The worst thing about healing shame is that you have to relive it and come out of the numbing phase. Here are some excerpts I found on the internet about healing shame. I realize that part of what I am doing is coming here looking for comfort. Is anyone else working through this hell of shame?
http://www.psychsight.com/ar-shame.htmlHealing Shame – short sheet
Shame always carries with it the sense that there is nothing one can do to purge its burdensome and toxic presence. Shame is the worst possible thing that can happen, because shame, in its profoundest meaning, conveys that one is not fit to live in one's own community.
There are few experiences that are more upsetting than attempting to communicate, and then receiving little or no response. We would rather fight than be neglected. Passion, risk, hurt are preferable to neglect--benign or malicious.
The Controlling Family
This is the family which is ruled by decree. It is the authoritarian, or the rigid, or the meddlesome family. The controlling family is one wherein any threat of deviation from the "way-it's-supposed-to-be" is rapidly squashed. The shame engendered by the parent's domineering control can cause the child to believe he has no "self" worth preserving: as it becomes impossible to live according to his own desires, and as he cannot give his parent what he wants, he has no choice but to kill himself.
The Abusive Family
This is the aggressive, the attacking family. It can be emotionally, physically, or sexually abusive. It can be implicitly or explicitly abusive. This is the family in which shame goes deepest, for the abused person feels deeply she is a damaged "self" and that her injury has made her unfit to share in this life with others. This is the family which may abuse the child when she is very small, thus establishing a sense of worthlessness in her which, in her adult life, she can give no cognitive content to. She simply feels worthless and that there is no recourse but to re-experience it whenever she experiences a failing, a dismissal, or an aggressive act.
The emotionally abusive family uses ridicule, punishment, putdowns. This is the family where the old and strong intimidate the young and weak.
The physically abusive family spanks, hits and uses emotional intimidation in threatening further spanking and hitting. It may also withhold meals or send the child to do a physically punishing tasks.
THE BURDENS OF SHAME
Shame-bound persons, believing themselves to be seriously flawed, without worth, and hardly belonging in the world inevitably have the consequences of their shame-consciousness show up very negatively in many areas of their life. For a person who has been shamed has no way out, his is the feeling of there being nothing he can do to set things right. Something vague, but decisive, has shrunk his soul.
The shame-bound person may become either an offender or a victim, or, as is most likely, one who vacillates from one mode to the other. If his experiences cause him to access his shame, he may take out his hurt and rage on others weaker than himself in his present community of family and friends. For another person whose defense is less aggressive, if she is re-shamed, she may fall into her accustomed role of victim, as she is naturally adept in this guise, having been an actual victim in her original family. Having learned to make a "virtue" of necessity, she has mastered playing the victim for what consolation rewards there are--some sympathy, some self-righteousness. For the offender there is some momentary sense of revenge and power, for the victim, a brief touch with martyrdom--and beyond these meager compensations, the despair of impotence and participation in the continuing of the cycle of shame. The shame of the parents becomes the shame of the children, and so on...
On the other hand, the shame-possessed person cannot grieve, for it was much too disappointing and painful to dare to believe that he could be genuinely important to another, or vice versa. Depression is marked by alienation and no real opportunity to bring things back together. At the center of depression is the sense of loss, and the shame-bound person carries the greatest loss of all, the loss of a valued self. The loss is made more difficult to emerge from as one recognizes that he is only partially aware of the dimension of his loss, having been deprived of the experience of and the model for respectful caring and nurturing.
The shame-bound person is controlling, rigid, and perfectionistic.
Shame comes from all "love" being conditional. Which, of course means that the love is never complete, never a comment on the person as she is, but as she pleases her parents by satisfying their expectations and demands. Not feeling the warmth of love, she needs desperately to control the world and is not able to tolerate deviation. She lives very carefully, for a slip can cause her to lose her fragile hold on things.
The shame bound person is numb and/or spaced-out. Life is so painful as-it-is that she takes the way of self hypnosis, or enters a self-induced trance-state in order to make her experience bearable. She lives anesthetized, and feeling as little pain as possible.
HEALING SHAME
Most of your shame-inducing experiences happened to you early in your life--when you were small and the world of parents and other caretakers loomed very large. Your fundamental feelings of insignificance, the "shame" that goes far back in your mind and soul, appeared long before you had any "choices" in the matter. Shame was your natural organismic response to the burdens and demands that were being visited on you by your family. Believing that making you ashamed would motivate you to behave as they wished (The demands of a dysfunctional shame-bound family are irrational and inconsistent, for the family only knows it is unhappy and does not know what would make things better. The child becomes the scapegoat for the family's incompetency in solving its problems-in-living.), your parents intended you to feel shame about yourself for your "bad" behavior. Sometimes, they even rationalized that shaming you was "for your own good." However, what actually happened was that they only succeeded in making you feel bad about being yourself, for you did not possess what they were demanding as you had neither the power nor the talent to change yourself in order to enter into their good graces.
There is nothing shameful about shame.
So the work of healing your shame is as profound as are the potentials of your soul. It reaches down into the heart of your concept of yourself and of your belief in the possibilities of life, alone, and in the company of others. Perhaps you have been mistaken, insensitive, unethical, self-critical, scared, negligent, stupid, masochistic, depressed--behaviors and states of mind you can do something about. But never have you been "bad," never not belonging; always, you have been just an ordinary struggling person and, now with an expanding awareness, joining with others to make your inner and outer life work better, striving to extract from the day its possible satisfactions and nursing a lively curiosity about what's next.
