September/October 2002

Facing, overcoming, and healing 
shame-formed attitudes and behaviors

By Robert Caldwell

 

      About 10 years ago I wrote an article entitled "Healing Shame." The article appeared at the beginning of the recovery movement, which begot Adult Children of Alcoholics and the broad popular success of John Bradshaw. Here I revisit the topic, adding thoughts that I've gained in these years, informed by a perspective on human experience that understands shame to be a central player.

      Shame is what you experience when you feel you are not being loved, when you feel people don't respect you, or admire you, or want you around. Shame is feeling you are not worthy or, at the end of the negative continuum, worthless. When you feel guilty, you believe you have done something bad; when you feel shame, you believe you are bad. When you feel shame, you believe that you are not loved because you are not loveable.

      Shame always brings the sense that something is fundamentally wrong with you, that you are rejected, criticized or excluded because you deserve to be. Shame feels as though it can't be fixed, because it is the result of some flaw, or disability, or perversity in your character that you should not have. There is really nothing worse in the emotional realm than shame, because it carries with it the belief that you are rightly not an accepted part of the community.

      Everyone feels shame. It is a natural and a necessary emotion. The person who feels no shame is neither respected nor popular. He is insensitive to the demands of living with others. Shame is nature's premier social emotion.

      Shame developed within the family to keep the hunters and gatherers at their tasks so that they could have the food, the shelter, and the safety they needed to survive. Our early ancestors could have lost themselves in the sweet nectar of tropical mangos if they didn't keep themselves alert with tension (stress). They were prepared to respond with highly aroused action (fear) when they heard an approaching tiger. When it got close enough they chased it away with rocks (anger). After protecting themselves from physical harm, had our ancestors relished those same mangos so much that they forgot to bring some home, their family would have died from starvation and their line would have ended.

      Shame is the way we let others know whether what they are doing is acceptable to us. It is, rightly employed, the kindest and gentlest of reminders, for it carries no physical punishment and can be evoked with the simplest look of expectation or disapproval.

      Shaming can also be vicious and repetitive, and disproportionate with the misbehavior that has been committed. This excessive shame-making unbalances human relationships in ways that cause pain and conflict. Shaming can become such a pervasive habit of individuals and families that they become shame bound. It is this unbalanced, debilitating and painfully aching shame that I speak of.

      As infants, we are all nurtured by parents and other caregivers who are themselves working out their own shaming feelings and behaviors. In growing up we learn many ways of coping with shame. Though each of us emerged from a unique family, there do seem to be several family styles that produce children who have particularly difficult struggles with shame throughout their lives: Abusive, neglecting, controlling, correct and enmeshing families. I will describe each of these types of families and the debilitating shame they foster. To understand how shame is created in our family is to begin to be aware of the origins and dynamics of our own shame-and to set the stage for healing.

 

The neglecting family

      From the time he was 10 years old, John came home from school to a mother who was immobilized with depression. She languished in bed and stirred only to get something for herself or to complain about her sufferings. John moved on tiptoe, waited on her hand and foot, as though he were his mother's mother.

      Martin was told by his parents that they deeply loved him. Yet, his experience of their "love" was confusing. Though he excelled in school, athletics and music, almost never did his mother or father attend his performances, not even when he was speaker at the Honor Society banquet.

      Janet was brought up by a succession of servants and nannies who assumed virtually all of her care. Mother and father were distant beings who seemed always to be more involved in something of momentous importance and only stopped by for what they assured her was quality time.

      John, Janet and Martin had few clues that they were valued-or that they even existed in their parents' eyes. There are few experiences that are more disturbing than attempting to communicate and receiving little or no response. This, of course, is highlighted in our childhood because families are supposed to be where we matter the most. We are born for contact; we grow and thrive on it. In the neglecting family, contact is diminished, even absent. We experience this lack of contact as something wrong with us: if Mom and Dad don't involve themselves with us, we believe it's our fault. Often, we try to justify our parents' detachment: "They had to work to support us," or "What I did wasn't so important anyway."

