Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy

by Jessica Fern

Shame researcher Brené Brown makes the important distinction between guilt and shame, with guilt being the perspective that I’ve done something wrong, which can be helpful and motivating, and shame the perspective that I am wrong, which can be debilitating and paralyzing.73 When we have critical or perfectionistic parts of ourselves that spew inner negativity and then shameful parts that absorb these thoughts as gospel, finding love and happiness in ourselves can feel nearly impossible. I’ve come to see our inner critic as a form of emotional autoimmunity. When someone has an autoimmune condition, the immune system goes into overdrive and the body starts attacking itself instead of protecting itself from outside invasion. When we inquire into the motivation of the inner critic, it is usually a part of us that wants to protect us, keep us safe or have us be successful, but its methods are actually self-harming and counterproductive to its protective intention. Shame is like a weakened immune system that will catch an emotional cold through even the smallest of insults, neutral feedback or questioning from another. Even though the part of us experiencing shame often feels powerless, it is quite powerful in its capacity to eclipse our ability to connect with our self and with others. Shame can function like a form of deflated narcissism where any and all phenomena in the world are taken as evidence for how you are not worthy or how you are fundamentally failing, flawed or bro...