Shame: What it is and How it Becomes Toxic

Shame is one of our basic human emotions, yet hardly anyone talks about it. When it is talked about, it’s mainly in specific contexts like religious spaces. But even then, guilt and shame are conflated all the time, and most people don’t know the difference between the two. Emotions like anger, joy, grief, and guilt have saturated our emotional vocabulary for a long time, but not shame. The problem with this is that many of us struggle with shame, without even realizing that that’s what we’re struggling with.

What most people don’t know about shame is that shame can wear many disguises. It hides behind uncontrollable rages, it lurks behind overblown pride, it conceals itself behind the labels of depression and anxiety. Shame is a chameleon in the realm of emotions, which makes it so hard to pin down. Peel back your friend’s need to incessantly boast and embellish their accomplishments, and find shame running the show, egging your friend on so he can finally feel good enough. Peel back your family member’s fit of intense anger, and find shame gnawing on them inside about expressing their vulnerable emotions. Peel back your addiction to alcohol or porn or TV and find a pit of shame that compels you to distract yourself with any available means.

In my own healing journey, depression and anxiety served as the language that helped me navigate my confusing emotions, but I always sensed something was missing. Only years later did I realize that shame was the true culprit that I was trying to track down for years in therapy. It was the missing link all along.

So what exactly is shame, and how does this fundamental emotion sometimes turn into something more sinister…by fueling our struggles with depression, low self-esteem, and a myriad other mental health problems?

Let me paint a picture for you. Sometimes I think shame must be intuitively grasped because it goes beyond words. Often our most painful memories of shame are from our earliest years, when we didn’t have the precise language to understand what we felt. So, with that said, imagine you’re a kid again, sitting in class during a hot day. The teacher drones on and on, and your eyelids start to feel heavy. You fall asleep, or maybe you just blink slowly. The next thing you know your teacher is at your desk calling your name, and asking you a question you don’t know the answer to. The kids around you turn their heads to stare at you and laugh at your surprise, or maybe it’s because of the dried up drool on your face. Your mouth turns dry. Your face becomes red. Your teacher calls someone else’s name; you drop your head into your hands.

Healthy Shame

This is a taste of what shame is like. In healthy doses, shame is akin to embarrassment—an uncomfortable yet fleeting emotion. Shame, like all other emotions, has a purpose, and that purpose is social. We feel shame before other people. Shame is our harsh but effective teacher in letting us know that something we did or said, or something about us in general, is not appropriate. Other people might reject us if we don’t change. Shame enforces social boundaries, and cautions us to act in a way that helps us to be accepted by our community. When you feel this form of healthy shame, you can be certain that you’ve just trespassed some kind of social boundary or unspoken rule. In the example above, shame let the child know that it was not okay for them to sleep during class, and that they were expected to pay attention at all times.

But healthy shame also represents, according to John Bradshaw, “the basic metaphysical boundary for human beings”.¹ Shame signals us to the fact that human beings are imperfect and limited. We make mistakes every day, embarrass ourselves occasionally, and do or say things that we later regret. Shame reminds us of our boundaries and our limits, and teaches us ultimately that we are not God. We are only human. This healthy form of shame is actually the foundation for many good things, including community, spirituality, and awe. The awareness of our limitations which healthy shame produces reminds us that we need help, from both God and others. It motivates us to seek out close relationships with others. It draws us to our knees in prayer. And sometimes, when we look up at the stars and feel just how small we are in this vast universe, it moves us powerfully to awe.

So shame is in some way intrinsic to the human experience. In fact, Charles Darwin distinguished shame as the only emotion which separates human beings from animals. Blushing, the primary manifestation of shame, cannot be found anywhere in the animal kingdom. Healthy shame is a natural expression of our humanity, which only becomes toxic under certain circumstances. But how exactly does it turn toxic?

