Healing the Shame That Binds You

by John Bradshaw

One of the landmarks in naming the demon I’m calling toxic shame is the outline of the control-release dynamics by Fossum and Mason in their book Facing Shame.

When shame underlies the control and release it seems to intensify both sides of the tension. . . . Shame makes the control dynamic more rigidly demanding and unforgiving and the release more dynamic and self-destructive. The more intensely one controls, the more one requires the balance of release and the more abusingly or self destructively one releases, the more intensely one requires control. Diets follow this control and release cycle. An addiction is an addiction. The word means to give oneself up (from Latin addicere). To be addicted is to surrender oneself to something obsessively. The answer for addicts is not trying to control the addiction. The answer is to be aware of powerlessness and unmanageability and surrender. Surrender means facing up to the fact that one can’t control it. That’s why it is an addiction.

ADDICTION TO GUILT You can also be addicted to toxic guilt. Toxic guilt says you have no right to be unique, to be the very one you are. To stay in toxic guilt forces you into constantly taking self-inventory. Life is a problem to be solved, rather than a mystery to be lived. Toxic guilt keeps you endlessly working on yourself and analyzing every event and transaction. There is never a time for rest because there is always more you need to do. Guilt puts you in your head a lot. Guilt is also a way to feel powerful when you are really powerless. “I’ve made my mother mad,” or “I’m responsible for her sickness,” are statements rooted in the grandiosity of toxic shame.

He defines identity as “an inner sense of sameness and continuity which is matched by the mirroring eyes of at least one significant other.” It was the contaminated mirroring by our significant relationships that fostered our toxic shame.

Toxic shame masks our deepest secrets about ourselves; it embodies our belief that we are essentially defective. We feel so awful, we dare not look at it ourselves, much less tell anyone. The only way we can find out we were wrong about ourselves is to risk exposing ourselves to someone else’s scrutiny. When we trust someone else and experience their love and acceptance, we begin to change our beliefs about ourselves. We learn that we are not bad; we learn that we are lovable and acceptable.

If you are an addict, you have to stop using whatever drug you’re addicted to or stop acting out with food, sex, gambling, work or whatever the activity addiction is. Your addiction has been your false secure base—your primary relationship. You have to give up your false idol if you want to rejoin the human race. Healing your toxic shame demands that you surrender to your powerlessness over it.

All addictions and enmeshed relationships are fantasy bonds, creating a life of inner withdrawal and self-indulging gratification. Such a life is inhuman. Only in the life of dialogue and community can we truly live and grow.

The restoration of a bond of mutuality with God has enormous power to heal toxic shame. Toxic shame is a disorder of the will. As disabled, the will becomes grandiose. As shame-based people get entrenched in their cover-ups, they become more shameless. They hide their mistakes with perfectionism, control, blame, criticism, contempt, etc. To be shameless is to play God. This grandiose God-playing is a spiritual disaster. It is spiritual bankruptcy. Steps Two and Three reconnect the essential bond of dependence in man with a Higher Power.

Perhaps the greatest wound a shame-based person carries is the inability to be intimate in a relationship. This inability flows directly out of the fundamental dishonesty at the core of toxic shame. To be a false self, always hiding and filled with secrets, precludes any possibility of honesty in relationships.

I needed to grieve the pain of my abandonment. This is the pathway to second order change.

The philosopher Gurieff is said to have suggested that, “Until we resolve our source relationships, we are never really in another relationship.” Leaving home means breaking our source relationships. And since we carry much of our shame as a result of those relationships, leaving home is a powerful way of reducing shame.

As Alice Miller has repeatedly written, “It is not the trauma we suffer in childhood that makes us emotionally ill, but the inability to express the trauma.”

Our childhood abandonment trauma must be validated as real or it cannot be resolved. Perhaps the most damaging consequence of being shame-based is that we don’t know how depressed and angry we really are. We don’t actually feel our unresolved grief. Our false selves and ego defenses keep us from experiencing it. Paradoxically, the very defenses that allowed us to survive our childhood trauma have now become barriers to our growth. Fritz Perls once said, “Nothing changes ’til it becomes what it is.” We must uncover our frozen grief.

