What you experienced as a child was not your fault.
But sometimes a small voice inside insists that it was.
That voice might be misplaced shame.
That voice might be misplaced shame even if it looks like anger, impatience, or despair at first glance.
Quetzal assures you that voice is entirely wrong.
Nonetheless, if left unaddressed, that voice can weigh in with its unhelpful opinion on various aspects of your life.
Read on for help with developing shame resilience, which will help you move through this challenging emotion whenever and wherever it arises for you.
Why might shame show up for adult survivors of CSA?
KASP, a CSA survivor project, explains that shame is a deep-rooted belief that “I am wrong,” “I am broken,” or “I am unlovable”, often developed during childhood trauma and in its subsequent secrecy.
As trauma therapist Brouillette explains, shaming events like these can shape your core self-perception.
The long arm of shame
If left unchecked, shaming events can have lasting effects on many aspects of your life.
For instance:
Self-esteem: Do you sometimes have difficulty feeling your views are important?
Mental health: Do you struggle with intrusive thoughts at times?
Social challenges: Do you seem to invest in relationships & friendships that put you down?
If so, undeserved shame about your past may be affecting your present and future.
Leaving the past behind
Why can’t I just move past this, you might ask?
Am I broken?
Not at all.
In fact, though it may seem counter-intuitive, your body has been acting exactly as it was designed to…
What’s the point of shame?
If all emotions are useful information, what’s the use in shame?
After all, Brené Brown, an eminent shame researcher, describes shame as an “…intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection.” (Brown, 2021, p. 137)
On the surface, that doesn’t seem useful at all.
But, as Janina Fisher, an international expert on trauma, explains, it is in fact an instinctive survival strategy.
Shame as a survival strategy
Shame is meant to indicate when we have said or done something outside of our values, showing that we need to repair or reconnect.
Ancestrally, if an early human did something outside of the tribe’s values, they would be left isolated and vulnerable to harm.
Feeling and heeding shame, then, was vital to survival.
Misplaced shame
In the case of CSA, it was the perpetrator who acted outside of humane values and disconnected you from safety, without repair.
But as a child, your instincts may have found that too frightening to accept;
- “If adults do things wrong, then who can I rely on for survival?”
- “If I lay the blame on them, how might they react?”
Consequently, you may have taken on their shame, as a matter of personal safety.
Shame originally tried to protect (Brouillette 2024).
Unfortunately, it may still be trying…
Where might shame show up?
As shame was your body’s survival method in one of its most traumatic experiences, it is likely trying to rely on shame whenever and wherever it senses perceived threat, discomfort, or pain.
And for a shame-prone person, that can be in anything from work feedback to judgment on parenting.
The 12 categories of shame
In fact, Brown, in her trailblazing work on shame and vulnerability, identified 12 distinct categories where shame commonly manifests (Brown, 2012, p. 69):
- Appearance and body image
- Money and work
- Motherhood and fatherhood
- Family
- Parenting
- Mental and physical health
- Addiction
- Sex
- Aging
- Religion
- Surviving trauma
- Being stereotyped or labelled
Basically, the cornerstones of our lives.
Hiding in plain sight
With shame potentially showing up in many facets of life, you might assume it would be easy to spot.
Not necessarily…
How might shame show up?
As Jennifer Lock Oman of Psychology Today notes, while shame is a topic very much talked about in current popular culture, many of us miss it when it arrives.
Because the initial sting is so painful, we instinctively rush past it into a masking emotion.
Spotting a Shame Spiral
Known as a shame spiral, ReachLink, an online mental health platform, explains that it typically:
- Begins with a trigger: you make a mistake in public, for example.
- Your body responds first: your face flushes and your stomach drops, perhaps.
- Negative self-talk comes next: “Everyone thinks I’m stupid,” or similar.
Then you may mask the shame with an unrelated response.
Masking with the Shame Compass
Don Nathanson, a clinical professor of human behaviour, thinks of these masking responses that you turn to next as 4 Points on a Shame Compass.
These are:
- Withdrawal: you move away from those you feel you’ve been shamed in front of.
- Avoidance: perhaps you use substances, compulsive behaviours, or overly focus on the image you present to the world.
- Attack others: you compare, compete, gossip, or lash out.
- Attack self: you become overly self-critical and/ or tolerating of abusive behaviour from others in the interest of maintaining “connection.”
You may even respond with more than one at a time.
Spiral problems
Though this spiral is common, it is not productive.
It causes us to bypass the shame & create a new problem, miss the low feelings of worth that fuelled the spiral, and break the social connection we need to fight it.
So how can we prevent this?
How to interrupt shame when it hits
Thankfully, as well as identifying the main 12 areas in which shame might be triggered, Brown puts forward a method to interrupt that shame.
This is known as Brown’s Shame Resilience Theory (SRT) (Brown, 2007).
Shame Resilience Theory (SRT)
As ReachLink explains, shame resilience isn’t about perfectly eliminating shame from your life.
Instead, it’s the ability to move through shame experiences in a healthy way.
This framework’s power lies in its practicality: no special training or ideal conditions are required.
You just need the willingness to tune into your mind and body and the courage to reach out to the right people.
The four elements of shame resilience
Brown and colleagues identified four elements of shame resilience:
- Recognise your personal shame patterns and triggers
- Practice awareness of shame’s origin
- Speak about your shame experiences
- Reach out to trusted people to do so
But these elements are not a step-by-step process.
A toolkit, not a ladder
ReachLink recommends thinking of them more like a variety of skills you can use together to interrupt shame.
And this skill set can be returned to again and again.
The more times you use it, the stronger your shame resilience becomes, and the less time passes between the shame response and the reduction in the shame’s intensity – our ultimate goal.
Next time
See our next article: “How to use the 4 elements of Shame Resilience Theory to move through shame as a survivor of CSA” for more detailed, practical support in applying these elements in your day-to-day life.
Freelance Copywriter for Quetzal
