For me and I suspect lots of you, understanding shame has been key to recovery. The circumstances that create someone who’s socially withdrawn and unable to control impulses or direct attention to chosen goals are at root shaming, and if you scratch the surface of a lot of associated behaviors and emotions, such as social anxiety and academic procrastination, there’s shame underneath.
C-PTSD
Complex PTSD is the diagnostic construct that strikes home the most for me–it’s comprehensive enough that it feels like the minimal concept to explain most of my problems. It’s basically the idea that if you spent a very long period of time, or grew up, trapped in negative circumstances in some way, you’ll have certain common issues. Does this symptom ring a bell?
“Changes in self-perception, such as a chronic and pervasive sense of helplessness, paralysis of initiative, shame, guilt, self-blame, a sense of defilement or stigma, and a sense of being completely different from other human beings.”
When I first read this, it struck me as the truest description of my teens and early 20s that I’d ever heard. Reading that post by the relatively mild fanfic addict in their late 20s who wanted to make friends but had always been too reluctant to reminded me of this–specifically the sense of being different than other people, set aside, and the learned helplessness when it comes to actually reaching out and solving the loneliness. Even if you feel like you’ve grown past whatever your childhood or other past issues were, the resulting patterns can still be limiting your behavior years later.
“But I wasn’t abused”
A lot of people start finding out that they have symptoms of childhood abuse survivors, but don’t want to malign their parents, or don’t think they had it “as bad as” some other people (no one had it “as bad as” the worst person who ever suffered in every way, and even people who had it pretty damn bad think they did’t have it as bad, by the way). But trauma and shame can result from not getting your needs met in a child in any persistent way, or suffering unavoidable losses. It’s not just about a parent cussing you out or hitting you.
Partial list of things that might have produced these symptoms (trigger warning, this is literally a list of traumas):
- Physical abuse, including “punishment”
- Sexual abuse or harassment or something that made you feel abused even if maybe the person doing it didn’t mean it that way (e.g. jokes, unwanted touching that may not have been intended as molestation, being in a sexual relationship too young even if you thought you were ready and consented and the other person was also young or you were technically of age)
- Verbal abuse, including “jokes”, unhelpful criticisms that the person making them says are “just the truth”, and manipulative or passive-aggressive comments that are hard to pin down as abusive on the surface
- Emotional abuse, including gaslighting (such as someone denying that they said or did something), lack of proper boundaries (such as a parent who “parentifies” a child by acting like their best friend, sharing emotional/personal confessions that aren’t age-appropriate, and/or failing to be sufficiently responsible so the child has to pick up the slack), perfectionism, controlling-ness, and so on
- Medical abuse or neglect, or simple trauma from medical issues
- Secondary trauma from watching someone else be abused or suffer medical issues or other trauma
- Living with someone who’s mentally ill, addicted, or takes up most of the family’s mental/emotional resources to take care of for whatever reason*
- Losing a parent due to divorce, jail, death, deportation, or other reason
- Being bullied by other kids, including otrasicization
- Being bullied by siblings, or put into a negative or limiting role by siblings or family for whatever reason
- Medical neglect, or not being able to receive medical care or not identified as needing it even if it isn’t intentional neglect
- Not having a close connection with a safe adult who you talk to regularly about how your day was and what challenges you’re going through
- Having immature parents who don’t set a good example of emotional and interpersonal skills
- Having parents who are absent because they’re always working, even if they had to do that for you to survive
- Being someone that society is hostile to, due to religion, race/ethnicity, national origin, disability, LGBT status, gender, etc
- Neglect of physical needs, such as not being provided with sufficient food or clothing
- Neglect of emotional/social needs
- Being raised in a religious (or other cultural/ideological) environment that wasn’t healthy for you
- Experiencing losses, traumas, or chronic stresses due to poverty, war, or natural disaster
- Moving and not easily being able to rebuild your life afterward
You might have experienced a lot of these and not have C-PTSD or other resulting troubles–there’s a lot of protective or healing factors and a lot of vulnerability factors. And if you do have serious psychological problems and can point to someone who’s went through the same thing but appears to be better off–(a) mind your own business, (b) you don’t necessarily know they aren’t coping with it negatively in some other way (and you might already know but be dismissing it because it’s not your problem), and (c) they probably had more support in healing or less vulnerability factors. It doesn’t make them better than you.