(For a clear and concise discussion of unresolved grief read After the Tears by Jane Middelton-Moz and Lorie Dwinell.)

As forms of energy, the disowned parts of us exert considerable influence. Shame-based people tend to be exhausted a lot of the time. They spend a lot of energy holding on to their false-self masks and hiding their disowned parts. I have compared it to holding a beach ball under water. Virginia Satir compares it to keeping guard over hungry dogs locked in the basement. The repressed parts exert lots of pressure by forcing us to keep their opposites going.

“As one moves forward in the consciousness process, the ego becomes a more aware ego. As a more aware ego, it is in position to make real choices.”

The “voice” may be described as the language of an insidious self-destructive process existing, to varying degrees, in every person. The voice represents an external point of view toward oneself initially derived from the parents’ suppressed hostile feelings toward the child.

It is as though you are divided into a parent and a child. The parent, or “top dog,” is always trying to get control to change you into something “better,” while the child, or “underdog,” is continually evading these attempts to change.

Shame-inducing thoughts tend to fall into three categories: self put-downs, catastrophic thoughts about one’s inability to handle the future, and critical and shaming thoughts of remorse and regrets.

Pause for a moment and write down five of your most shaming thoughts. For example, the following five are thoughts I worked on while doing this exercise a few years ago: 1. Your pants are so tight, it’s really disgusting. (Obsession on weight) 2. I’m a failure as a father. (Obsession on parental duties) 3. I think I’m really sick. (Obsession on physical illness) 4. What’s the use. I’m just going to die. (Obsession on death) 5. You’re really selfish. (Obsession on morality)

PERSONALIZATION Shame-based people are egocentric. I compare it to having a chronic toothache. If your tooth hurts all the time, all you can think of is your tooth. You become tooth-centered. Likewise, if your self is ruptured, and it is painful to experience your self, you become self-centered.

Shame-based people relate everything to themselves. A recently married woman thinks that every time her husband talks about being tired, he is tired of her. A man whose wife complains about the rising price of food hears this as an attack on his ability to be a breadwinner.

Personalization involves the habit of continually comparing yourself to other people. This is a consequence of a perfectionistic system that fosters shame. A perfectionistic system demands comparison. “He’s a much better organizer that I am.” “She knows herself a lot better than I do.” “He feels things so deeply. I’m really shallow.” ...

“SHOULD” THINKING Karen Homey wrote about the “tyranny of shoulds.” Should thinking is a direct result of perfectionism. In this thought distortion you operate from a list of inflexible rules about how you and other people should act. The rules are right and indisputable. One client told me that her husband should want to take her on Sunday drives. “Any man who loves his wife ought to take her for a drive out in the country and then to a nice eating place.” The fact that her husband didn’t want to do this meant that he was selfish and “only thought about himself.” The most common cue words for this thought distortion are “should,” “ought” and “must.” A shame-based person with this thought distortion makes both himself and others miserable.

Mind reading is a form of imagining and fantasizing. In the long run you’re best off making no inferences about people. Treat all your interpretations about other people as hallucinations. Use that word when you give your interpretation. Say, “My fantasy or hallucination is . . .”

Use the words “should,” “ought” and “must” as red flags. Flexible rules and expectations don’t rely on these words because there are always exceptions and special circumstances. Rigidity is the mark of mental illness; flexibility is the mark of mental health. Without flexibility, there is no freedom.

Scott Peck has defined love “as the will to extend myself for the sake of nurturing my own and another’s spiritual growth.” This definition sees love as an act of the will. This means that love is a decision. I can choose to love myself, no matter what the past has been and no matter how I feel about myself.

The rejection of self is the core of toxic shame.

Remember that toxic shame turns you into a human doing because toxic shame says your being is flawed and defective. If your being is flawed and defective, nothing you do could possibly make you lovable. You can’t change who you are.

