CPTSD - Living with feelings of shame

Hi everyone, this is Athena from Courage Coaching. Welcome to my channel. If you are new here then please click on the subscribe button in order to get notifications for any new videos that I upload. In today's video I wanted to talk about shame and why shame is something that creates so much havoc in our life. Why does shame make us feel so so bad and how easy is it for others to cause us this feeling of shame? Now shame is essentially a painful sense of unworthiness or inadequacy, a deep feeling that we are flawed on some level and a lot of adult survivors of narcissistic abuse continue feeling deep feelings of shame and a lot of survivors of abuse continuously feel shame in moments where other people wouldn't. So they are triggered in many different situations and this deep feeling of shame pops up and makes them feel awful. Now when somebody else shames us they bring up a feeling of inadequacy, powerlessness and embarrassment and it is like having a spotlight shining on you and making you feel all of these emotions and it feels awful and this is something that I've experienced myself in my own childhood and it's still something I suffer with at present. Now what are some examples of shame? What does it sound like? What can somebody say in order to make us feel this way? Some examples of this are as follows. Are you stupid? How can you not know that? Are you serious that you don't understand that? What is the matter with you? Any idiot would know what to do in that sort of situation. God how can you not understand that? It's so simple. So any of these sound familiar to you? Well these are things that I heard in my childhood. Now the problem with some of the previous examples I mentioned is that these statements are not going to motivate the person on the receiving end of them. These statements are not going to make that person feel better, do better or miraculously suddenly know something that they didn't know before. In many cases when we are young we are shamed for not knowing something. We are shamed when we don't do well at school and you know when you are shamed for not knowing something well then this leads to feelings of fear and guilt because you don't know something and of course what does this lead to? This leads to the child then not asking for help or not asking for a teacher to explain something again even if they haven't understood it. So then they are scared of speaking up. They are scared of asking questions because they were already shamed for doing this before and the fact is that everybody is allowed to not know something. Everybody's allowed to learn at a different pace. Everybody's allowed to mess up, to make mistakes. When we are taught that we're not allowed to make mistakes and that we always have to be successful and that we always have to be smart, well this doesn't leave us any wiggle room at all to be wrong or to make mistakes. Now if we talk about shame in a more general way, shame is something that can hurt us because we feel bad about ourselves because we think that we are flawed. But feeling ashamed can also be an emotional deterrent for not doing something that is bad. Shame stops us from doing things that are socially inappropriate. So shame is good in some ways because it stops us from doing things that are not socially acceptable, that are not appropriate. But shame can become very toxic if it's turned inwards and we are ashamed that we exist. Shame is not good when we constantly feel faulty or deficient in some way and we're punishing ourselves because of this. We choose relationships because we don't think that we deserve a healthy relationship so we end up with abusers. Shame is something that can be very very destructive if we live in constant shame about ourselves and we feel small and we feel worthless. We're just going to repeat certain patterns of behavior that basically prove to us that we actually are these things that we believe. And this is when shame is harmful. This isn't when shame is good. Now there are two ways of thinking when we feel deep feelings of shame. One of them is saying I am really just a nobody and I am not worth being in this world. Or we can think this world has done horrible things to me and I am going to be an asshole from now on because I'm so sick of being treated badly. And the second way of thinking is basically what a narcissist will do. They will bury their shame deep down and then they will go out and blame everybody else. They will have a sense of entitlement and they will hurt people because they don't want to feel shame. They will blame people because they don't want to look at themselves. They don't want to look at the flawed part of themselves. And this isn't a healthy way of dealing with shame but it is at the core of narcissism. Having deep deep feelings of shame. Toxic shame is something that we have from growing up in dysfunctional homes and many of us can have this toxic shame and still be kind to others and still live lives where we are honourable and authentic and we are accountable for our actions and we treat people with respect. It may be that instead of harming others we will end up in harmful relationships because we don't feel good enough, because we don't feel worthy enough because of our feelings of shame. And we end up in abusive relationships repeating the cycle of abuse that we may have experienced already in our childhood. If you have experienced deep feelings of shame and still live with this feeling then I would love to hear your story about this so please feel free to share this in the comment section below the video. Shame is a difficult topic. Shame can destroy people's emotional health and it can lead to depression and anxiety, underperformance and many many more. But shame can also be something that with empathy and with self-love and with self-care we can conquer it. We can tell it to just sod off and not be part of who we are. But it requires consistent effort, consistent love and consistent empathy towards ourselves. So that is the end of the video everyone. Thank you so much for watching and for listening and I'll see you very soon. Take care, bye bye.