I spent decades of my life living in toxic, pervasive shame due to developmental trauma and not knowing it. Embracing healthy shame has replaced it and given me the internal resourcing to enrich my relationship with my self and to learn to trust others who are safe. This is a gift that keeps on giving daily. It’s not that I don’t feel shame: I am a human being and it’s an emotion, so there is no way to avoid shame. What is different is my internal response to it.
I grew up in a home that was toxically dysfunctional and abusive. I was groomed to be the Scapegoat within the family dynamics. Coming out of trauma and abuse like I did, my identity was completely intertwined with toxic shame.
I had no idea the toxic shame lens was how I viewed myself, others, and the world at large. Toxic and pervasive shame was my reality.
A history of inter-generational trauma and multi-generational transmission of shame form a very unstable foundation. My parents’ toxic shame, and its behavioral manifestation, was transmitted to me by word and deed consistently, hand in hand with abuse. I had to fit into the family system to survive.
Shame is a social construct emotion: we must be accepted by our tribe, community, family, or we won’t survive. When I’m five years old, I can’t go out and put a roof over my head or put food on the table, so I’m completely dependent on my primary caregivers. Shame’s evolutionary purpose is to keep us safe: it operates in service of our survival.
Because of this essential biological need for safety, the easiest route for my brain to protect my body while growing up was in self-abandonment: disconnecting from my emotions and adapting to the family dysfunction.
If the toxic shame told me at every turn in the road, “it’s your fault, you are bad, you are wicked, you’re not worthy, and you’re certainly not enough,” that shame would keep me small, silent, and malleable, and therefore “safe.”
I contorted myself to fit the toxic dysfunction, completely groomed to believe and accept that this was my role, on every level.
Self-abandoning and disconnecting from my emotions is at the core of my attachment wounding.
When we internalize destructive attitudes during traumatic experiences from childhood, we strengthen our shame story over and over again. I love what Bret Lyon of The Center for Healing Shame, where I was certified as a Healing Shame Practitioner, sometimes says: “shame is the answer to every question.”
If I was responsible for all the “bad” things in my childhood, then I didn’t risk disconnection by speaking up, which would have been a threat to my survival. Shame is all about physical, emotional, and nervous system safety.
Looking back, I recognize that toxic shame saved my life. In keeping me small and silent, since I didn’t speak up when atrocities were being committed, the abuse was all normalized. And if I had spoken up? It would have been worse.
Shame’s intent is to keep me safe. Circumstances in my home life were consistently unsafe. Children, as they are trying desperately to attach and attune to their primary caregivers, are amazingly intuitive on how their role presents itself and what is needed to fulfill it while staying out of trouble. Shame helped me to assimilate into the family culture, as I was parentified/adultified from a young age and was under constant control and criticism.
The family rules and mottoes were entrenched; what I know today to be true is that I couldn’t have done things any differently.
Today, I’m beyond grateful for this complicated, intricate, nuanced emotion.
We are all born with the emotion of shame, but it takes an event to trigger it. I couldn’t tell you what my triggering event was: I just know that it happened when I was pretty little since all of my earliest memories are tinged with feeling like I was wrong, like I wasn’t good enough, and like I was just inherently bad. This was my identity.
Toxic shame happens when our emotions, feelings, wants, needs, and behaviors are met with consistent/chronic judgment, censure, and punitive responses. When we have toxic shame, it becomes pervasive and internalized: we don’t know anything other than that shame is who we are, showing up a long time after the original abuse/dysfunction happened. I essentially was shown daily that it wasn’t okay for me to feel what I felt or to express it (authenticity), and this goes against healthy brain development.
Children don’t automatically know how to regulate their emotions and manage their behavior. This is where co-regulation with their primary and nurturing caregivers comes into play. Because neglected or (emotionally, physically, sexually) abused children aren’t getting their needs met by responsive caregivers, the children’s biological imperatives of self-soothing and self-regulation are stunted.
So it’s no surprise I landed in therapy at 20 years old, unable to regulate my emotions, constantly activated in my nervous system, triggered in my brain and body, with recurring nightmares and no ability to self-soothe. I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety.
I remember thinking that I felt like I was losing my mind: I was terrified to go to sleep at night and succumb to the pain that had been trapped for so long, but being awake was awful, too, so it was a constant horrid cycle for me.
Entering therapy was the hardest and best thing I ever did for myself.
Throughout the years of 1 to 1 therapy, group therapy, EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), brainspotting, somatic work… I remember the first time my therapist used the word “shame” with me.
I thought, shame? What? Why would I have shame?
She told me once that I was the most dissociated person she had ever treated, and while I thought, “oh, I don’t think that is a compliment,” she went on to say that shame was like a coat I never took off, even if it’s 90 degrees outside. That started the evolution of my seeking and learning and painfully trying to break down what was shame in me and what was the “real” me — my Self.
