So shame is an ever present emotion within us and is usually the least understood in terms of our mental health, our triggers, even how we think. We often think when we're triggered or we're stuck, we might, you might have a realization sometimes that's like. This is just who I am, right? And it most likely isn't just who you are.
If you grew up in childhood trauma or relate to having PTSD or C-P-T-S-D, shame somewhere along in your history like mine, really got amped up to the point that we're so used to it. And society is also pretty slow to understand things like shame, so it's not just you struggling with it. If we can understand shame as a basic human emotion as well as how shame gets like turned up and amplified in an abusive family system, which is what my work is about as an educator on child trauma, we can connect the dots and be less ruled by a lot of unnecessary.
Very intense shame that we experience, and it's really freeing to not be ruled by shame. And shame can be elusive and really normalized again, like in society and with ourselves to the point that we don't intimately know. It is shame, but we suffer from the lack of psychoeducation about it, which is what the video is about.
And I'd like you to consider to leave a comment right now about what you think is one of your biggest sources of shame or shame issues, or how you get triggered to shame in the reaction and kind of. If that what you're describing is gonna pop up on this list later, you're probably also gonna be helping somebody by naming the shame and leaving the comment.
So I think it would be great if we could just get by with much less shame, like feel a healthy amount of shame about accidentally leaving some trash at a campsite or something and not go to a shame hole or feel like we're a terrible person or that we are solely responsible for dooming the planet. Um, that would be nice to just make it so much smaller to not wake up in the middle of the night.
Convinced that we're gonna get fired because we set a cringey, bad pun at a work meeting that day. If you relate to that, you'll know what I mean. So what is shame? I believe shame is relevant to everything about our mental health. Attachment styles, people pleasing, fight responses, fond responses, how we cope, how we react.
Shame is like the liquid of a soup. It's like the broth in which our childhood trauma issues and, and symptoms float around like little alphabet pastas. And I, I know I totally just dated myself there. Here's what I mean, and I'll reframe this in terms of common triggers with C-P-T-S-D from childhood trauma, and yes, this looks silly, but just stay with me.
Shame is the undercurrent, it's the vehicle, it's the fuel to many of these issues. Here's what I mean. We can say dissociate from making a social mistake like at a party or something, and then our early shame pops up and says that we are an idiot for saying something wasn't really that funny in a group or something.
An intense shame reaction. We can have an anxious, preoccupied attachment style for not being loved or being seen by an aloof parent. In our early shame says that we're not worthwhile. We can be hypervigilant about being abandoned or being made fun of or teased because we can't tolerate the earlier shame of those things to be happening again in the present.
Raise your hand out there if you are highly prickly to feedback. I'm not saying feedback is easy or a good time. But it might be the most intense way you get triggered. Feedback is like marinating in this shame broth. We can be depressed about not having the right career or ability to manage the world or hit milestones that others seem to be able to.
And an early family message of being defective is also play in terms of our early shame. We can have intense anxiety about not being good enough with our peers or in general, and haven't yet connected that anxiety to the shame of say, being neglected by an apathetic or unavailable parent. Or say, we even had a golden child sibling and you got forgotten in that golden child kind of attention that they got.
So what I'm trying to say with the soup analogy is there's usually an undercurrent of shame in all of our issues, and it's important to be able to really dial into that shame. Which is gonna be very helpful in your your journey of healing it. Here are some brief recap issues about shame. Here are some like shame mechanisms and concepts to help further understand shame.
And again, you might think you understand shame, but most people don't really understand their shame. Shame versus guilt. In my experience, guilt is a gnawing feeling about being unable to remedy a situation or feeling like you're failing others somehow, where shame automatically tells us where inherently bad or a failure or not good enough.
Childhood trauma coming from having abusive parents can involve what I call direct. And indirect shame. Direct shame is like we're being told that finger in our face, you're a bad kid. I can't believe you just did that. You're bad in various ways where indirect shame can be about feeling embarrassed about something a parent does or their character, or the type of house that you grew up in 'cause it's chaotic or messy.
I did a video on this topic of direct and indirect shame that I'll put in the description for you. Another concept is full of shame or shameless. Childhood trauma greatly influences our shame, either acutely elevating it or we can really repress it greatly. Both have unwanted consequences in our lives and social life and intimacy in our functioning.
