Voyager
09-15-2004, 10:20 AM
Have you ever wondered why you were drawn to a toxic shame system? I was reading an article on toxic shame and codependency last night, and a lot of questions were answered. I've often wondered why some people are drawn to abusive churches, while others wouldn't be caught dead anywhere near one. Thinking back, the shame was obvious. My former pastor used the pulpit to berate, shame, humiliate, manipulate, and slander people (members and non-members alike). Why was I willing to tolerate that?
I also wondered why many of us on this forum feel disgusted about ourselves even when we haven't done anything wrong. I've noticed a pattern by reading the posts here (mine included) that many of us are ashamed of ourselves. We feel like we are rotten to the core. Over time, I have learned to be much easier on myself - but at times I still deal with this issue. I'm sure that getting out from under the toxic shame system has helped a lot.
The article that I read last night shined some light on these questions for me. I'm going to share a few paragraphs from it with you all. I thought this would be a good topic to discuss here. I am finding that the more I learn about why I have hated myself, the more I can learn to love myself.
Here are a few excerpts from the article:
------------------------------------------
Fear of intimacy is at the heart of codependency. We have a fear of intimacy because we have a fear of abandonment, betrayal, and rejection. We have a these fears because we were wounded in early childhood - we experienced feeling emotionally abandoned, rejected, and betrayed by our parents because they were wounded. They did not have healthy relationship with self - they were codependents who abandoned and betrayed themselves - and their behavior caused us to feel unworthy and unlovable.
As children we were incapable of seeing ourselves as separate from our families - of knowing we had worth as individuals apart from our families. The reality we grew up in was the only reality that we knew. We thought our parents behavior reflected our worth - the same way that our codependent parents thought our behavior was a factor in rather they had worth.
Sharing who we are is a problem for codependents because at the core of our relationship with ourselves is the feeling that we are somehow defective, unlovable and unworthy - because of our childhood emotional trauma. Codependency is rooted in our ego programming from early childhood. That programming is a defense that the ego adapted to help us survive. It is based upon the feeling that we are shameful, that we are defective, unworthy, and unlovable. Our codependent defense system is an attempt to protect us from being rejected, betrayed, and abandoned because of our unworthy, shameful being.
We have a fear of intimacy because we were wounded, emotionally traumatized, in early childhood - felt rejected and abandoned - and then grew up in emotional dishonest societies that did not provide tools for healing, or healthy role models to teach us how to overcome that fear. Our wounding in early childhood caused us to feel that something was wrong with our being - toxic shame - and our societal and parental role models taught us to keep up appearances, to hide our shamefulness from others.
As long as we are reacting unconsciously to our childhood emotional wounds and intellectual programming, we keep repeating the patterns. We keep getting involved with unavailable people. We keep setting ourselves up to be abandoned, betrayed and rejected. We keep looking for love in all the wrong places, in all the wrong faces. Is it any wonder we have a fear of intimacy?
The truth is that the ways that our parents treated us in childhood did not have anything to do with who we are - was not really personal. They were incapable of seeing themselves clearly. They certainly could not see us clearly - could not see our unique individuality from a perspective that allowed them to honor and respect us as beings separate from them. Their perspective of us was filtered through a prism of their own shame and woundedness. They projected their hopes and dreams, their fears and insecurities onto us. They saw us as the fix for their feelings of unworthiness, an extension of them that gave their life meaning - or perhaps they saw us as an inconvenience and a burden holding them back, preventing them from making their dreams come true. For some of us, a parent(s) was so caught up in their alcoholism or survival drama or career that most of the time they didn't see us at all.
Our parents taught us that keeping up appearances, worrying about what the neighbors think, was more important than our feelings - because it was so important to them. Or, some of us experienced a parent who went to the other extreme, where they acted like they didn't care what anyone thought - which caused us to feel embarrassed and ashamed of their behavior because it was so out of balance, and caused us to worry about what the neighbors thought. They taught us to give power to other people by wearing masks and keeping secrets.
Even more importantly, our role models taught us to be emotionally dishonest. Because it wasn't safe to be emotionally honest we lost our self - did not know how to be emotionally intimate with our self, and instead constructed a false self image to survive. We learned to wear different masks for different people.
At the foundation of our relationship with our self - and therefore with other people and life - is the feeling that we will die if we reveal ourselves to other people, because then they will see our shameful self. I felt deep within me (in those rare instances of breaking through my denial and blaming to a moment of honest clarity), that if I let anyone see who I really was, they would run away screaming in horror at the grotesque, deformed, shameful being that I was.
