“Contained in the experience of shame,” writes the psychologist Gershen Kaufman, “is a piercing awareness of ourselves as fundamentally deficient in some vital way as a human being.”[13] People bearing trauma’s scars almost uniformly develop a shame-based view of themselves at the core, a negative self-perception most of them are all too conscious of. Among the most poisonous consequences of shame is the loss of compassion for oneself. The more severe the trauma, the more total that loss.
