Understanding How Shame Hinders Clear Requests

If you have been practicing making requests from the consciousness of Mindful Compassionate Dialogue or Nonviolent Communication, you likely find it pretty challenging. My students often say that making requests is the most challenging skill to integrate. One reason for this difficulty is the presence of shame regarding feelings and needs.

If you are like most people, you grew up in an environment in which the relationship to feeling, needs, and specific requests was modeled in one of the following three ways:

1. Feelings and needs were not expressed or spoken. They were exiled. There was an unspoken agreement to not rock the boat, but simply to go along and maintain harmony at all costs.

2. Particular feelings and needs were okay at certain times or perhaps for only certain family members while others were shamed, dismissed, and belittled.

3. Feelings and needs were spoken, shouted, and mixed up in a confusing tangle of blame and enmeshment.

Experiences like these leave you unsure of the validity feelings and needs and who is responsible for what.  This kind of conditioning often triggers shame regarding feelings and needs. Shame usually functions on an unconscious level. It is a voice in the background telling you that something is wrong with you and your experience of feelings and needs or that you are somehow broken and others don't experience what you experience.  Since, without support, shame could be debilitating, you find ways to move away from it internally.

One of the most common ways to move away from shame is to defend or criticize others. Defensiveness and  criticism move attention away from authentic feelings and needs and the shame that arises with them, while also allowing an indirect and limited expression of feelings and needs. Mixed in with this is the thinking error that if you show you are not wrong or you make the other person wrong, your feelings and needs will be validated.  

Both shame and the impulse to move away from it, makes expressing and hearing requests difficult. Without the confidence that your needs are valid, your request gets expressed with a defensive or critical tone. And, when you hear requests from others, you are more likely to hear threat or criticism. Considering all that may lie underneath a simple request, you can hopefully access compassion for yourself and others around the difficulty of this subtle practice.

True requests from the frameworks of Mindful Compassionate Dialogue and Nonviolent Communication, not only require the courage and confidence to stand in the validity of your feelings and needs, but also creativity and an ability to negotiate.  It's no small thing to ask yourself to be direct with an expression of feelings, needs, and specific requests.  

Finding the courage and confidence to make true requests is something that requires support from those who can consistently embrace your vulnerability and thus create a space for you to bring shame into the light where it can be healed. People who can genuinely be present for vulnerability tend to set clear and direct boundaries, engage in consistent self-care, offer more empathy than advice, listen more than they talk. They are also able to share their own vulnerability in a context that can honor and hold such sharing.

When you are with such people, you can work toward dissolving shame by sharing little bits of vulnerability at a time and mindfully taking in the new experience of being received with care. Just catching an impulse to defend or criticize and then pausing to focus on a full inhale and exhale, and watching the impulse until it falls away, helps to interrupt the cycle of shame.  As your relationship to feelings and needs becomes one of acceptance and allowing, you will find that requests become a simple and accessible part of everyday life.

Practice

Take a moment now to celebrate the places in your consciousness that are free from shame, by naming three true requests you made with ease recently.