The Trauma of Shame and the Making of the Self

By Shelley Stokes and Sherron Lewis

Shame influences more of our thoughts and actions than many other emotions. Used as a punishment for bad behavior, shame acts as an incentive for us to behave in socially acceptable ways. As a common method used to regulate children's behavior, shame is by far one of the most pervasive socializing agents. Many of our more persistent, punitive, and critical feelings about ourselves stem from humiliations in early childhood even if we don't remember the specific events that prompted them. While we all experience shame from time to time, when shame becomes toxic, it can play a central role in our life-long development and functioning. At its worst, shame can become a devastating attack on one's personhood and a threat to the integrity of the self. Many books on shame and the process of healing have been written, but few have been written specifically from a psychodynamic depth psychology perspective. It is intended that The Trauma of Shame and The Making of the Self will make an important contribution to that effort. Shelley Stokes, PhD, and Sherron Lewis, LMFT Authors of Letting Go and Taking the Chance to be Real (Lewis and Stokes 2017)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781642981704

Book preview

Chapter One

Introduction

Shame and the Making of the Self

We all experience shame from time to time. In actuality, shame influences more of our actions than many other emotions. With the exception of the psychopathic personality disorder in which there is little or no sense of conscience, the experience of shame appears to be universal and inevitable as a consequence of self-awareness, reflection, and self-appraisal.

Our experience of shame can vary in intensity from the mildest social embarrassment to an overwhelming level of self-condemnation. If it lasts long enough, however, shame can change the way we see ourselves, diminish our self-esteem, dull our motivation to meet core needs, and reduce our normal feelings of entitlement. At its worst, shame may become a devastating attack on one’s personhood and a threat to the integrity of the self, which can lead to life-threatening circumstance or violence against others.

We may be only indirectly aware of feelings of shame, which may underlie feelings of intense anxiety, severe depression, or an overall inability to function in normal ways. Some of us may mask feelings of shame through use of mood-altering substances, may become severely detached from others, or experience varying forms of emotional disorder. We may even suffer from deep feelings of shame that we keep hidden from others. Indeed, it may be surprising to realize how central a role shame plays in our life-long development and functioning.

Our Earliest Experiences of Shame

Our earliest feelings of shame begin in childhood, even prior to our development of language. Common everyday failures in achieving simple goals often lead us as infants and as toddlers to feelings of being helpless, inadequate, or not big enough. Lack of parental empathy and attuned support further intensify these early feelings of insufficiency. Such natural core tendencies to experience shame, unfortunately, are often used against us in misguided parental attempts to instruct and to socialize us.

From infancy on, shame is used to punish us for our misdeeds and bad behavior. It makes us aware of our faults and imperfections, and it arouses our fears of rejection, criticism, and abandonment and, thereby, provides a powerful incentive for us to behave in socially acceptable ways. Sadly, many of our more persistent, punitive, and critical feelings about ourselves stem from experiences in childhood—feelings of not being important enough, or lovable enough, or not being seen or heard. Such early experiences can leave an imprint on the way we understand and feel about ourselves, about other people, and about the world, and can persist into adulthood even if we don’t remember the early events that prompted them.

As a child, I (SL) remember being severely spanked when my parents thought that I was acting spoiled or throwing a temper tantrum. Indeed, spanking a child will certainly decrease, if not end, the behavior in question. However, over time, it will also inhibit the child’s ability to acknowledge and express her own needs as it distorts her perception of how to feel and react to herself and others empathically. In providing no explanation that could redirect, soothe the child, and settle her down, it shames the child and silences her authentic voice. Simple statements such as, You are really angry, I know, and it’s hard to calm down or You are disappointed and it’s hard to see that we will … [fill in the blank] … again later, I promise might suffice and may need to be repeated several times as the child works through her discontent. In such interactions, the child’s needs and feelings are validated and taken into consideration. She then learns to take her own feelings and others’ feelings seriously and learns to treat herself and others compassionately.

As parents, we sometimes don’t understand the need to clarify our actions and think that the child won’t remember or be seriously impacted by these types of situations. Understandably, we may feel too tired, busy, or distracted by other things, causing us to be less sensitive to our child’s feelings and needs. Nevertheless, ongoing instances of non-recognition of a child’s needs and feelings through punishment and shaming is emotionally damaging.

While such early experiences are often unremembered, they are nonetheless retained. As the poet Maya Angelou has so eloquently expressed, we may not remember specifically what was said or done, but we never forget how we were made to feel.² We may have a global sense of things having felt bad, or of being bad, or we may vaguely remember being left alone in silence. Such experiences shape our later thoughts and feelings about ourselves, others, and the world.

This is especially true when parents who are overly emotionally reactive, judgmental, or excessively needy or otherwise emotionally damaged provide persistent critical messages to their children, thereby passing on to their children their own unresolved feelings of shame. The echoes of their negative voices, which may have seemed unquenchable and not easily appeased, can lead to adult defensive postures that render our real selves largely invisible and emotionally inaccessible and limit our possibilities of ever living fully in the present.