*Reading some of these might have provoked shame or guilt on your own part again–e.g. the part about living with someone with mental illness may have made you think, “I’m mentally ill. Am I so bad that it would be traumatic for someone to live with me?” but please don’t interpret it that way. There are some mentally ill people who neglect or abuse their children, and some addicts who behave in a way that traumatizes children, and some families who, through no fault of the affected person and perhaps no fault of their own given their access to resources, use up all their energy on one person’s issue to the detriment of other family members’ needs. These are listed separately because there’s a tendency of people affected to say that what they experienced doesn’t count because they think it would be selfish to focus on their own needs when the other person was clearly suffering or had limited capability.
‘And a side note on anger and blame–I’ve found experiencing (and expressing in appropriate/safe ways) anger and blame to be a crucial aspect of healing. Since I struggled with basic feelings of unworthiness, it was helpful to point out that, no, the problem was not inside me, it was in how I’d been treated, by my parents and society–both the things they did and the things they didn’t do. I’ve even found writing down all the reasons I had to be angry at an abuser who I’d prematurely forgiven (blaming myself or no one) to be a necessary cure for flashbacks. But some people believe that blaming others isn’t useful, and I suspect that’s because some people who do it get trapped in feeling hostility and aggression or abdicating their own responsibility to respond to the reality of their lives even if they don’t like it and it isn’t fair. Blaming/feeling anger is a tool for reclaiming your own power–if it stops being that, and starts fueling ruminations, withdrawal, abusive behavior on your part, or an addiction to the high of self-righteous anger, notice it and move back to healing in a workable direction.
How does all this cause shame?
If you’re like I was, you’re vaguely aware that some people describe abuse as leading to shame, but your overriding understanding of shame comes from the dominant social narrative that shame is what someone feels (or should feel) when they’ve done something really wrong.
But some people draw the distinction between guilt and shame this way: Guilt is what you feel about violating your own standards; shame is what you feel when you’ve violated other people’s standards.
The further link here is that your brain isn’t that sophisticated and doesn’t reason out whether you should be feeling shame when it unconsciously learns shame–it just knows, especially when you’re a kid, that what you’re experiencing is what happens when you’re being shamed. Any kind of abuse, neglect, serious loneliness, or other forms of suffering, exclusion, abandonment, or rejection might translate into “I don’t deserve better/people don’t want to see my basic needs met” in your psyche.
Signs of shame
If you’re still not sure that what you’re experiencing is shame, here’s some possible ways it could manifest on a daily basis:
- Social anxiety or embarrassment being common or life-steering emotions
- Intense regret over things you said, possibly a long time ago, that didn’t result in any obvious negative consequences
- Locking up under pressure (when someone expects you to perform) on a task that you could probably tackle if no one would know about it
- Defensiveness, fragility, or a hair-trigger temper over criticism, potentially over anything that remotely smacks of criticism
- Continual sense that you’ll get fired from your job, fail out of school, be broken up with, or that your friends don’t like you anymore, even when there isn’t strong, realistic evidence that this result is imminent
- Intrusive thoughts that make you feel like a monster and that you obsess over (morbid thoughts OCD)
- Procrastinating whenever you think you might “fail” at something since in your mind, it’s not just one task with a risk, but rather the whole idea that you’re a “failure” and that you’ll therefore never have a good future
- Thinking your life trajectory is going toward on-the-streets homelessness, even when you have savings and/or plenty of people who would take you in
- Difficulty speaking at all, or a least loudly and clearly and saying what you mean, assertively
- Hunched shoulders, bent back, downward-looking eyes/not meeting people’s gaze
- Frequently assuming other people are better than you or would be preferred by other people for some purpose without evidence; feeling caught up on comparing yourself and constructing narratives about how you are less worthy than the people who you do have evidence to construct such a narrative for
- A defeatist attitude/learned helplessness, where you don’t try to find or take opportunities to pursue the life you’d rather want, and/or have beliefs that single you out for failure, like, “This is just how my life goes” whenever something bad happens but not when something good happens
- Excessive attempts to prove yourself, such as workaholism, anorexia/excessive exercising, reading tons of social justice critiques and obsessing over your personal role/behavior in these systems, getting really into religion and trying to perfect or purify yourself that way, etc.
