JIM O'SHEA
Counselling Service

Shamed  children come from  families that are closed; families that are not emotionally lubricated, but remain stuck in an unloving and shaming atmosphere. Very often as the pain of toxic shame becomes intolerable, the family may turn on an individual member to vent their shame and relieve their pain.

When the child’s emotional needs are not met, and when the child becomes an adult, the child within the adult carries these same unmet needs. This needy child within the adult can never be emotionally satisfied, and can never satisfy his own children. As the child grows and leaves the home all the other systems (social, church, work etc.) only add to the shame that is at that unfortunate person’s core. In other words, we are formed by our childhood, our brain is programmed by the type of attachment to our primary caregiver. If that caregiver does not give us emotional warmth we feel unloved, and eventually unloveable.

It is important to recall that in the early stages of our lives, we learn from our parents. We are like sponges. Dr Margaret Paul explains that the feeling of shame comes from the feeling that there is something  wrong with us, that we are basically flawed, inadequate, wrong, bad, unimportant, undeserving, or not good enough. As a result of not feeling seen, loved, valued, and understood, we came to believe that we were not loved because there was something wrong with us. Lynne Namka says that shame gives us a ‘fundamental sense of inadequacy’.

 We learn our feelings, our behaviours, our boundaries (physical, emotional, intellectual), how to relate, our moral foundations, coping skills, and so on. But, shamed parents cannot do these, and thus cannot model them for their children. They are unable to give their children the emotional time that is required for the child’s needs, and for the child’s emotional development. They simply don’t know how. They are too focussed and preoccupied with their own mysterious pain. The child, therefore, is abandoned, and never learns the emotional comfort, and, indeed, the right to feel happy; and, in the future, cannot pass it on to their own children. It’s so sad.

toxic shame over  generations can be fuelled by family secrets. These may include suicides, addictions, incest, abortions, and other disasters. The closed family tries to keep them secret, and they create havoc in the family through the impact of the shame generated. Families automatically and subconsciously create defences to cope with this. Such defences may include the freezing or repression of feelings, denial, and even idealization of parents. The real difficulty arises because they are subconscious or unconscious, and so cannot be dealt with without the help of counselling and therapy.

For some reason ‘like often attracts like’, and it frequently happens that shame based people are attracted to each other, and form relationships. Thus toxic shame is at the core of their relationship, they tend to shame each other and are unable to show real intimacy. Their children are exposed (from the moment they open their eyes) to this shame-based environment. This will become clearer in a later post when I deal with the characteristics and behaviours of shame based people.

Fundamentally being enmeshed means losing one’s identity. The child’s identity becomes entangled with that of the parent. The child cannot learn proper boundaries, and suffers a loss of self-esteem. Self-esteem comes from a strong sense of identity and separateness. The child who has been enmeshed may suffer from toxic shame and may have a rage (people may refer to it as a temper) until the roots of the shame have been explored. Such rage will also spring from the subconscious feeling that an abuse has occurred. Nothing kindles rage as much as abuse.

 Lynn Namka examines other sources of shame caused by adults to children. She looks at parental withdrawal, favouring a sibling, having very high standards of behavior, and reacting with anger when the child fails to reach them. Shame is also sown in the child by punishing them for crying or for showing other forms of vulnerability, such as being in pain or distress. Sexual abuse is one of the greatest causes of shame, making the child feel dirty and bad, and the child can absorb the shame of the abuser.

These are easier to trace as sources of shame. They are self-evident. Enmeshment, however, is more difficult because it is more subtle. The child as an adult may remember being very much loved by the primary carer, and cannot understand why over-love breeds rage and shame.