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The Impact of Shame

Writer's picture: Crystal KingCrystal King

By Crystal King


Wanting to hide. Wanting to escape. Wanting to run. Wishing you could sink into a hole where no one will see you. Wishing you could find a cave to cover you from the intense and painful exposure. This urge to get away from being seen is one we have all faced at one point or another. It is the feeling of shame. Not just ordinary shame, toxic shame. Unlike guilt, which tells us that we have done something hurtful that we need to go repair, toxic shame forms our identity and tells us that we… are… worthless or bad and that exposure will annihilate us. Exposure during the moments we feel small, inadequate, disgusting, incompetent, and insignificant can indeed annihilate us. This is because exposure, in the presence of criticism and judgement, will cause us to feel searing rejection.  Rejection registers at the same place in the body as physical pain. That is why we hide. Of course we hide from exposure. We withdraw from it the same way we withdraw from a burning fire. We withdraw to save ourselves.


cave depression

Here’s the thing though. That fire that could burn us raw and kill us, is also the very thing that is capable of saving our life. When used in an appropriate way, it will save us from the grip of hypothermia. While exposure in the presence of a critical spirit, judgement, or condemnation can annihilate us, exposure and vulnerability in the presence of compassionate acceptance, and a loving curiosity will bring us back to life. It will thaw the ice tomb we have built around our heart.


ice landscape

But what if our nervous system cannot detect the difference between safe and unsafe exposure? Sometimes, any and all exposure can signal danger to our nervous system, causing us to distance from even the slightest hint of the fire’s warmth. One of the ways we keep safe from exposure is to turn cold, shut off deep connection, and build an ice castle around the shame so we do not have to feel the intolerable voice that says we are irrelevant or incapable. We freeze or numb the pain of shame. This is natural. This makes us feel safe. The deep fragility we hold inside feels stronger with the ice wall; we become impenetrable. But there is one problem. We are ice. And ice is inflexible. It is solid, firm, safe, but inflexible. This poses a problem…. because psychological flexibility is a vital ingredient for health, wellness, and expansion of the soul. Ice cannot expand.


Stepping aside from the metaphor, take a look at how this happens in practical terms. It starts with an emotional experience. A deeply painful one.  An experience so painful, so common, and maybe at such a young age, that the psyche has long ago numbed it out and does not even register it as pain. Instead the brain has built various strategies to feel bigger, less fragile, and more in control in the face of the worthlessness inside. This all starts with an emotional experience and ends in a core belief.


To Illustrate:

Imagine a little boy living in a home where emotions are rarely validated, seen, felt, or understood.  He is outside, playing in the yard, and one day, an overwhelming incident happens. This particular incident has pushed the little boy outside his window of tolerance, and his nervous system goes into a hyperactive state. He is confused, hurt, afraid. He cannot name these emotions because he does not understand emotion in language, but his body knows. His body is feeling and housing all these emotions. Maybe he starts shaking, maybe he feels queasy, maybe he feels a strange knot in his gut or tension in his head, maybe his heart rate shoots through the roof. But he doesn’t register any of this as an emotional experience. He is disconnected from the emotional experience taking place in his body. Unknown to him, he is experiencing dysregulation of the nervous system. Now he makes a decision. If his caregivers are a place of safety, he may go to them and receive the comfort needed to re-regulate his internal system. However, if he consciously or unconsciously knows they are not a source of comfort, he will seek other avenues to regulate (this can be the start of addictions for internal regulation).


little boy depression

But let’s say he does reach for comfort from his caregivers because, after all, this is biologically the top known source of safety for a child. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, they cannot or do not soothe him. Maybe they are disconnected from their own emotional selves, maybe they are unaware, maybe they are caught in their own trap of dysregulation. The point is, they do not see him. They do not soothe him. They do not make him feel safe. Maybe they even make fun of him. Maybe they demean him for having a reaction to his distress. Maybe their response makes him feel dumb, foolish, and insignificant. Maybe they think he should toughen up, and the best way to do that is to minimize his needs. So he becomes quiet, shuts down, walls off. They think it worked; minimizing and making fun of his distress has just made him stronger and shut him up. Regrettably, what they cannot see is that they have just made him more fragile. They have caused him to isolate from others and from his own body, from his own felt experience. Henceforward dysregulation, confusion, and pain will magnify as this wound goes underground and is held onto in a corner of his body. This little boy’s unprocessed wound does not disappear. The energy around the wound locks in place.  This happens over and over and in time, it fragments the boy from his own body and his emotional connection to himself.


