Personal Perspective: We all go through it, no one is immune, and nothing produces more universal shame in our society than aging.
While we certainly suffer many painful losses as we age, we also can gain notable gifts.We all go through it, no one is immune, and nothing can produce more universal shame in our society than the shame that often accompanies aging. People can get shamed for different qualities, beliefs, or behaviors, but we all are exposed to spoken or unspoken shame as we age, and it starts when we’ve barely begun to enjoy our adulthood. By our mid-30s we’re already beginning to experience the changes.
What compounds this predicament is that it is not just society projecting this, it is also internal—we have absorbed these messages from our social environment. In our 60s and 70s, we must work with the entrenched stereotypes we have absorbed. Ideas like we are out to pasture, that life is over, we are supposed to be relegated to sitting in our rocking chairs, and we have no productive use in society anymore.
As a specialist in working with shame, I have come to believe in the concept of “healthy shame,” in which we are willing to see and accept our limitations and understand that we are all human and we all have limitations. We all have strengths and we all have weaknesses and these strengths and weaknesses vary and change over time. The concept of healthy shame is featured in my new book, “Embracing Shame: How to Stop Resisting Shame and Transform It Into a Powerful Ally.
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