I think of this as a spectrum of either being hyper shame based with high anxiety, or being a bit numb or shameless, which paradoxically. Is still operating from shame. So it's like hyper shame versus hypo shame. Being shameless can look like a vibe that's like no one will ever mess with me again and I'm never gonna play the fool again kind of a thing from the fight response, and that is more repressed shame than everyone hates me in this meaning neurotic type of shame.
One of my favorite concepts to describe shame is shame being. Fixed gravity thing, and a good analogy about shame is that shame is the main human emotion that other emotions orbit around, like the sun and the solar system. It's the main entree to the emotional buffet Here, for example, you might feel intense shame if something sad happens to you, but you quickly start to compare your situation that you're sad about to maybe someone who has it worse.
That's kind of a stuck thing with childhood trauma. The sadness that you're experiencing is an. Fixed relationship to shame, which is like the sun in this analogy, and it can't escape the orbit of shame or the sun. And being right sized or embracing your own sadness is being judged by your shame. Another example of the orbit thing is curiosity.
You might be curious about doing some art. Or music or be curious about what might it be like to do a creative project and be a creative person. But the shame, which again is the sun in this analogy, keeps that curiosity planet in a fixed, locked orbit that that curiosity can't fly off and explore itself.
So that's what I mean about gravity, where other emotions and other things that we might want to do or experience is stuck in this fixed orbit with shame. This fixed gravity moving on, that shame can influence everything. About us, like our purchases to what we eat, to our social life, how we make our money, what kind of sex life do we have?
What kind of sex do we like? There can be shame, undercurrents through all of that. Do you sometimes feel bad about what you eat, what you buy, and this is one of those consistent thoughts that involve shoulds. I should eat more organically. I shouldn't like this kind of sex. I should never call in sick ever.
I shouldn't buy these silly things. It's like a daily undercurrent thing that we need to dial into. Moving on. There's also shame in society rules. We can view shame as a good like innate biological defense to be able to maintain our social status for our need to survive. Things go smoother socially in our lives if we're not doing shameful or antisocial, hurtful things where we are cast out of groups, which is what we need to kind of survive healthy shame when it works.
Keeps us from being cast out of society by doing extreme hurtful acts. It would be cool if that's all that shame was, like thinking about morality or being conscientious. It would be great if our shame didn't go to such an acute and overwhelming over the top place and was just there to remind us to treat people the way that we wanted to be treated.
Shame is also a big umbrella term. It also means things like being mortified, being embarrassed, feeling less. Than ridiculed in dignity, which I'll talk about later. Feeling humiliated, feeling found out or exposed, both from real situations or just things that we assume in our heads about how people might see us or how we might be being treated.
Another shame-based concept is when we have a very shame-based parent. This is a big piece to all of these issues, is when we're being raised by a parent who is also marinated in shame their whole life, where they react deeply and intensely to what they perceive to be mistakes or how things look like a neurotic, shame-based parent not in touch with their childhood trauma might.
Freak out if you miss a day at school because missing things is a reflection upon the family and upon them, and it's just something bad that they can't name is gonna happen if you miss a day at school. So now let's talk about what is the opposite of shame. Um, when I discuss shame, I like to add it's opposite, which I believe to be the word integrity, whether we're two years old or 80 years old, I think that humans feel good if they're seen as having integrity.
Like it bothers us when we don't. Integrity and dignity can be taken away in childhood trauma. If we envision the heartbreaking scenario of, say, a three-year-old toddler being screamed at because they had a bathroom accident. Really intense direct shame. While it's slow around this idea of dignity and integrity, I believe that people are parenting children these days more from the idea of protecting their children from.
Being shame Too much. Mistakes are just mistakes and there's still love there. Healthy parenting is about when we understand that children are already vulnerable to shame, and our job is to protect them from experiencing too much shame. Too much shame is where the damage comes in. That's like an analogy about screaming at a toddler for, for having an accident.
That's the stuff that stays with us. Even if. Parenting is extremely triggering and extremely stressful, but we still understand that we can't shame them too much. We still need to bring a lot of love and acceptance there, and I think that if we can help our kids maintain some power and some goodness, and see their humanity, that's like the shield that protects us from childhood trauma.
