Excerpts from the book Healing The Shame That Binds You, by John Bradshaw
I became aware of the massive destructive power that shame had exerted in my life. I discovered that I had been bound by shame all of my life. It ruled me like an addiction. I acted it out; I covered it up in subtle and not-so subtle ways; I transferred it to my family, my clients and the people I taught.
Shame was the unconscious demon I never acknowledged. In becoming aware of the dynamics of shame, I came to see that shame is one of the major destructive forces in all human life. In naming (and identifying) shame, I began to have power over it.
I discovered that shame as a healthy human emotion can be transformed into shame as a state of being. As a state of being, shame takes over one’s whole identity. To have shame as an identity is to believe that one’s being is flawed, that one is defective as a human being. Once shame is transformed into an identity, it becomes toxic and dehumanizing.
Toxic shame is unbearable and always necessitates a cover-up (a false self). Since one feels his true self is flawed and defective, one needs a false self which is not flawed and defective. Once one becomes a false self, one ceases to exist psychologically. To be a false self is to cease being an authentic human being. The process of false self formation is what Alice Miller calls “soul murder”.
Toxic shame is the greatest form of domestic violence there is. It destroys human life.
Toxic shame is the core of most forms of emotional illness.
Gershen Kaufman writes:
Shame is the affect which is the source of many complex and disturbing inner states: depression, alienation, self-doubt, isolation, loneliness, paranoid and schizoid phenomena, compulsive disorders, splitting of the self, perfectionism, a deep sense of inferiority, inadequacy or failure, the so-called borderline conditions, and disorders of narcissism.
Toxic shame so destroys the function of our authentic self that clear syndromes of shame develop out of the false self cover-ups.
Refusing to accept our true authentic selves, we try to create more powerful false selves or give up and become less than human. This results in a lifetime of cover-up and secrecy. This secrecy and hiding is the basic cause of suffering for all of us.
There are two forms of shame: nourishing shame and toxic/life-destroying shame. As toxic shame, it is an excruciating internal experience of unexpected exposure. It is a deep cut primarily felt from the inside. It divides us from ourselves and from others. In toxic shame, we disown ourselves.