Our lives have been dictated by an emotional defense system that is designed to keep hidden the the false belief that we are defective. We use external things - success, looks, productivity, substances - to try to cover up, overcome, make up for, the personal defectiveness that we felt caused our hearts to be broken and our souls wounded in childhood. And that personal defectiveness is a lie. That feeling of toxic shame is a lie.
It was so painful that we had to lie to ourselves about it. We were forced to be emotionally and intellectually dishonest with ourselves by the codependent defenses we adapted. We had to learn how to live in denial of the pain and shame at the core of our relationship with ourselves. Codependency is a vicious form of Delayed Stress Syndrome, of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. (Codependence as Delayed Stress Syndrome) The emotional trauma caused us to disassociate - to not be present in our own skins in a conscious way - and to rationalize and deny our emotional experience of life. We built up a dishonest self image to try to convince ourselves that we had worth based upon some comparative external factors: looks, success, independence (the counterdependent rebel), popularity (people pleasers), righteousness (better than others, right to their wrong), or whatever. That false self image was not completely dishonest because it was formed in reaction to some basic aspects of who we Truly are - but it was a twisted, distorted, polarized perspective of our self adapted in response to toxic shame for the purpose of giving us some ego strength, some reason we could feel better than others.
That false self image, the masks we learned to wear, is something we invested a lot of energy into convincing ourselves was the truth. But deep inside, in our moments of insight and clarity, we knew we were hiding a shameful secret. Often we got that toxic shame about our being confused in our memories with some behavior in our childhood that felt shameful. It is very common for us to have a secret that involves a way in which we were abused - physically, sexually, etc. - that we go to great pains to avoid because we associate the feeling of toxic shame with that incident and think it was our fault.
We do not want other people to see in to us, because then they will learn our shameful secret. We have a fear of intimacy because of the false belief that our relationship with our self is based upon.
Our addictions, compulsions, and obsessions; our continuing quest to reach the destination, to find the fix; our inability to be present in the now through worrying about the future or ruminating about the past; are all tools that we used to avoid the emotional pain. Our behavior patterns and dysfunctional relationships (of all kinds, with other people, with money, with our gender and sexuality) are symptoms. Codependence is a defense system that was adapted by our damaged egos to try to avoid falling into the abyss of shame and pain within.
(continued below)
I also wondered why many of us on this forum feel disgusted about ourselves even when we haven't done anything wrong. I've noticed a pattern by reading the posts here (mine included) that many of us are ashamed of ourselves. We feel like we are rotten to the core. Over time, I have learned to be much easier on myself - but at times I still deal with this issue. I'm sure that getting out from under the toxic shame system has helped a lot.
The article that I read last night shined some light on these questions for me. I'm going to share a few paragraphs from it with you all. I thought this would be a good topic to discuss here. I am finding that the more I learn about why I have hated myself, the more I can learn to love myself.
Here are a few excerpts from the article:
------------------------------------------
Fear of intimacy is at the heart of codependency. We have a fear of intimacy because we have a fear of abandonment, betrayal, and rejection. We have a these fears because we were wounded in early childhood - we experienced feeling emotionally abandoned, rejected, and betrayed by our parents because they were wounded. They did not have healthy relationship with self - they were codependents who abandoned and betrayed themselves - and their behavior caused us to feel unworthy and unlovable.
As children we were incapable of seeing ourselves as separate from our families - of knowing we had worth as individuals apart from our families. The reality we grew up in was the only reality that we knew. We thought our parents behavior reflected our worth - the same way that our codependent parents thought our behavior was a factor in rather they had worth.
Sharing who we are is a problem for codependents because at the core of our relationship with ourselves is the feeling that we are somehow defective, unlovable and unworthy - because of our childhood emotional trauma. Codependency is rooted in our ego programming from early childhood. That programming is a defense that the ego adapted to help us survive. It is based upon the feeling that we are shameful, that we are defective, unworthy, and unlovable. Our codependent defense system is an attempt to protect us from being rejected, betrayed, and abandoned because of our unworthy, shameful being.
We have a fear of intimacy because we were wounded, emotionally traumatized, in early childhood - felt rejected and abandoned - and then grew up in emotional dishonest societies that did not provide tools for healing, or healthy role models to teach us how to overcome that fear. Our wounding in early childhood caused us to feel that something was wrong with our being - toxic shame - and our societal and parental role models taught us to keep up appearances, to hide our shamefulness from others.
