Humility vs. shame

They aren't the same thing, but each can masquerade as the other. This confuses me: I need humility to make an honest recovery, and I need to eradicate shame for the same reason. But when I try to think about humility, I often connect with shame instead.

The difference has to with honest self-awareness, yes? Shame is a sense of inner worthlessness, a conviction of no-goodness. Its roots seem to delve deep into the psyche and its history into early childhood. Shame, especially unacknowledged shame, contributes to addiction in part because if you're carrying around a lot of it, you will often feel pain that seems to require altering or medication. And shame also leads one to allow (or cause) oneself to be victimized and/or to fail to take good care of oneself, behaviors that also feed addictions.

Shame is comprised of lies, right? Distortions. People aren't inherently worthless or no-good. I'm not sure whether I have yet bought into a fluffy-bunny vision of the inherent lovableness of all human beings. But I can buy into an inherent blank-slateness. People are born innocent; from the beginning the world challenges us, sometimes in ways we can't easily overcome. Survival requires accommodation, and for a great many different reasons (many of which are beyond our control), some of us adapt more constructively than others. We become responsible for our actions as we attain the capability to reason about them. But mistakes are inevitable, not because we're crappy people but because we're simply people.

The proof (?) that shame is a great lie might be that it doesn't foster growth. It fosters stagnation, withdrawal, self-loathing, depression. It's a friend of entropy. It works against the improvement of the human condition, individually and collectively.

Humility is a different animal altogether, though I can't claim intense familiarity with it. It's a great (and difficult) truth, not a great lie. It's an honest examination of oneself: gifts as well as defects, contributions as well as destructive acts. Humility seems to include, from my observations at AA, a genuine recognition of how very much one has to learn. It includes willingness to be taught and to acknowledge that one is part of a larger Universe to which one has certain responsibilities.

It seems to me that shame, paradoxically, enables a certain arrogance in that it separates us from people. The inner conviction that one is just too fucked up to recover or grow or improve offers an easy way out. If I'm not like you "good" people, I can retreat and curl up and die, or anyhow drink myself into oblivion (same thing, see?), because there's no point trying to change. If my flaws are so deep, so profound, that I'm not worth saving, then fuck it, I'm going to buy a bottle of wine.

I'm not suggesting the above as a conscious thought process of most alcoholics, not commonly anyway. But some version of it lies under the surface, and frequently not far under, for many. I think I'm one of them, as E suggested the other day. For now I'm kind of unclear about what to do about it, but in terms of making progress in AA I think an understanding of the difference between shame and humility is critical. Otherwise it becomes too easy to substitute the former for the latter, which means your recovery is founded on lies and moreover won't heal your psyche. End result: relapse.

Another paradox is that true humility, a truly honest look at how I've lived the last number of years, is likely to feel rather shitty. That's because I haven't been true to my values in a variety of ways. AA promises that conducting an honest moral inventory, followed by sharing your discoveries with your Higher Power and another person, followed by making amends when it's possible and not harmful to do so, will result in newfound peace and healing. To undertake this project with sincerity is, from what I'm hearing, far scarier than simply trying not to drink.

Fortunately for my comfort zone, I'm getting way ahead of myself (again). I have quite a bit of groundwork to lay before I'll be ready for those steps. Part of it probably has to do with working on the shame thing, though I think that's likely to be a lifetime project.