Shame: What it is and How it Becomes Toxic

Shame is one of our fundamental human emotions, yet hardly anyone talks about it. When it is talked about, it’s mainly used in religious spaces. But here, too, 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 long since saturated our emotional vocabulary, but not shame. The problem with this is that many of us struggle with shame, without even realizing that what we’re struggling with is called shame. Take myself, for example. I’ve struggled with my mental health for a long time now, and whenever people asked about it, I’d pull out somewhat clunky terms like “low self esteem”, “inferiority complex”, and “self-loathing”, which all ultimately boil down to the same thing—shame. I’ve also struggled for a while now with social anxiety, only to discover recently, after stumbling on a video on shame, that the root of my anxiety was really shame. Shame was the true culprit which 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 basic emotion sometimes turn into something more sinister…by fueling our struggles with depression, low self esteem, and a myriad other mental health problems?

Healthy Shame

Shame, like all other emotions, has a purpose. It helps enforce social boundaries, and cautions us to act appropriately—that is, within the boundaries—so that we are accepted as part of our community. Here’s an example to help picture shame in action. In Kindergarten one day I remember sitting with the rest of my class on a large rug while our teacher read us a story. Each kid occupied a square on the rug, and we were arranged in rows facing the teacher. In the middle of the story, I had to fart. And so I farted. Loudly. Immediately, row after row of my classmates in front of me whipped their heads around to see who farted. A feeling of terror spiked within me. My face flushed as I turned my head around like everyone else, pretending to look for the person who farted. Despite this sneaky move, it felt like everyone still knew and was staring at me. I fidgeted in my spot and wished more than anything that I could disappear. The feeling I was experiencing was shame, and I learned then that farting is something which should only be done in private. I had infringed on a social boundary, and the awful feeling of shame I felt was my harsh but effective teacher in letting me know that farting in public was inappropriate.

When you feel this kind of shame, you can be certain that you’ve just trespassed some kind of social boundary or unspoken rule. 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 bound up with one’s 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 starts to impinge on our identities, we come to believe that who we are at our core is bad or rotten. Toxic shame therefore is more than the fleeting feeling of shame that we experience when we are exposed. It is the deep-seated belief that one’s true self is intrinsically flawed. Here you can see the difference between (toxic) shame and guilt. A person experiencing guilt recognizes 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 reparations for their wrongdoing, while the person with toxic shame isolates themselves from others and believes that they deserve to be punished.

Here’s an example to illustrate this difference. Once, I made a promise to a friend I didn’t keep. When she found out, I didn’t apologize to her right there and then, like I should have. Instead, I went home and cried about it and felt like a worthless human being. I later sent her a hasty apology via text but in my mind the damage was done and there was nothing I could do or say to repair it. Internally, I condemned myself and felt horrible about what I did, but outwardly I didn’t look very sorry. When I saw her again at school, it was awkward between us, and our friendship never fully recovered from that moment on. The problem was that I acted out of a place of shame and not guilt. I felt bad about not keeping my promise to my friend, but instead of making things right with her, I turned inwards and criticized myself. I told myself that the reason I hurt my friend was because I was a bad person, and not because I simply acted badly that one time. Because I felt like who I was as a person was bad, I became more distant from her, rather than actively moving towards reconciliation as a guilty person would have done. All this to say… in a nutshell, guilt says “I did something bad” and shame says “I am bad”.

Characteristics of Toxic Shame

One significant marker of toxic shame is the struggle to be one’s authentic self around others. This is because prolonged toxic shame produces a deep rupture within oneself. John Bradshaw described this experience as “soul murder”. In order to cope with the painful everyday feeling of shame, the toxically shamed person 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 as more-than-human or less-than-human. The person whose false self is more-than-human strives to be perfect in everything they do. These people are the perfectionists and super-achievers in the world who believe that external accomplishments, feats, and adulation from others will finally make them feel accepted and worthwhile. The more-than-human false self can also look like the religious moralist who tries to earn a sense of value through doing good deeds for others or fastidiously following religious rules. In contrast to this, the less-than-human false self enacts their felt sense of inferiority and worthlessness. 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 and famous person inhabiting 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 one’s 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.

If you’ve ever asked yourself the question, “Why is it so hard for me to be myself around others?” or “Why do I never feel good enough?” or “Why am I so afraid to let others see who I truly am?” you might be carrying toxic shame. 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 foreclose the possibility of deeper connection 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 breeds and festers.

Unlike the life of the party example, in my case shame had me repress most of my personality whenever I stepped out of my house. At home I was loud and expressive, but outside of the house I tucked away most of my true thoughts, opinions, and emotions deep inside, under a thick blanket of social anxiety. At one point, when my anxiety was at its worst, most of my relationships with others were shallow, and a lot of my friendships were merely transactional, because I didn’t fundamentally trust anyone enough to be myself around them. In some areas, like writing, for example, I tried to be more-than-human, and I obsessed over my academic work in the hopes that I would receive validation and praise from my instructors. I became a rigid perfectionist and I often found myself paralyzed by writing assignments. In other areas of my life, I showed up in the world as less-than-human. In most spaces, I tried to be as invisible as I could. More than anything, though, I felt deeply alone throughout all of it. I couldn’t connect on a deeper level with other people, but I didn’t know why.