As long as we are reacting unconsciously to our childhood emotional wounds and intellectual programming, we keep repeating the patterns. We keep getting involved with unavailable people. We keep setting ourselves up to be abandoned, betrayed and rejected. We keep looking for love in all the wrong places, in all the wrong faces. Is it any wonder we have a fear of intimacy?
The truth is that the ways that our parents treated us in childhood did not have anything to do with who we are - was not really personal. They were incapable of seeing themselves clearly. They certainly could not see us clearly - could not see our unique individuality from a perspective that allowed them to honor and respect us as beings separate from them. Their perspective of us was filtered through a prism of their own shame and woundedness. They projected their hopes and dreams, their fears and insecurities onto us. They saw us as the fix for their feelings of unworthiness, an extension of them that gave their life meaning - or perhaps they saw us as an inconvenience and a burden holding them back, preventing them from making their dreams come true. For some of us, a parent(s) was so caught up in their alcoholism or survival drama or career that most of the time they didn't see us at all.
Our parents taught us that keeping up appearances, worrying about what the neighbors think, was more important than our feelings - because it was so important to them. Or, some of us experienced a parent who went to the other extreme, where they acted like they didn't care what anyone thought - which caused us to feel embarrassed and ashamed of their behavior because it was so out of balance, and caused us to worry about what the neighbors thought. They taught us to give power to other people by wearing masks and keeping secrets.
Even more importantly, our role models taught us to be emotionally dishonest. Because it wasn't safe to be emotionally honest we lost our self - did not know how to be emotionally intimate with our self, and instead constructed a false self image to survive. We learned to wear different masks for different people.
At the foundation of our relationship with our self - and therefore with other people and life - is the feeling that we will die if we reveal ourselves to other people, because then they will see our shameful self. I felt deep within me (in those rare instances of breaking through my denial and blaming to a moment of honest clarity), that if I let anyone see who I really was, they would run away screaming in horror at the grotesque, deformed, shameful being that I was.
Our lives have been dictated by an emotional defense system that is designed to keep hidden the the false belief that we are defective. We use external things - success, looks, productivity, substances - to try to cover up, overcome, make up for, the personal defectiveness that we felt caused our hearts to be broken and our souls wounded in childhood. And that personal defectiveness is a lie. That feeling of toxic shame is a lie.
It was so painful that we had to lie to ourselves about it. We were forced to be emotionally and intellectually dishonest with ourselves by the codependent defenses we adapted. We had to learn how to live in denial of the pain and shame at the core of our relationship with ourselves. Codependency is a vicious form of Delayed Stress Syndrome, of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. (Codependence as Delayed Stress Syndrome) The emotional trauma caused us to disassociate - to not be present in our own skins in a conscious way - and to rationalize and deny our emotional experience of life. We built up a dishonest self image to try to convince ourselves that we had worth based upon some comparative external factors: looks, success, independence (the counterdependent rebel), popularity (people pleasers), righteousness (better than others, right to their wrong), or whatever. That false self image was not completely dishonest because it was formed in reaction to some basic aspects of who we Truly are - but it was a twisted, distorted, polarized perspective of our self adapted in response to toxic shame for the purpose of giving us some ego strength, some reason we could feel better than others.
That false self image, the masks we learned to wear, is something we invested a lot of energy into convincing ourselves was the truth. But deep inside, in our moments of insight and clarity, we knew we were hiding a shameful secret. Often we got that toxic shame about our being confused in our memories with some behavior in our childhood that felt shameful. It is very common for us to have a secret that involves a way in which we were abused - physically, sexually, etc. - that we go to great pains to avoid because we associate the feeling of toxic shame with that incident and think it was our fault.
We do not want other people to see in to us, because then they will learn our shameful secret. We have a fear of intimacy because of the false belief that our relationship with our self is based upon.
Our addictions, compulsions, and obsessions; our continuing quest to reach the destination, to find the fix; our inability to be present in the now through worrying about the future or ruminating about the past; are all tools that we used to avoid the emotional pain. Our behavior patterns and dysfunctional relationships (of all kinds, with other people, with money, with our gender and sexuality) are symptoms. Codependence is a defense system that was adapted by our damaged egos to try to avoid falling into the abyss of shame and pain within.
(continued below)