As we work on ourselves, we kind of reclaim these ideas and have a good foundation that we're a good person and being a good person is to have some dignity, to have some integrity, and we have some power in being a. Good person. We have goodness in being a good person. We have our humanity there where we're okay to like be human and make mistakes good enough.
Healing, I think, is when we don't lose our power and we're able to have to maintain our goodness. We're able to maintain and see our own humanity even if we make mistakes or something comes up. That's a big difference. So here are some real life examples of shame to help survivors become more familiar with how the emotion works in us and manifests within us from the context of our childhood trauma.
These are like everyday real life examples of how shame reveals ourself to us and keep thinking about. Unnecessary or intense or maybe a bit over the top. These are, I'm not judging you in that. I'm just saying if you grew up in childhood trauma, you were most likely set up to struggle with shame in an intense and unnecessary way like I was.
So I'll briefly name how the issue can come from childhood trauma, and I'll also try to give you an idea about what each example would look like if there was more healing taking place around the issue. And I'm gonna be listening these from less severe to more severe. Number one is when we say, oh, you too.
And this is a light example of shame, where we're somewhere like an airport and we interact with someone who works there and tells us, have a good trip. And we respond with you too. It's pretty funny, it's pretty innocent. But depending upon the severity of someone's shame-based childhood trauma, we can really perseverate on that funny little mistake.
Why is it shame? And it's pretty normal, right? Definitely normal, but mistakes are normal. But excessive shame really turns that up and we walk away from that interaction really starting to feel terrible. Shame will manifest here by telling us that we're an idiot while we're walking away. And it can be worse if we tend to be unconsciously hypervigilant about trying to not be seen as an F up and not being seen like an F Up is really a big one for childhood trauma survivors.
It was for me. Maybe I'm just more out with it now that IM. Like I embrace my F up qualities. Um, after we say You too, uh, we might have a mini shame attack about something that is really just kind of a funny cliche. Our inner child can go to a place that I can't even pull off trying to seem like a normal person.
And that's a really big, intense shame-based thought. This shame example can come from your childhood as having a strategy of having to hide. Having to hide how we feel about ourselves, having to hide what, what goes on at home. Having to hide being told that we're a terrible kid so we can go, uh, into schools as little kids and try to just pretend to be perfect.
And then when something like a mistake, like a simple innocent mistake like this comes up, we can feel exposed and I can't even keep it together, kind of a thing. Healing the shame on a deeper level with this one. Can. Just being able to see the humor in making a mistake and feeling that you're terrible somehow healing is also gonna, allowing ourselves the grace to simply being human.
We can have magical thinking that we still need to be perfect and hide, and that isn't a human experience. So that's what I mean about the humanity. Number two related to that is bomb jokes when we're trying to be visible. Or funny, and that fails. If I made a joke in a meeting and it bombed, I would experience a deep physical sensation of shame, like a shame attack, and I would dissociate while hating myself for just taking the risk that I just took by telling a joke, like my energy and my body would drop down to my feet and I would want to crawl into the woodwork to escape.
It's awful. And the childhood trauma in this example could involve experiencing abuse, where taking a risk inside your family, like making a joke or asking a question could get you attacked. Expressing yourself could have immense contempt aimed at you in your family. It can also be trying to be funny and be liked, which is really a common thing for childhood trauma survivors.
And being funny isn't bad, but we can really go into a shame hole when we wanna be. Funny and it doesn't land with more healing. Around this one, we again see our humanity, that some jokes are great, some jokes bomb, some are cringey, but those don't have to require a shame spiral about being a terrible person if we bomb.
That is really about our family and not about the present. And as a side note, some childhood trauma survivors, this is super specific, some childhood trauma survivors. Tell jokes or make references that no one really gets because they're so, so specific. And yes, it could be a neurodivergent issue, but that's not what I'm referencing here.
There's a phenomenon of an inner child thing where we kind of tend to think that everyone has watched episode seven, season four of Dr. Who, and we make jokes about it, thinking everyone's gonna kind of get that. We don't really kind of assume kind of a thing, but there's. There's something gonna going on.
And then I think it could come from really neglect and not learning how to read others, or not learning how to do lead-ins with people. Like have you seen Dr. Who are you a fan to our social conversation? So the third one is taking it personally. I'm an idiot. I'm not an idiot. So our childhood trauma shame can make us react to basic questions and situations.
