Inner Voices, Toxic Shame, Part 2

At the heart of shame in our lives, I think are our oldest and deepest wounds, the hurts and distorted world view carried by our inner child or children. This information is stored very deeply in our psyches and is often out of range, really, of our intellect. These are not wounds which we can think our way out of as they often begin in pre-consciousness and are also deeply embedded in our bodies. As the John Bradshaw quote I used my last article ( http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/1143... ) so profoundly described it, there is a snowball quality to this kind of emotional and spiritual damage; it builds on itself.

In addition to this, most of us who live at the mercy of toxic shame have grown up in profoundly dysfunctional homes. We grew with parents who kept elephants in the living room ( http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/agor... ). We often grew up being told by very angry people that "anger is wrong." Some of us have been told that parents love their children, but have not felt loved. We have been told that we are created in the image of God and then made to feel ashamed of our bodies or of our very existence. We have been told that God loves us but will see us burn in hell if we "misbehave." The range of what misbehaving means in dysfunctional families is huge in scope and can be anything from breathing to laughing to having an opinion to being a sexual being to being sexually active to.... Whatever displeases or embarrasses our parents at any given moment in time.

Many of us who carry toxic shame have been raped before we were even capable of understanding the concept of what that means. Some of us were used as maids, babysitters, kicking boards, or sexual partners for parents who were out of control. Some of us were used as therapists and sounding-boards for our parents' pain and confusion. Some were used as both. Few of us were seen or acknowledged as wondrous, unique beings, precious in our parents' eyes.

I don't think this was malice on the part of our parents. They were, most of them living out of their own toxic shame and I think toxic shame is a contagious or inherited disease, which, left untreated, passes from generation to generation in a deepening spiral. I know I have said this before in some article or another but part of what made my mother so damaging was that she did not set out to hurt me. She did not say out loud, "your body and your humanness disgust me," but it was there in things she said to me, in her own body language in a thousand messages I probably still don't know I received. She did not say to me, "I'm ashamed of you," but it was clear that my laughter and my body and everything about me was a reflection of her shame about herself. She did not see me with the eyes of love. She saw me with the eyes of potential humiliation. She related to the world and her children not based on reality but based on a fear of what the neighbors might think. We kept our tv turned so low that even with very good hearing it was difficult to make out what was being said. If we got silly, she was convinced that our laughter was an offense to the neighbors. She didn't like the neighbors but she none-the-less worried about offending them. My mother was even uncomfortable with my laughter. In my very young days I had a laugh which I still long to recover. I think of it as a "Buddah laugh." It came from the core of my being and rolled out of me. It often came spontaneously from a place of connection to something I now think of as divine. It was contagious and when it started it usually took everyone else with it until we were all in pain laughing just for the pure joy of doing so. My mother hated that laugh. "You'll be crying by bedtime," she would intone. And she would make it true. She wasn't trying to hurt me. She was frightened. She could not help herself. Intellectually she had risen above the brutality of a childhood in which she was beaten and belittled. She had cast aside the religious teachings which said dancing, laughter, movies were all sins worthy of damnation. But she didn't know how to expunge those beliefs from her unconscious, from her physical and emotional responses to life and because I am highly intuitive I absorbed them by a kind of emotional osmosis.

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