during the interaction, but after. It has been a couple of hours since the interaction and I cannot move it from my mind. It is intrusive and taking over. I have discussed in previous posts about the shame and other negative feelings being diagnosed with ADHD and Autism can have. Majority of these, from memory, were reflections on past scenarios. 

Today I come to you from within the shame storm.

So what happened? You will be surprised, it is something very minor and none of the people concerned will probably give it another thought. This is generally the nature of the moments in which we experience shame. I, however, am currently fixated on and cannot move these feelings no matter how rational I be. That is the problem with shame, no matter how much you can rationalise it, no matter what you do, sometimes it just shows up, plonks itself on the couch in your head (or stomach, or heart) and chills like an unwelcome house guest. 

The unwelcome house guest in my mind came from a conversation I had walking out of a meeting. The interactions probably lasted all of 5 minutes, not even. Nothing really in consideration to the time I am spending with it. 

I was in a meeting with external agencies from the one I work in. Another member of the meeting I thought looked familiar but could not place the person. That is, until they said their name and I realised I had worked with their mother previously. Upon leaving the meeting we were waiting for the lift and their was a group of us. I asked this individual if my previous co-worker was their mother and they confirmed. In the course of the trip down and walking out of the building (first floor, lifts by the door), I had made one, maybe two comments, small talk and we went on our ways. Firstly, I am terrible at small talk and often just blurt things out therefore the first point of shame. Should I have mentioned I made the connection? (It can be weird because I remember random stuff about people that the average person necessarily wouldn’t, could be construed as creepy?), should I have made the comment about the co-workers change in employment (they have thrived since and we worked together a long time ago), should I just have said nothing. This leads to my next point, what is the co-worker going to think when they hear about the interaction? When I knew them (think 10 years ago) I was a very different person. What others think of me is absolutely none of my business and will not have any impact on my life at all, however this is what the unwanted house guest does, bees totally irrational yet more and more seductive and charismatic the more you try to get them to go away. 

So here I am in my shame storm. For me typing this post is helpful because it is creating distance between me and my little unwanted house guest. The house guest is still sitting there but I am walking into another room and closing the door until the house guest wants to let themselves out. 

I have referred to my experience as a shame storm, because feelings like this are just like the weather, they come and they go. Sometimes its a little rain shower, sometimes its a hurricane but eventually, the sun always comes out again. It may take a long time, but it does come out again. This isn’t just something for people with Autism and ADHD, this is something everyone experiences.  I think with us neurodivergent people, it can look a little different and the severity of the storm would be different to that of someone who is neurotypical, but at the end of the day, we all experience shame, and, like any negative emotion and any day the weather is terrible, it will pass, eventually.