It's like someone asked you a question at work and you bust out with, I'm not an idiot, you know, or you feel that on the inside. So like questions can really feel like accusations or we overly read into them. We'll overly assume judgment from others and react from shame, which might take us down a shame hole for the overreaction of kind of getting fighty with somebody.
Or we can stay angry and self-righteous as well. It usually comes from a childhood of. Being the butt of jokes and the family behaving like the child is defective in some way, or your family would talk about you behind your back or treat you like you needed special help when you actually didn't, or you were judged simply for being a child and not an adult.
So it's a highly common shame reaction for those who were scapegoated and things were extremely personal. And as a side note, the reverse in taking it personally is also the shame example. Where we always assume that we're wrong and someone asks us the same question, one reaction could be, I'm not an idiot.
The other reaction is, oh my God, I'm an idiot. They found out shame influences our perception about what people are communicating to us. We can greatly misinterpret questions and react from What the F do you mean by that? To profusely. Apologizing and both reactions are ruled by shame. And incidentally, working on our childhood trauma will take care of a lot of these shameful issues if we're really looking at how we lost our goodness in our family system, but healing with this one.
What that might look like is that we're able to take questions and not take it personally or go to such an apologetic place because again, we've got this foundation of knowing that we're a good person and we don't lose that. Moving on to number four is this idea that shame is contagious. Those who struggle with shame can overly take on or overly feel the shame of others in uncomfortable situations.
Let's just say you see someone publicly make a fool of themselves because they drank too much, or someone at work was reprimanded for not showing up consistently. We can resonate with such people like musical tuning forks and feel terrible. For them and even feel terrible about ourselves somehow.
That's how insidious shame can be. This can get us into trouble in relationships with emotionally immature or narcissistic people. We can overly feel for them in their mess and their mistakes and like we resonate too much with their mess. This one can come from growing up with a parent who was immature or would make a mess out of their life, or somehow they might have been a tragic figure, like nothing went right for them.
I'm not judging this is real, or kind of, you know, self-imposed by them and as children. Growing up with a tragic parent, we or immature parent, we were really focused on them. We were really, we paid a lot of attention to them. We might've even been absorbed in their mess. And the shame can come from, as little kids, we want to be able to help them.
We're not seeing them as immature. We just want to help our parent who's a. Who's a hot mess, but the shame might come from our inability to do that. This one is also about not being protected as a child from adult emotions and adult situations. Like I often say, as kids, many of us knew too much when shame is healed in a good enough way.
With this one, we can be sympathetic and empathetic for those struggling, but energetically we are boundaried. We don't have to take all of that kind of stuff on. We're able to kind of let people be themselves. There's no longer this gray area, and we're safe in ourselves to know that we're not bad for not taking someone else's mess on what needs to get healed.
In this one and I'll talk about later, is we can feel like we're cold or we are narcissistic for not taking on someone else's mess or shame-based situations of others and not helping them. Number five is, I can't be like them Related to the last one, I think childhood trauma survivors, most of our psychic energy about how we are in the world is about trying to not be like one or both of our parents.
You might feel intense shame if you say no to someone. Like in that last example, if you had an. Uncaring or unempathic parent who was all about themselves. You might feel intense shame if you forgot your wallet at lunch and a friend covers you, and that shame might be about having a parent who was entitled and took advantage of others and being taken care of by a friend in that moment is intensely shaming or uncomfortable for you.
You might feel some shame if things get a little bit messy in your apartment or if you feel emotionally messy. If you had a parent who struggle with things like hoarding or having extremely poor mental health. So we can overly compensate in different ways to not seem like an abusive, unempathic, toxic parent.
We can overly feel for others for not wanting to seem like an aloof, narcissistic, abusive parent. We can put a lot of energy into trying to not be a certain way in the world. Which is childhood to trauma based. Shame in these examples. Healing this one looks like embracing on a deep level that we're not our parents who behaved either shamelessly or had too much shame.
We've separated from them through doing some work, and we know the difference of who we are as opposed to who they were or are. I think with this one, as kids, we can feel like an accomplice to the parental dysfunction, which creates a deep sense of shame and healing is about recognizing that we didn't ask to be part of any of that.
