Healing the Shame That Binds You

by John Bradshaw

In this earliest stage of life, we can only know ourselves in the mirroring eyes of our primary caregivers.

When we are exposed without any way to protect ourselves, we feel the pain of shame. 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. To be right is to be certain, and to be certain stops us from being curious. Curiosity and wonder are at the heart of all learning. Plato said that all philosophy begins in wonder. So the feeling of absolute certainty and righteousness causes us to stop seeking and learning.

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).

Spiritual traditions, as well as evolutionary biologists, tell us that we each have a true self (soul) and an inner core that cannot be destroyed by those around us.

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.

Hell, in my opinion, is never finding your true self and never living your own life or knowing who you are. This is the fate that lies at the end of the journey of ever-deepening toxic shame.

The neurotic assumes too much responsibility; the person with a character disorder not enough. When neurotics are in conflict with the world, they automatically assume that they are at fault. When those with character disorders are in conflict with the world, they automatically assume the world is at

It is like internal bleeding—exposure to oneself lies at the heart of toxic shame. A shame-based person will guard against exposing his inner self to others, but more significantly, he will guard against exposing himself to himself.

When children have shame-based parents, they identify with them. This is the first step in the child’s internalizing shame because the children carry their parent’s shame.

Our identity demands a significant other whose eyes see us pretty much as we see ourselves.

For example, if you were never allowed to express anger in your family, your anger becomes an alienated part of yourself. You experience toxic shame when you feel angry. This part of you must be disowned or severed. There is no way to get rid of your emotional power of anger. Anger is self-preserving and self-protecting energy. Without this energy you become a doormat and a people-pleaser. As your feelings, needs and drives are bound by toxic shame, more and more of you is alienated.

There is no way you can share your inner self because you are an object of contempt to yourself.

This paralyzing internal monitoring causes withdrawal, passivity and inaction.

be severed and alienated within oneself also creates a sense of unreality. One may have an all-pervasive sense of never quite belonging, of being on the outside looking in. The condition of inner alienation and isolation is also pervaded by a low-grade chronic depression. This has to do with the sadness of losing one’s authentic self. Perhaps the deepest and most devastating aspect of neurotic shame is the rejection of the self by the self.

As the false self is formed, the authentic self goes into hiding. Years later the layers of defense and pretense are so intense that one loses all conscious awareness of who one really

Codependency is a condition wherein one has no inner life. Happiness is on the outside. Good feelings and self-validation lie on the outside. They can never be generated from within.

Why would parents, who were once abused and beaten children, want to play their parents’ role? This answer lies in the dynamic of identification. Offender identification was clearly defined by Bettelheim with the phrase “identification with the aggressor.”

When children are physically hurt and in psychological pain, they want out of it as quickly as possible. So they cease identifying with themselves and instead identify with their shaming oppressor in an attempt to possess that person’s power and strength. In forming the identification with the parent, one becomes at once the weak, bad child and the strong transgressor parent.

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.

TOXIC SHAME IS PRIMARILY fostered in significant relationships. If you do not value someone, it’s hard to imagine being shamed by what he says or does.

It’s difficult to let someone get close to you if you feel defective and flawed as a human being.

Shame-based parents cannot do any of these. They simply don’t know how.

The poisonous pedagogy justifies highly abusive methods for suppressing children’s vital spontaneity: physical beatings, lying, duplicity, manipulation, scare tactics, withdrawal of love, isolation and coercion to the point of torture. All of these methods are toxically shaming.

child needs structure and predictability. He needs to be able to count on someone.

was rarely able to do this without getting caught. To my son’s young mind if a piece of that story were missing, it was disastrous. It would put his world out of order. In a more dramatic way, for a child to be continuously moved from his family causes severe upset.

He cannot rely on his own emotions, has not come to experience them through trial and error, has no sense of his own real needs and is alienated from himself to the highest degree.

Abuse is abandonment because when children are abused, no one is there for them. What’s happening is purportedly for the child’s own good. But it isn’t about the child at all; it’s about the parent. Such transactions are crazy-making and induce shame. In each act of abuse the child is shamed. Young children, because of their egocentrism, make themselves responsible for the abuse. The child says to himself, “My caretakers couldn’t be crazy or emotionally ill; it must be me.”

child must maintain this idealization. Children’s minds are magical, egocentric and nonlogical. They are completely dependent upon their parents for survival. The idealization ensures survival. If my parents are sick and crazy, how could I survive? It must be me. I am crazy. There’s something wrong with me, or they wouldn’t treat me this way.

