The pas de deux of shame

Shame is a destructive force, especially when it is re-enforced by someone you love, even more if they are your life partner. If you are uncomfortable and disconcerted by what you are, uncertain about what it makes you, fearful of how others may react, you are made vulnerable. It makes you doubt yourself. It erodes your self-confidence and your self-esteem.

If your partner's reaction is to be ashamed about that within you which they find difficulty in accepting, then they are caught in a double bind: they love you, but they do not love what you are. They want to have the one without having the other, but it cannot be like that. They will not face or embrace what it is they find distasteful within you, but you need it to be faced and embraced, very much need that to be so, to help overcome your own fears because of it - to know that you can be loved as you are. They love you, but reject that in you which they feel is shameful. Because you love them and value their opinion of you, you take on that shame that they feel and it drives you further into a more permanent and damaging shame. Such a poisonous dance for two.

But what if that which is being denied is what your core being is? What if it is about how you were born, how you are made?

Imagine being biologically both male and female in the same body, the one hidden within the other, but no-the-less there, very much there. Now imagine your life partner denies the existence of this and makes any reference to it, any illusion, any sign or mention completely and utterly taboo. Think how that might drive you into feeling shunned. Making you feel that so much as the least mention and you will be completely and totally rejected as an abhorrent object of unmitigated shame.

They have found some form of accommodation with it by exporting their difficulties, by denying that it is there. This puts the onus on you join their game of pretending that it does not exist - or facing being shunned.

That is the pas de deux of shame.