Accountability Without Shame

It’s difficult to accept wrongdoings and mature from our mistakes when we fail to make the distinction between the goodness of our core and the poorness of our behaviors. Shame is poison to our self-image, stemming from defining our worth through our actions and what we do, rather than who we are in our essence.

In a world where our childhood environments didn’t hold our emotions as delicately as they needed to be and were instead quick to be scolded + judged + corrected, we learned to blame ourselves for skills that no one guided us in building. Many of us grew up confusing our underdevelopment as a failure of ourselves rather than a failure of the system.

While that doesn’t justify poor actions or our negative impact, what it does is make space for forgiving our unconscious mistakes and safely learning more righteous choices. Receiving grace in blind spots - what we don’t know we don’t know. And not blaming or shaming ourselves for our “unknowing”, since only new awareness gives us new responsibility. With the additional recognition that most of us are underdeveloped in relational skills that we also have a social responsibility to proactively learn whenever we can.

When we remove shame in wrongdoing and feel seen in our pure intentions, our hearts can more effortlessly open to constructive feedback from people we trust, understanding the weight of our actions from a place of self-worth rather than a place of worthlessness.

This reduces mentally correcting something labeled as “wrong” to avoid doing “wrong” to avoid being bad, so that instead we go deeper - safely connecting to our loved ones’ hurt responses knowing that their pain doesn’t change our inherent value.

This way our behavior modification involves a deeper layer of heart connection and correction, giving greater potential for long-term progress, healing, and aligned actions moving forward.