Shame

Shame is an important aspect of trauma and traumatic stress that hasn’t received great attention in conventional psychology or psychotherapy, despite growing research pointing to its significance, both developmentally and across the lifespan.

What is Shame?

Shame is an emotion and physiological state related to social threat, inferior social standing, or lack of belonging. Shame can be the result of traumatic incidents, more prolonged exposures, or more subtle emotional abuse or neglect such as lack of relational attunement in childhood.

Shame has a pro-social function if shame is momentary or temporary and leads to repair and reconnection with the group; for example, it can promote social order, stimulate learning and repentance, and teach empathy.

However, when shame is chronic (“toxic shame”), it loses its function as a social emotion and instead leads to distortions in one’s core identity. A person who has experienced chronic shame may experience themselves as worthless or bad and believe there is something inherently wrong with them at the core.

Shame and the Nervous System

Shame and associated shame-based self-appraisals are linked with states of autonomic nervous system states of hypo- and hyper- arousal, as shame activates the fear/threat detection areas of the brain. UCLA Neuropsychologist Dr. Allan Schore describes shame as an “inhibitory state of energy conservation withdrawal.” Subjectively, shame creates a felt sense of shrinking back, smallness, gaze aversion, slouched posture, and often a frozen and foggy feeling characteristic of parasympathetic hypo-arousal (Schore, 2003)