Toxic Shame: The Silent Epidemic

 

Bekhal, a Kurdish woman in her early twenties went missing from Zakho. Kurdi was a mentally disabled woman who lived on her own. She became pregnant after she was raped and that was when she went missing. Rumors circulated that her father had committed an honor killing to stop the shame she brought upon her family.

Bekhal and her unfortunate situation lives with me to this day. It was not until two years ago, that I woke one morning with an epiphany, realizing how my whole life has been consumed by the destructive power of shame! Shame ruled me like a substance ruling the life of a person with substance use disorder.  Shame has made me lash out at my loved ones. I would go into hiding for fear of being exposed and the pain I would have to endure once exposed. Though I am a pharmacist, shame made me go to the extent of thinking and behaving irrationally to justify some of my missteps in life. Shame has caused me to be untrue to myself. Because of shame, I have learned to cover up things I did not want to be associated with, including the things that made me who I am. 

I grew up hearing and believing that I, as a woman, carried the shame of the family while my brothers carried the honor of the family. Any misstep by me would cost my family their respect and reputation in society. I grew up with the word “ayba”- or shame- talking to me and shadowing every step of my life. With this cultural and societal pressure, I learned that the only way to be accepted and loved is when I am not myself.

In my case, shame was fueled by the expectations I grew up with. These expectations come from religious identity, age group, gender, culture, sex, the roles we play in society as mothers, female executives, sisters, and daughters. These expectations were not only conflicting at times but were emphasized unequally, when it came to my sisters and I, simply because we were females. These expectations were non-stop, confusing, and impossible to attain. And we were so used to making sure we met all those unrealistic expectations, we ended up as servants to shame with no freedom of speech, expression, belonging, or being our authentic selves.  

Growing up as a first-generation immigrant in the United States, I often found myself feeling split and entangled in two conflicting worlds: East and West with two different societal, cultural, and religious standards.  I found myself torn between which cultural and societal standards to follow that would cause me the least amount of shame and reprimand. The first thing I was encouraged to do when I landed in the U.S. was to smile more. However, in my home country, girls were shamed for smiling at strangers because smiling was considered flirtation. When trying to meet the standards of my root culture and society, I was often perceived by American friends as dry and rude for not wanting to socialize, smile, or hangout in co-ed groups. In a way, I grew up to value and master “fitting-in” instead of being true to my authentic self.

Growing up in a patriarchal culture, freedom of expressing emotions almost did not exist.  Living in the Middle East, I was taught early on not to laugh out loud in public, not to smile at strangers, not to speak freely, and not to show confidence or express my needs to anyone but family. I was taught not to trust anyone.  The same went for my brothers. I often saw them being shamed for crying and being told to toughen up when they expressed emotions.  I grew up to believe that family was everything and always came first, and we were never to challenge anything that came from our elders.  I had to give up college and school activities because they simply did not meet the cultural and family standards for being a “good” girl.  I would meet with my college professors to identify alternative opportunities that would not require me to stay late at night on the college campus.

 

What is Shame?

Many people confuse shame with guilt and fail to understand the impact shame might have in our day-to-day lives. Shame and guilt are emotions, and they are often allowed to drive many of our behaviors.  Guilt is a feeling we get when we feel we have done something wrong. While guilt is specific to an action, shame is related to our self-identity. Shame is not when we do something we regret, but when we are or believe we are someone “less than”. Shame is what distinguishes humans from all other animals. When feeling guilty, we attempt to correct the behavior; however, when feeling shameful, we direct the behavior towards ourselves in relation to societal and cultural standards as well as other people’s opinions of us.