My therapist guided me to start with the emotional health perspective. Emotions are unconscious somatic sensation: they rise up in the body and are an amazing measurement of how we feel. Emotions are data, like a personalized report from body to brain! And shame was an emotion.
Learning to see that all emotions had value was both painful and hard. The ones that hurt and were uncomfortable felt like my baseline, while sitting in them, leaning into them, felt unbearable. Over the years, I dug in deeper — cognitively — as it was the only thing I felt I could control: how much I learned in an attempt to try to make meaning of my trauma and to give language to the experiences, emotions, and shame-story of my trauma.
I read everything I could get my hands on. John Bradshaw’s book, The Shame that Binds Us, became my go-to in trying to understand how I had gotten to my early 30’s still so steeped in toxic shame, even though I had been out of my parents’ house for years.
Brené Brown came out with her research on shame when I was in my mid-30’s. Her TED talks, articles, and books became my mainstay for a long time, especially through an incredibly hard period in my life when my mother suicided, and I went into addiction. I did so much work in therapy as life was happening around me: I was married, divorced, raising two children on my own, and was solely financially responsible for myself and my children; I was exhausted all the time.
Bit by bit and little by little, working on my toxic shame was a process, I realized. What I didn’t know at the time was the work I was doing was indeed the transformation from toxic shame to healthy shame: I had no language for how/why it felt different from toxic shame, but it did.
The process was slow and challenging at every twist in the road. Being raised as I was, I could not stop cracking the whip on myself because my “flaws” would be revealed to the world and would be visible to others.
The stress of living with toxic shame is unrelenting. It’s the perfect setup.(to what?)
When I did do something that I could have healthy pride over, I was unable to celebrate and be kind to myself: I could only whoosh out a breath and then jump to the next expectation because, yes, I had escaped being shamed that time, but if anyone else only knew who I was deep down inside, I would be shunned or exiled.
Living in a state of constant hypervigilance — a state of heightened awareness, accompanied by behavior that aims to prevent danger — meant that I was never in a place where I could be curious about what was driving my experience: I could only survive and keep trudging. A lot of hopelessness and despair, grief and anxiety colored my days.
Transforming toxic shame into healthy shame meant increasing my capacity to get through those moments with maybe less of an arousal surge (fight or flight) or constriction (freeze, fawn, or flop), less of a derailment with a shorter time span. This was a crucial point in my shame journey as the more I felt agency over these states, the more I felt empowered over my body and my own physiological experience.
As I kept going to therapy, learning, and going back to school to change careers, I started to notice that there were times when my shame was less in a given situation, and that motivated me to change my behavior in the future when confronted with something similar.
I felt peace upon thinking, “okay, yeah, I made a mistake and I choose to practice doing it differently next time.” These delicate buds coming up from the charred ground of my past and toxic shame were incredible to me. It wasn’t across the board, but healthy shame was starting to obliterate the toxic shame.
Over the years, the transformation from toxic to healthy shame has given me so many gifts: embracing shame on a daily basis, sitting with my emotions and leaning into them, waiting for my bodily response before making decisions — these are all beautiful nuances of healthy shame.
My healthy shame motivates me to do things differently when I make a mistake (and I make a lot of them). Each time it happens, there is almost this glee about “Oooh, I get to see where the shame pocket is!” Healthy shame helps me to accept my limitations, to be okay with others making mistakes, and to operate more from a place of self-compassion, compassion for others, and acceptance.
I also can see when I’m in my preferred shame reaction (for instance, denial, avoidance, or attacking self/others) or when someone else is, and what a gift it is to see these reactions more objectively. In the arena of emotional health, I learned how to set boundaries, but balancing that with the ability to see someone’s shame reaction — which then helps them to stay out of the emotion of shame — can take the “personal” out of it so that I’m quickly righted to the place of better understanding.
Another gift healthy shame has given me is the ability to feel regret for things I have done that have harmed others, though it takes away the blame and shame of self over those mistakes.
Healthy shame mobilizes, while toxic shame shuts down. I love how healthy shame takes away the disconnection from self. It’s connective and integrates my cognitive experience with my heart and gut, which is constantly noting who/what is good or bad for me.
Embracing the ultimate protector — knowing that shame can be a both/and rather than an either/or — is a beautiful, messy, ultimately healing process.
Hoping you are taking good care of all your parts today, especially those with toxic shame. You deserve healing and nurturing. You are enough.
© Jennifer Kindera LLC, 2023. All Rights Reserved.
—
This post was previously published on medium.com.
***
From The Good Men Project on Medium
 |
 |
 |
 |
***
Join The Good Men Project as a Premium Member today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
A $50 annual membership gives you an all access pass. You can be a part of every call, group, class and community.
A $25 annual membership gives you access to one class, one Social Interest group and our online communities.
A $12 annual membership gives you access to our Friday calls with the publisher, our online community.
Register New Account
Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
—–
Photo credit: Matt Duncan on Unsplash
