Integrity and Working Through Shame
At least once a week I have an accountability call with my good friend and partner in men's work, Damian Reid. We would go over the week's accomplishments and failures, and share what we're learning about ourselves personally and professionally.
Recently, Landmark came up in our conversation. Landmark is one of the largest personal and leadership growth organizations in the world. Damian and I have both experienced Landmark in different stages of our lives. It was in completing the Landmark Forum and their advanced curriculum for life that inspired me to become a coach. One of the tenets of Landmark is integrity, and a topic of our call was where are we not in integrity.
Someone who possesses integrity is seen as having strong moral principles, virtues and sound judgment. They are honest and guided to doing the right thing. We use the euphemism, "keeping your word" for someone with high integrity. In Landmark, integrity has a lot to do with authenticity - being true to oneself. And authenticity is the foundation for a life of freedom, power and joy. When we're not living with integrity we're essentially lying to ourselves and others.
While I fully subscribe to this understanding we leave out something vitally important to what living with integrity truly means. And there's much more healing and growth available to us when we can delve into this other dimension of integrity.
Integrity is about wholeness.
Integrity is about fully accepting everything we were, we are and who we're becoming.
As children, life taught us to hide aspects of who we are to cope at home, in school and out in our communities. Some of us were encouraged to grow up too quickly, to man up, robbing us from our childhood and the ability to connect with love. We were taught to hide our emotions and imaginations, and that we needed to work harder and assert ourselves to get ahead. We may have had to deal with overbearing mothers and absent fathers and various forms of abuse and trauma with little to no support. And particularly for young boys of color, sons of immigrant families, in a White-dominant culture, we were taught to be ashamed of our gender, color, hair, bodies, speech, customs and faith.
We suppress or cut off these parts of ourselves, creating what some call the denied self or the shadow. And later in life these qualities are looking for room to be seen, expressed and shared. But we regard these parts of ourselves with shame. And this shame can be so powerful, it will sabotage our best efforts towards a meaningful and fulfilling life.
It is one thing to feel shame for not keeping your promises, or doing the wrong thing, or making a mistake. We can learn and recover from these episodes. It's something else when we associate shame with the fundamentals of who we are. For some it can create an inner struggle that can be so unbearable to manage without some kind of unhealthy strategies such as deprecating self-talk, drugs, alcohol, sex or work. On one hand, our natural abilities and qualities want to be free and shared with our world. And on the other hand, sabotaging beliefs of worthiness and shame keep them concealed.
To restore integrity at this depth does require us to work through the feelings of shame, to explore our denied parts, to dive into our shadows to bring our whole self to light. It is in this work we rediscover our authentic self as the foundation for a life of freedom, power and joy. When we live with integrity we are not only keeping our word, we are also nurturing healthy self-esteem, confidence and love. We become the living embodiment of full self-acceptance of every aspect of who we are.
Living with integrity requires patience and practice. It requires courage and humility to look at the parts of your life you’ve been avoiding, dismissing, putting aside, over indulging or sabotaging. To restore a sense of wholeness is the work and our responsibility as men.
With love,
Charles