Their mess and the shame belongs to the parents who had the responsibility for it or their lives or what was going on. Not us as little kids. This is especially true if you grew up with addicted parents or parents who struggled with mental health issues or mentally off parents. So moving on to number six is what I'm calling pressured peers.
Pressured peers is just what I'm creatively calling for. The shame of feeling like you're not as accomplished or up to speed in life as other people your age. It's actually a great source of depression for people. We can feel intense, ongoing shame to see people our age to be able to do things like buy a house, have a career that's fulfilling.
Be social in a way that they might want to be accomplished, be skilled, or even have kids. So this can be, and doesn't always have to be an issue with childhood trauma. It can be about societal pressure to kind of like hurry up and die or hurry up in age. There's a thing in society that does that. Gotta get the degree, the house.
The spouse, the kids, the career, and then at 70 you can just chill. Although with childhood trauma based shame from C-P-T-S-D, there's a tendency to bloom later in life that I find, which I think is actually better. And I'm biased because I bloomed much later in life than my high school peers. But the shame here is about situations just not having a partnership when your peers have long since been in long-term relationships are married.
The shame here tells us that society standards are benchmarks to our worthiness. The benchmarks aren't shameful unto themselves, but for survivors of childhood trauma, intimacy, and careers. Or being in the world seamlessly like others can be. It's a complicated thing that we have to kinda work towards or do work around in a highly common childhood trauma issue, is not wanting to have children for fear of harming in them in the way that we were harmed or not feeling confident to be able to, to.
Get them what, what they need. That is both kind of a setup from our own childhood, but I also think it's kind of a noble decision of protecting, you're kind of protecting society from the same old stuff, which is, I believe, to be noble, and I know this is a deep, deep. Personal issue for people, so I don't mean to kind of speak lightly to it or go too fast.
When this is healed, we can accept and embrace late blooming or our choices in life and our decisions, and it doesn't have to be such a heartbreaking comparison. Healing. This can also look like doing some grief work around the time that we actually lost in bad relationships or the wrong careers, or struggling with our mental health.
Again, we were set up to not be on the level of our peers because of what happened to us as children, and also due to all the energy we spent struggling with the trauma as we were going through adult life and and development. The reverse of this issue is, this also happens for childhood trauma survivors, is that they approach all of those benchmarks with an intensity.
I have to do this. This is what's gonna make me worthy to have the house, the spouse, the kids, the career, but they're not present for any of it. Which is sort of like the opposite of what I just described with this idea of pressured peers, the benchmarks, the career, the house, the kids. They become evidence that we are defective.
And a toxic family can also be pointing that out to us. When are you gonna have kids? When are you gonna do the thing? Can definitely parrot that narrative. A great source again, of depression is how we compare ourselves to our peers. And I've done, I've done everything late in my life compared to the people that I graduated high school with, career relationships, children, and I think it's.
More enjoyable to actually bloom late. And again, I think a great big source of depression is how we compare ourselves to peers. I've done everything late in my life compared to those who I graduated high school with. I got to my career late, my relationships late. I got to have children late. And I think it's more enjoyable to actually bloom late, to be more present when we are actually doing these things we want in life.
Number seven is what I'm calling Enough is enough. Traditional grip. So I've been playing drums since I was 11 years old, and for most of my time, most of my life, I've had this shame ghost kind of following since I started playing about that. I've never learned something called traditional grip.
Traditional grip is in your left hand or your nondominant hand, actually. You play the drum like this and your other hand. Plays like this, it's like an old marching band kind of a thing. I learned match grip, which was kind of easier for me at the time, and I never learned traditional grip. I'm a decent drummer who doesn't need or want to play situations where traditional grip would be really handy, such as marching band or jazz or fast fusion or anything like that.
Um, to my inner child, for years there was this, yeah, you might be a recorded drummer and people might want to seek you out to have you play in their band. But you never learn traditional grip. So shame tells us that. You might say, be a badass accountant who uses spreadsheets, or you're doing bookkeeping and you really know you're, but there's still this nagging feeling that's like, yeah, but you never learned how to do pivot tables.
Well, this kind of really this bummer kind of feeling that we're criticizing ourselves and therefore, because you didn't learn pivot tables or traditional grip that you're a fraud at what you're doing. The shame also makes good enough benchmarks movable. You master pivot tables, or if I mastered traditional grip, there'd be some other impossible standard where shame might say, yeah, you learned pivot tables, but you don't know how to code.
