Shame and Its Impacts

Description: The feeling of shame can be described as a sense of smallness, worthlessness, and powerlessness in a given situation. This reflects shame’s benign developmental origins as the toddler’s natural response to limits and discipline. The “self-in-the-eyes-of-the-other” is at the center of shame- “I am as I am seen”. Shame brings a feeling of being exposed and generates extreme concern about another’s evaluation of oneself as disgusting, repulsive, disgraceful … It results in a state of self absorption and isolation. Shame essentially splits a person into both an “observer” and “the one being observed”. The observer part witnesses and criticizes the part being observed.

Shame signals: Shame produces an implosion of the body: head lowers, eyes closed or hidden, and the upper body curved in on itself as if trying to be as small as possible (the bodily acting out of the wish to disappear). The face may be buried in the hands. There may be a turning away of the head or entire body from others or a hiding under some object. There is an aversion of all eye contact. Additionally, thought and speech often fragment during a shame reaction, producing pauses, false starts, inaudilbility and poor articulation. This is often experienced as “going blank, somewhat like dissociation. The avoidance of eye contact in such moments is easily understandable and to push for eye contact in moments of shame can actually be harmful.

Systemic impact: Shame is more than a feeling. It is an entire, organismic state that affects multiple systems in the body. Shame operates at primitive levels below the reach of rational thinking. Shame brings with it a subjective sense of time slowing down which serves to magnify anything that occurs during a state of shame. It also is accompanied by intensified feedback from all perceptual modalities, particularly Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) reactions such as blushing, sweating, and increased heart rate. These autonomic reactions induce a state of heightened bodily awareness, which combines with the slowed sense of time to produce the extreme self-consciousness that is a part of feeling shame.

Shame-rage: Shame simultaneously generates self-protective anger or rage along with it. This shame-rage may or may not be expressed at the time, but it does find expression in some form, sooner or later, and often turns into a desire for revenge. Shame-rage aims at triumphing over, and humiliating another, so the other is put in the position of experiencing shame. In this way, escape from shame is sought by downloading it onto another. AD children wearing down their mothers with repeated rejection and criticism typifies this. The mother’s sense of being a terrible mother is the recreation, in her, of the child’s shame about being a terrible child. This internalized shame-rage poses a real emotional threat to the AD child.
Source: