Shame is a killer : facing and freeing ourselves is essential in recovering from trauma and abuse.

One of the key things of suffering abuse or trauma of some kind is shame. We are all victims of a society in which we seem to judge everyone a lot by externals. There is a very strong emphasis on coping, on not struggling, on having it all together and keeping it all together even when things are not going right. We have a hard time acknowledging grief and helping support those going through hard times. I do think this tendency is slowly starting to change in recent years. We are seeing people come out and talk more openly about abuse and the associated shame.

As a young child we naturally come to believe that all that happens to us is somehow our fault. Our abusers will often tell us this anyway or imply that if we ever dared to tell someone we may die or be punished or exiled in some way. Often it is the family scapegoat who is the one who starts to bust the lid on family dysfunction or has a breakdown and is then exiled or shamed by the system.

Pete Walker also points out in his book on Complex PTSD that as we start to heal one inner psychodynamic we have to contend with is the internalised or externalised critic. I see evidence of the external critic all around me in society. I see a lot of shaming in comedy that can also be a form people becoming honest in an ironical way or pointing fun at the ridiculousness of things, however in some cases without an inner empathic understanding, humour may be used subtly or not so subtly to disparage. Some teasing takes this form of shaming the most vulnerable family member.

The hardest thing to deal with though in healing from abuse or trauma and associated shame is the internalised critic. This part of us has an investment in us not being vulnerable, it may associate being vulnerable with being weak, small and defenceless which is exactly what we were when as young children we were shamed or abused. Sadly without support to know any better we so often end up turning this blame upon ourselves. We mistakenly feel we should have been bigger or stronger than we really were or more able to cope with emotions we never got to find a way to express or contain in healthy ways. Our parents suffering similar wounds too often just pass them down. We may have been told it was bad or wrong to protest or feel angry, sad or frustrated if humiliated or prevented from expressing something we needed to or struggled in needing to learn a more healthy way to express.

There is an enormous power that comes with telling and knowing the truth of our history and being believed; with busting aside the performances and pretences of the False Self we had to build and hide behind in order to feel strong or deny and run from the truth. There is true power in being Real.

Lately I have been re reading some of Charles Whitfield’s on healing the Inner Child and he speaks of this need to experience our true feelings and be real as most essential in recovery. Emotions (energy in motion that get stuffed up inside) can be laden in shame for we may have been told that legitimate responses to trauma or abuse or neglect or suffering were bad or wrong. In this case our ability to feel and understand our emotions in our body becomes compromised.

Unfortunately for most of us the experiencing of our true feelings (sensations of emotion as residues carried inside of us) does make us feel very small again, that is why many of us need a healthy adult mentor around to speak up for and champion the smaller self that was vulnerable. Most of us have internalised a powerful inner critic that denies the truth of the abuse and also fears liberating it, this may be an introject of a parent’s voice offering trouble if we dared to be real. For those of us left in childhood without these supports and submitted to silence or disbelief by the family or other social institutions we cannot do this without help. Getting out from a mistaken sense of shame carried on and internalised by our inner critic is not easy. It may feel we will literally die or be destroyed if we tell the truth or stand up to the shaming killer of truth inside.

This fear does not exist for no reason but we do need to face it. It is the wall of fire we most definitely must come through in order to find healing and freedom from unnecessary shame and know the truth of what happened to us. It takes bravery to come out and defy the inner or outer critic others may turn on us, but it is courage that is needed, our hearts fire, to burst through and liberate our soul from unnecessarily acquired shame.