I found an article I was reading on Shame. I know my friend has mega doses of shame passed on from her family as a child. She has had similar things happen to her like I read on this board. She is I believe (N) or Nishishihsihssssh and it confuses me how some become offenders and others victims and mix and match within the family itself. I wonder how come some escape and deal with it and others become N's.
Here is the article.
Understanding How Shame Binds Us and How to Begin to Free Ourselves
Robert D. Caldwell, M.Div.
Shame is the inner experience of being "not wanted." It is feeling worthless, rejected, cast-out. Guilt is believing that one has done something bad; shame is believing that one is bad. Shame is believing that one is not loved because one is not lovable. Shame always carries with it the sense that there is nothing one can do to purge its burdensome and toxic presence. Shame cannot be remedied, it must be somehow endured, absorbed, gilded, minimized or denied. Shame is so painful, so debilitating that persons develop a thousand coping strategies, conscious and unconscious, numbing and destructive, to avoid its tortures. 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.
In this quite imperfect world where we were all nurtured by parents who were themselves, in some sense, shame-bound, we have learned to feel shame--some more than others. There are four kinds of families which are most adept at spawning shame-dominated progeny--abusive, neglecting, controlling, and enmeshing families. To understand something of how shame is created in these family contexts is to begin to be aware of the origins and dynamic of one's own shame, and to begin to take steps toward its undoing.
THE SHAME MAKERS
The Neglecting Family
John came home every afternoon to a mother who was depressed. She languished in bed and stirred only to get something for herself or to complain about her sufferings. John moved on tiptoe, waited on her hand-and-foot, making himself his mother's mother. Martin was told by his parents that they deeply loved him. He excelled in studies, athletics and music, but almost never did his mother or father attend his performances, not even when he was the speaker at the Honor Society banquet. Janet was brought-up by a succession of servants and nannies who assumed almost all of her care. Mother and father were distant beings who always seemed to be more involved in something of "momentous importance" and only stopped-by for what they assured her was "quality" time.
In these households each person had infrequent clues that he or she was valued or even existed. 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. We are born for contact; we grow and thrive on it. In the neglecting household, this is lost, and we experience neglect as something wrong with us--after all, if "they" don't care to involve themselves with us, it "must be" our fault. The child, having no perspective that would help him see that it is his world that is dysfunctional, not himself, experiences being treated as a non-person as though he has no right-to-exist.
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. This is the family of "piano lessons, whatever," of "you'll do every vestige of your homework before you can talk to your friends," of "don't speak unless you are spoken to." This is the family that is portrayed with clarity and passion in Dead Poet's Society: the blindly ambitious father "knew" what was "best" for his son, imposed his paternal vision, never seeing his son's true interests, resulting in catastrophic consequences for his son's sense of worth and for his will to live. This is example of how 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 controlling family carries deep shame. It's "solution" is to make the exterior "perfect", thus, hopefully obscuring and forgetting about the rot within. The parents in this family cannot tolerate any variation on their crystallized ideas and styles, hence they give little credence to the self-aware wishes of the individual to mobilize for self-fulfillment.
The Enmeshed Family
This is the family with fuzzy, haphazard, or permeable boundaries. It is the symbiotic family where it is never clear where one person begins and the other ends. It is the family where one borrows clothes from another without permission, for there is the running assumption that what belongs to one belongs to all, and that "If I want it", then my child, or parent or sibling would want to give it to me.
In the enmeshed family everyone shares the other's life-system, like siamese twins. One learns not to look within one's self for awareness of what one is about, but to the other members of the family. The child who is happy when his mother is happy and sad when mother is depressed is enmeshed. The child who is made privy to all the struggles of the parents and invited into them, often made responsible for them and asked to comfort or give advice to his parents is in the enmeshed family. The child who is relied upon as being "father's little helper" or "mama's strong little man" to the point where he begins to define himself as essential to his parents for their happiness is in the enmeshed family.
Enmeshment greatly handicaps one's sense of individual identity, and consequently the sense of individual effectiveness and responsibility. If one is not "separate", how can one make a real decision about her place in the family, and, by extension, in the world. Also, enmeshment is very hard to see if one is in it, for the net becomes a part of the self. One shares in the family shame, the family's inability to be strong in the world, the family's inferiority feelings, simply because one belongs to the family, not specifically because of anything one has done. The enmeshed family has made the choice to attempt to cope with its frailty and shame by fusing with one another in an effort to find strength in numbers, and in emotion-based reciprocal justifications, blame-makings and affirmations. Unfortunately, this results in the loss of a sense of personal power. Shame shared is still shame.
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. Repeatedly, from her mother, Sarah heard this bedtime story: "You were the ugliest baby the Stork had, so, out of the charity of our hearts and feeling so sorry for you, knowing no one else would take you, we brought you home. You should be forever grateful." In a strange city Rachel had this to cope with: "I can't stand you. Get out of this hotel room right now." And at 12:00 p.m. in a strange city, the teen-age girl is locked out of her parent's room for the night.
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. Alfred's jaw was broken by his burly father when he said to him in a moment of teen-age bravado, "Dad, I've got a right to stay out late like the other kids." Thomas was made to carry bricks from one side of the yard and back again for a whole afternoon to demonstrate his acknowledgement that his parent was in charge of him. Janice, an eleven year-old, was beaten till welts rose on her buttocks because her "religious" mother could not stand the sound of her daughter blurting out a four-letter-word. Children do not separate their "self" from their body, and the physically abusive family is experienced as attacking and devaluing the core of one's being. We are a violent culture, and the majority of persons in America have felt the shame--for we cannot feel of "worth" to another when we suffer his painful and debasing intrusions in our bodies--of physical abuse at some time in their lives.
The sexually abusive family goes deepest into the psyche of the person to evoke shame. (Though sexual abuse is usually carried out by a single person in the family, almost always there is complicity by the other parent or siblings, consciously or consciously, to evade the reality of the behavior.) According to some accounts, at least one in three women and one in seven men have been sexually abused. The sexually abusive family invades the body of the child, this center of one's being: one's sexual self. Sexual abuse takes many forms, from the overt to the subtle. It may be the father making "cute" remarks about his daughter's developing breasts, or the mother bathing her son when he is eight years old. It may be enemas given on a routine basis or sexually explicit "educational material" put in the child's hands before she is ready for it. It may be an older brother repeatedly fondling his sister and threatening her with recriminations should she "tell." And, of course, it may be direct acts when the child is exploited for the sexual pleasure of the adult through genital stimulation and/or intercourse. The child-victim is mortified, loses the sense of her own self, creates a terrified secret with the offending parent, is fearfully anxious that it will happen again. (Indeed, it often does; one researcher reported that once sexual abuse has started with a given child it is repeated on the average of 83 times.) Often the child feels--because she is so young, she has little or no cognitive understanding of "why"--that she is worth nothing to her family, and hence to herself. She experiences the molestation as a violation of her feelings, freedom and the discrete reality of her body. She experiences it as though something is flawed about her. And she becomes, in her own eyes, the object of scorn and guilt. The scaring, the shame-making is acute.
Sorry have to split it. The rest is on post to follow