Another symptom of toxic shame is a proneness 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 which is extremely hard to break free from. 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.

How Toxic Shame Develops

You’re probably wondering at this point how toxic shame develops. What has to go wrong for someone to internalize toxic shame? The answer might be a little surprising, but the seed of toxic shame is usually planted during childhood. Let me explain. A child’s sense of self-worth is developed at a very young age within their interpersonal bond with their caregiver. One of the most important jobs for parents is to affirm and mirror their child’s emotions. A child can only come to know who they are through the mirroring eyes of their parents during this early stage of development. As John Bradshaw states, “We are ‘we’ before we are ‘I’”. When we are very young, we don’t understand our internal experiences because we lack an emotional vocabulary. One of the roles of our caregiver is to help us name our emotions, affirm them, and help us deal with them. We come to trust our caregiver when they respond appropriately to our emotions. When parents are shame-based, they cannot mirror their child’s emotions, and as a result the child becomes psychologically abandoned. When a caregiver fails to emotionally bond with their child, the child develops toxic shame. Shame is often transferred generationally, because parents with toxic shame cannot attune to the emotional needs of their child and instead shame their child. The child thus carries the parents’ shame, and the generational chain of shame continues until someone intentionally breaks it.

Let me give you an example of how things can go wrong. If you felt angry as a child, and your caregiver mislabeled your emotional experience as “selfishness”, then you’re likely to judge yourself as a selfish person whenever you feel angry. Now, instead of feeling angry, you feel ashamed whenever you get angry. This is what Bradshaw calls a shame-bind, which is when you immediately feel shame for experiencing a certain emotion or need. This can potentially cause much bigger problems in the future. Maybe you’re in an abusive relationship down the line, and instead of using your anger as motivation to stand up for yourself or leave the relationship, you feel ashamed instead of angry, and judge yourself as selfish for thinking about leaving. You stay in the toxic relationship, and you become more and more unhappy. Maybe as a child you felt curious about something and asked your parent about it, but your parent lashed out in annoyance and anger. Curiosity and enthusiasm then become bound up in shame for you. You keep your head down and you don’t ask questions as an adult. Maybe as a toddler you started to exert your autonomy and began to test your parents’ boundaries. Instead of expressing their anger in a non-shaming way, your parents disciplined you by spanking you and saying abusive things to you. What happens then is that your drive for autonomy becomes wrapped up in shame. Emotions are very important because they provide us with critical information about ourselves and give us the motivation to act accordingly. When we are shamed for feeling our feelings, or expressing normal human needs, we lose access to the raw experience of our emotions and drives, and we become disconnected from who we are. Toxic shame starts to color everything.

Toxic shame also develops within the family system. Families are social systems with their own rules. The number one rule in the family is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The family is characterized by the interrelationships and dynamics among all of its members. The second law of the family is homeostasis. Each family member does their part in order to ensure balance and harmony within the family. In functional families, the role each family member adopts is flexible and self-imposed, but in dysfunctional families, the role each family member has to play is fixed and rigid. For example, if one child is out of control and puts a lot of strain on the family, the other children might become as invisible as possible. They might become overly responsible, self-controlled, or helpful. Each person in the family plays a role which covers up their true self. All of the members of the family are enmeshed with one another and compensate for one another’s weaknesses. If Mom and Dad are emotionally unavailable, Child 1 may respond by becoming rebellious and acting out. Child 2 might respond by disengaging emotionally with the family and becoming hyper-independent. Child 3 might respond by becoming an emotional sponge and caregiver for the rest of the family. In dysfunctional families, our role is imposed on us, whether we like it or not. No one may voice their expectations, but we understand that to be accepted we must behave in a certain way, and it is this unspoken rule which is unhealthy and extremely damaging.

Enmeshment within the family system, emotional mis-attunement with one’s caregivers, abuse of all kinds, and neglect are the main ways in which toxic shame is transferred from parent to child, and from brother to sister. This is not to say that shame isn’t also absorbed from other environments as well, such as school or church. John Bradshaw simply looks in-depth at the family system in his book as one major source of shame. Shame-based people form shame-based systems which ultimately perpetuate and induce shame. We can only begin to unravel shame and its harmful effects when we can name it. Shame is a corrosive force which not only destroys individuals but undermines societies. It is a problem we must address and confront not only for the sake of self-understanding and self-healing but for the sake of the health of our communities. Shame is pervasive and it affects so many people because abuse, neglect, and addiction are so rampant. In order to tackle these problems, we must address the invisible underbelly of shame which sustains all of these issues. Shame breeds in silence. To combat shame, therefore, we must talk incessantly about it.

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