The Human-ness of shame…….

Shame, for me, feels like heat. I feel it traveling up my neck and into my face. I turn red. My arms feel tingly and detached from my body. My head feels frozen and my posture wants to collapse. The next thought in response to the incoherence I feel is usually, “wow, get it together”, followed by “what is wrong with me!”.

Does this sound familiar?

It should.

In one form or another we all know what shame feels like. Shame is hardwired into our neurobiology, evolved over millennia and embedded in our nervous systems. Shame has persisted, for better and for worse, to champion various survival functions - to keep us from harm, to keep us safely attached to others - to keep us alive.

When we’re still little, we’re very much dependent on the adults in our lives for our continued survival. We need them to feed us, bathe us, explain the world to us, cover us in warm blankets before bed, clean and bandage our cuts, monitor our temperature when we’re sick, hold us when we cry and join us in our joy. Before we’ve learned how to take care of ourselves we know that care is something that we need to get from someone else. The ones who do the caring are very important to us.

As we start to talk and learn, we are discovering that the stove is hot and it makes mom yell when we reach for it; that our brother cries when we take his toy and our caregiver scolds us. And we feel shame. Patricia DeYoung, in her book Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame, defines shame as “the experience of one’s felt sense of self disintegrating in relation to a dysregulating other”. When we experience the “no” and “bad”, our young self, our place in our little social ecosystem, momentarily disintegrates.

And hopefully that disintegration is fleeting. Ideally we learn we’re okay through a series of ruptures and repairs. We get reprimanded and although we might feel some shame and momentary distress, it’s dissolved through attuned, connected caregiving. We learn that we can do something “bad” but that doesn’t mean that we ourselves are bad. Mom explains she yelled because she felt scared that if we touched the stove we would hurt our hand very badly. We understand that even in that scary moment we were loved and seen as good and whole. We feel reconnected and we feel better.

But although shame may be a biological vestige of a survival function, it couldn’t feel farther from protective. When it pulls us under, even in those small, time-limited moments, it is devastating. We burn, melt, freeze, will ourselves to disappear…

And from this state, on repeat and without repair, the overwhelming belief that sinks its truth into our bones is, I’m bad.

Shame, in this form, has bled through its protective-function boundaries. It holds us in its clutches for years and decades, casting a lens over our eyes and tingeing everything we see with an invisible shame-film. When ingested whole, shame becomes an un-nuanced, unmetabolized interpretation of who we are..“There must be something wrong with me”. “I’m a failure”. “It’s hopeless”. It’s no longer the uncomfortable yet mostly short lived shame that shows up to keep us from the thing that might hurt us. Now, we enter the arena of toxic shame, which pervades every aspect of our being, identity and functioning.

Think about it. What if we don’t get to have a repair and recover from the shame state? What if we are left alone with the “I’m bad” feeling for a few hours. What if we are even left in the I’m bad place repeatedly, day after day and year after year? We might logically draw the conclusion that there must be something bad in us. We are shameful. Somewhere along the line, an interpretation about ourselves has taken root. I’m wrong. I’m not lovable. And so chronic shame is created in this way “when this disintegration/dysregulation happens continually and is unrepaired” (Patricia De Young).

In adulthood, some thread of toxic shame might manifest in milder forms like imposter syndrome, procrastination, or low self worth. “I feel completely disconnected from the version of me who wrote that essay. Look at me, pathetically struggling to write this email!”; “If I can’t even check off that one tiny thing that’s been on my to do list for six months, how can I trust myself to do anything productive, ever?” Or, on a more personal note, “do you, the person reading this, know that I’m actually so incredibly flawed and imperfect? If you knew, would you stop reading right here?” Or, more insidiously, “There’s no point in even trying. I know it’s hopeless. I always fail. I hate myself.” And so the spiral goes and goes and deepens and grows.

We avoid, drink, scroll, sleep, compulsively chase dopamine in our phones, our relationships, our meals and daydreams. Some of us learn how to wall ourselves off from any feeling to avoid this feeling. We think about things rather than feel about things, as we unconsciously attempt to harness the sharper edges of our narrative into a less painful shape. After all, we just like to understand things. We’re intellectualizers! Our bodies? That knot in our stomach? Yeah, no thanks. We’d rather not go there.

The thing about shame spirals, other than the fact that they’re arguably one of the most horrible experiences ever, is that they’re sneaky and quick. Much of the time they’re completely automatic and out of conscious awareness. When our shame gets triggered, before we even recognize it as shame, we’re halfway down that rabbit hole to every shameful thing we’ve ever done. Before we know it, the hating parts of ourselves have cleanly pinned our hated parts into a permanent shape of every horrible thing and feeling within us. We’re trapped and paralyzed. We’re awful. We don’t deserve. We might as well stop trying. One thing becomes everything, and everything, including us, is bad.

So what would happen if we could grow some wings and fly out of that shame hole to look down on the process from some safe distance? What would we see?

If we could retrace our steps and set the speed to half time, we might be able to notice the moment we step up to the rabbit hole. Maybe we could see our toes peak over the edge. What if in that moment we could take a step back, and maybe a couple more. Maybe we could even point our finger at the hole and name it - that’s Shame. Maybe we could recognize it - that’s something that we’re all wired with a capacity for. Something that evolutionarily was meant to keep us safe and alive. What if we were able to notice, with less conviction, the next thought that comes from the rapidly approaching shame state? And what if, rather than throwing that thought as a stick onto the shame conflagration we’re preparing for ourselves, we just notice the embers, recognize them as shame, and put the stick down beside our feet. What if we stop feeding the fire? What if we can say to an externalized shame state, so what? I’m having a thought that I don’t deserve this. I’m having a thought that I’m a loser. Of course I’m having this thought…I’m in a shame state.

What if in those moments we can remember that all our thinking from this state is going to be shame-tinged. What if we can anchor into that knowing and start to be curious about what’s happening in our body? I’m feeling hot. Ah, yes, I know this feeling…this is shame. Can I ride this wave until it dips back down, without adding logs to the fire and without jumping down the rabbit hole?

If we can start to practice that, we’re one step closer to extricating ourselves from toxic shame. We can remind ourselves that shame is an affect state. It’s biological before it becomes narrative. Our blood pressure rises and it comes back down. Our heart rate speeds up but then it slows down again. We can endeavor to ride the shame wave, which – while ranging from disintegrating to uncomfortable – has a beginning, a middle and an end. And we can remember that, after all, this is also just kind of a really painful part of being human.

By Kyla Winner-Connor