Toxic shame and extreme psychological pain
Warning: This blog might contain ideas that can be triggering and distressing for some readers, please ensure that you look after yourselves or speak to a professional counsellor if you feel unsettled after reading.
What is shame? Like all emotions, shame is natural that serves a function to move us to get our basic needs met. We feel the innate healthy shame when we have done something wrong, or when we are aware of our limitations as a finite human being. Shame develops in our psyche before our development of speech. For instance, it is not uncommon for a child to experience healthy innate shame as shyness in front of a stranger. The feeling of shame or shyness signals to the child to seek familiar faces for safety. However, when healthy shame becomes toxic shame, it can destroy lives. Toxic shame is primarily fostered in significant relationships and is passed from one generation to the next (“Healing the shame that binds us” by John Bradshaw).
Toxic shame is developed when a child or an adult unconsciously internalises as her identity and her sense of self the false messages of “I am flawed and defective as a human being, and I am a mistake”. When a person believes that she is inherently unacceptable as a human being, that is final. It is because she finds it impossible to accept an unacceptable, worthless, defective, and inferior human being that is herself. Because she is unable to change what is under her own skin, she feels trapped and powerless. She disowns herself. She lives with constant excruciating psychological pain. Her innate drive is to hide and cover up to others and to herself to survive. She suffers in isolation, even though there are much evidence against the false belief that she is a flawed human being, her internalised toxic belief about herself stay untouched. She is unconscious and unaware of what is causing her intense psychological pain. She naturally and unconsciously does whatever it takes to avoid the pain by covering up and hiding from herself, but the more she covers up the more she loses sight of what is causing her this intense psychological pain.
The truth is there is inherent value in each human being. The life destroying lies that you are flawed and defective as a human being are evil (Healing the shame that binds us” by John Bradshaw). There are many psychological phenomena and social reasons why a shame-based person internalises this toxic false message about herself unconsciously. She might have internalised this toxic life-destroying messages when she was a defenceless child, or when she was vulnerable and betrayed in significant relationships. The first step of healing and recovery is to gain awareness of this unconscious psychological process. A shame-based person requires a skilled and experienced counsellor who understands the dynamic of toxic shame to help her achieve the first significant milestone of gaining awareness of her internalised toxic shame, and how that plays out in her psyche and her life. If the internalised toxic false messages are destroying the life of a shame-based person, she needs to externalise the toxic false messages about herself and work hard to disown the ingrained false messages about who she is. John Bradshaw in “Healing the shame that binds us” outlines extensively the different ways to externalise the internalised toxic messages. This journey of collaborating with your trusted counsellor into freedom and pain-free existence can be challenging yet one of the most worthwhile and rewarding experiences life can offer.