Toxic Shame Healthy Shame by Juliet and William
Those of us who are shame bound often don’t see it.
It’s a bit like a fish swimming in water.
It doesn’t know the medium that it’s in.
~To watch the video click below~
Transcript:
Juliet Grayson:
Shame is such a painful, viscerally painful experience, that actually people don’t want to stay in shame. It’s agonising to stay in toxic shame. Maybe you talk a little bit about your experience of toxic shame.
William Ayot:
Do I have to? The feeling of toxic shame is one that is all-consuming. It’s more than just a sense of wrongness.
It’s an identity issue to the point where you are wrong. Shame is about who you are if guilt is about what you do. Toxic shame tends to be built up over time. It’s not a switch that is turned on. It’s a thing that is built up by experience, by life experience. It is both corrosive.
I think it was Jung who said it was a soul-eating emotion. It really does attack the very soul. At that point, if you are feeling toxic shame, you are feeling shame on a level of total overwhelm.
That’s the difficulty. It is also a thing that utterly diminishes you. Immediately, you are into shrinkage. You are on the back foot. You are made smaller. You are questioning everything about yourself.
Juliet
So healthy shame is about socialisation. Healthy shame is stopping little Jenny from touching herself, touching her genitals when the vicar comes to visit. It is letting children know what is socially acceptable and what is not socially acceptable.
In shame, the connection between two people gets broken and disrupted. Healthy shame is where you are made aware of something where you have stepped close to or over a line, but actually, you are made aware of that without that disconnection happening.
Whereas, to give you a couple of definitions of toxic shame, the one I like is Gershon Kaufman. Shame is the rupture of the interpersonal bridge. That is Gershon Kaufman, who wrote about shame in the 1970s. Often, shame makes us feel like we just simply need todie, need to annihilate ourselves. That is how clients kind of talk about it. This is really interesting.
This is why I think the thing about hidden shame is so important, because we have these primary emotions.
Let us say I have the emotion of anger. Normally, I would express my anger, complete my anger, have a good old shout and a stomp and whatever. It comes to completion, and then I feel satisfaction.
Or I feel grief. I cry. I sob. I weep my heart out. It comes to completion, and I feel
satisfaction.
Or joy. I am excited and exuberant. It comes to completion, and I feel satisfaction. What shame does is shame freezes that. It is like shame is a different quality of feeling that comes in and stops the emotion from completing.
I think anyone who is stuck and feels like they cannot move on, very often, it is that they have started to have an emotion, and then shame has stopped it, and they cannot get to that place of completion. If you get stuck in depression, if you get stuck in rage, or I had a client who was stuck in being un-able to complete his joyfulness and have satisfaction from that. He was shame bound, so he could not express and celebrate things, because the shame was what was stopping him.
In my family of origin, we, I wasn’t allowed to do anger as a child. We really didn’t do anger. My father would sulk, which is a kind of passive aggressive form of anger, but overt anger just simply wasn’t allowed, and it was shame that stopped it.
William
Here’s the kicker. Most of us, if we have been toxically shamed, if we have been deeply shamed, most of us don’t know we’re in it. Those of us who are shame bound, or caught up in shame, or deeply shamed, it’s almost impossible to see it. It’s a bit like a fish swimming in water. It doesn’t know the medium that it’s in.
Juliet
Yeah.
William
Is this making sense? I hope so.
Juliet
Absolutely.
William
Basically, what’s happening is that the layering of the shame has happened again, and again, and again, and again, and again, to the point where it becomes the norm, but it also becomes the medium in which you live. At that point, the context of shame is all there, all pervasive. Everything seems to be, everything informs the shame, so that it’s almostimpossible to break out of it. It’s a very difficult situation to be in. That’s to do with this idea of arresting a feeling, the lack of completion.
It’s almost like an enchantment, to use an old term, to be caught, to be held. To be held in a glamour or an enchantment was literally to be frozen in something. Of course, that’s the kind of situation that we’re talking about. People can live in that for their entire lives without knowing they’re in it.
Juliet
As I have been. To be honest, I was brought up in a shame-bound family, and I just hadn’t recognised it. It was so much the water I was swimming in that I wasn’t seeing it until relatively recently this year. At the ripe old age of 61, I finally get it. Extraordinary.
William
The difficulty comes when we don’t know what it is, but we do know the feeling.
Juliet
It feels yucky.
William
We know the yuckiness of the feeling, and the yuckiness is such that we don’t want to feel it.
What do we do? We pass it on. We give it to the next person. We shame them. We can actually behave in such a way that we are perpetuating within a family, wherever that might be. We are keeping it going. We’re keeping that dark flame alive.
That’s a very difficult thing. It’s a very difficult thing for anyone to see in themselves. When you begin to realise the damage that one has done, the hurt you’ve done, the diminishment that you’ve caused in your shame, not just as a victim of shame, but as a, to use a word, a perpetrator, or a continuator of shame.
This is part of a series of 13 talks on Shame.
You can buy them individually, or Series 1 and Series 2.
See more details on https://therapyandcounselling.co.uk/recordings-of-talks/
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