Keep in mind, this all starts with an emotional experience and then ends in a core belief. The impact of the incident, combined with the caregiver’s neglectful or harmful response, has taught the boy something. His feelings of insignificance form a belief about himself. Maybe he says, “I am stupid”, “Emotions are foolish and need to be stuffed and suppressed”, “I am so worthless for feeling this way”, “I hate myself for doing ____”, “I am bad”, “I am disgusting”, “I am insignificant.” Moving forward, anytime his nervous system feels that jolt which sends him outside of his window of tolerance, these beliefs come up again and again. They have been wired in, causing him to remain in a state of toxic shame, believing the worst about himself.  What this little boy does not know is that, (in the words of Dr. James Hollis), “You don’t choose your feelings. Feelings are autonomous responses to what has happened. You can repress them, suppress them, anesthetize them, project them onto others, but you are, in the end, a creature that has an autonomous feeling response.”  Autonomous feelings themselves are not shameful, but when we are shamed for them and suppress them, we become dysregulated and this can drive actions that we regret, that cause harm, that further our fragmentation and distance from self.


So, because of feeling small, shamed, and insignificant for having an overwhelming emotion, this little boy learns over time to repress, suppress, anesthetize, or project his distressing feelings. He feels distress and his brain remembers that reaching out for connection made him feel small and worthless. He will do anything to keep from feeling that again. He will disconnect, blame shift, project, or numb out whenever that feeling is triggered. He is now motivated by his shame. He has learned that an emotional reach, aka “exposure,” is annihilation of self.


fragmented mirror

Fast-forward and place this boy in an intimate relationship. A rupture happens between him and his partner. This is a normal, inevitable part of all relationships. But there is no capacity for repair because he is riddled with toxic shame. This makes his relationships extremely unstable.  Whenever he becomes triggered in life, he acts out (blaming, drugging, raging, isolating, overworking) rather than reaches out. This hurts him and his partner. This acting out due to his dysregulated nervous system further drenches him in his shame. The cyclone of shame repeats.

Guilt (in a person who sees themselves and others as valuable) can motivate repair work and ownership, but a shame storm (in a person who sees themselves as worthless) will just create an urge for escape, blame shifting, hiding, anesthetizing. The fragility created when shame overtakes us causes our protective parts to rise up and defend against any perceived attack. A level 3 offence may be met with a level 10 response when our protective parts are defending an entrenched wound that was never healed.


This little boy had made a vow once to never feel the shame that came with his vulnerability again. This vow protected him in a home where vulnerability was shaming. This vow became his mantra, his way of showing up in the world. It served him well. But now his vow keeps him from the very source that can bring healing into those wounds. His vow keeps him locked up with the unprocessed anger, hurt, terror, and anguish that had nowhere to go.


A secure connection (which allows us the psychological flexibility to expand) is lost to him...

Author C.S. Lewis talks about this dilemma:

 “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”


So what will bring this boy’s heart out of the casket he created to keep it safe? What will make it come alive again and re-connect this boy to his sense of value? How does this boy train his brain to find safety in exposure and vulnerability?  The very thing that destroyed him!?  How does he learn to feel the warmth of the fire, allowing it to melt his heart, without triggering his intense fear of getting burned?


He finds some safe people, and he takes the risk of deeper connection through exposure… because, as AA says, “we are only as sick as our biggest secret.” So, One step at a time, he can find secure connection to others and start to feel the warmth of the fire in profoundly healing ways.


fire

First he looks at pictures of fire. They frighten him, but he learns to feel his distress and understands that feeling his terror will not destroy him. Pretty soon, he has trained his brain to tolerate seeing pictures of fire. It does not dysregulate him the way it used to. Time for the next step. Now, he stands 20 feet away from a real fire. He cannot feel its warmth, but he can smell the faint hint of smoke. His urge to run is back! The smell of smoke and its closeness triggering his nervous system. But this time, he recognizes it for what it is: a smoke screen, concealing the route to intimacy. He tells himself he is safe. He can tolerate it. He rides the wave of anxiety, and once more, he continues to train his brain that standing that close to the fire will not actually destroy him.  He learns to regulate near the fire and gets closer and closer, until one day, he can actually feel its warmth. It starts to melt the ice castle around him. It enables him to move his once frozen, inflexible limbs. He has found freedom. Freedom from the casket or coffin he placed himself in. Freedom in exposure. Freedom in connection. He is no longer bound by psychological inflexibility and he moves to higher and higher levels of expansion.


cave with light at end


Note: To anyone struggling with shame, “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek” (Joseph Campbell). Feeling your distress in the presence of safe people will not destroy you, but your avoidance patterns surely will. Feeling your distress will train your brain to tolerate your emotion rather than anesthetize it. While disconnection, rupture, and neglect in relationship are what originally landed you in this shame cycle, the healing and resiliency that comes through connection and comfort in relationship can be yours if you seek it out and allow it. All the while, your body is going to send you cues based on implicit memories from the past, and you are going to have to notice those and ask yourself with compassionate curiosity about the actual facts of the present.


Keep in mind that a shame storm can hit us at any time in life, and it can be created at any age. This does not only happen in childhood. Regardless of when you feel shame and why you feel it, the antidote is the same. As Brene Brown says, “Shame cannot survive being spoken and being met with empathy.” Do the opposite of what shame tells you: instead of hiding, find an empathic witness and be seen.




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