JIM O'SHEA
Counselling Service

Children can be quite aggressive. This aggression is an inbuilt human condition, which may be called upon in later life, for example, to defend oneself. It is important for the parent not to feel threatened by their child’s aggressive impulses.  This does not mean that they are encouraging aggression, but are neutralising it by allowing it in their role as parents. In the same way the child should be allowed to experience and express ordinary feelings such as jealousy, rage, sexuality, defiance and so on. If the parents have been allowed these feelings when they were children, then they will accept them from their own children. This will allow their children to internalise them. If they are forbidden they foster toxic shame. It is normal to be jealous if appropriate[1], it is normal to feel rage if the occasion demands it[2], sexual feelings, too, are normal.[3] 

Another way of looking at it is that the child must learn the good and the shadow side of being human. Otherwise, to prevent core shame the child will split off the good, and conceal the bad or shadow. This will prevent the child from having a holistic view of himself. He will be shamed by the shadow or the bad side. He will only love the good side, and so will not really love himself. We must love our whole self, the good and the shadow. Otherwise we are not truly human, and, as I said previously, core shame dehumanises.

Lynn Namka outlines other characteristics based on fear within the shamed person. People who are toxically shamed try to hide. They are crucified by fear of self-exposure in such areas as sexual feelings and actions, aggressive behaviour that is against public standards, issues around bathroom functions, body odours and cleanliness. They are also filled with fear of failing at a task when being observed by others, and dislike doing or saying something that may cause hurt to others. They are very conscious of class and social status. I remember being asked by an acquaintance about my father’s job, and being ashamed to tell him. My father was an excellent collierey storeman, but in my state of toxic shame I felt ashamed of him. This might give an indication of the burden of toxic shame.

 Marc Miller gives a helpful list of characteristics of shame based people. They are really feelings as well. They include alienation, inadequacy, helplessness, powerlessness, defenselessness, weakness, insecurity, uncertainty, shyness, ineffectual, inferiority, feeling flawed, exposed, unworthy, hurt, intimidated, defeated rejected, dumped, rebuffed, stupid, bizarre, odd, peculiar and different.

• Rage. Some people suppress the rage that stems from being shamed to the core. This can easily turn to depression. Shame contaminates all feelings, except rage. Rage is the most powerful of all feelings. Rage is internalised and makes the person bitter, sarcastic, and negative. If the raging person has power, it can breed violence, revenge, and vindictiveness.  Rage protects the shamed person by keeping others at arms length, or by spraying them with shame.
• Arrogance.  Bradshaw defines this as exaggerating one’s own importance. It hides the burning core of shame.  It is the ultimate cloak to hide the real self.
• Being critical and blaming others. Blaming and criticising others decreases the feeling of shame that the toxically shamed person feels. It makes others seem smaller and failures, and the shamed person correspondingly feels superior and feels better. The parents who blame and brand their children with negative criticism shame them to the core, because the child is too young to make a proper judgement on the criticism.
• Being judgemental and moralising.  This is related to perfectionism and to being critical and blaming others. It is a strong way to plant one’s own shame in one’s children. It also affects how children may experience God, and from my experience breeds an unfounded sense of sin. It is an example of spiritual abuse, of which there was much when I was a child in the 1950s.
• Contempt. By holding another in contempt the shamed person shows disrespect for a person’s humanity. It a rejection of another person. For example, the teacher, who is shamed to the core, is in great danger of showing contempt for his pupils (who have less knowledge, and less experience that the teacher). I deeply regret any negative comments I ever made to any of my students, although I was always conscious of the importance of praising them. Nevertheless, this minimises how I was. One negative comment to a vulnerable student is too many. A child who is subject to much condemnation by teachers will in turn learn how to show contempt for others.

 shame based people have many undesirable characteristis, which are a burden to them, and very damaging in a relationship.

• Perfectionism is a heavy burden. Bradshaw says that it comes from expectations by parents from their children whereby they are only valued for doing. That may be true, but that is not why I experienced it. To me it is a means of protecting oneself from the pain of shame. The bottom line is that we cannot be blamed if we are perfect. But, despite superhuman efforts we are never good enough, and are eternally driven to achieve more. The perfectionist hates being compared to others, and competes as hard as he can with others. He is not content to do his best, but judges himself against others.
• Power and control. Being in power means that one has the best means of controlling others, as well as controlling our thoughts, feelings, actions and expressions. We cannot be shamed if we hold the power, we feel less vulnerable, and unfortunately we cannot form an intimate bond with another.

Because core shame takes place at a very young age, before the child has formed any boundaries, and results in a loss of self-trust, the adult lacks judgement. How often have I heard clients say that they don’t understand why they have made stupid decisions. Such distrust of his basic powers (judgement, trust, feelings, and desires) renders the person powerless and insecure. The shamed person makes enormous efforts to keep the pain of toxic shame at bay, as they appear to lead successful, happy lives, but experience fear, hurt and loneliness. He also develops many defences to ward off the pain. These can be seen as characteristics. And boy, there are such a lot of them. Some are as follows:- denial, rage, envy, criticism, blame, caretaking, rescuing, power control, spraying shame onto others, perfectionism, judmentalness, addictions, alienation (borderline personality), paranoia, narcissism, criminality, eating disorders, patronising, people pleasing, moralising, righteousness, violence, sexual abuser, workaholics, and disconnection.

All of these may not always necessarily stem from toxic shame. But when you look at them and think about them, it is easy to see why they may be connected to core shame. I will look at them in more detail in my next post

Another characteristic of the shame-based person may be abusiveness. Abuse breeds shame. Abuse is learned as a child, and the person who has been abused may go on to abuse others, – (at least the tendency may be there). Of course many people who have been shamed by abuse do not go on to be abusers. They exercise responsibility. I need hardly add that sexual abuse, at whatever age the person experiences it, breeds the deepest core shame.One of the unfortunate legacies of being shamed as a child, results in the stifling of human creativity and spirituality. The new born baby is infinitely creative, and has the potential of enormous spirituality. He has the potential for wonderful growth as a human, a growth which is stunted and choked by toxic shame. Such shame dehumanises (as stated above, it leaves us more than human or less than human).

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.