There seems to be a disagreement on whether we can have ‘healthy’ shame.  Dr. Brené Brown, a shame researcher, proves that all types of shame can be destructive. Meanwhile, Gershan Kaufman and John Bradshaw, clinical psychologists, believe in the benefits of having healthy shame. I believe we all need a level of healthy shame in our lives. Healthy shame keeps us grounded, teaches us humility, and lets us know that we have limits.  Healthy shame teaches us that we cannot know it all, allowing us to continue to seek knowledge. Healthy shame allows us to coexist in a society that has standards and expectations, many of which can be positive, such as rules against stealing, lying, and killing. By reminding us of our limits, healthy shame can guide us to a purpose. However, healthy shame can turn toxic when it becomes integrated into our identity.

With toxic shame, we perceive our identity as flawed or defective. And to cover up our flawed identity, a toxic shame-based individual learns to create a false sense of self to cover up the defects. In a way, a toxic shame-based individual is sending a message that they are more than human, and when their defects are exposed, they perceive themselves to be less human.  Toxic shame is dehumanizing because it rips us from our authentic self. Dr. Brown explains how with shame, we see ourselves through someone else’s eyes. When we feel toxic shame, we have convinced ourselves that we are flawed and defective, and that makes us somehow unworthy of love or care. According to Dr. Merrill Norton, an addiction pharmacist, healthy shame wants us to seek help while toxic shame tells us we are unworthy of help. And when we seek help, we are sending the message that we as humans have limits, we acknowledge our imperfections and vulnerabilities and our will to share them with those who have earned our trust.

In her book, I Thought It Was Just Me, Dr. Brown explains, “Women often experience shame when they are entangled in a web of layered, conflicting, and competing social-community expectations. Shame creates feelings of fear, blame, and disconnection.” As social creatures, we are emotionally, spiritually, and mentally wired for connection. We want to belong and find things that connect us all to something far greater than our human understanding.  Shame rips us from that sense of belonging.  With toxic shame, we feel our flaws will be exposed when we get close to others. According to Dr. Brown, shame is an intensely painful experience, as it leads us to believe we are unworthy of acceptance and belonging because of our flaws.

How Do We Develop Toxic Shame?

According to Dr. Maria Montessori, who is best known for her Montessori theory, children are curious, and their role is to explore. Children in a functional family can make mistakes and are corrected in a non-shaming manner. In other words, a child can cry or have tantrums without worrying about caregiver’s withdrawal or abandonment. Children need a lot of security and a trustworthy environment in order to learn about themselves and the world around them. In her theory, Dr. Montessori talks about how a child’s development depends on the environment she or he is in, and the environment includes the parents.  In the Montessori theory, there is the prepared environment principle, which links the child to learn from adults through a classroom setting filled with activities that allow freedom of movement of choice and set the child up for success. However, the environment must be safe, and children must feel they are free to construct and explore. That same type of environment is required for a child to grow up to be the best version of themselves – one that is judgement- and shame-free.

 

In the early phases of growth, our understanding is preverbal, and our developmental needs are met through emotional interactions with our caregivers. We need our caregiver’s touch, time, and attention. We develop an emotional identity through mirroring a parental figure. In a functional family system, children learn healthy shame from their parents at an early age. To ensure a healthy shame, parents need to guide and model in a non-judgmental, shame-free, loving manner that provides a child with a secure base to return to after venturing forth and exploring the world. By healthy modeling, a child learns how to show anger appropriately, how to maintain healthy boundaries, how to recover from mistakes, how to communicate, how to be a being, how to cope with stress, and how to self-love.

 

Toxic shame is often rooted in dysfunctional family systems. In a dysfunctional family system that lacks emotional mirroring, when the caregiver is emotionally unstable or unavailable, the child grows up with no validation for their own emotional needs. That child is often shamed when demonstrating a need because their needs clash with their caregiver’s need.  The child learns that his emotional needs do not matter and grows up with unmet needs. This creates needy “adult children,” a term coined by John Bradshaw. Needy “adult children” can never have enough attention from others, even negative attention. They walk into their adult relationships with so many shame-based unmet needs and expectations putting their relationships and partners in a difficult spot.

