For Years I Carried Shame Like A Handbag. Here’s How I Learned To Put It Down.
by Anonymous
Warning: This article contains details of childhood trauma, suicidal thoughts, and sexual abuse.
Shame and I go way back. Since the age of three, in fact.
I didn’t have imaginary friends as a kid. I had shame as my constant, invisible companion.
Shame comes in a lot of forms— “shame on you,” “that’s a shame,” “I’m ashamed to admit.” But for me, shame is worthlessness. To carry deep shame is to carry an unyielding sense of worthlessness. As Dr. Bernard Golden put it when speaking of toxic shame, “Some researchers suggest that shame comes about from repeatedly being told, not that we did something bad, but that we are something bad.”
Shame is poisonous. It attacks your sense of self. Shame becomes you. It is how you define yourself.
When shame is your lifelong companion, then nothing you do matters— not the status you achieve, or the money you make. No level of prestige, or beauty, or sex-appeal can make a difference when underneath all that is the internal, subconscious mantra that repeats, “I’m worthless.”
Shame is a massive, opaque, impenetrable wall. And when shame is at the core of who you are— when shame is your foundation of self— then it will shape your life in every possible way.
At the core of worthlessness: abuse.
There were three seminal occurrences in my childhood that laid the foundation for shame and they happened before the age of five. Abuse at the hands of people I was supposed to trust.
Molestation, physical abuse, abduction, and sexual abuse by people I knew and loved and trusted meant the world suddenly became a dangerous place, full of dangerous people. And somewhere in my little child’s mind, I learned that I must mean nothing.
Less than nothing.
As an adult who studies childhood trauma, I learned this is a common reaction to childhood abuse. When children are abused, it causes cognitive-dissonance in the child's subconscious. As kids, we come to understand that the adults in our lives are the people who take care of us and protect us. So when they not only fail in protecting us, but are in fact the very perpetrators of violence against us, our psyches can’t process this betrayal.
When abuse shows up where love and protection should be, most children—me included—assume they deserve the abuse. That’s the only thing that makes sense to a kid. Because to a child’s mind, the equation is simple: you’re supposed to love and protect me, so if you don’t love and protect me, then I must have done something wrong.
Which is how shame is born.
Abuse convinces a child that they are worthless.
The subconscious logic goes a little something like this. “If someone who is supposed to protect me could treat me like that, then I don’t matter to them. If I don’t matter to them, then I don’t matter at all. And if I don’t matter at all, why do I even exist?”
That’s the core of feeling worthless— that we shouldn’t even exist.
How Shame Harms A Child
Physical abuse indirectly instills shame. But adults can also directly shame a child by the words they choose. When children are mocked for their feelings, called names, or made to feel “dirty” because of healthy expressions of sexuality (yes, children have healthy expressions of sexuality, too), or threatened or coerced in the name of “disciplinary tactics,” deep-seated shame will often be the result.
And this deep-seated shame can manifest in many ways - including self-injurious behavior like cutting, burning, and even suicide.
I know this because by age eight, I had attempted suicide. Several times.
“this deep-seated shame can manifest in self-injurious behavior like cutting, burning, and even suicide. ”
Adulthood: feeling worthless on the inside while trying to look like you “have it all.”
For a long time, I wasn’t actively conscious of my feelings of worthlessness. Those feelings were insidious and deeply hidden within the darkest parts of myself. I wouldn’t speak up for myself, even when I knew I was right because I believed that my thoughts and opinions didn’t matter, even if they were right.
That belief system fueled a deluge of negative self-talk that went unchecked. Thankfully, it’s been so long now since I won the battle over negative self-talk, I can’t remember the things I said to myself. I just know they amounted to different iterations of self-hatred.
My self-esteem was so low, that when I was nineteen and started getting attention from men, I took that attention to mean that I was worth something. By the age of twenty-two, I had created an image for myself entirely based on sex-appeal. Being desirable became my power. I concentrated all my energy into my looks, and drew satisfaction from knowing that me and all my friends were “hot.”
But on the inside I was numb. Completely numb. On one painfully bleak evening, when I just couldn’t stand the numbness any more (I was probably twenty-one), I decided on a whim to go to Hollywood and get my tongue pierced. Just so I could feel something.
I consider this part of the shame-induced self-injurious behavior carried over from childhood. “I hurt myself today just to see if I still feel.” I remember hearing Trent Reznor sing those words. It sounds cliché, but that’s how I felt.
What helped me put down my shame.