Toxic Shame

Shame becomes extremely toxic and destructive when it is tied to your identity. A person who internalizes shame as their identity believes that their whole being is inherently flawed, inadequate, or defective in some way. As a healthy emotion, shame reminds us of our all-too-human limitations, but when it is bound up with your identity, you come to believe that who you are at your core is bad or rotten. Toxic shame is thus more than the temporary feeling of shame that we experience when we are exposed. It’s the deep-seated belief that your true self is inherently flawed. Here you can see the difference between toxic shame and guilt. A person experiencing guilt recognizes that they have done something wrong, and feels regret for their actions. A person with toxic shame believes that who they are as a person is wrong, and feels that all of their actions are as a result defective. The guilty person will be moved to seek forgiveness and if possible make amends for their wrongdoing, while the person with toxic shame often isolates themselves from others and believes that they deserve to be punished. In a nutshell, guilt says “I did something bad”, while shame says “I am bad.”

The reason why toxic shame is so damaging is because it affects everything else in your life. If you struggle with toxic shame, you are bound to have difficulties with managing your own emotions in a healthy way, maintaining close relationships with others, and knowing who you are.

Characteristics of Toxic Shame

One significant characteristic of toxic shame is the struggle to be your authentic self around others. This is because prolonged toxic shame produces a deep rupture within yourself. John Bradshaw called this experience “soul murder”. To cope with the painful everyday feeling of shame, the person with toxic shame disowns their true self and opts instead for a false self around others. This false self can manifest in one of two ways: it can appear more-than-human or less-than-human.

If your false self is more-than-human, you strive to be perfect in everything you do. These are the perfectionists and super-achievers in the world who believe that external accomplishments, feats, and validation from others will finally make them feel accepted and worthwhile. In contrast to this, the less-than-human false self enacts their felt sense of inferiority and worthlessness by being helpless. This person might look like the drug addict on the side of the road who has lost interest in life, or the teenage delinquent leading a life of crime. The irony of toxic shame is that it plagues both extremes of society—the wealthy, famous person in the upper echelons of society and the addict lying on the side of the road may in fact both be suffering from shame. At the heart of toxic shame is the rejection of the self by the self. The refusal to accept your authentic self fuels the shame and gives rise to false selves. Those with toxic shame either try to create a more-than-human false self in order to gain acceptance from others or simply give up and become less-than-human. Over time, those of us who struggle with toxic shame are so used to putting up our false selves that we become more and more detached from who we really are.

Another sign of toxic shame is a lack of intimate relationships. Toxic shame severely limits the quantity and quality of our relationships with others. True intimacy involves two people showing up as their true selves and connecting authentically with each other. Because those with toxic shame interact with other people via their false selves, they limit the possibility of connecting deeply with others. They might expend a great deal of energy trying to connect with others, and outwardly they might seem like the life of the party, but deep down they will feel utterly alone. Sooner or later they will crash and isolate themselves from others because only when they are alone can they be themselves. Shame keeps people divided from others and divided within. It pulls us irresistibly to hiding and isolation, where it slowly festers and expands its grip over our lives.

Another symptom of toxic shame is being prone to addiction. In fact, toxic shame and addiction go hand in hand. John Bradshaw writes that neurotic shame is actually the root of all compulsive and addictive behaviors. People with toxic shame believe deep down that no one could ever love them as they are. This distorted belief gives rise to distorted behaviors like: “If I work harder, or drink, or binge watch, or binge eat, I’ll feel okay.” The toxically shamed person will usually rely on such addictive behaviors in order to attempt to regulate their emotions and feel okay about themselves, but what ends up happening more often than not is that the addiction will reinforce the shame…which will then reinforce the addiction, and so on… it’s a toxic cycle that is extremely hard to break. As Bradshaw points out, toxic shame turns a person into a “human doing” rather than a human being. Rather than accepting ourselves for who we are, we turn to destructive behaviors in order to fill the void inside of us, a void created by our lack of self-love and lack of intimate relationships. This is precisely why toxic shame is so devastating. Its end result is alienation from others and self-destruction.

Shame is closely tied to many mental health disorders and addictions, yet it still remains widely misunderstood. It is only when we can name shame for what it is that we can start to undermine its power over our lives. Toxic shame is a master of disguise. It works behind the scenes and pulls our lives apart piece by piece. By naming it, investigating it, and by tracing its influence in our lives can we begin to heal and understand ourselves and others better.

1. Bradshaw, John. Healing the Shame That Binds You. Health Communications, Incorporated, 2015. ↩︎