Quotes About Shame

Pocaterra looked at blushing as the external sign of shame and believed that blushing was both the recognition of having made a mistake as well as the desire to make amends. Three hundred years later Darwin would posit blushing as that which distinguishes us from all other animals. Darwin knew that the mother of the blush was shame. For Darwin, shame defines our essential humanity.

We humans are finite, "perfectly imperfect." Limitation is our essential nature. Grave problems result from refusing to accept our limits. Healthy shame is an emotion that teaches us about our limits. Like all emotions, shame moves us to get our basic needs met.

SHAME-BASED MARRIAGE AND PARENTAL MODELS It is obvious that a major source of toxic shame is the family system and its multigenerational patterns of unresolved secrets. More specifically, these families are created by the shame-based people who find and marry each other. Each expects the other to parent the child within him or her. Each is incomplete and insatiable. The insatiability is rooted in each person's unmet childhood needs.

Shame tells us of our limits. Shame keeps us in our human boundaries, letting us know we can and will make mistakes and that we need help. Our shame tells us we are not God. Healthy shame is the psychological foundation of humility. It is the source of spirituality.

Emotions are a form of thinking, and blocked emotions bias thinking. As emotions get bound by shame, their energy is frozen, which blocks the full interaction between the mind and the will.

When we are exposed without any way to protect ourselves, we feel the pain of shame. If we are continually overexposed, shame becomes toxic.

These roles not only shame us but they become our refuge of hiding. As we pretend to be real men and women, we can hide the fact that we really don't know who we are. We can mood-alter by playing our role to the hilt. In the mood alteration of being a real man or woman, we can avoid our painful shame.

shame as a healthy human emotion can be transformed into shame as a state of being. As a state of being shame takes over one's whole identity. To have shame as an identity is to believe that one's being is flawed, that one is defective as a human being. Once shame is transformed into an identity, it becomes toxic and dehumanizing.

Crushing the toddler's autonomy and purposeful will is the most damaging form of shaming that can be done. When autonomy is crushed, toxic shame is manifested either as total conformity or rebellion against authority. Once willpower, anger and purpose are bound in shame, a child's selfhood and personal power are severely wounded. His drive for separateness and autonomy are bound by shame. This has been called a "purpose shame bind.

Shyness can become a serious problem when it is rooted in toxic shame.

Toxic shame results from the unexpected exposure of vulnerable aspects of a child's self. This exposure takes place before the child has any ego boundaries to protect herself. Early shaming events happen in a context where the child has no ability to choose. The felt experience of shame is being exposed and seen when one is not ready to be seen.

All toxic scripts have the injunction "Don't be you." An injunction shames the authentic self and causes self-rupture.

Both are driven to cover up their deep sense of self-rupture, the hole in their soul. They may cover up in ways that look polar opposite, but each is still driven by neurotic shame. In fact, the most paradoxical aspect of neurotic shame is that it is the core motivator of the superachieved and the underachieved, the star and the scapegoat, the righteous and the wretched, the powerful and the pathetic.

This means that shame monitors excitement and pleasure. Nature has made the sexual experience the most exciting and pleasurable of all our experiences. Nature wants us to mate and procreate. Sex and shame go hand in hand because we need our sense of shame as a boundary for our sexual desires.

Hell, in my opinion, is never finding your true self and never living your own life or knowing who you are. This is the fate that lies at the end of the journey of ever-deepening toxic shame.

We heal our toxic shame when we grasp that our "adult child" issues are about what happened to us, and not about who we really are!

Such a person does not have his healthy guilt (moral shame) available to him. Healthy guilt would say, "I made a mistake or a blunder, and I can repair that blunder." When a person's guilt has become neurotic, it becomes an "immorality shame.

NEED SHAME BINDS When these needs are neglected, children are given the message that their needs are not important, and they lose a sense of their own personal value. They are not worth someone being there for them. They get the feeling they do not matter. As their needs are chronically rejected, children stop believing they have the right to depend on anyone.

Script messages tell us the way we are or what role we are supposed to play in life. They shame who we authentically are and create self-rupture.

A toxically shamed person is divided within himself and must create a false-self cover-up to hide his sense of being flawed and defective. You cannot offer yourself to another person if you do not know who you really are.

Toxic shame, with its more-than-human, less-than-human polarization, is either inhuman or dehumanizing. The demand for a false self to cover and hide the authentic self necessitates a life dominated by doing and achievement. Everything depends on performance and achievement rather than on being. Being requires no measurement; it is its own justification. Being is grounded in an inner life that grows in richness.

The fantasy bond is an illusion of connectedness that the child creates in relation to the primary caregiver, who is shaming her. Paradoxically, the more a child is violated, the more she creates the fantasy bond. Bonding to abuse is one of the most perplexing aspects of shame inducement.

What I couldn't grasp is that there is no way to change your being by your doing. The shame-based core cries out, "You're flawed and defective! There's something wrong with you!" All the doing in the world won't change that.

Toxic shame is spiritual bankruptcy.