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The process of false self formation is what Alice Miller calls “soul murder.”
Unconditional love and acceptance of self seems to be the hardest task for all humankind. Refusing to accept our “real selves,” we try to create more powerful false selves, or we give up and become less than human. This results in a lifetime of cover-up and secrecy. This secrecy and hiding is the basic cause of human suffering.
Total self-love and acceptance is the only foundation for happiness and the love of others. Without total self-love and acceptance, we are doomed to the enervating task of creating false selves. It takes lots of energy and hard work to live a false self.
He goes on to suggest that in denying evil, humans have heaped evil on the world. Historically, great misfortunes have resulted from humans, blinded by the full reality of evil, thinking they were doing good but dispensing miseries far worse than the evil they thought to eradicate. The Crusades during the Middle Ages and the Vietnam War are examples that come to mind.
There is a structure of evil that transcends the malice of any single individual.
the affect shame has the potential for the depths of human evil or the heights of human good. In this regard shame is demonic. “The daimonic,” says the psychologist Steven A. Diamond, “is any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person.”
The only way a child can develop a sense of self is through a relationship with another.
TRANSCENDIENCE Shame as WISDOM, knowing what is valuable and what is not worth your time.
If we are continually overexposed, shame becomes toxic.
Richard Bandler suggested that one of the major blocks to creativity was the feeling of knowing you are right. When we think we are absolutely right, we stop seeking new information.
Toxically shamed people tend to become more and more stagnant as life goes on. They live in a guarded, secretive and defensive way. They try to be more than human (perfect and controlling) or less than human (losing interest in life or stagnated in some addictive behavior).
Family Secrets,
Any child who reaches preschool with a shame-based foundation (no secure attachment and constant overexposure) will experience her needs as selfish and her sexuality as shameful and bad.
The major problem in our lives is to decide and clarify our responsibilities. To truly be committed to a life of honesty, love and discipline, we must be willing to commit ourselves to reality. This commitment, according to Peck, “requires the willingness and the capacity to suffer continual self-examination.” Such an ability requires a good relationship with oneself. This is precisely what no shame-based person has. In fact, a toxically shamed person has an adversarial relationship with himself. Toxic shame—the shame that binds us—is a core part of neurotic and character disordered syndromes
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Toxic shame is the feeling of being isolated and alone in a complete sense. A shame-based person is haunted by a sense of absence and emptiness.
In Miller’s book, For Your Own Good, she outlines in detail the reenactments of a teenage drug addict and a child murderer.
Children will invest as much energy as is needed to ensure the preservation of family harmony, even if it means sacrificing themselves to do so by developing psychological disorders. —Joel Covitz Emotional Child Abuse
The children in a dysfunctional family take on rigid roles necessitated by the family’s need for balance. For example, if a child is not wanted, he or she will try to balance the family by not being any trouble, by being helpful, perfect, super-responsible or invisible. This is the Lost Child role. I capitalize it to show that it is a dysfunctional role.
Family secrets can go back for generations. They can be about suicides, homicides, incest, abortions, addictions, public loss of face, financial disaster, etc. All the secrets get acted out. This is the power of toxic shame.
We cannot heal what we cannot feel.
The parenting rules used in most Western world families create massive shame. Add alcoholism, incest and physical abuse to these systems, and you get major dysfunctionality. Alice Miller has summed up these rules under the title “Poisonous Pedagogy” in her book For Your Own Good. These rules state: 1. Adults are the masters of the dependent child. 2. They determine in godlike fashion what is right and what is wrong. 3. The child is held responsible for the parents’ anger. 4. The parents must always be shielded. 5. The child’s life-affirming feelings pose a threat to the autocratic adult. 6.
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Alice Miller, in her powerful book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, has described the paradoxical fact that many good, kind, devoted parents abandon their children. She also outlines the equally paradoxical fact that many highly gifted, superachieving and successful people are driven by a deep-seated chronic depression, resulting from their true and authentic selves being shamed through abandonment in childhood.
When emotionally abandoned people describe their childhoods, it is always without feeling. Alice Miller writes,
The child says to himself, “My caretakers couldn’t be crazy or emotionally ill; it must be me.”
Offenders are literally addicted to the power that physical violence gives them. Physical offenders like the fear they induce in others. Violent offenders are shame-based and can completely avoid their toxic shame by bullying and hurting others.
Learned helplessness is a kind of mental confusion. The people can no longer think or plan. They become passively accepting of their abuse.
witnessing violence done to a parent
To have our sex drive shamed is to be shamed to the core.
Whenever Max felt insecure, anxious or needy, the inner event registered as sexual desire. Max turned continually to sex for the self-nurturing he was starving for but that addictive sex cannot provide.