 

In a shame-based dysfunctional family system, emotionally immature parents, a term used by Dr. Lindsay Gibson in her book, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, do not know how to model because they did not have parents who modeled for them. Dr. Gibson explains, “Unfortunately, emotionally immature parents are usually too uncomfortable with closeness to give their children the deep emotional connection they need.” Parental abandonment and emotional neglect can adversely impact a child’s self-confidence and their adult relationships since people repeat old patterns and then blame themselves for not being happy, Dr. Gibson continues. With our brains craving what is familiar to us, in this case identifying with someone who is also shame-based, shame-based “adult children” from emotionally immature parents often enter into relationships and marry other shame-based adult children. According to John Bowlby, a psychiatrist and founder of attachment theory, the most primitive part of our brain tells us that safety lies in what is familiar to us. Shame-based marriage carries shame at its core and is passed to the next generation of children and those children’s children.

 

Toxic shame-based “adult children” are emotionally split when it comes to expressing their feelings. As children, they learned to disown the parts of their feelings that were ignored or not validated by their caregivers. In his book, Healing the Shame That Binds You, Dr. John Bradshaw explains that anger, sadness, dissatisfaction, love, desire are all emotions. And “e-motions,” he explains are energy in motion. These emotions are intended as energy to flow from our body.  However, when our emotions are not validated and allowed to be expressed, we start alienating those emotions from ourselves to survive in a dysfunctional family system.  As a child, you become conditioned never to expose those feelings and all that energy, instead of flowing, stays dormant inside you over the years.  You learn to never feel safe exposing or sharing your feelings because of shame. You are no longer you, instead you are an object with a fragile self-image constantly tormenting yourself about what others might think of you if you express those emotions. In his book, Shame, the Power of Caring, Dr. Gershan Kaufman explains this concept as paralyzing, “This paralyzing internal monitoring causes withdrawal, passivity, and inaction.” Due to this shame-based alienation, as an “adult child” you are no longer your authentic self. Therefore, you can never feel a sense of true belonging in your adult relationships. Shame-based alienation is what causes the creation of a false self, where one’s self-worth comes from others rather than from within. This false self-worth is what promotes co-dependent adult relationships.

 

As shaming experiences continue to resurface, the images created by those experiences are imprinted in a child’s memory bank. With each new shaming incident, a new visual image forms that becomes associated with the existing shaming experiences. Each new experience potentiates the old shaming experience, leaving the child with a collage of shaming memories. As the child grows up, a word, simple frustration, or minor anger can trigger the collage of painful memories that the child has stores in their memory bank. The “adult child” often carries inside of herself a list of all the transgressions made by others against her, and a running list of reasons not to trust others. This list emerges when triggered by stress as a familiar, although dysfunctional, coping mechanism. “See,” the perpetually wounded adult child says to herself, “I was right again. Everyone will always hurt me, I guess I deserve it.”

 

How Does Toxic Shame Present in Our Lives?  

 

Adult children from a toxic shame-based family perpetuate the dynamic of their caregiver’s emotional immaturity with their own children.  According to Gershan Kaufman, emotionally immature parents who abandon their children are reliving scenes in which they were abandoned in their childhood. We as “adult children” re-enact the shame-based abuse from our emotionally immature parents. With shame being perceived as a deficiency in identity, our brain automatically identifies us with what is familiar. In the book, The Fantasy Bond: Structure of Psychological Defenses, Robert Firestone talks about how children in dysfunctional family systems develop a fantasy bond with their abusive caregiver. The more the child is abused and neglected, the more the child creates a fallacy attachment with the caregiver.  Children are egocentric by nature, a term coined by Sigmund Freud, and they have a remarkable ability to blame themselves for adult problems. In a shame-based dysfunctional family system and through a fantasy bond, the child not only overidealizes his caregivers but interprets their mishandling and abuse to be his fault.

