Toxic shame has its roots in childhood abandonment, abuse, and trauma. As such, feeling better will almost always go back to accessing your childhood self – the very part of you that was confronted with the trauma in the first place.
Childhood abuse, neglect, and other traumatic experiences can cause toxic shame and make us believe we're not good enough.
Certain types of trauma have been associated with greater feelings of shame, including sexual violence, childhood abuse or neglect, and intimate partner violence.
According to the authors, shame—like pain—evolved as a defense. “The function of pain is to prevent us from damaging our own tissue,” says Sznycer. “The function of shame is to prevent us from damaging our social relationships, or to motivate us to repair them if we do.”
Feelings of shame can also cause the brain to react as though it were in physical danger. This may activate the sympathetic nervous system and trigger defense responses like fight, flight, or freeze. Shame is often associated with the desire to become invisible or disappear.
These behaviors include doing things to make yourself feel small, trying to avoid being the center of attention, or not sharing your thoughts or feelings. Concealing yourself is a method of self-protection.
Shame has a central social component, and involves fears of being judged, criticized or rejected by others rather than just judging oneself. The origins of shame can almost always be tied back to past experiences of feeling judged, criticized, or rejected by someone else.
A typical shame response involves being overwhelmed with an intense feeling of conspicuousness and a strong sense of being judged by others, along with painful and negative emotions centred around one's feelings of inadequacy, all triggered by a mishap, mistake or transgression which has been 'witnessed' by others ( ...
Shame can be a contributing factor to depression, anxiety, and co-dependency. [iii] People who are constantly ashamed may have emotional difficulties and may fight a mental battle each and every day. People who live with shame are less likely to take healthy risks.
The following characteristics also differentiate toxic shame from typical shame: It makes you question your worth or causes you to feel worthless. It makes acknowledging your emotions uncomfortable (because you're conditioned to believe your emotions are shameful) It causes depression and anxiety.
Empathy is the Antidote to Shame.
Negative experiences in childhood, such as abuse, neglect, or criticism from parents or caregivers, can lead to feelings of unworthiness. Trauma or abuse, such as physical or emotional abuse, can also cause feelings of unworthiness.
You won't find “disorders of shame” as a category in the DSM-5 (the official American catalogue over mental health diagnoses), and yet shame is probably the biggest single cause of most of our psychological problems.
When we experience a traumatic event, shame and guilt are common survival skills we rely on. Like the flight, fight, freeze and appease response, these coping skills that are often meant for our survival, can leave us paralyzed.
Therapists can work with clients to identify the triggers for their feelings of shame and then provide strategies to cope with those triggers. For example, if a person has been struggling with substance abuse, they may learn how to manage their emotions better so that they aren't triggered by substances.
Originally suggested by Lewis (1971), the self-behavior view holds that shame proneness is the tendency to view and experience one's core self, or entire person, as inherently flawed, bad, defective, or unworthy (Tangney, 1996; Tangney et al., 1992b).
Shame is connected to processes that occur within the limbic system, the emotion center of the brain. When something shameful happens, your brain reacts to this stimulus by sending signals to the rest of your body that lead you to feel frozen in place.
Cognitive processing therapy (CPT): CPT occurs over 12 sessions, during which a person talks about their trauma, works to understand how their trauma affects their emotions and behavior, and then implements strategies for controlling the effects of trauma, including shame.