Toxic shame results from the unexpected exposure of vulnerable aspects of a child’s self. This exposure takes place before the child has any ego boundaries to protect herself.

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

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.

and unconscious. They were the best decisions available to you at the time. And they kept you sane. They literally saved your life. The very defenses that were once life-giving later on become the preservers of our toxic shame.

All my life I used up my energies by always having to be guarded. This was a mighty waste of time and energy. The fear was that I would be exposed. And when exposed, all would see that I was flawed and defective as a person—an imposter. Control is a way to ensure that no one can ever shame us again. It involves controlling our own thoughts, expressions, feelings and actions. And it involves attempting to control other people’s thoughts, feelings and actions. Control is the ultimate villain in destroying intimacy. We cannot share freely unless we are equal. When one person controls another, equality is ruptured.

While criticizing and blaming, Mom is relieved from her toxic shame, but is acting shameless. When parents act shameless, their children have to take on their parents’ toxic shame.

Besides self-assertion, envy may disguise itself in admiration or greed. Apropos of admiration, I can remember feeling disgusted with myself as I grandiosely praised a person I actually envied. Upon analysis, I found myself saying almost the exact opposite of what I felt. This is envy’s ultimate disguise, to pass itself off as its exact opposite.

True admiration, which, because it is free of conscious will, always has the option of silence. Envy’s limitation of admiration clamors for public acknowledgment. The more stinging the envy, the more ardently must the envious one dramatize himself as an admirer whose passion . . . shames the more reticent responses of others.

To be shame-based is to be in intolerable pain. Physical pain is horrible, but there are moments of relief. There is hope of being cured. The inner rupture of shame and the “mourning” for your authentic self is chronic. It never goes away. There’s no hope for a cure because you are defective. This is the way you are. You have no relationship with yourself or with anyone else. You are totally alone. You are in solitary confinement and chronic grief.

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.

Food can never satisfy the longing, and as the longing turns into shame, then one eats more to anesthetize the shame. The meta-shame, the shame about eating in secret and binging, is a displacement of affect, a transforming of the shame about self into the shame about food. The same dynamic takes place in obesity.

Intellectualizing is often a way to avoid internal states that are shame-bound. One’s very way of intellectualizing can be addictive. Generalizing and universalizing keep one in categories so broad and abstract that there’s no contact with concrete, specific, sensory-based reality. Abstract generalizing is a marvelous way to mood-alter.

To heal our toxic shame we must come out of hiding. As long as our shame is hidden, there is nothing we can do about it. In order to change our toxic shame we must embrace it. There is an old therapeutic adage that states, “The only way out is through.”

Since it was personal relationships that set up our toxic shame, we need personal relationships to heal our shame. This is crucial. We must risk reaching out and looking for nonshaming relationships if we are to heal our shame. There is no other way.

“It is not the trauma we suffer in childhood that makes us emotionally ill, but the inability to express the trauma.”

In order for grief to be resolved, several factors must be present. The first factor is validation. 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.

Delayed grief is the core of what is called post-traumatic stress disorder. As soldiers come back from the war, they have common symptoms of unreality: panic, being numbed-out psychically, easily startled, feeling depersonalized, needing to control, having nightmares and sleeping disorders. These same symptoms are common for children from dysfunctional families. They are the symptoms of unresolved grief.

The philosopher Gottfried von Leibniz taught us that concepts (intellectual knowledge) are always based on precepts (sensory knowledge). Every thought we think carries sensory data with it. Every thought we think was first perceived, seen, heard, touched, tasted, smelled. Concepts trigger sensory images—either visual images, auditory self-talk or feelings (kinesthetic) responses.

Shame spirals are also triggered by internal self-talk. Such inner talk is based on old beliefs we have about ourselves and the world. These beliefs were fostered by our shame-based caregivers. Auditory shame spirals result from introjected parental voices that were originally the actual voices of our shaming caregivers. They play like recordings in our head. The transactional analysis therapists estimate there are twenty-five thousand hours of these recordings.

When a caregiver acts “shameless” by raging, condemning, criticizing or being judgmental, we take on the shame they are avoiding. While they avoid their shame, we have to carry it. In actual fact it is our shame, i.e., we actually experience being shamed by their acting in a shameless manner. We accepted their judgment as being about us, when it was really about them. It is in this sense that we carry their shame.

So words are anchors that trigger past sensory experience.