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Embarrassment
Responsibility, Accountability, and Toxic Shame
How does toxic shame affect you today?
Posted February 15, 2021 Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
You made a mistake. You recognize it. You accept your share of the responsibility for it happening, but what influences you to begin to beat yourself up and make it “less” about who you are, and “more” about what you are worth as a person?
Toxic shame is the answer. When you make anything about your worth as a person, you create a trap that there is no recovery from, because everything including the aspects of the situation being considered loop back in their entirety to you and only you. It is as if we brand ourselves with this hyper responsibility/shame. We digest it. We absorb it, so that it stays with us as we move forward. It becomes a tally sheet within us, of all the things we have ever been involved with that didn’t go well enough. It makes us uncertain as we face the events and choices of the future. It never ends unless we face it down and commit to recovering.
The truth is that normally there are aspects of most situations that we have very little, if any, control over. As individuals, we are just not that powerful that the entirety of anything can just be about how we made it happen.
Where does toxic shame come from?
A very common beginning is problematic messaging from narcissistic parents.
These are parents who regularly deprive their children of the right to have and learn from their own opinions, because the parents position themselves as too vulnerable and needy that the child pities them and defers to their neediness. Another way parents can disenfranchise their children from self-worth is the "my way or the highway” message. This includes those who must always be right or intimidate their children with sanctions and withhold their love and approval, damage their confidence, and self-worth. The shame of perpetually being criticized, corrected, and emotionally bullied can result in self-recrimination versus realistic responsibility; i.e., shame to a degree.
These children no longer simply feel bad, but they also feel bad about who they are as people.
Often narcissistic parents generate shame in their children because they fail to differentiate between a mistake in the choice the child made, and a choice they made themselves in the past that might have been a mistake.
The child feels it is never safe to take a risk when deciding something and the fact that there is never full information available or the guarantee of a perfect outcome begins the dance with perfectionism and procrastination. Two more reasons to be ashamed become the child’s safest option. They have become encircled in no-win outcomes. Caught up in a vortex of blame and shame, how are they going to learn to deal with these overwhelming feelings of self and other blaming and shaming? They aren’t, and so blame and shame becomes a part of their core personality.
Recovery from Toxic Shame
Recovery is a three-step process.
1. Understand the problem by getting as much background and contextual information as possible.
2. Get the help and support you need to process the feelings you experience.
- Remember, as a child of a parent with narcissistic traits, there is a strong probability that your feelings were not validated or acknowledged.
- Processing feelings is not the same as talking about them with friends.
- Re-feeling the pain involved can be destabilizing. The step of processing these feelings is hard but doable work. Get an informed professional to coach you.
3. Consider getting additional perspectives to make valid sense of what happened. These new perspectives are not “instead,” but “as well."
Often situations are more complex than they felt as a child or the meaning we have taken away from our past and held tightly onto as the adult we have become.
This broader, but valid perspective makes room for us to ease the effects we have been experiencing as symptoms.
This also clears the way for us to feel our real feelings and accept the values and beliefs that are authentically our own. These newly-discovered aspects of ourselves will almost certainly be more appropriate and effective in the context of our life today, moving forward.
