Quotes About Shame

When the fear, hurt and loneliness of the shame in a dysfunctional family reaches high levels of intensity, one person, often the most sensitive, becomes the family Scapegoat. The function of this role is to lessen the pain all the members are in.

I've added a few I haven't mentioned. Notice that all the roles cover up the shame-based inner core. As each member of the system plays his rigid role, the system stays frozen and unchanging. Dysfunctional families are frozen in a trancelike state. The shame-core keeps the system frozen. Everyone is in hiding. The roles cover up each person's true and authentic self.

When shame is toxic, it is an excruciatingly internal experience of unexpected exposure. It is a deep cut felt primarily from the inside. It divides us from ourselves and from others. When our feeling of shame becomes toxic shame, we disown ourselves. And this disowning demands a cover-up. Toxic shame parades in many garbs and get-ups. It loves darkness and secretiveness. It is the dark, secret aspect of shame that has evaded our study.

Your addiction has been your false secure base—your primary relationship. You have to give up your false idol if you want to rejoin the human race. Healing your toxic shame demands that you surrender to your powerlessness over it.

What a perfectionistic system creates is a "how to get it right" behavioral script. In such a script one is taught how to act loving and righteous. It's actually more important to act loving and righteous than to be loving and righteous. The feeling of righteousness and acting sanctimoniously are wonderful ways to mood-alter toxic shame. They are often ways to interpersonally transfer one's shame to others.

We must give up our delusional false selves and ego defenses to find the vital and precious core of ourselves. In our neurotic shame lies our vulnerable and sensitive self. We must embrace the darkness to find the light. Hidden in the dark reservoirs of our toxic shame lives our true self.

Shame is the master emotion because it binds all the other emotions. Freely expressing our feelings is like thawing out. As shame binds all our feelings, we become psychologically numb.

Blame. Whenever things don't turn out as planned, blame yourself or others. Blame is another defensive cover-up for shame. Blame maintains the balance in a dysfunctional system when control has broken down.

Most gays carry an excessive amount of shame, as there is particularly strong and widespread shaming of boys who don't display the traditional masculine traits and behaviors. If you are a gay man or woman, your wounded inner preschooler needs to hear that it is perfectly okay to be who you are.

Genesis suggests that four relationships were broken by Adam's toxic shame: the relationship with God, the relationship with self, the relationship with brother and neighbor (Cain kills Abel), and the relationship with the world (nature). The Twelve Steps restore those relationships.

Shame-based people also do not believe they have the right to depend on anyone.

Families are as sick as their toxic shame secrets.

Shame is the affect which is the source of many complex and disturbing inner states: depression, alienation, self doubt, isolating loneliness, paranoid and schizoid phenomena, compulsive disorders, splitting of the self, perfectionism, a deep sense of inferiority, inadequacy or failure, the so-called borderline conditions and disorders of narcissism.

A person with internalized shame believes he is inherently flawed, inferior and defective. Such a feeling is so painful that defending scripts (or strategies) are developed to cover it up. These scripts are the roots of violence, criminality, war and all forms of addiction.

Everyone needs a sense of shame, but no one needs to feel ashamed. —Frederick Nietzsche

Whatever we call them, all of us have some voices in our heads. Shame-based people especially have dominant, negative shaming, self-deprecating voices.

Just as the shame-based parents cannot accept their own weaknesses, wants, feelings, vulnerability and dependency needs, they cannot accept their children's neediness, feelings, weakness, vulnerability and dependency. Firestone writes that the voice is the result of the "parents' deeply repressed desire to destroy the aliveness and spontaneity of the child whenever he or she intrudes on their defenses.

The Bible suggests that Adam was not satisfied with his own being. He wanted to be more than he was. He wanted to be more than human. He failed to accept his essential limitations. He lost his healthy shame. The Bible suggests that the origin of human bondage (original sin) is the desire to be other than who we are . . . to be more than human. In his toxic shame (pride), Adam wanted a false self. The false self led to his destruction.

The shame is internalized. Shame is no longer a feeling; it is an identity. The real self has withdrawn from conscious contact and therefore cannot be the object of his esteem.

Our healthy shame is nourishing in that it moves us to seek new information and learn new things. Inferiority can be experienced as a healthy limit to our abilities.

Whenever a shame-based person feels his real feelings, he feels ashamed. So, to avoid that pain he numbs out.

If we humans are essentially spiritual, then when we are abandoned, abused or enmeshed, we are spiritually violated. Indeed, when our caretakers acted shamelessly, they were playing God. Healthy shame tells us we are finite, limited and prone to mistakes. When our caretakers acted shamelessly, we were forced to carry their shame. Our self-esteem was wounded by that shame. Co-dependence is the outcome of this abuse.

He said that "intellectualizing about our problems is complex but easy, while doing something about them is simple but difficult." Shame-based intellectuals love to analyze.

Feelings of excitement and curiosity become bound in shame, and the child's courage and enthusiasm are severely limited. Toxic shame takes on the face of apathy or cowardice at this stage. Describing the impact of her father's incest, the poet Mary Oliver writes in her poem "Rage": "And you see how the child grows—timidly, crouching in corners.