When Normal Shame Turns Toxic

Thus, what otherwise may be experienced as normal feelings of shame can turn toxic if shame is persistently evoked and/or not repaired. Toxic shame can start to exist as a part of our core sense of identity, passively occupying a central part of who we experience ourselves to be and can take us down a dark hole of emotional pain. We may even become so wedded to the pain of shame that there seems to be no escape from it as it may feel so central to who we sense we are.

In such a state, toxic shame can diminish our basic ability to self-sooth and stifle our sense of creativity, our capacity for intimacy, and our sense of inter-independence with others. It can disrupt our sense of self-continuity across circumstance and time. It can change the very way we see ourselves, and even corrode the very part of us that believes we are capable of change (cf. Brené Brown, Ph.D.³).

We Depend upon Our Parents

As infants and as children, we depend upon our parents for attachment, love, protection, survival, and emotional structuring. They set the rules of engagement for us as children and contribute to our sense of who we are. However, parents are only capable of reflecting back to the child, a version of who the parent understands the child to be. And much of this ability to reflect back depends on how the parent understands and perceives his/her own self. It is difficult to love and nurture one’s child if one hasn’t been loved and nurtured adequately in his/her own childhood enough to grasp the meaning of this incredible endeavor. The way in which we come to recognize our authentic self as an adult is directly related to the support our parents were willing and able to give to our self-expression during our childhood.

With parents who are emotionally healthy, this process of interactive reflection is naturally internalized by the child and is consolidated through consistent guidance and nurturing, thus allowing the child’s authentic sense of self to be safely revealed. Such children then continue guiding and nurturing their authentic self throughout their adulthood in a process of self-reflection and self-soothing.

The Impact of Emotionally Damaged Parents

Some parents, however, may be so emotionally damaged and inadequate themselves that they turn to their children for core emotional support and comfort instead of being providers of it. Many present problems may find their origin in the degree of severity of our parent’s unintentional and unconscious dysfunction and on the presence or absence of ameliorating influences in our early life.

This is especially true when the child’s core needs are suppressed in service of meeting the needs of the parents. Since the core self has been shamed into submission, a victimized persona takes its place and begins to masquerade as the real self.

This has occurred because parts of the emerging self have become arrested, thus remaining underdeveloped and, when later triggered, seek expression and become manifest in emotional and physical disorders. Constant fear of what others think of us and anxieties about being judged or not being liked emerge as a projection of how much we come to judge and dislike ourselves. Low self-worth, negative self-talk and harsh self-criticism, self-limiting beliefs, unrealistic expectations of self, and needing excessive reassurance, acceptance, and praise from others are byproducts. Shame-prone identities (Harper and Hoopes⁴) can develop, which become painfully evident and worsen over time. We may even become reluctant to express our real feelings and needs and come to feel embarrassed for even having them.

Restoration

Feelings of shame don’t just go away, or just get a little bit better every day. In fact, coping with the aftereffects of shame can be very difficult. Often, unwanted symptoms (negative thoughts, depressed and/or anxious mood, self-critical internal voices, etc.) stay and often keep returning and intruding on our present.

Further, feelings of shame can involve implicit and unconscious nonverbal memories, sensations, and emotions that can easily be reactivated. Intruding visual, auditory, and/or other somatic experiences may occur in reliving shameful experiences over and over again as if past events were still occurring in the present (cf. Rothschild 2000).

We may become hypervigilant and hyperalert to even minor signs of rejection, inadequacy, and rebuff, seeing rejection and disapproval even when there isn’t any. We may become our own worst critic, berating ourselves mercilessly. We may withdraw or become quick to react defensively or cynically, and even lash out. It may become more and more difficult to believe that others could possibly see us in a positive light. Our negative inner voices may tell us You’re stupid, Nobody likes you, You should be quiet, You just make a fool of yourself, Why can’t you be like other people? In the face of such onslaught, we may lose interest in things that would otherwise be important to us, find ourselves unable to think clearly, may start to withdraw from even those most important to us, and begin to wander through our lives like a ghost.

Shame can seem to become an essential part of us, but to see that we have become attached to shame can come as a shocking realization. More startling, still, may come the realization that as long as a part of our emotional sense of self is invested in shame, we will sabotage every attempt we make to heal from it. However, once we have achieved such realizations regarding our previously unconscious identification with shame, we have the opportunity to break our attachment to it. First, we must realize that we do not have to identify our whole sense of self with feelings of shame. We can instead observe our feeling of shame without letting it hijack our total sense of self as if shame is all we are, or were.

Healing

It is, however, possible to learn ways to cope with feelings of shame without getting lost in them and without losing our sense of ourselves in shame’s self-reinforcing process. Simply telling a person to let go of it—without showing them how to do it—is a conscious instruction that will only result in anger, depression, or frustration, and likely compound the problem by adding an additional layer of criticism and blame to our feelings of shame for continuing to hold onto them. Clearly, simply suggesting that we just let go of feelings of shame, as if they were a tangible thing that we could simply drop to the ground and walk away from, doesn’t work. Shame is not a tangible object, but rather is a feeling, which arises spontaneously in response to internal images, thoughts, or other triggers.

This book will show you how to begin teaching yourself to recognize those toxic feelings of shame that shape present experience.