- Apologizing for things you don’t need to apologize for and then apologizing for apologizing
What do I do about shame?
First, like with any type of emotion, thought, urge, etc., learn to look at it in your head and accept it. Trying to fight or eliminate something in your mind can just make it stronger, since you’re directing more energy toward it and since there’s no way to actually remove a thought from your head–trying to just creates more pathways to it/associations with it.
“Accepting” it doesn’t mean that you act on it, believe it, dwell on it, or anything of that sort. You can have a thought in your mind while doing the opposite of what the thought says, or something completely unrelated to the thought. The idea here is just seeing it as a passenger in your head while you continue driving your life. I’m drawing on ACT here–ACT also teaches a set of defusion exercises, to lower the intensity and believability of these mental experiences without trying to get “rid” of them, and mindfulness exercises, which will help you see your thoughts as thoughts instead of absolute reality, and also let you direct your attention elsewhere.
Having established that you’re not going to try to live without shame in any way, here’s some tips (mostly from DBT) on how to handle it:
First, do a reality check. Decide that you’re only going to dwell on shame if it’s justified–if you did something really bad (it actually hurt other people) and have yet to make amends for it, or, if amends aren’t possible, do what’s required to make it so you won’t do it again.
Do a reality check again–break out the paper and probe your reasoning and assumptions here–if you’re coming up with “yeah, this is real” a lot, because for me I’ve been practicing this for a couple weeks now and have never yet come up with a shame response that was justified. I’m sure I will in the future, but I expect it’ll be a few times a year or less, not every day.
If shame isn’t justified, do the opposite of what shame makes you want to do: Hold your head up and shoulders back; speak loudly and clearly; tell someone (who won’t reject you) what you did or announce it to the world if that’s not particularly risky.
If it is, do your best to make amends/take prevention steps, then go do the things you do for unjustified shame, because now it’s time to heal from your shame, not let it drive you further down the wrong path.
It’ll be easier to get out of the cycle of shame if you’re in a situation that isn’t shaming–for instance, you have a social circle where you’re accepted and people aren’t verbally abusive/shaming; you have a job where you aren’t abused and powerless; you have good friends or family you can call when lonely or when you’re feeling rejected, out of place, or bad about something you did who you can talk it over with; and you have competencies that you exercise on a regular basis to do something that you and other people think is valuable, so you feel pride. This might seem like an impossible dream–meant for someone else, but not for you–but you get there one step at a time. If you both work on the emotional regulation techniques for shame listed above, and move toward a life situation with more positive aspects, the two efforts will reinforce each other and be more effective than working on one alone.
Conclusion
For many of us, shame is the water we swim in, so we don’t even know it’s there. We might notice a few of the stronger currents that pull us away, but not how it’s blurring our vision of the world and slowing our movements through it on a moment-by-moment basis.
For someone fighting addiction, shame is often very familiar–what we feel when we relapse, the fear we have even when free from our addiction that we’ll go back to its shackles, the habit of avoiding people we care about when they might realize we’ve relapsed, of avoiding commitments to other things we’d like to participate in out of fear of flaking out, the times we’ve been compelled to binge harder by our very shame about having relapsed in the first place.
We need to work on recovering from the shame as much or more than we need to work on removing the addiction. The severity of negative consequences/risk of the addiction can determine which you prioritize, but ultimately shame is a root cause of addiction and addressing it will help over time. And that includes addressing shame over the fact that you are addicted–and what you’re addicted to.
Fanfiction Addiction Recovery 