Let’s revisit the situation with the child who hid her sister’s lovie and refused to own up to it or apologize despite her sister’s obvious distress. Refusal to apologize is a classic example of shame: it presents as cold and unempathic when, in fact, in these moments, a child is overwhelmed with “badness” and freezes up. She cannot apologize because to do so she’d have to “see” herself as the person who just did something awful, and she’d have to face the unwanted feeling of being unlovable to others. (“No one would want to love or take care of a kid who is so awful.”) She cannot confront the
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