So not good enough or enough is enough, is an exhausting form of shame. Where you might be an amazing artist who thinks that they suck 'cause they never learned how to do watercolors even though you hate watercolors. Like that kind of a thing. So where this comes from in childhood, and I think it comes from being raised by a highly critical or miserable parents who had off expectations or were full of shame themselves.
You might've been taught that someone is always gonna be better. Or greatness or worth of being good enough is for other people, not you guys. Like you'll never measure up. The family or parent could have also sabotaged things because you or they didn't meet possible Olympic or Pulitzer Prize or Grammy based kind of expectations, like it's magical thinking and weird expectations.
Kids can also come up with unreasonable expectations on themselves or tell themselves that they won't be loved or liked like their best friend is unless they learn how to do something that they can do the cartwheel or play whatever. Um, and it can come from really watching who gets attention in school.
That we can have this part of shame going on when this is healed, you recognize that you don't need to learn traditional grip or pivot tables and you're able to embrace the gifts that you have and to look at. There's so much stuff that we compare and judge ourselves against. It's lovely when all that kind of like wash is away.
I've met many childhood trauma survivors who made great money and what. They do, but they expressed anxiety about not being at the top of their field only to discover that they're actually happy where they're at. And it's just old self-imposed pressure from from childhood. Number eight is something that I called.
Yes, it's serious. Instead of taking things personally, this shame example is about taking things to seriously. A classic example I give is when you're invited to a party and you need to bring the most. Perfect, expensive or thoughtful thing, and bringing anything less means that you're a terrible person, so things can be very serious for you.
While being thoughtful and caring is really a good thing, it's not great when it's coming from a place about shame or fear or control. If you have a partner that's like, let's just bring some chips and SALs and call it a day, and that starts a fight, that might be a clue for you. Nuanced and FYI, but I'm, I'm talking about the marked need to cover your bases so people don't think ill of you or think that you're an F up or a terrible person, or that you don't look trashy in some way.
Could be another kind of word with that. The same thing with gifts. It has to be a really thoughtful, can't be phoned in gift, and that can be like a lot of pressure. Why, and yes, it's nice to be able to give thoughtful gifts, but it's, is it coming from shame where you have to look a certain way or cover or like you're preventing someone from judging or criticizing you?
In childhood. This can really come from growing up with a parent who took things way too seriously as well and had a lot of perfectionism and control to growing up in say, shameful poverty or chaos. And the shame there is where you are hiding and influenced by is about never wanting to look poor. Or look selfish, or look uncaring, or look thoughtless.
Again, it can also be about compensating. So when this is healed, you know, life is so much easier and less intense when we know our goodness is there no matter what, and things are good enough no matter what. Even if we don't have the time to prepare an amazing side dish or a gift, and we just bring a bottle of wine, which is good enough.
Again, this is all nuanced, but I think you probably understand what I mean. Lastly, number nine is, I could never do that briefly. I could never do that as a sharp thought or expression. When an opportunity comes up to be more visible or take on a challenge or try to finally explore something in you that you're maybe drawn to, what I mean is an opportunity comes up at work to present your work in a meeting, and there's an intense reaction.
I could never do that. An opportunity comes up when someone says, you'd be good at selling cup. Cakes that you make or market a service or a thing that you do. I could never accept money about that. Accepting money would be wrong. It's wrong, right? Could never do that. An opportunity to take a dance class or sing at an open mic.
Your roommate says, you have a nice voice and you should perform somewhere, and there's, oh, I could never do that, even though there might be your dream to do that. Shame tells us that. Being visible or wanting a bit of the spotlight is terribly wrong or grandiose. It also convinces us that we'll make a fool out of ourselves.
So there's a lot going on with this one. You might also have some grief or jealousy when you see others who can freely take up some of the spotlight without shame. And our inner child can be intimidated by such people or feel like they're a bit too showboating. So we can also be judgy of those who have some spotlight.
While we kind of want some of it as well where it could come from in childhood trauma is being raised in an incredibly shame-based family where the right thing to do is to let other people shine. But wanting that for yourself is selfish and wrong. Abusive families can even police their children from being too extroverted or wanting to be funny, or wanting to be entertaining, like just normal kid stuff.