 

This same concept of a fantasy bond by Robert Firestone explains why “adult children” from shame-based family systems are often drawn to abusive relationships in which they overidealize the abusive partner. According to Dr. Gibson, when parents neglect the emotional needs of their children, these children learn to discount their emotional needs, growing up to expect the same “caregiver neglect” from their adult partners, and accepting things in relationships they often do not want. These abusive relationships are a re-enactment from childhood, and the child’s brain gravitates to what looks and feels like home, a concept known as a “trauma bond,” which I will write about in a later blog. As adult children, they continue living with abuse and toxic shame, their self-worth diminishes, and they eventually stop trusting their own observations, judgement, and decisions.

 

Abuse becomes a pattern in the life of an adult child from a toxic shame-based dysfunctional family system. With a diminished self-image and worth, adult children become paralyzed and lose their self-confidence and power of choice. They become stuck in abusive relationships because they are starved for love and affection. Their rationale for staying in this type of relationship is ‘the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.’  Sigmund Freud called this concept repetition compulsion, a psychological phenomenon maintained by shame in which the person repeats and re-enacts an event or puts oneself in the same situation repeatedly. 

 

In the case of addiction, which is rooted in having a wounded inner child suffering from abandonment, hurt, loneliness and alienation, the person with addiction attempts to heal or numb that inner child with destructive behaviors such as excessive intake of alcohol, drugs, gambling, working out, overachieving, etc. Toxic shame and addiction turn into a cycle where toxic shame produces more shame.  The more the person struggling with addiction feels toxic shame, flawed and not worthy of help, the more they get involved in practicing the destructive behavior, “I will feel better if I work harder, instead of spending more time with the problems in my family” or “I will feel better about myself in the moment I drink or spend more money.” This destructive behavior is our body’s craving for dopamine. To continue feeding the fake external persona and the need for dopamine, the person becomes addicted to work, spending, drinking, achievement. And just like co-dependency, shame robs the person with addiction from their spiritual being.

 

Perfectionism and the need to control are core symptoms of toxic shame. Because human beings having limits, the toxic shame-based individual creates superhuman goals and expectations, which are often impossible to accomplish. And when they fail to accomplish these unrealistic goals, they are feeling like a failure. In her book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller talks about how so many highly educated and successful career professionals are driven by their deeply wounded inner child who has suffered from many years of depression due to emotional abandonment.  Growing up in a shame-based culture and dysfunctional family system, I found myself turn to a “human-doing” by overachieving all that I could to compensate for the emotions I suppressed to meet family and cultural expectations. 

Standing Up to Toxic Shame

For so many years we have allowed toxic shame to consume our lives, damage our relationships, rob us of our identity and prevent us from attaining a sense of belonging and self-actualization.  The only way of getting back to being human and belonging is to stand up to shame. Below are some of the strategies I have used, and that may help you to develop a shame resilience:

A. Recognize shame triggers and catch them early. Name the thought, the distorted thought, or the emotion and let it wash through your body. Shame is an energy in motion with a set timeline. When you experience toxic shame, you need to learn to recognize it and consciously allow the energy to flow out of your body.

B. Respond to the inner voice: The inner critic is the voice that says you are defective, screwed up and should have known better.  To stand up to toxic shame, learn how to hear this inner voice, see where it’s coming from, confront it, talk to it through journaling maintaining compassion towards yourself.  You are not your thoughts. 

C. Seek trauma-based therapy: As an adult child, you grew up in a dysfunctional family system where your emotions were neither mirrored nor echoed.  You need to see yourself mirrored and echoed in the eye of a non-shaming person, in this case a trauma therapist. 

D. Develop a trusted network with whom you can expose your wounded inner child.  As a child from a toxic shame-based family you lacked a caregiver to model healthy shame.  Use this trusted network to mirror healthy shame.

E. Set healthy boundaries: when someone triggers your shame consciously or unconsciously, develop the courage to tell them how you feel because of what they said. As a child, you repressed your emotions.  You need to slowly start talking about shame with those who trigger your shame.

