How many times did we all hear that line as a child? How many still hear it today? Just keep your ears open around families, and you will still hear children getting told, “You should be ashamed of yourself!”

Hey, that’s great advice. I should be ashamed of myself. Because we all know that shame is a healthy way of approaching life. Psychologists have proven that being ashamed of oneself ultimately leads to a variety of wonderful benefits, including:

• Low Self-esteem
• Inability to form healthy relationships
• Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
• Depression
• Chronic Fatigue
• Bipolar disorder
• Disociative / Multiple Personality Disorder
• Alcoholism and Drug Abuse
• Repressed anger
• Self-destructive behaviour
• Abusive behaviour towards others
• Addiction
• Suicide

And these are just a few of the health benefits associated with being ashamed of yourself. If you have more you’d like to add, just hit the comments button and type away.

For those of us raised in religious households, the implications go even further. [And this is not meant as an attack on religion, but a comment about how religion is misinterpreted and bent the wrong way.] We learned that God created us, but then ended up ashamed of that creation, because we somehow found a way of offending God, and that’s when “Sin” came into the world. So now God wants us to be ashamed of ourselves. The more shame, the better, because without shame, there can be no forgiveness. We must kneel at the foot of the Cross, and gaze up at the Son of God, nailed there for our Sins. We should be ashamed of ourselves! If you’re not wallowing in shame, you probably don’t love Jesus.

Not all Christians believe that shame is good. Some of the more “liberal” minded (and therefore supposedly “wrong“) believe that God loves us, that God is not ashamed of us, and that we are forgiven for making mistakes. I wonder what life would be like without being ashamed…