And it's like the family can beat you into humility, which wrecks. Vulnerability. We can also be ridiculed by a family for wanting to share ourselves in some way. Children are naturally like, look what I can do. You know, like cartwheels, drawings, whatever. That's like a healthy developmental way to be seen and be mirrored in the world.
Um, we can learn from children doing that who haven't been abused so much by just simply showing their light, you know? And yes, we can be introverted and shy and not want any of this kind of stuff or attention, which is perfectly okay too. This can also come from having a parent. Demanding attention or demanding the spotlight from the world in a self-consumed and narcissistic way.
So it feels icky to kind of be, be on this, on the stage in some way. It can also come from being compared to others unfairly, like having a mother who gushes over your best friend growing up, but never you. So when this is healed, we simply allow ourselves. The vulnerability in being seen and embrace that we not only have the right to exist and take up space, but there's also nothing narcissistic or shameful about wanting to share ourselves or get some attention or even, you know, some compensation for our gifts or for our talents or for our interest.
And getting unstuck is so freeing. In this kind of shame that's around shooting ourselves down, so how to work on shame. If you're interested in doing some work on shame pertaining to any of these issues, I have a course called Toxic Shame and Childhood Trauma. The course helps you identify and start to work on your inner child on working with childhood trauma based shame and situations that you experienced growing up.
You can find a discount code in the description to this video and also a link to the course right up here. So I had some runners up to this list. So some examples I left out require their own topic or video, and they're also more obvious and maybe not so random. One is the shame about our bodies and sex that requires its own huge dedicated video.
Another is about imposter syndrome, but elements of some of that were covered in these other nine. A big source of shame is something that I call transparent frog. There's really a frog in nature that you could see through it and see its organs. Um, and this one is about the shameful. Feeling about feeling extremely transparent in the world that everyone knows about you and your defects and something like that.
And I discussed transparent frog in a video. I called 11 oddly specific childhood trauma issues. And I'll also have the link to that in the description of this video. And lastly, there's also regret attacks, like it's 2:00 AM you're trying to sleep and your brain brings up that goofy thing you said in class 20 years ago, and you feel a shame surge.
I see that one about being as about hyper vigilance popping up. To keep us in an elevated place to make sure we don't do shameful things. Some final thoughts. So trying to heal childhood trauma-based shame. Keep thinking about the words integrity, goodness, and power. Little children are very vulnerable to those things, and that our wounds as survivors are often about our goodness being taken away or not being encouraged to have any power or to take any risk or simply be seen as a good kid.
It's a highly vulnerable thing to be human, and it's really tough to have those early experiences mess up our sort of present life based to shame and understanding Our shame can take some reflective work. Next time you feel bad or you feel triggered, ask yourself, might it be related to shame? Here's some questions for you.
Is your trigger about how you're being seen? Is your trigger about not measuring up? Is your trigger about being taken advantage of or feeling like you're being taken advantage of? Are you compensating to cover something up? Is your anxiety about not doing enough today? All of our triggers, I think, is gonna have an undercurrent of shame to them in some way.
Even if it's shame. Underage, shame under sadness, shame under freakout. We have to be able to name and nail shame in order to be able to heal from it. Healing will. Involve a lot of looking at how you were treated as a child and processing those relationships, say with an abusive parent or neglectful parents.
And the healing comes from reclaiming our personhood, reclaiming our integrity and our dignity, our goodness, our power, our innocence as a child, and breakdown some long standing toxic shame beliefs that we might have. Some new beliefs might be that, um, sharing ourselves is a good thing. That we're human and hiding so much is kind of silly and gets us nowhere that other people are human too, and it's often not about us when they trigger us that we can start to laugh things off authentically and not take the world so seriously or take ourselves so seriously that we're not bad for wanting what everyone else wants, being noticed.
Being loved being included. And lastly, and I know that this is nuanced for many people, but I think healing shame is gonna involve accepting our personal timeline. It's better to get the things late on your own timeline and on your own process to never get the things at all. So I'd love to know your thoughts.
Leave a comment if you strongly resonated with any of these and add what you might've felt was missing. I think it would really be cool to have a discussion in that way.
