More on the Shame Subject

For me, since I don't have anyone at the moment to discuss this with, I need to read and highlight bits that I have found interesting, so here are more:

From  Regulating and Coping with Shame:

In other words, they learn to expect shaming experiences, they learn to hide their flawed sense of self from others, and they interact with others in a way that increases the likelihood of receiving shaming messages.

With shame, people experience an accompanying desire to disappear or hide, or to “break into a thousand pieces”. More frequent and intense experiences with shame eventually lead to an internalization of shame. Internalization of shame is a condition in which a person feels flawed at their very core. They experience a “badness” about themselves that does not change regardless of their actions. Some experience this as “not ever being good enough”, “having a bad effect on others”, and “being broken in some way but not being certain about how or why they are broken”.

According to many theorists (Harper & Hoopes, 1990; Kaufman, 1996), the internalization of shame has roots in the dynamics of interpersonal relationships early in life and is subsequently influenced by interactions with peers, teachers, extended family, and in adult contexts such as romantic relationships and work. Internalization of shame, sometimes referred to as proneness to shame (Cook, 1996), is related to the absence of three processes in families which Harper & Hoopes (1990) referred to as the affirmation triangle. The three processes are accountability, intimacy, and appropriate dependency. When any one of these processes is absent in family relationships, individuals will experience and internalize shame.

In conditions where dependency, accountability, or intimacy are absent, children internalize shame and become shame prone meaning that they begin to view the world as a place where they expect shame from others and actually do things that bring shame upon them. The received the message that they are inconvenient to their parents, that their basic feelings are inappropriate, and their interpersonal world is unpredictable.

According to Panskepp (2004), while people have the inherent capacity to experience affects of different kinds, the environment they are raised in interacts with these affect programs in their brains and can increase the likelihood that an individual will use certain affect programs over others. An example would be a child who experiences a lot of fear training his affect systems to more easily and quickly go to fear. When a child feels anger, fear, or sadness, if the parent is threatened by the presence of emotion in the child, or if the parent sends a message that the emotion is inappropriate or inconvenient, the child will experience shame, and when this happens frequently, children will internalize shame and assume that something about them is flawed because the feelings emanate from them but seem to be rejected by others as something bad. Over time the internalization of shame leads to what Miller (2008) calls a presentation of a false self in which a person presents an image to others that is not congruent with their internal experience of themselves and their world.

According to Kaufman (1996), individuals proceed through several steps to finally internalizing shame. In the first stage, they exhibit self contempt, self blaming, and negative comparisons of themselves to others. As they continue to give more energy to such thoughts and behaviors, they move to stage II in which they begin to disown attachment needs, feelings, and what Kaufman calls self clusters such as the child self, the adolescent self, and the needing self. In time an individual eventually moves to the third stage in which splitting, seeing the self as all negative and others as all positive, takes over. The final step in the process is one in which the whole person bases their identity on shame. They arrive at the conclusion that it is better to receive affirmation for one’s badness rather than no acknowledgement at all. In family systems without a healthy affirmation triangle (accountability, intimacy, and dependency) this development sequence for shame proceeds fairly quickly and at young ages.

Fearing discovery, the shame based person reacts first by distancing in the relationship so that the anticipated discovery of shame by the other person and the feared abandonment and rejection when their shame is discovered is never realized. Becoming defensive and blaming others is also used to protect oneself from intense experience of shame. Substance use and sexual compulsivity are behaviors that are often used to avoid the more dark feelings of shame. While these activities do not resolve the internalized shame, they help individuals temporarily feel better and suspend for a time the feelings of shame. Unfortunately, the shame usually returns with more intensity as the individual deals with their feelings about their behavior or experiences the interpersonal disruptions that are often accompanied by drug and alcohol use and sexual behavior outside the relationship. Self harm, eating disorders and rage are also ways of defending against shame. Again, they do not resolve internalized shame, and they contribute to become more shame prone, but they allow people to escape for a short time from the intense shame affect. Fee & Tangney (2000) found that procrastination was another way of avoiding the risk of being shamed.

Compass of Shame Scale, CoSS (Elison, Pulos, &, Lennon, 2006; Nathanson, 1992).- This scale measures use of the four shame coping styles, namely Attack Self, Withdrawal, Attack Other, and Avoidance. In the Withdrawal category, a person acknowledges the experience as negative, accepts shame’s message as valid, and tries to hide from the situation. In the Attack Self category, the person experience is negative, shame is internalized, and anger is turned inward on the self. A person in the Avoidance category does not acknowledge the negative experience of self, denies the message of shame, and distracts from painful feeling. In the Attack Other category, a person often does not accept the negative experience of self and often denies the shame message the negative experience of self, typically does not accept shame’s message, and then blames or ridicules someone else.

And a bit from: Shutting Shame Down

The Catch-22, of course, is that shame creates emotional patterns that make us reluctant to face it down. After all, who wants to look inward when what’s staring back is a painful emotion that makes us feel unworthy and unlovable? Ultimately, though, avoiding or suppressing this universal feeling can result in long-term emotional and physical consequences that trump the short-term discomfort that accompanies self-analysis and honesty.

At its core, Brown says, shame “is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.

“We’re afraid that people won’t like us if they know the truth about who we are, where we come from, what we believe, how much we’re struggling, or, believe it or not, how wonderful we are when soaring.”

The emotional experience of shame is fueled by negative self-talk. The messages we tell ourselves in these moments, says Brown, are always a variation of “never good enough.” 

he end result, says Tamar Chansky, PhD, author of Freeing Yourself from Anxiety (Da Capo, 2012), “is that we feel bad about who we are. And in a preemptive strike, rather than waiting to be shunned, we hide” or engage in other distancing behaviors. “Then we think we aren’t deserving of good things; we become very negative about ourselves and our world gets much smaller.”

To compound matters, says Neff, people often have a lot of self-judgment about their shame, and it becomes a nasty cycle: An emotional wave washes over you, you blame yourself for getting stuck in a spiral of unworthiness, and then you feel even less deserving. Shame feeds shame. But by cultivating resiliency we can interrupt this negative emotional loop.

WOMEN'S shame generally centers on appearance and the need to be perceived as perfect. What’s more, women feel pressure to achieve beauty and perfection without appearing to put in any effort. If someone sees them sweat, it doesn’t count.

Good thing I happen to have that session with Jacqui coming up, and with that social worker Jerilyn next week.