For the past few days I’ve been preoccupied with the nature of shame– the kind of shame that makes an individual human being feel different and “less than”.
Like many adult children from dysfunctional families, I’ve struggled with this issue–and touched on it in other posts.
I googled shame and toxic shame and found many amazing things. I have wanted to understand the dynamics involved because I do believe that knowledge is power and that each of us has the ability to empower ourselves, to lay claim to all that we are.
Shame concerns self-perception, seeing oneself in negative, in a kind of inverted and dark self-awareness. Old tapes constantly run that say “You don’t matter,” “I don’t matter,” ”It doesn’t matter– it’s only me”.
Those of us afflicted with shame are given to understand that our needs for affection, comforting, attention, are shameful. When I was lonely and at loose ends, needing the constancy of affection and guidance from my mother, I was criticized and sent away, left to fend. A child so abandoned tries to understand why that is the case and concludes that she must be unworthy and different. Along came abuse of varying stripes: an abused child is a child who has no self-esteem, whose fledgling identity has been utterly compromised–who begins to withdraw in shame.
A feature of shame is that one feels that one’s deepest vulnerabilities have been exposed, and that rings true to me. Things people have said to me and about me over the years have cut deeply and I find myself repeating them at times, shaming myself: ”To leave her, ” one ex lover said, “You just have to go on to the next town.” ”No one in their right mind,” a friend said, “takes a basketcase to Europe.” ”She is stuck in childhood.” ”You have so much wrong with you that…..” (fill in the blanks). ”You go through animals like I go through toilet paper.” ”You are a bottomless pit of emotional need” — a psychiatrist. And the most shaming of all: ”You have X Disorder…in fact, to such a degree we can’t afford to have you around.”
In response to shaming, we can take ourselves hostage. In my case, I determined that I was such a failure as a human being, so unlovable that I fell into deep self-devaluation. I permitted others to shut me out and I shut me out. I surrendered to the idea that I should get used to a marginalized life, that I deserved it. I became alienated from whoever it was that had written those poems, published those things, taught scores of inner city children, earned an MFA, tried to save her parents, saved a host of baby animals, and held down a rigorous university teaching job in the face of grueling insomnia. Until recently, I didn’t see my survival of six months in a nursing home and a terrible injury, how I left that toxic environment, strengthened my leg and made it work for me, extricated myself from a viciously entrenched codependency and took action to get my own place and start writing again, as powerful indications of courage,and hallmarks of a strong and remarkable, worthy person and woman. !
I offer this as a mantra for all shame survivors: ”I am not worthless. I am not crazy. I am not someone to fear. I am not a failure. I am not a mistake. I don’t deserve to be excluded, dissed, rejected or abandoned. It’s o.k. to love and value me, and live with shoulders squared, eyes to eyes with others of my species, in the whole world.”
Years ago, when the ACA– Adult Children of Alcoholics– movement was in full swing, a number of people “in recovery” for various things made an effort to get to know their “inner child.” The paradigm of inner child, critical parent, loving parent had already been postulated by Transactional Analysis therapy and other schools of psychology. The idea of an inner child has been helpful to me at various points along the crooked journey of recovery from alcoholism and trauma. It is a convenient way to look at my immaturity in various areas.
At one point I bought the idea that my inner child needed to be reparented by an “expert.” I bravely opened up to “reparenting”– as opposed to “rebirthing”, only to realize that giving other people the power and authority to act as my parents was precisely the wrong solution for me: I needed the adult me strengthened and that she exists, validated.
Validation and growth have come piecemeal for me. It is up to those burdened with diagnoses and those compassionate bright people in the foreground of research into trauma and mental illness to come up with strategies for our parenting/living with ”the inner child”. She isn’t going to go away. How then, do we take control of our lives, affirm our strengths, convince ourselves that we can live in the real world, forgive those who diss us and abandon us, keep from shutting down and hiding away in despair.
These are very real problems for someone with a hyperactive, lonely, often depressed inner child.
A deeper problem, an imperative with respect to healing at every level, is how we become the same person. How do we integrate the parent and the child? Helpful people can give us tools, but we have to use them.
Writing in Psychology Today, Stephen Diamond, Ph.D., a practicing pyschotherapist, puts this eloquent solution forward:
“First, one becomes conscious of his or her own inner child. Remaining unconscious is what empowers the dissociated inner child to take possession of the personality at times, to overpower the will of the adult. Next, we learn to take our inner child seriously, and to consciously communicate with that little girl or boy within: to listen to how he or she feels and what he or she needs from us here and now. The often frustrated primal needs of that perennial inner child–for love, acceptance, protection, nurturance, understanding–remain the same today as when we were children. As pseudo-adults, we futilely attempt to force others into fulfilling these infantile needs for us. But this is doomed to failure. What we didn’t sufficiently receive in the past from our parents as children must be confronted in the present, painful though it may be. The past traumas, sadness, disappointments and depression cannot be changed and must be accepted. Becoming an adult means swallowing this “bitter pill,” as I call it: that, unfortunately for most of us, certain infantile needs were, maliciously or not, unmet by our imperfect parents or caretakers. And they never will be, no matter how good or smart or attractive or spiritual or loving we become. Those days are over. What was done cannot be undone. We should not as adults now expect others to meet all of these unfulfilled childhood needs. They cannot. Authentic adulthood requires both accepting the painful past and the primary responsibility for taking care of that inner child’s needs, for being a “good enough” parent to him or her now–and in the future.”
Food for thought, yes? Dr. Diamond proposes that there are many adult children wandering around in the world who have not been labeled with a diangosis, but who operate from varying levels of dysfunction.
In any event, we have more psychological laundry to do. In the meantime my best shot as a “mother” is to take us out for a latte and to tell her that we are not helpless, that we matter.
1 comment | tags: Borderline Personality Disorder, inner child, Integration, Reparenting, self-esteem, self-love, Transactional Anaylsis, trauma survivor | posted in Politics and Commentary, Tour d'Force Posts, Trauma Survival