How to tell if you may be dealing with chronic shame every day.

You’re as sick as your secrets.

That’s one of my favorite sayings from Alcoholics Anonymous. When you hear that statement, does it hit a certain way? Does it make you think of something you’ve been hiding all your life? Another way to understand this secret is through the lens of chronic or toxic shame.

If there is shame in your life, you are more likely to have anxiety or depression issues. Or, to put it another way: if you have depression or anxiety issues, it’s very likely you have unacknowledged shame (Kammerer, 2019).

For some, there may be an actual event, a trauma, that you have always had trouble accepting and therefore detached from. But for others, it may be a matter of hiding negative beliefs you have about yourself, which you've always carried… but somehow put out of your mind.

Gina* comes into therapy saying she’s dealing with depression that’s hard to treat. One day she mentions she’s given up dating. “I just don’t have the energy for it anymore, it’s so draining when I go out with someone. Maybe it’s just not for me,” she tells me. But she still feels depressed and lonely. She actually does want to meet someone. It turns out that, with some exploration, she harbors a deeply held belief: “I’m just not lovable.” She has never put it to herself in such simple words, but now it hits her that she has seen herself this way all her life.

This is shame.

During a session with Frankie, they tell me: “I just can’t make decisions. I second guess myself, my partner keeps asking me “are you sure?” I feel like I can’t be a good partner or a good parent.” Since childhood, Frankie has believed that they just aren’t good enough. Every success is a fluke. The other shoe is going to drop, they will be found out and seen for the failure they really are.

This is shame.

Shame is feeling certain that you are flawed; that you’re a problem, a burden. It’s the feeling that you’re always failing, or you will inevitably fail. It’s the feeling that you are “rejectable” or it’s only a matter of time before everyone abandons you. Shame means you believe you even deserve to be abandoned. You are invisible, and it’s better for everyone if you stay that way.

Where does chronic shame come from?

Janina Fisher offers a very simple evolutionary understanding of the origin of shame: It’s a survival response that develops in the brain around the time a child can walk because “as soon as they have that ability to explore, they have the ability to endanger themselves” (Fisher). So shame is an intense survival response playing as instinctual a role as fight/flight/freeze/submit/attach. Imagine a child walking toward a busy street, and their mother raises her voice to save them. The child may react with alarm and shame, which is an intense negative feeling, forcing them to negatively associate busy streets with bad feelings. This is a protective response.

But the more intense kind of experience that leads to chronic shame is the result of an accumulation of shaming events, coming from a caregiver or parent, over a prolonged period of time. These ongoing shaming events shape a child’s environment as well as their core self-perception. Environments like this are created by parents or caregivers who are consistently punitive, rejecting, blaming, withholding, or neglectful.

Growing up with ongoing shame leads you to be vulnerable to a shame trigger. So many experiences trigger the feeling that you want to shrink up into yourself, disappear, become invisible, curl up and die. It’s the feeling that all eyes are on you; there’s a spotlight melting you.

All of these gestures are your brain telling you to become smaller, to get out of sight.

Your brain is trying to protect you by disappearing from sight and from further harm. This is a trauma response, so much so that Fisher includes it in the set of survival mode reactions (Fisher):

• Fight

• Flight

• Freeze

• Shame/Submit

• Cry for Help/Attach

• Two ways to break free of chronic shame

Imagine growing up with a friend you have always relied on, who has always been there for you and always protected you. That’s how the shame response feels to your brain. It feels like a survival mode response that is instinctually there to protect you. And you need to learn how to say to your brain: "the thing is, actually, this friend isn’t so helpful to you. It causes a lot of pain, and misery, and avoidance, and we are trying to let all of that go!" So the first point to remember is that shame was originally protective.

To find relief, we need to approach it from two directions: top-down and bottom-up:

Self-talk (top-down) is about changing the script in your head with compassionate, limit-setting self-talk. Set aside a few minutes every day to check in with yourself. You will start to notice consistent self-critical assumptions about yourself. Take a moment to talk back to them with a realistic, positive perspective. This is most effective if you try it out loud. (Learn more about self-talk here.)

Changing your posture (bottom-up) helps use your body to send a message to your brain to stop feeling shame. The next time you feel shame triggered, notice your body’s response. Is it starting to curl inward? Are you turning your gaze down or slouching? Remind yourself to straighten your spine, open your chest outward, take deep breaths, look around you, and imagine your body being more expansive. (Learn more about sensorimotor therapy here.)

Of course, the above techniques take practice, and can help, but if you are struggling with chronic shame, it’s very likely you’ll see more progress with a therapist. It’s best to have another person to help notice the shame to overcome it.

*These case examples are fictional composites; I never write publicly about specific clients.

References

Fisher, Janina. “Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST): a New Approach to Treating Unsafe Behavior “ Downloaded from janinafisher.com

Kammerer, Annette. “The Scientific Underpinnings and Impacts of Shame” Scientific American. August 19, 2019

Photo by Renaud Confavreux on Unsplash