53 Significant Factors of Traumatic Shame
We all have shame. It’s part of the human condition.
Shame and primal abandonment are reciprocal. Whereas Abandonment is the fear of disconnection, Shame is feeling unworthy of connection. Their relationship is cyclical. They reinforce each other.
Some of us are more shackled by shame than others. At any given time, depending on triggers, we operate somewhere along a silent shame continuum.
We consider shame to be traumatic when it has an ongoing impact on how we feel about ourselves and function in the world.
Shame works silently within. We tend to keep it hidden. We hide it from others, and if we can, ourselves.
Shame has a corrosive impact in that it can interfere in our self-esteem, confidence, and goal-achievement.
Shame is the primary source of performance anxiety. It holds us back from shining our light on the world.
Shame is the source of our inhibitedness, uncertainty, inability to reach our potential – all additional recursive sources of shame.
Shame is responsible for the insecurity that sabotage our relationships.
Shame triggers self-doubt when someone – anyone – disconnects from us or walks away (Is something wrong with me, something I’m lacking, something I did wrong?).
Self is the main tool for negotiating our way through life. Traumatic shame represents bruising to that Self. Its impact is therefore devastating.
Shame is trauma because it is based in primal abandonment fear (you fear abandonment because you feel unworthy of being kept), which triggers fight or flight response.
Once the mammalian brain is aroused to a state of emergency, however subliminally, we react by falling back on automatic, over-learned old defense mechanisms.
Shame’s myriad defenses become self-defeating, causing us to keep repeating the shame trauma. These “repetition compulsions” as they are called in the field of trauma, interfere in our lives.
Shame begets shame. It interferes in our ability to reach our potential. Failure to reach our potential is yet another source of shame.
Clinically speaking, shame is dissociated, detached from consciousness.
We react to shame triggers that we are not necessarily conscious of.
Shame dissociation is occurring at the very moment that it is arousing performance anxiety. We don’t necessarily feel this shame as shame; we feel it as anxiety, a rush of adrenaline, rage perhaps, the urge to do well, relief if we are succeeding, distress if we are not.
The primitive logic of the shame itself – the negative message that we’d incorporated into our sense of Self (I’m really not good enough, I’m unworthy) – that part often remains detached from consciousness where we can’t get to it.
Shame’s dissociative nature explains why the rational mind is not able to resolve shame so easily.
In the course of any normal day, on a subliminal level, the raw human nerve of shame can twinge when we feel even slightly dissed, overlooked, criticized, excluded, ignored, misunderstood, invisible, rated, judged, ‘diagnosed’, unheard, condescended to, unappreciated, taken for granted, not chosen, not reciprocated with, or given unsolicited advice. These and many other seemingly minor triggers can affect our mood, level of confidence, even our posture and facial expressions without our being aware of it.
We’ve been developing personality defenses since childhood to cope with and assuage shame.
Personality itself can be seen as a defense against shame.
Looking across the shame spectrum, on one side we can see the people-pleasers, perfectionists, co-dependents, people who keep a low profile, those who wear masks and guises to cover up how they feel about themselves. On the other we can see the attention-seekers, extraverts, the overtly confident, people who enjoy the spotlight and thrive on performing.
Being the class clown may be a diversionary tactic to camouflage shame. So might be being the bully, or victim, or top athlete.
The spectrum also includes those who boldly display shamelessness, examples of which are prominently on display in our political arena. Keeping one’s dukes up and showing audacity in the face of criticism can be a well-fortified defense against traumatic shame. This might seem praiseworthy to those who feel a little “less than, “put down”, or who are shy, inhibited, easily shamed. They might secretly idolize and wish they could be more like the shameless person who can lead with brazen, unflappability.
We developed our defenses early on as autonomic, knee-jerk, habituated reactions to shame.
These defenses tend to become maladaptive in adulthood. For example, “avoiding” helped us survive an emotionally turbulent childhood, but doesn’t serve us well when we have a term paper due. “Overeating” helped compensate for not feeling good about ourselves in childhood, but doesn’t help us now when we try to stay fit and trim.
Even when we are fully aware of how destructive these old behavior patterns are, we find them difficult to break because the trauma of shame has set these defense mechanisms into the deep structure of the brain.
Why does shame hide behind a wall of secrecy? We’ve learned to become ashamed of our shame.
We don’t want our shame it to show lest it red flag us (blushing be damned!).
If we don’t hide the shame we feel within, people would know that we are (or a significant part of us is) inherently unworthy, not enough, not special, inadequate, incapable, insignificant, puny, ineffectual, helpless, dependent, pathetic, inferior, not up to par, different, weak and powerless, damaged, dysfunctional, a failure, disgusting, repulsive, ugly, and more.
These are feelings, and fleeting at that, but to the rigid closed brain system of the unconscious mind, they seem like facts.
A part of us firmly believes the efficacy of these shame messages.
What to do about it? Thanks to the pioneering work of Brene Brown and other clinicians, shame is becoming more conscious, less taboo. We are beginning to recognize the shame within us and own up to it as part of being human.
In fact, any clinicians emphasize that talking about our shame, bringing it out into the light, is good for us.
Psychology literature from the past had long suggested that therapists ought not to use the word ‘shame’ with their clients, presuming it to be too emotionally charged with taboo, too toxic an image to invoke in the mind, in other words, too shaming.
Sigmund Freud had mostly avoided addressing shame directly.
The current literature on shame discusses how little had been written about the subject in the past.
Clinicians have since uncovered many of hidden facets of shame and developed techniques for bringing shame out of the shadows.
Clinicians are finding ways of treating the trauma of shame.
This offers a beginning.
An important area that needs to be added to the body of work is connecting shame to its primary source in primal abandonment fear.
Abandonment and Shame are joined and reciprocal (I’m ‘not enough’ to compel my loved one to stay with me forever – I will be abandoned).
Shame-reduction involves tapping into the emotional resources within the primal wound of abandonment.
The outer layers and manifestations of this wound are diverse and deceptive in that they guide us away from this primal source.
Therapy can go off on tangents about everything else except the deep root of shame itself (“I’m angry at my friend for dissing me”).
Without shame-directed therapy, people are left to heal themselves with easier-said-than-done platitudes or self-help prescriptions.
People might also spend endless hours in an uninitiated therapist’s office.
People blame themselves if their therapy and self-help efforts don’t work, heaping more shame upon themselves.
There is a more direct and effective path to take. It is safe and instantly rewarding and works directly with the originating source of shame and abandonment.
We can approach shame with a few simple tools that involve doing, i.e. Targeted sharing about shame and primal fear one-on-one or within a group; Guided visualization to arouse our imagination in creating positive images for the brain; Using tools to connect to the primal emotional core, and Commencing a healthy new relationship to Self through Separation Therapy
Shame-reduction therapy heals and empowers the Self to bulldoze through our emotional stumbling blocks and shine our unique, individual light into the world.
Separation Therapy is one of the tools you will learn in my workshop.