 

The controlling family

      This family rules by decree. It is the authoritarian, the rigid, the meddlesome family. Any threat or deviation from the "way it's supposed to be" is rapidly squashed. This family coerces piano lessons, preaches, "You'll do every bit of your homework before you can talk to your friends," or "Don't speak unless spoken to." This is the family portrayed with clarity and passion in the film Dead Poet's Society: The blindly ambitious father believes he knows what is best for his son and imposes his vision, never considering his son's inherent interests. The consequence is catastrophic: His son loses all sense of worth and his will to live. Dead Poet's Society is an example of how the shame engendered by a parent's domineering control can cause a child to believe he has no self worth saving. When it becomes impossible for the young man to act according to his own vision and preferences, and he cannot give his demanding parent what he wants, he comes to believe be has no choice but suicide.

      The controlling family attempts to compensate for a deep shame of its own. Its solution is to control behavior according to the personal biases of the powerful (the parents). Thus, the insecurity within is obscured, and the human drive toward creativity is squelched.

 

The correct family

      This family mirrors the Waltons, the Brady bunch, the Cosbys. It is the family that has no obvious serious problems. Everyone meets community standards for behavior and attitude. There is success, loyalty and life lived-by-the-rules. It is the great American ideal.

      The underside is that it is too much of the above. People try too hard to be good or responsible or pleasing to one another. There are subtle rules for measuring up. These are so pervasive that the children don't even rebel against authority; they are not aware they need to.

      Richard never stays out too late in his teen years, yet he believes he is going home early because he gets tired easily. He's not consciously aware that he feels a pressure never to vary from his parent's intention and misses a chance to try out his own individual preferences. His life is lived in the continuous avoidance of being shamed by always producing the behavior that is acceptable, without paying attention to his own wishes and energies.

      In this family, a child never really knows what her wishes and capacities are, or what her spontaneous behaviors might be. Life is given to the avoidance of painful, shaming experiences. Therefore she does not learn how to deal with the inevitable stirrings of unacceptable interest which show up in everyone's life. Nor does she learn how to deal with vigorous shaming experiences that cannot be avoided. She is always just a step away from being shamed. A result of this correctness is that she is never really settled into her true self. She does not have the skill of saying and believing: "Well, that's just me. They can take me or leave me."

 

The enmeshed family

    Members of this family don't experience themselves as separate persons. One never knows where one ends and another begins. The boundaries between persons are fuzzy, haphazard, and permeable. Everyone wears each other's clothes without permission, eats off each other's plates, borrows money and forgets to return it-for "what belongs to one belongs to all." A silent assumption is pervasive: "If I want it, then my child or parent or sibling wants me to have it, and will share it, or give it to me."

      In the enmeshed family everyone shares the other's life system, like Siamese twins. A child in this family learns not to look within himself for awareness of what he is about, but to the other members of the family. The child who is routinely happy when his mother is happy and sad when his mother is depressed is enmeshed. In this family, the child is prematurely made privy to the struggles of the parents, often made responsible for them and asked to comfort or give advice to his parents. He may be cast as "father's little helper" or "mama's strong little man" to the point where he begins to define himself as essential to his parents for their happiness.

      Enmeshment greatly handicaps this child's sense of individual identity, and consequently his sense of effectiveness and responsibility. If he is not separate, how can he make a real decision about his place in the family and, by extension, in the world? Also, enmeshment is very hard to see if one is in it, for the net becomes a part of the self. This person shares in the family's shame, the family's inability to be strong in the world, the family's inferiority feelings, simply because he belongs to the family, not specifically because of anything he has done. Members of an enmeshed family attempt to cope with shame by fusing with one another to find strength in numbers, in emotion-based reciprocal justifications, blame-makings and affirmations. This results in the loss of personal power. Shame shared is still shame.

 

The abusive family

      Aggression, attacking and rage are the hallmarks of this family. It can be emotionally, physically or sexually abusive-or any combination thereof. It can be implicitly or explicitly abusive, or both. This is the family in which shame goes deepest, for the abused person feels that she is damaged and that her injury has made her unfit to live happily with others. This is the family that may abuse the child when she is very young, thus establishing a sense of worthlessness in her to which, in her adult life, she can give no cognitive content. She simply feels worthless in that she has no recourse but to re-experience it whenever she finds herself failing, being dismissed or the object of an aggressive act.

