Archeologies of Shame in the Body

When Shame Speaks Through Blood

Collage I made of a photo of my grand mother Joanna. Here at an older age. She died when she was only 61.

When I think about shame, I often think of my grandmother. I think of myself. I carry it in my body. I carry shame in my body.

To remember her is not simply to recall a woman.

It is to stand at the edge of a ruptured riverbed—one carved by war, poverty, exile, patriarchy, and the weaponized beauty that systems both desire and punish.

She was a fascinating woman. Some say she was a witch.

I think I look like her—though not exactly. Differently.

But I’m not here to tell her story.

I want only to sit with her—quietly.
To look into her deep eyes filled with pain and unspoken sorrow.
To meet her as she may never have been met:
Without demand.
Without decorum.
Without the compulsion to sanitize her for history.

I’m not here to solve anything for her.
Not for my family.
Not even for myself.

What I am here to do is more radical: I refuse to exile her complexity—
Even if it stains the myth that helped my family survive.

Unbinding Shame from the individual

Shame in the modernist frame is a flaw in the self. In the transgenerational framework (can also be called the meta-relational), shame is an inherited strategy—crafted to prevent rupture in relationship.

In my lineage, shame became a kind of currency.
It was used to navigate survival, to shield us from violence, scarcity, and disapproval.
It kept the family “together”—but at what cost? Probably the cost of everyone´s truth.

I come from a line of strong women, I said that before. And of course, I am strong myself too.

I often think : what was denied to preserve the appearance of strength? What have we been shamed for : softness? needs? refusal? longing? boundaries? Who carried the shame of others—in silence? What parts of us were exiled so we could belong?

My grandmother - Ioanna was her name - was a woman of secrets, silences, and strength.

She was a nurse. She was a beauty.
She possibly was a sex worker.
She was also a mother who had to make an impossible choice.

She was a widow with a baby in her hands.
She was the lover of a violent man.
She was the daughter of displacement and death.
She was a body that broke under the weight of pain and medication.

With a metal wire clothes hanger in her hands and silence in her mouth, she ended life within her—I have been told - again and again—alone, aching, and unseen.

How did she carry all that without disappearing entirely?

Whether she was a sex worker or not is, in a way, secondary to the truth and the love I have always felt for her. I know her body became a site of negotiation, survival, and perhaps, shame. She may have endured the impossible contradiction of being desired and disrespected by the same system—men who longed for her and harmed her, society that praised her beauty and punished her autonomy. And if she held this in silence, my shame is not mine alone, —it is an echo of her story too. An unspoken story.

The Orphaning: A Core Wound

My grand mother placed one of her daughters (my mother) in an orphanage. Not the other daughter. This event has rippled the field. This has seeded a rivalry, a battle, a gap, a misery based not only on attention, but on a felt betrayal of safety and belonging. Between two sisters back then. Between two sisters today (my sister and myself).

The sisters back then may have never named it—but that kind of wound shapes the DNA of intimacy. It says: love can be revoked. One is chosen, the other is cast out.

Sisters are not just family—they are often the closest proximity of the system’s unresolved wounds. When lineage cannot heal vertically (parent to child), it starts pressing horizontally—onto siblings. The rivalry, the jealousy, the over-functioning, the collapses, the mirrored hurts—they are not just sister issues. They are ancestral echo chambers.

I do not talk to my sister anymore.

This has been on and off for years. We do not understand each other. I have tried but I have failed. I feel awful about that. I am - consciously and unconsciously - trying to repair the unrepairable by being the good one, the strong one, the one who understands, the one who doesn’t abandon, the one who pardons.

There is a shadow beneath the dynamic with my sister. Even if neither of us went to an orphanage, the pattern lives on: One gets attention, the other collapses. One becomes the responsible one, the other the needy one. One sacrifices, the other receives (but never feels whole).

I have promised myself not to harden my heart in resentment, and not to calcify my pain into verdicts. Until I understood it is much more than me and her.

The Failed Mother-Daughter Transposition

As my mother was not mothered, she was not able to be my mother. She was too wounded and emotionally unavailable. So, early on, I took on the task to mother her (but that is another story for another time) and of course, to mother my sister. I was 8 when it all started. The truth is, I was never in a mutual relationship with my sister. What we had was a sort of compensation. This created a false sense of intimacy and a power dynamic that eventually led to resentment. She hates my authority. I hate her dependence. Neither of us ever got to just… be sisters.

If only we could all turn toward our wounds with eyes wide open—and not only for our own, but all those that echo through generations, carried by women whose grief was too raw for language, too dangerous for story, too inconvenient for legacy. In doing so, maybe we have a chance to be something more than be a descendant or a good ancestor. We can become the weaver of rupture—someone who dares to tend to frayed relational threads not by forcing repair, but by staying with what was too long denied.

∞

I have tried to be a bridge for my mother, even when she could not or would not walk across.

∞

I am trying to hold a connection to my grandmother across time, shame, and silence.

∞

Late, yesterday, I wrote a letter to Ioanna.

Grandmother,

I don’t need your life to be clean to honor it.
I see the threads of war, hunger, beauty, shame, and impossible choice woven through your days.
I do not ask you to explain why you gave my mother away.
I do not ask you to justify your pain.
I just want you to know:

You are no longer hidden.
Not behind myth. Not behind beauty. Not behind medicine.

I will not sanctify your suffering.
But I will sanctify your right to complexity.

I will carry your memory as a question, not a judgment.
And I will not pass your shame forward.

You are part of me.
And through me, may you be more free.

∞

There is a lot of work that remains to be done. I know now this is a testament to the depth of the entanglement—and probably also to my capacity to keep turning toward all this again and again, even when it feels impossible. After all, shame often guards what was once punished.

“In my lineage, shame was a teacher of silence.
It taught us how to disappear just enough to be tolerated.
But it never taught us how to be loved without performing.”

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Pause here. (I invite you in a somatic invitation)

Drop your attention into your body—not to fix anything, but to notice:

Where do you first feel shame, when it rises?

Throat? Chest? Gut? Skin?

Now ask gently:

Whose voice is that? Is it yours… or your mother’s? Or your grandmother’s? Is it a teacher, a religion, a culture? What tone does it use? What does it say?

We are not trying to overwrite it. Just witness its inheritance.

What qualities in your lineage were ridiculed, punished, or exiled?
(Sensuality? Rest? Dependence? Rage? Pleasure? Creativity?)

What were the women in your family shamed for? Not being enough? Being too much? Not needing anyone? Needing too much?

∞

With love, and dedication, Sage.