Shame, Relationships, and Adverse Childhood Experiences

Shame is the root of many relationship problems, depression, anxiety, explosive anger, trauma, addictions, eating disorders, perfectionism, the inner critic, shyness, and hyper-sensitivity to criticism.

Shame is a powerful, painful primary emotion that everyone experiences. At its worst, it is coupled with a freeze response that blocks our ability to feel and function well. If we deny feeling shame, we can’t heal it. However, we can learn to embrace and become comfortable with shame, just as we can acknowledge and accept all emotions. In the process, we become more comfortable with being fully human.

Sheila Rubin and Bret Lyon are psychotherapists who have studied, taught about, and treated toxic shame for many years. They are also married. As a youth, Sheila was shy (code for shame) and self-critical. She’d grown up with a mentally ill mother, and her parents continually argued. She and Bret saw each other for a year and a half, at which point Sheila broke up with him because of his anger.

Bret didn’t know he had shame until the breakup. His friends had never seen him get angry. In therapy, he learned that his shame led to anger. When a person was dismissive or not listening or paying attention, it triggered his shame, which came out as anger. Bret realized he had been more comfortable feeling angry and powerful than feeling shame. He eventually went back to Sheila and proposed. She agreed, if they could go to couple’s therapy.

Their experience of working through their shame eventually led to an excellent training course on healing shame (Rubin & Lyon, 2021). Here are some highlights.

Understanding Shame

You might think of shame as existing on a continuum. At one end of the continuum is healthy shame. Healthy shame kindly says, “Don’t do something that hurts others, yourself, or civilized society. You don’t wish to be that kind of person.” Healthy shame, if minimal, is beneficial. It motivates us to respect useful rules and boundaries. It promotes better relationships, a clear conscience, growth, and a sense of belonging in the world.

Healthy shame involves taking appropriate responsibility for your part of a problem while discerning what you weren’t responsible for.

Healthy shame is humble, acknowledging strengths and weaknesses, accepting limitations, and setting realistic expectations. It says, “I’m not perfect. That makes me just like everyone else.”

Healthy shame understands that it takes time to grow, that mistakes are part of being human. It appreciates partial successes and trusts that you’ll learn and improve.

Healthy shame doesn’t freeze after adversities but reengages with life—discerning what you’ll take away from painful experiences and what you’ll let go of to move forward. It apologizes for being unkind and then releases judgments for your imperfect attempts.

At the opposite end of the continuum is toxic shame, the deeply painful sense that we are not good enough, wrong to the core, unlovable, that we don’t fit in or belong. There is no kindness in toxic shame.

Shame, especially toxic shame, is experienced primarily as bodily sensations and emotions, perhaps accompanied by unpleasant images and thoughts.

Shame Fluctuates

Emotions, including shame, typically fluctuate. For example, paying attention to experiences that cast you in a positive light—such as satisfying accomplishments, helping others, using your gifts or talents, or being treated kindly by others—lessens shame. Frozen toxic shame begins to thaw, for example, by locating where shame is sensed in the body and embracing it with compassion.

Shame and Relationships

Rubin and Lyon explain that shame especially results from the rupturing of important relationships. If the relationship is not repaired, the shame can become toxic.

In intimate adult relationships, opening ourselves to another makes us particularly vulnerable. Adult relationship ruptures (for example, through a breakup, divorce, or shaming conflict) can trigger attachment disruptions from childhood. For example, Bret became angry when Sheila was on the phone or multitasking, triggering memories of being ignored by his ultra-busy parents. Children are not yet able to reason that a fault lies with imperfect parenting, so they conclude that something is wrong with them.

Adverse Childhood Experiences Essential Reads

Sibling Aggression and Abuse Are ACEs

Are Mr. Nice Guy’s Thoughts Your Thoughts?

A skilled parent might repair a scolding, for example, by kindly saying, “I’m sorry for getting angry when you ran into the street, but you can’t do that.” A partner might say, “I’m sorry that I hurt you by the way I asked for what I needed. I understand you’re angry with me, but it’s not OK to get nasty. I love you. Let’s work this out.”

Shame’s Unique Qualities

1. Shame has unique action tendencies. All emotions have action tendencies. For happiness, it is to smile; for anger, it is to aggress; for fear, it is to protect. Shame’s action tendencies are to run away, withdraw, disappear, vanish, and, often, freeze. If we freeze, we don’t actively self-protect. However, freezing might cause an offender to back off.

A child who freezes might passively protect himself by numbing anger toward a powerful offending caregiver, thereby preventing further punishment. Instead of anger, the child now feels shame.

2. Shame combines with fear. Feeling inadequate or not good enough, one fears being seen, humiliated, judged, ignored, or disliked. So, the person might become shy, withdrawn, self-conscious, or afraid to attempt new challenges.

3. Shame is so painful that it morphs into common symptoms:

• Attacking self. This might play out as painful self-criticism or perfectionism (“I must do something perfectly or else I’ll avoid it”). After a relationship break, the self-attack might come as a felt sense, with or without words, that says, “What’s wrong with me?! I am broken. I need a gentler voice from my partner.”
• Attacking others. This might manifest as criticizing, blaming, passing one’s shame off on another (“You are the problem!”), arrogance, anger, rage, or even violence. One might think, “What’s wrong with my partner? She’s crazy for blowing up like that.” But underneath, the hidden thought is often, “What’s wrong with me that I can’t make this relationship work?” The more shame you have, the more you’ll likely attack others.
• Denying. Shame can be so painful that we deny its existence, numb all feelings, dissociate, or turn to addictions to avoid the pain (unfortunately, addictions increase shame, often causing a return to the addiction for relief).
• Withdrawing from important relationships. One might flee a partner after a hurtful conflict—pulling in, licking wounds, isolating, distrusting, or losing hope. In ruminating and trying to figure out what went wrong, the shamed person might—if a kind perspective can’t be found—turn to attacking the self (even resulting at times in depression or suicide) or attacking the partner.

Hope for Healing

The brain is plastic. Shame pathways, imprinted in the brain in childhood and added upon in later years, can be rewired by applying effective strategies that impact the bodily sensations, emotions, images, and thoughts of shame (See, for example, Rubin & Lyon, 2021; or Schiraldi, 2021). Some guiding principles:

• As best as you can, replace judgments with kindness and patience. Don’t shame yourself (or others) for having shame or for imperfect efforts to deal with it. Remember: All people carry shame; learning to befriend it is a process.
• Acknowledge that you’ve come up short at times while also appreciating where you’ve done well. (For example, “Yes, my marriage failed. I really blew it sometimes, but I’ve been a really good parent; I’m trying to improve.”)
• View shortcomings with humor and optimism. We have to laugh at the ridiculous things we all do at times, knowing we can improve.

To paraphrase Sheila and Bret, we each have the gift of life and gifts from life, and we are, and increasingly will be, a gift to life.

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