F. Start your healing: Write letters to your wounded inner child reminding them that they are worthy of love and have the right to show anger, love, frustration, and any other feeling they have felt shame for in the past.

G. Live for you:  The only way to live an authentic life is to stop comparing yourself to others and stop living for others. Practice self-love through mindfulness with your right hand placed on your heart, repeating, “You are enough, you are worth it, and you are loved.” What would you say to a best friend about herself thinking the same negative thoughts you might have? Consider reducing the amount of time you spend on social media, which only fosters comparing yourself and your life with an unattainable ideal. 

H. Manage Expectations: Everyone has an expectation of you, but not every expectation is one you should have for yourself. Evaluate these expectations, understand why they exist, and ask what purpose they serve. Who said I must have XYZ credential? A thin body? Be married? By what age? Have kids? And how many? Who should decide how I live my life? With self-love and compassion, revisit those expectations and see which ones you need to let go, and which expectations you can meet halfway.  

I. Come out of hiding: We heal through belonging and connecting with others. It’s only through acknowledging, respecting, and sharing our vulnerabilities with those who have earned our trust that we can begin to heal from toxic shame.   

J. Find your perspective: Look at the big picture and remind yourself what is causing you to feel toxic shame, and will it matter a week, a month, or a year from today?

K. Find your independence: You are more than a relationship: In my culture a women’s sense of self-worth is often measured in her ability to maintain a marriage. While marriage is a societal norm, given the rates of unhappy marriages and divorce, we should consider that belonging and love should start from within us and not be dependent on validation from someone else.

L. Stop right-fighting: Catch yourself in the middle of an argument and ask what are you really fighting over? If you look deep down, you may learn that you are fighting a narrative that you subscribed to at a young age, that you are not good enough and are now battling things you had to suppress because were shamed. Ask yourself if being “right” in this moment or about your shame-based narrative is more important, or the relationship with the person you are arguing with is more important.

M. Be your own best advocate: Remember the most important relationship is the one you have with yourself.  I often write letters to myself to remind myself how many hurdles I had to overcome to get to where I am today.  In the letters, I brag about how proud I am of myself while taking deep breaths to let those thoughts sink in and connect to my whole body.

N. Release the anger: Anger is another energy in motion that you need to let flow out of your body to regain a sense of control.  It is okay to be angry as long as you appropriately release the energy.  Emotions and corresponding thoughts don’t have to lead to destructive actions, such as lashing out on another person physically or verbally. My go-to mechanism for releasing my anger has been kickboxing.  What is yours?

O. Drop the labels: You are more than a stereotype. We live in a society that has reduced us to labels. You may have been called an “A” student or an “F” student. You may be labeled as a “person of faith” based on how you present yourself and how often you attend religious services. You may identify strongly with a certain race/ethnicity, gender, or political platform. However, labels often foster assumptions that you believe about yourself or about other people. Furthermore, labels can be divisive. Labels separate us and prevent us from obtaining a real connection.

P. Find your peace: Develop an inner place for silence through breathwork, prayers, mindfulness, and/or yoga:  Shame is a childhood trauma that puts you in a fight or flight state when you are triggered.  With deep breaths, daily mindfulness, and yoga you can learn to relax your body,  mind, and to be more prepared and mindful when the next shame trigger hits.

 

Our Journey in Life  

I end this blog with a quote from the little book of inspiration, Together is Better, by Simon Senik, “You can’t do it alone so stop pretending you can.”

 

As a world traveler, I find my most meaningful journeys to be the “Soulful” journeys I take with myself where I embrace my imperfections. Our souls see the deeper meaning in everything. In our relationships and deep human connection, the soul gives the meaning that we call “love.” As a social species, we need a soulful belonging to thrive with others.

 

Rumi said, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” To find true belonging from a place of worthiness, we first have to belong to our authentic selves and remove the barriers that we have surrounded ourselves with, one being toxic shame.