Say hello to your shame demons

This past weekend, I watched K-pop Demon Hunters, which, if you aren’t familiar with it, is a silly children’s cartoon movie on Netflix. It acted as an unexpected trigger for me, and as the movie moved toward its climactic scene, I found myself sobbing on the couch because I’d never felt so seen by a children’s cartoon. You see, the demons that our K-pop heroines fight in this movie are powered by shame. This felt like such a brilliant (though possibly unintended) allegory for the very real inner demons I faced during my recover which were also fueled by shame.

So today, I want to write a little about shame.

What is shame?

If you look it up online, shame is usually considered to be an emotion which is associated with embarrassment or humiliation. It is related to but different from guilt, with guilt usually being associated with the idea that “I did something wrong,” while shame is associated with, “I am wrong.” However, most of what I found online about shame never quite struck a cord with me. It never felt like the descriptions of shame matched the extreme and unbearable pain that ripped through my chest and body when I allowed the sensation of shame to rise to the surface.

Then a couple years ago, I read the book, Embracing Shame by Bret Lyon and Sheila Rubin. In it, they described shame as essentially being a freeze response (which can also trigger fight-or-flight). This resonated so strongly with me. Shame is an emotional attack against the self, in order to prevent an emotional—or even possibly physical—attack from from those around us. We use internal shame to keep ourselves in check so that society won’t reject us. We literally freeze up in order to stop ourselves from acting in a way that could lead to rejection.

There seem to be at least two levels of shame. One is considered healthy. Healthy shame is the kind that helps keep some of our most anti-social behaviors in check. It helps us understand what actions are acceptable to our society, and it helps us learn how to pay attention to other members of society to recognize when we’ve crossed boundaries we shouldn’t have.

The other level of shame is toxic. This is the shame that causes us to freeze up, to hate ourselves, to think that the problem is us, to believe that we are fundamentally flawed and unlovable, to believe that if we can just be perfect enough then people won’t see the monster that we believe we really are.

Toxic shame is not just an emotion. It is literally a constant, internal attack against our true self. It is one or many parts of us constantly reminding us that everything we’re doing is wrong because, at our core, who we are is wrong.

I suspect that shame is the root of a lot of chronic illness and chronic pain.

Even as we work through all of the other repressed emotions that led to whatever illness we’re recovering from, shame sits at the root of them all because shame is likely one of the main reasons we repressed them in the first place. We were taught that it was unacceptable for us to express our emotions and we were not taught healthy ways to process our biggest emotions. We learned that we were wrong for having these emotions, and the only acceptable option was for us to repress and hide those emotional parts of us.

Over time, these repressed, wounded parts of us festered and transformed from upset child parts into the internal demons that now tell us how awful we are, or how stupid we are, or how much we’re overreacting, or how much everyone will hate us if we don’t look and act just right, or that we deserve bad things happening to us.

Shame is really complex, and I plan to write more about it as I continue this newsletter, but for now, I want to also share some hope: The antidote to shame is seeing it.

Tips for healing shame

Shame is a monster that thrives in the shadow. It can only exist if it remains hidden. So if you want to heal, you need to see and acknowledge hidden shame.

For some repressed issues, addressing shame may even be one of the easiest solutions. I found it shockingly helpful to simply say or write, “I am ashamed (of/that/for) …”, and then I would sit with the pain arose in my chest with that acknowledgment. I simply had to acknowledge that it was a source of shame, and then feel what it felt like in my body.

For some issues, that may be all you need to do. For others, you may need to journal or cry or get angry. Or it may take quite a while for the feeling to pass, and so you may need to sit with it for a while.

Once you’ve accessed one layer of shame, you might then be able to access a deeper source of shame. If that happens, again, all you have to do is say, “I am ashamed (of/that/for) …”, and acknowledge the new layer.

The bigger challenge is that finding the source of shame may mean figuring out how to acknowledge things that you’re currently in denial about. Your body and mind will resist this, and they may fight back hard, so here are a couple of tips to get started:

1. Be gentle with yourself and start with topics that are easier for you to access. For example, you might start by just creating a list of things that you tend to be perfectionist about or things for which you set standards that you can’t meet. Perfectionism and unrealistic standards can be acts of self-hatred and deeply connected to shame, so simply acknowledging that these areas are problematic for you could be a good first step. You don’t need to go any farther than that if you feel resistance, or you could try journaling about some of the items on the list that feel more accessible. Even just seeing the list is an act of seeing your shame, and that will already start to help you shift away from toxic, subconscious shame.

2. You could also create a list of things that are generally sources of shame in our culture, but here you are actively feeling what the shame feels like in your body. Some examples of common sources of shame could be about your weight, or your activity levels, or where you live (e.g. still living with your parents, or renting instead of owning a home, or not owning a big enough home, etc.), or any debt you might have, or whether you’re a good enough parent (or a good enough child). There are a lot of sources of shame in our society, and they could be easier to start with since they’re so common. If you start with common sources of shame, you might want to also consider how they feel unique to you.

3. Then every time a source of shame arises in your life, you can work on acknowledging this moment as a source of shame. Again, all you’re doing is shining some light on the shame. You don’t necessarily need to change what you’re doing at this point. You don’t need to try to go deeper or find new sources of shame yet. If you want to try to journal about it or process emotions around it, great! But if the resistance to processing it is still too strong, then you can still feel good that simply acknowledging it is huge progress.

4. The goal is simply to see and acknowledge your shame. The more you can raise an issue of shame as you’re journaling or using other healing techniques, that’s great. If you want to try to share some of this with a therapist or a trusted friend or family member, that’s also great. But I think, especially early on, the most important person to see your shame is you.

One thing to keep in mind is that your shame voices will try to stop you from seeing the shame for what it is (which is simply an emotion to feel, process, and move on from). If you see the shame, then it is no longer as big of a deal, and your shame voices are terrified of that happening. Your shame voices believe that you will be rejected and die if anyone ever sees these shameful parts of you, and so the shame voices will do everything in their power to keep you in line. So as you work with your shame, you may meet some internal voices that say really awful things to and about you. They really can feel like demons.

No matter how awful the voices in your head might get, please remember: these voices are not the real you.

The voices may represent child parts of you that deserve lots of compassion so that they can process something that was too big for you to deal with when you were young. In this case, you want to act as the kind, loving parent that your child part needed. (For more tips on this, I wrote here about learning to love our inner demons, and I wrote here about dealing with self-hatred.)

Alternatively, these voices may represent distorted versions of criticisms you’ve heard from other people. In this case, I would visualize them as black ribbons inside of me, and I would either send them floating back to the people they came from, or I would ask the earth to take them and compost them into positive energy.

In any case, the goal is to see your sources of shame. By starting with topics that are easier to access, you can begin to teach your mind and body and all of your child parts that you now have the capacity to deal with and process these old sources of shame. Over time, you will be able to build up the capacity to see and deal with your most toxic shame demons.