      The emotionally abusive family uses ridicule, punishment and putdowns. The old and the strong intimidate the young and the weak. Sarah's mother repeatedly told her this bedtime story: "You were the ugliest baby the stork had, so out of the charity of our hearts and feeling so sorry for you, knowing no one else would take you, we brought you home. You should be forever grateful." When Rachael was 13, in a strange city, she had this to deal with: "I can't stand you. Get out of this hotel room right now." At midnight alone in a cold corridor, this fragile girl was locked out of her parents' room for the night.

      The physically abusive family spanks, hits and uses emotional intimidation in threatening further physical punishment. It may also withhold meals or force the child to do physically punishing tasks. Alfred's jaw was broken by his father when he said, in a moment of teen-age bravado, "Dad, I've got a right to stay out late like the other kids."

      Thomas was made to carry bricks from one side of the yard to the other for a whole afternoon to demonstrate his acknowledgement that his parents were "in charge." Janice, 11, was beaten till welts rose on her buttocks because her religious mother could not stand the sound of her daughter blurting out a four letter word. Children do not separate their self from their body; consequently, a physical attack is experienced as an extreme devaluing of one's being. We are a violent culture, and the majority of people in America have felt the hurt and disorientation of physical abuse at some time in their lives.

      The sexually abusive family intrudes and violates deepest into the psyche of the person to create oppressive shame. Though sexual abuse is usually carried out by a single person in the family, often there is complicity by one or more family members to evade facing the reality of the behavior. According to some accounts, at least one in three women and one in seven men have been sexually abused. The sexually abusive family assaults the body and mind of the child, and the center of his of her being, the sexual self.

      Sexual abuse takes many forms, from the overt to the subtle. It may be a father making "cute remarks" about his daughter's developing breasts, or a mother's too-intimate bathing of her son when he is eight years old. It may be enemas given on a routine basis or sexually explicit "educational material" put in the child's hands before she is old enough to understand. It may be an older brother repeatedly fondling his sister and threatening her with recriminations "should she tell." And, of course, it may be direct acts for the sexual pleasure of the adult through genital stimulation or intercourse.

      The child victim is mortified and often is bound in a dreadful secret with the offending adult. She lives in terror of it happening again. And it often does; one researcher reported that once sexual abuse has started with a given child, it is repeated an average of 83 times. The child feels that she is worthless to her family, that her family cares nothing about protecting her, and that no one would believe her. Hence she also feels worthless to herself. She experiences her molestation as a violation of her feelings, freedom and the discrete reality of her body. And she becomes, in her own eyes, the object of scorn and guilt. The scarring, the shame-making, penetrates to the center of her soul.

 

The burdens of shame

      Shame-bound people, believing themselves to be seriously flawed, without worth and hardly belonging in the world, inevitably see the consequences of their shame-consciousness show up negatively and painfully in many areas of their life.

      Dominant in the shame-bound person is a lack of self-esteem. He feels dishonored and without belonging. With his boundaries mushy and his sense of himself flawed, he hardly has a self at all, let alone one to feel high regard for. Shaming a person makes him sink as low as he can go, for a person who has been shamed has no way out-he feels there is nothing he can do to set things right. Something vague, but decisive, has shrunk his soul.

    One shame-bound person may become either an offender or a victim or, more likely, one who vacillates from one mode to the other. When her experiences ignite her shame, she may take out her hurt and rage on others weaker than herself. Another shame-bound person may have less aggressive defenses. When she re-experiences her shame, she may fall into her accustomed role of victim. She has learned to play the victim to earn the rewards of sympathy, pity and self-righteousness. For the aggressive person, there is a momentary sense of revenge and power; for the victim, a brush with martyrdom. Beyond these momentary compensations lurks the despair of impotence, of feeling trapped in the cycle of shame. The shame of the parents becomes the shame of the children.

      The shame-bound person has difficulty with intimate relationships. Feeling little worth in herself, she does not wish another to know her, expecting that he will surely see what a shameful creature she is. She dares not reveal her real self, for her history tells her this ultimately makes her more vulnerable to rejection. She puts up a false front, pretends and postures doing all the things she believes will impress others. She can never do that which is the essence of intimacy: Reveal herself transparently to another.