Understanding the distinction between being and doing is one of the great lessons of my life. I tried so hard to achieve and do better and better. But no matter what I did, I still felt the deep sense of defectiveness that is the mark of internalized shame. Saying “I love myself for whatever. . . .” is a powerful counteraction to the voice of shame. Saying “I accept myself unconditionally” can transform our lives.

I refused to talk about diets or exercise. I knew that until she accepted herself exactly as she was, she would never change. She couldn’t lose weight by continually shaming herself. How can a problem that is organized and motivated by toxic shame be cured by increasing the toxic shame? Every time my client compared herself or put herself down with a negative label, she started a shame spiral. The shame spiral intensified the toxic internalized shame, which set her up to eat more as a way to mood-alter the pain of the shame. Self-labeling and odious comparisons are the way to stay overweight, not the way to lose weight.

GIVING YOURSELF TIME AND ATTENTION

The work of love is the work of listening to yourself.

discipline allows us to enhance life’s pleasure. If you love yourself, you’re willing to delay gratification so that something else more conducive to your growth might take place.

If I love myself, I will live in reality. I will commit to telling the truth and being responsible. Those behaviors increase my self-esteem. If I love those behaviors in others, why wouldn’t I love them in myself?

Another action and work of love that will enhance your self-love and heal your toxic shame is to become more assertive. Assertiveness is based on self-love and self-valuing.

errors. The process of learning has been defined as “successive approximation.”

Awareness is the degree of clarity with which you perceive and understand, consciously or unconsciously, all the factors relating to the need at hand.

Expanding awareness is an obvious corollary to the problem of mistakes. If you are mistake-prone, you might consider expanding your awareness as you approach a course of action. This is the most useful solution. Vowing never to make the same mistake again is not useful because you will make the same mistake again if you do not expand your awareness.

Saying that you have always made the best decisions available to you does not relieve you of being responsible for your mistakes. Responsibility means accepting the consequences of your actions. There is a consequence for every action. Becoming more responsible means expanding your awareness to be more aware of the consequences of your choices.

Because of abandonment trauma, shame-based people become adult children who form codependent relationships. These relationships are dominated by the fear of abandonment. They are the result of the “bond permanence” Alice Miller speaks of. Such relationships are dominated by attachment issues, either overattachment (enmeshment) or being underattached (isolation).

Having been abandoned gives me a feeling of scarcity. I’d better hold on to what I’ve got because there may not be any more. It’s hard for me to delay gratification for the same reason. There may not be any more.

control. I have tried to set relationships up in such a way that I become so important to the other people that they cannot leave me.

Control is the great enemy of intimacy.

Each time we reenact with a new fantasy bond relationship, we are trying to do the grief work. We choose the same kind of person in order to have another chance at resolution. Each new partner represents aspects of one or both of our parents. We try to make our partner into our parent(s) so we can resolve the conflict and move on. Since we are no longer children, it never works.

His mother used to threaten him by telling him that the police were going to pick him up and take him to jail. Such a practice is not uncommon. Many shame-based people experience overreactions of shame inducement just by the mere presence of a boss or authority figure.

Since deceit is fundamental to all animal communication, there must be a strong selection to spot deception, and this ought in turn to select for a degree of self-deception rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray—by the subtle signs of self-knowledge—the deception being practiced. Regression of the true self is an evolved adaptation used by the child as a deceptive tactic and developmental strategy.

Empathetically view each of your despised and disdained parts. They represent the shadow side of your consciousness. The more you avoid thinking about these parts of yourself, the more they become unconscious. The more unconscious they are, the more you will project them on others by criticizing, blaming and judging. This keeps you alienated from others.

After much practice you can create a state of mindlessness. This state is called the silence. Once the silence is created, an unused mental faculty is activated. It is a form of intuition. With this faculty one can know God directly.

An interesting and succinct way of describing the act and benefit of meditation.

“There is nothing that has to be done; there is only someone to be.”