How to Bake a Marble Cake of Shame

One of the most common ways we manage feelings of shame is to bake them into our own, individual marble cakes–that rich, colorful mixture of vanilla and chocolate cake batters that’s an exciting discovery of childhood. But what could a delicious marble cake possibly have to do with shame?

A marble cake’s best feature is its combination of contrasting flavors. Once blended together and baked, a marble cake can only be served in a swirling slice that’s both light and dark. You can’t ask for a separate slice of vanilla or chocolate cake when a marble cake is served.

We handle the tough emotion of shame the same way. In How Shame Runs the World, you will learn that shame actually occurs in two distinctly different “flavors”–“prosocial” shame that daily guides our lives toward success and “corrosive” shame that only brings us pain. But we have never been taught that these two, distinct “flavors” of shame exist. Instead, all feelings of shame we experience get blended together in our minds as a marble cake of shame that is always served to us as a single flavor combination, the flavor of “bad news.” All of us have learned to register any feelings of shame we experience as nothing more than derogatory, harmful judgments about ourselves.

This week, in MLive Media Group’s column “Dear Annie” by Annie Lane, a writer asks for ideas about how to handle shame about having an affair while married. But the shame that needs to be handled is not the writer’s. Instead, it belongs to her friend, a friend who keeps calling the writer to constantly unburden herself, “to revisit every detail, every regret and every ‘what if.’” Understandably, the writer is frustrated, tired, and at her wit’s end about how to handle her friend’s ceaseless confession of free-flowing shame.

What can the writer do? In reading Chapter 13’s Four Key Lessons Up Front in How Shame Runs the World, the writer will learn that her burdened and burdensome friend must first recognize the huge marble cake she’s baked for herself. It consists of corrosive shame that is relentlessly punishing her, as well as prosocial shame that’s available to teach her a crucial lesson about what works and what doesn’t work for her in conducting her marriage. But the friend doesn’t know how to recognize and separate these two types of shame, so she cannot solve the shame she feels and let go of the awful weight she carries.

The situation can be simply fixed. (Hint: While it’s not up to the writer to “fix” her friend, the writer can read How Shame Runs the World herself and share how its lessons have helped her in her own life. This is a much better plan that offering unrequested, “helpful” advice.) Ongoing, repetitive, painful feelings of shame can be identified, sorted out, and understood as two, distinctly different recipes about shame. Only then can shame be completely resolved. The friend who has “carried…shame ever since and can barely live with herself now” can permanently heal her pain.