      Depression often possesses the shame-bound. Too shamed to stand up for themselves, they attack themselves with regrets and self-recriminations. Depression may be thought of as the stuck place between anger and grief. Depression is having learned that there is nothing one can do about one's ill fortune. The person who feels no sense of self-worth does not know how to get angry constructively, for that would be too much aggression. On the other hand, the shame-possessed person cannot fully grieve his tormented history. It is much too scary to dare to believe that he could be genuinely important to another, or vice versa.

      At the center of depression is the sense of loss. The shame-bound person carries the greatest loss of all, the loss of his valued self. Since he is only partially aware of the dimension of his loss, and since he has been deprived of the experience of respectful caring and nurturing, the loss is even more difficult to emerge from.

      The shame-bound person is controlling, rigid and perfectionistic. She has had to compensate for not having felt a sense of love. Her experience of love is the opposite of the highly touted, idealized concept of unconditional love. Her shame comes from love offered only under strict conditions. Such "love," of course, is never complete, never a statement of the lovableness of the person as she is, but only as she pleases others by satisfying their expectations and demands. She attempts to put life in perfect order to compensate for the chaos in her heart. Not feeling the warmth of love, she needs desperately to control her world and is not able to tolerate deviation. In a loveless world, doing things right brings the only reward she can attain. She lives very carefully, for a slip can cause her to lose her fragile hold on things.

      The shame-bound person narcissistically clings to his image; after all, it is the most positive thing he has going for him. His emotional processes are so contaminated by shame that he experiences few feelings other than those that are defenses against feeling himself lowest-of-the-low. He believes he has no real self to be loved, or respected, or needed. To compensate, he postures himself as lovable, assumes himself respectable and creates the self-delusion of being indispensable to others. He works hard at it. He lives by his false-self, often bouncing between an over-inflated and under-inflated presentation of himself. He does not strive for self-fulfillment, only for self-image fulfillment. Small wonder that he is highly prone to act out the shame-rage syndrome, a pattern of explosive outbursts when his defenses against his low self-esteem are penetrated.

      Often the shame-bound person avoids and withdraws from life. She appears numb or spaced out. Life is so painful that she retreats to a self-induced trance state in order to make her life bearable. She lives anesthetized, feeling as little pain as possible, sacrificing, in the process, experiencing passion or joy.

 

Undoing shame

      Shame is, indeed, pervasive and profound. It doesn't fix easily, for it is a condition of our psyche and our soul. But with courage, attention and plain hard work, healing is possible. Here are some guidelines for undoing your shame.

.  Accept that your imprinted, shame-bound feelings are not your fault. Most of your shame-inducing experiences happened to you early in life, when you were small and your world of parents and other caregivers loomed large and formidable. Your fundamental feelings of insignificance, the shame that goes far back in your mind and soul, appeared long before you had any choices in the matter. Shame was your natural body and mind response to the burdens and demands that were being visited on you by your family.

      Your caregivers believed that shaming you would motivate you to behave as they wished. Sometimes, they even rationalized that shaming you was "for your own good." Actually, they succeeded only in making you feel bad about being yourself. As a child, you could not grasp that your parents were the dysfunctional persons in the family; you knew not of their failures but only of those attributed to you by the grown-ups. You could only feel awful (shame) for failing to please. I repeat: Your shame did not begin as your fault.

.  Face shame, experience it, incorporate it. As you are your memories, your history, your joys and your talents, you also are your experiences of shame. There is nothing shameful about shame. You have every right to yours. You earned it by surviving in the midst of shaming people. There is no escaping any part of yourself-your shame experiences are in your neurons and your cells. Don't deny or finesse them. Face them, own them and incorporate them into yourself. After all, they are painful memories, not imperious demons. They cannot in themselves hurt you again, though you may believe they can, for you are not vulnerable as you were when you were small. Some things have changed, and one of them is the perspective and position you have as an adult to confront, and not be done in by, the shaming experiences the world continues to present.

.  Laugh heartily and often at shame. People in shame-recovery are a growing, vibrant community who are learning to trust others enough to be open and vulnerable. Finding them and sharing your shame is a way of forming strong and rejuvenating ties with others. Your sense of shame can be your channel of empathy and pathos into the hearts of others. Laugh with Woody Allen, Rodney Dangerfield and Charlie Brown as they help you own the universality of your shame. Nothing helps dispel shame more than good-hearted, sharp-minded comedy about our foibles and failures and frights.