Getting over my feelings of worthlessness took time. It was a process that began with taking an honest look at myself and seeing how shame had impacted my behavior in ways I didn’t like. I didn’t like the emphasis I had put on my looks and seeking approval and acceptance from being wanted.
I had gone from zero sense of self to having a self-image based entirely on external validation. I had grown to hate the attention I got from men and wished for invisibility.
“it was time to build my self-esteem based on something real, something that could not so easily disappear.”
I decided it was high time to build my self-esteem based on something real, something that could not so easily disappear like looks or a job or money. So I thought about what made me feel good about myself when I was a little girl, and I realized that it was the things I accomplished, like my creative pursuits.
When I was growing up, anything that had to do with writing or creativity garnered high marks. And I enjoyed those things above any other course of study. So I created a new “Self” based on my passions, pursuits, and talents.
It was also around that time that I found my life’s purpose in helping other survivors of childhood sexual abuse and sexual assault heal from their trauma. I became a support group facilitator and counselor to survivors.
Around the same time, I saw an Oprah episode about self-love. The guest described a practice that I found lovely and nourishing. She called it a “self-blessing.” The practice entailed blessing yourself each day by putting your hands on a part of your body and saying something like, “I bless my eyes for they give me sight and the ability to see truth.”
As a survivor of sexual violence, my body had been violated. It became a crime scene. And after living for years without respect for my body, this practice of self-blessing felt like a divine thing, something that would restore a feeling of wholeness and value to my body.
I started doing the practice every morning in the shower. I would start at the top of my head and work down to my feet, blessing each part, spending extra time blessing my pelvic area that had held the emotional trauma of the abuse for all those years. Some mornings I would cry as I moved through the practice because I had spent so much of my life hating my body. Eventually, though, by doing this regularly, I developed deep love and appreciation for myself.
As much as I was helping the women in our support groups work through their healing process, they were also helping me by sharing their stories, particularly their journey through shame. I remember one woman who made us all burst out laughing when she admitted how for so long she hated her body but then concluded, “It took me a long time to love my tits. And now I REALLY love my tits!” Reclaiming your body and loving your body isn’t just self-empowering; it empowers the women around you to love themselves.
And while this body-focused self-work was healing, I still had to learn to reframe the things that happened to me as a child. I learned this during certification training in a process called Rapid Resolution Therapy - RRT is a powerful hypnotherapy tool for working with anxiety, depression, and PTSD.
I was skeptical about it so I volunteered for a demo. There were six of us—counselors, social workers, and psychologists— sitting with the trainer in a circle. He asked me what I wanted to work on. Immediately, a memory of being shamed about being sexually curious during my childhood popped in my head. I told the group the story, and the trainer began the process.
When they say Rapid Resolution Therapy, they mean it. The steps involved in the hypnotherapy took a matter of minutes. He had me remember the incident fully before he began and I could feel the shame sitting in my chest. After the process, he asked me to remember the incident again and when I did…I actually laughed. I felt a lightness and joy. The shame surrounding that incident seemed to have disappeared.
In its place was a new realization that of course I did that as a child. I was a child and I was curious. The group supported me through the process by reframing the situation and normalizing my behavior as “children’s exploratory play”—it’s what little kids do. I felt restored. And it amazed me that something so quick and easy as RRT could zap away the shame of that memory so completely.
Reframing my childhood challenges in school meant acknowledging the extreme hardship of changing schools on a near yearly basis. Having to make friends all over again, learn the new “playground politics,” the new teacher’s expectations, and the new curriculum was hard. Never feeling rooted anywhere was hardest. So of course I struggled in school to catch up.
That didn’t mean I wasn’t smart.
By the time I completed my graduate program in Somatic Psychology, the study of the mind-body connection with a specialization in trauma, I had learned so much about how we hold shame in our bodies and ways to work it out. One tool I used to move shame out of my body was dance. For years, I took various forms of dance from Afro-Haitian to Flamenco, and each style of dance taught me a new way to feel my body, use my body, and feel competent and confident in my body.
Undoing shame has been a process of unearthing long-held beliefs about my self-worth, cultivating a sense of self based on my competencies and talents, fostering self-love and appreciation, and reframing the things that happened to me in my childhood. It hasn’t been easy, and it certainly wasn’t quick. But it has been some of the most life-affirming self-growth work I’ve done.
I don’t know where I’d be if I had not taken on recovering from shame. I know that I wouldn’t have the deep friendships I have now because shame would have kept me feeling unworthy of them. I know that I would not have had the courage to follow my dream of becoming a writer because I still would have carried the belief that everything inside me was worthless and that I had nothing of value to offer to the world.
I know I have value. I know it. So do you.