One experience of internalized shame is what Kaufman terms the “internal shame spiral.” He describes it as follows: A triggering event occurs. Perhaps it is trying to get close to someone and feeling rebuffed. Or a critical remark by a friend . . . a person suddenly is enmeshed in shame, the eyes turn inward and the experience becomes totally internal, frequently with visual imagery present. The shame feelings flow in a circle, endlessly triggering each other. The precipitating event is relived internally over and over, causing the sense of shame to deepen, to absorb other neutral experiences
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Shame internalization has four major consequences. A shame-based identity is formed, the depth of shame is magnified and frozen, autonomous shame activation or functional autonomy results, and finally, internal shame spirals are made operative.
Harold Gardner has convincingly shown that we have eight or nine different kinds of intelligence.
successful. In his Poetics Aristotle states that the power of a great tragic hero results from the combination of his nobleness coupled with some tragic flaw. Willy is noble. He is willing to die for his faith. It is his faith that is the tragic flaw. He truly believes that if a man makes money and is well liked, he will be a success. This is what it means to make it.
Toxic shame is often manifested in dreams of being naked in inappropriate places or in not being prepared, as in suddenly having to write your final exam without having studied for it.
The unexpected quality of a shaming event creates a lack of self-trust in a child. As toxic shame develops, the child stops trusting his own eyes, judgment, feelings and desires. These faculties form our basic human power. The distrust of our basic faculties results in the feeling of powerlessness. As vulnerable aspects of the self are shamed, they are disowned and separated from our felt sense of self. This self-separation process results in a split self. We are beside ourselves. We become an object to ourselves: When I become an object, I am no longer in me. I am absent from my own
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Most likely one of the sources of anxiety for me.
When Herkamer tells her he hates her, she cries, telling him that maybe someday she won’t be home when he wants her.
Grandmother constantly saying I'll be sorry when she's gone
process.” I’m describing a “racket formation.” A racket is a family-authorized feeling used to replace an unacceptable and shameful feeling.
So many of my emotions would convert into anger. Sadness, hopelessness, powerlessness, emotional injury, frustration, guilt.
One way to handle them is to attribute them to others. If my own anger is disowned, I may project it onto you. I may ask you why you are angry.
Is this why I believe people are angry with me all of the time?
5. Turning Against Self. Turning against self is an ego defense whereby a person deflects hostile aggression from another person and directs it onto self. This defense is extremely common among people who have been abandoned through severe abuse. Because a child so desperately needs his parents for survival, he will turn his aggressive rage about his abuse into abuse of himself. The extreme form of this is suicide. In such cases (the French call it self-murder), the person so identifies with the offender that he is killing the offender by killing himself. Common but less intense examples
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Eric Berne, the founder and original creator of transactional analysis, developed the notion of life scripts. He observed the fact that a part of the population lives very tragic lives. Their lives are tragic because they seem to have no choice. They are like actors playing their roles according to a script. Berne felt that the majority of the population acted out banal or melodramatic lives. The melodramatic scripts were described by Thoreau when he said that the mass of humanity live lives of quiet desperation. Berne felt that very few people live truly authentic lives.
Perfect One,
Rascal,
Genius,
What I couldn’t grasp is that there is no way to change your being by your doing. The shame-based core cries out, “You’re flawed and defective! There’s something wrong with you!” All the doing in the world won’t change that.
Some children will express rage when they are shamed;
Arrogance or pride is defined as offensively exaggerating one’s own importance. The proud, arrogant person alters her mood by means of her exaggeration. The victims of arrogance are those who are unequal in power, knowledge or experience. The victim feels inadequate around the know-it-all, be-all, proudly arrogant person. He believes he is inadequate because of his lack of knowledge, experience or power. Anyone who is on the arrogant person’s same level simply sees her as arrogant.
To patronize is to support, protect or champion someone who is unequal in benefits, knowledge or power, but who has not asked for your support, protection or championing.
As Fossum and Mason have said, “One of the most clearly identifiable aspects of shame is addictive behavior.”
Jane Middelton-Moz, a brilliant clinician in the Seattle area, in Children of Trauma: Rediscovering the Discarded Self, tells of watching the origins of a possible eating addiction while sitting in an airport. A mother and father were having a verbal fight. Their eighteen-month-old child was lying on a seat next to them. They were paying no attention to the child. Each time the child made any noise, the mother thrust a juice bottle in her mouth. A person sat down next to the child and startled her. She began to cry in alarm. The mother looked in her purse and found another bottle filled with
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Diets underscore one of the most paradoxical aspects of toxic shame. In dieting and losing weight, one has the sense of controlling and fixing the problem. As you saw earlier, control is one of the major strategies of covering up shame. All the layers of cover-up are attempts to control the outside so the inside will not be exposed.