      There is no more powerful connection than that of shame transformed into a bond of understanding and mutual support for one another's healing. No group laughs more heartily and deals with shame more effectively than Alcoholics Anonymous, for they simultaneously accept their pains and failures, while seeing and sharing the humor in the gap between their pretenses and their realities. In the process, they become transparent and vital and real. Nothing is more successful at banishing shame than the reciprocal laughter of acceptance from those who have traveled the same path.

.  Replace shame with mature guilt. Guilt has received bad press, and well it should-if, and only if, you are talking about neurotic guilt that self-flagellates and changes nothing. If you are talking about mature guilt, then guilt is one of the great inventions of our nature. For mature guilt lets you know what you, yourself, deem unacceptable, and offers you an opportunity to do something about it. Shame, on the other hand, is a feeling so deep and so overwhelming, that it seems there is nothing you can do.

      Henry feels shame that he is not the sort of person who can ever excel at his work. Whatever happens, a demotion, a "blowing out" by his boss, Henry senses that this is because he is basically inadequate, so he hangs his head and lowers his eyes and dampens his energy. Finding the smarts and the courage to re-evaluate himself as guilty of inertia and poor training, he begins to create and achieve goals that are possible for him. He sets certain standards, and if he doesn't achieve them, he can rightly feel guilty that he is failing. He can then increase his efforts to succeed or redefine his goals. He has moved into consciousness that his worth can be defined by realistic possibilities, not by the unfocused and hidden demands of shame-formed expectations.

. Don't take it lying down. The basic physiological response to shame is to avert the eyes, compress the chest and generally give the impression that the shamer has won the day. While this has its usefulness when talking to unsympathetic authority, it is not the way to dispel the feelings of shame. Responding quickly-and wisely-will give you a whole different sense of yourself. If someone rolls their eyes at you, a direct response such as. "Are you implying that what I'm doing is not smart?" will prompt a burst of adrenaline that will save you a lot of nocturnal tossing and turning. If you are treated disrespectfully by your boss, go into her office and say, "I'm not sure that you understand how serious I am about my work, and I notice that you seem to be implying disapproval. I would like to speak openly about this so I may know just what your opinions are." This will give you a whole different sense of yourself and your place in the office. Pride in your capacities to stand your ground will replace shame.

.  Make a new family. You must learn from new experiences that you are not unworthy of belonging to the human community. To heal your shame, you must create a healthy family for yourself. Think of an occasion when you have stood against those who would make you feel bad about yourself. Think of how you counted on your connection to a friend or lover or teacher who backed you in your struggles. Their support helped you to experience the event as healing rather than retraumatizing.

      The other day, reading People magazine in the doctor's office, I came upon this comment of tender yearning and wisdom. Heather Graham, the delightful comedienne of Austin Powers, told of people being upset about her not speaking to her mother for years. She explained that her family is extremely judgmental about her being in what they deem "racy" movies, but that she feels it is important to have people around her who like her just as she is.

      Already you have begun this "new family"-clubs, churches, professional societies are efforts; lovers, friends, marriages are efforts; even cliques, cults and gangs (though of dubious effectiveness) are efforts. Your success in healing from shame will be crucially influenced by your ability to surround yourself with those who find you loveable, who support you in the way you lead your life, who are for you even when they don't like your behaviors; and toward whom you heartily reciprocate.

      The work of undoing your shame is as profound as are the potentials of your soul. It reaches down into the heart of your concept of yourself and of your belief in the possibilities of life, alone and in the company of others. It causes you to re-examine in your own mind and heart an idea expressed in the sentimental and profound motto of Father Flanagan of Boys Town: "There is no such thing as a bad boy."

      Can you make yourself a claimant of this truth? If you can, then you are on your way to discovering the freedom of surrendering your self-definition of being a bad, shame-deserving person. Perhaps you have done things that were mistaken, insensitive, unethical, self-critical, negligent or masochistic. But never have you been bad, never unworthy of belonging. You are just an ordinary struggling person, striving to extract from the day its possible satisfactions and nursing a lively curiosity about what's next.

 

      Robert Caldwell, M. Div, LCPC, practices individual, couples and group psychotherapy in Bethesda, Maryland. He can be reached by calling 301-652-6180 or via e-mail at rcaldwell@psychsight.come. For more information, visit his website at www.psychsight.com.