Healing the Shame That Binds You

The parenting rules used in most Western world families create massive shame. Add alcoholism, incest and physical abuse to these systems, and you get major dysfunctionality.

This process is a reversal of the order of nature. Now the child is taking care of the parents’ needs, rather than the parents taking care of the child’s needs. This caregiver role is strangely paradoxical. In an attempt to secure parental love and avoid being abandoned, the child is in fact being abandoned. Since the child is there for the parent,

He goes on to say that without feeling, nothing matters, and with feeling, anything can matter.

Another consequence of this emotional abandonment is the loss of a sense of self. When used as another’s narcissistic supplies, a person develops in such a way as to reveal only what is expected of him and ultimately fuses with his own act or performance. He becomes a “human doing” without any real sense of his authentic self.

Codependency is a condition wherein one has no inner life. Happiness is on the outside. Good feelings and self-validation lie on the outside. They can never be generated from within.

When we are exposed without any way to protect ourselves, we feel the pain of shame. If we are continually overexposed, shame becomes toxic.

I want to expand the meaning of the word abandonment to include various forms of emotional abandonment: stroke deprivation, narcissistic deprivation, fantasy bonding, the neglect of developmental dependency needs and family system enmeshment. My definition of abandonment also includes all forms of abuse.

The major problem in our lives is to decide and clarify our responsibilities.

Let me expand here on the process whereby healthy shame is transformed into toxic shame. The process is called the “absolutizing” or “internalization” process. The healthy feeling of shame is lost, and a frozen state of being emerges, whereby a person believes himself to be flawed and defective as a human being. This transformation involves three d