How to Understand and Overcome Shame
Guilt vs Shame
Children don’t have the mental or emotional capacity to understand the difference between guilt and shame. When used appropriately, guilt can be adaptive and helpful, while shame is more often destructive and unhelpful.
One example is with infidelity. Guilt would say that cheating is a bad behavior, while shame would call cheaters bad people. Guilt is a tool to help people fit better into society, while shame is a weapon used to break someone’s spirit.
Parents who are overwhelmed, ignorant, mentally ill or struggling with their own trauma often exploit this naivety to gain control over their kids. However, there are significant insidious consequences. Parents who use shame to control their kids, create adults who suffer in silence.
The Function of Shame
When we’re in a conflict situation, we only have two choices: to escalate, or de-escalate.
The escalation route, is where the fight or flight response kicks in. A threat is identified, and physiologically our bodies prepare for action. If we have a chance of fighting off the threat or getting away safely, this is the best option for our survival.
However, if there is no chance of us winning the fight or getting away safely, we have to deal with the threat in another way. With the de-escalation route, we can either freeze or submit. Modern civility makes it so most of us aren’t faced with physical threats most of the time, so this process manifests during relational conflict, where the threat is an emotional attack or rejection.
If you have a chronic tendency to self-blame, hide your emotions, shut down or struggle to communicate, that tells me the environment you grew up in required de-escalation to survive. If you grew up in a prolonged state of de-escallation, you likely struggle with shame.
Imagine a child who is afraid and overwhelmed. This child feels trapped in a bad situation where they can’t say or do anything about it, and they don’t trust the adults in their life to help them without consequences. Fight and flight are not an option, because the kid relies on these adults to survive. What can the child do?
They have to submit. Rather than the adults adapting to the needs of the child (as they should), the child has to adapt to the adults. The child learns to stay alert for subtle changes in their parents’ moods that signal potential danger. It’s kind of like when you’re a kid and you want to ask your parents for something, and you have to gauge whether or not they’re in the right mood before you ask — but on steroids.
Subconsciously, the child understands that hiding their emotions and needs feels safer than the risk of showing they need help. Kids must be seen and not heard. They were raised with the impression that their presence and preferences are an inconvenience or burden.
Rather than helping their child develop their own healthy ego, sense of self and nurturing their confidence, parents that use shame to project their own ego onto the child, where the child is now responsible for making the parent look and feel good about themselves.
Internalized Shame is a Survival Strategy
We internalize what we’re repeatedly exposed to. So if shame is the way parents control, we adapt to that methodology. As screwed up as it is, internalized shame is a survival strategy to minimize damage.
Consider the outward appearance of shame. When someone feels shame, their head is down, they are quiet, they avoid eye contact, and they hide from others. Shame registers visually as submissive and appeasing. It is the human equivalent to a cornered animal “playing dead”; it communicates, “I’m not a threat to you, I have nothing you want, please don’t hurt me.”
The child is forced to ignore their internal experience, and focus on their parents’. For whatever reason, whether it’s divorce, substance abuse, overwhelm, mental illness or generational trauma, the parents aren’t emotionally available to their kids. These kids understand that their best bet at survival, is making sure their parents don’t get too upset.
Kids in this environment instinctively know that if they “escalate” by being outspoken about their feelings and needs, it will likely provoke an attack or rejection from the adults in their life. These kids know that if they cry, their parents will be angry with them or make it about themselves. If they laugh or play too loudly, they’ll be scolded for it. If they have interests outside of what their parents want, they won’t be encouraged.
Whether the adults are unable to or unwilling to support the child, the result is the same. The child is left with the responsibility of maintaining a relationship with their parent through blind obedience, and the child blames themself for their own suffering.
Internalized shame is a regulator or brake system that reduces self-exposure to an interpersonal threat. It teaches us to shut down and shut up. If you withhold your feelings and needs from others, they can never reject you, criticize you, or get upset with you. Shame keeps us safe by never expecting help from others.
If being honest with your parents about your feelings and needs was not safe as a child, shame develops instead of communication skills. When you grow up without communication skills, you believe honesty will bring you pain! All vulnerable conversations trigger that same helplessness and shame that restricted your vocal cords as a child. You collapse, caretake or people please; not because you want to, but because it was hardwired into your nervous system at a young age.
Shedding Shame
The reason why I’m explaining all of this is not to blame everything on your parents. You can find the best parent in the world, and they still aren’t a perfect parent. Rather, my point is to untangle what is and what isn’t your responsibility.
Children are responsible for learning how to be a competent part of society. Parents are responsible for teaching them how to do so. Shame is a hard and fast way of gaining control, rather than a true education of how to be in the world.
If you were shamed as a child, you were taught to be obedient, not competent. You were held accountable for regulating other peoples’ emotions and egos, at the expense of learning how to regulate your own. This is absolutely inappropriate, and the goal of therapy and this video, it to put accountability where it is appropriate.
The shortcomings of your parents when you were a kid was not your fault. As an adult, it is your responsibility to heal the wounds of your childhood. However, the burden of shame makes that process impossible, because shame gaslights your inner child into holding onto all the blame, and making excuses for your parents.
Shedding shame begins with understanding what you should have gotten as a child, letting yourself off the hook for impossible standards, and regaining connection with yourself, so you can develop real connections with others.
Where Can I Find More Help?
If you’re looking for a space to release shame, reconnect with yourself and improve communication within your relationships — therapy can be a great resource for you!
Maybe you aren’t fully ready for therapy yet — That’s okay too! Click the button below to subscribe to my YouTube Channel, Tips from a Therapist, where I offer some of my best tips on how to improve your relationship with yourself and other people.
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The more you know, the more you grow!
