JIM O'SHEA
Counselling Service

At any rate, let us very briefly look at what the literature says about some of the characteristics of the shamed person. One of the characteristics explored is grandiosity, which can be a delusional disorder, or simply a boastful individual who imagines that he is more important and has more talents than anyone else. This is being more that human. Psychologists label this as narcissism (a complex term that cannot be explored here), or over-love of oneself. Shamed people are very involved in themselves, very self-preoccupied with little interest or empathy in others. Bradshaw puts it very well

‘The Narcissist is endlessly motivated to seek perfection in everything he does. Such a personality is driven to the acquisition of wealth, power and beauty, and to find others who will mirror and admire his grandiosity. Underneath this external facade there is an emptiness filled with envy and rage. The core of this emptiness is internalised shame’.

Such a person cannot generate real intimacy with another, must always be in control, they withdraw from others, including their partners and children (by being busy, often seeing their lack of feeling as a strength or a virtue), and they rely on blaming others.

The characteristics of  shame-based people.

I suppose this post could also be called ‘what shame does to the person.  It has been shown in the previously that these characteristics are rooted in us by one or both shame based parents.

 My own experience was having a negative frame of mind and outlook, feeling uneasy without knowing why, feeling envy and jealousy, being driven, being a perfectionist- in brief not knowing who I was. I had never heard of the term ‘real self’ until well into my training. When I heard that term something clicked. I knew what I was looking for, and it was so worthwhile when I found my real self. When I read Carl Rogers book On Becoming a Person (worth buying) all began to change. I was in Galway (west of Ireland) on holidays, and as I read it I began to cry, the first tears for myself in almost 50 years! You see, one of the defences against toxic shame is to split the self. We cannot bear our toxic characteristics. They are too painful. So we develop a false identity out of the shamed core, and we never know our real selves.

Parents who suffer shame, spew it onto their children. They find it difficult to release their children and hold them for as long as possible. These Children lose their identity and imbibe their parents sense of core shame. these parents decide in all cases what is right and what is wrong, and stifle the child’s ability to make such decisions. it is like brainwashing. such parents are angry and raging and they blame the child for this. they feed their needs off the child, and behave in a childish fashion. they are autocratic  nagative in their behaviour, and subjugate the child’s will to their own, at  a very early stage in the child’s life. to look at toxic parents I recommend 2 books by Alice Miller, For Your Own Good, and the Drama of Being a Child.

A further shaming rule, associated with perfectionism, is the absence of permission to make a mistake. Making a mistake is a sign of vulnerability to the shame based person. Vulnerability is a sign of strength, but the shamed person sees it as a sign of weakness that increased his shame. By all means use the mistake of others to shame them. By shaming them one protects oneself from the awful feeling of shame.

Blaming is another shame based rule in the toxically shamed family. Blaming others protects one from feeling shame. Toxically shame based families also stifle the full expression of any feeling, and makes its members hide true feelings, needs and wants. It creates a dysfunctional person of each member who struggles and do not know quite what the struggle is about.The shame based person protects himself from the pain of shame by spraying shame on others. It makes sense doesn’t it?  The more shaming rules there are in a family, the more protection the shamer has. The shamer is normally the most powerful person in the family. The shamed members of the dysfunctional family are incapable of forming warm, intimate relationships, they are filled with distrust, and envy and jealousy and control thrive in their midst.

In my last post I have shown that toxic shame means being shamed to the core, so that it permeates and pollutes all other feelings, except rage. Now I would like to explore how we can become toxically shamed. Generally such shame is sown in us in our early childhood, and is reinforced as we grow through childhood, so that by the time we are adults it is ingrained in our core.

 As tiny babies we are totally dependent, and rely upon the love and affection of our parents, and particularly upon our mothers, who are our primary carers. I must emphasise that these contributionson on  shame are not exercises to blame parents. But, it is a fact that we learn from our parents, we imbibe their feelings, and if they are shame based we automatically absorb and internalise their shame. We can be shamed, in what psychologists call our family systems, in many ways.

 Enmeshment is one source of toxic shame, and sufferers of toxic shame from this source have no idea of why they are so unhappy at the core. They are unaware of an enmeshed relationship, and thus unaware that they have been shamed to the core by such a relationship. Interestingly the Dictionary of Psychology makes no reference to it. I only came to understand it as I was undergoing therapy for my counselling training, when my therapist used the imagery of the river being swallowed up as it enters the sea.

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.