The nature of shame: connection, protection, and the shattering of Self
Shame. The world speaks to it often, wrestling with something that is at once a soul shattering affect and a living toxicity that cannot easily be remedied through conceptual interpretations. And whilst shame can at times be a momentary shift of embarrassment, quite often when we have experienced complex or more ambiguous forms of trauma shame becomes an embodied anguish of Self-defeat and alarmed aloneness. Shame becomes a lingering yet intense sense of Self as not-enough, too-much, or in an emergent confusion of fundamental fault, failure, or flaw.
Perhaps it is vital to note here that, in part, our worldly interpretive wrestle lies within and between shame’s neuroevolutionary and interpersonal intent and the impact of a sociocultural misuse of shame and power. Indeed, where evolutionarily there was a mammalian motivation of safety and survival-based protection, the impact of the conflation and misappropriation of shame and power today has left many feeling alarmed and alone. This is ultimately an unrelenting misuse (either conscious/intended or non-conscious/unintended) of relational power and hierarchy through shame. A recursively disorientating, disorganising, and disintegrating affect that leaves us struggling to grasp a grounded sense of Self, time and time again. No wonder it is toxic.
Before we speak to what shame becomes, we might first fathom what shame is for. We might sense why it is here at all, and how, in its origins, it once served the youngling who needed it.
The Neuroevolutionary and Interpersonal Origins of Shame
Shame is inherently relational. In its affective and neuroceptive origins, shame once held a motivational intention of safety and protection, and importantly of re-connection in distress. Individually and collectively, this deeply embodied affect was intended to establish the hierarchical substrate that dependence imposes. Both within the family system and the broader necessitated systems of collective living, shame served to powerfully protect still-dependent younglings from harm by keeping them close through orientation, proximity, and attachment.
Yet the deeper motivational pull beneath the shrinking submitting effect of shame often reaches beyond the danger before us and toward the bond itself, toward connection and belonging with the very Other whose care our survival depends upon. Here shame moves within and between the affective distress of separation, the panic of aloneness, and the grief of rejection or abandonment, each calling forward the care and nurturing response of an Other. That is, when in danger, orientation and proximity emerge through an intense and embodied affect that autonomically instigates a sensorimotor energy of submission, drawing the youngling into attachment through aligned connection and belonging.
Said another way, shrinking and submission are movements of the attachment system itself, the reach for care when flight or fight is not a survivable option. This is why, neuroevolutionarily, we autonomically find our Self shrinking our authenticity, appeasing into the Other despite the cost to who we are. By nature, as dependent creatures even when the source of predatorial and protective energy are one and the same, the embodied pull toward orientation, proximity, and attachment endures.
What Has Gone Amiss
As can be derived here, there is an intrinsic link between shame and power that, neuroevolutionarily, underscores the hierarchical dynamic where a youngling can be socialised with a sense of belonging always remaining intact. Within the “good-enough” holding environment, particularly throughout early development, this hierarchical dynamic only remains benevolent when rupture is met with repair. When shame emerges within the caregiver-youngling relationship, it is vital that the deflation, the curling under and inward, or the turning away is recognised in the youngling and returned to. This recognition and return is a reparative reconnection that relies upon its initiation by the caregiver.
Certainly, it is the welcome of co-regulating connection and a warm sense of belonging through communicative meaning-making through which the affective intensity of shame can be metabolised and orientation, proximity, and attachment restored. Succinctly placed, through repeated cycles of rupture and repair, the developing Self comes to know that mistakes can be digested, and that even inrupture, connection remains available. Without such repair, without re-connection and belonging with communicative meaning-making, misappropriation and harm begin to ensue. The very thing intended for protection, without repair, can manifest into an embodied form of shattering shame.
Perhaps we might say here, it is power’s guise as protection that so readily becomes fragmenting shame.
When Protection Becomes Power
Importantly, these dynamics are fraught with oppression and disempowerment and often move far beyond childhood and far beyond the familial environment. Throughout history, and unquestionably pervasive in our atmosphere today, is the sociocultural misuse of power and shame under the guise of protection. Sadly, there has seemingly become a conflated sense of connection and belonging wherein rigid adherence to the Other has been tied to significance and worth of the Self.
Whether systemic or individual, the link between power and shame continues to organise our adult relationships, our intimate partnerships, our families, our workplaces, and the wider systemic and sociocultural milieus we move within. This then leaving many of us feeling alarmed and alone.
These are the wider milieus where often we are seeing more and more spaces of all-or-none, right-or-wrong, in-or-out, black-and-white “rules of engagement” superseding any sense of a differentiated yet still connected Self with an Other. Somewhere along the way shame became a form of power to divert attention from Self, Other, or group, to avert responsibility or accountability, and to establish and maintain hierarchies of dominance and subordination rather than equality and equanimity.
Whether within the primary attachment relationship or the relationships of adulthood, fragmenting shame emerges where repeatedly vulnerability is met with ostracising criticism, contempt, invalidation, humiliation, hostility, denigration, and/or aggression, or its complete opposite of cut-off, blocking, gaslighting, scrubbing, stonewalling, and/or ghosting. This is the recursively disorientating, disorganising, and disintegrating affect that leaves us struggling to grasp a grounded sense of Self, time and time again.
Presence and Absence
As has been implicitly indicated, and yet remains vital to articulate clearly and explicitly, fragmenting shame forms in more than one way.
In its more obvious form shame emerges from its presence in clearly definable acts. Notably however, shame can also emerge from the absence of our innate core needs.
To clearly differentiate presence and absence, we can see that through shame’s overt presence, there is an act: of power, of authority, or of dominance that draws forth submission; and where repair repeatedly goes amiss in these acts, the relational rupture fragments and the impact is a soul that shatters in shame. Conversely, the insidiousness of shame emerges from what is left ambiguously absent: through a youngling left invisible, unseen, unheard, unacknowledged, unrecognised, and unprotected.
Absence can be seen as the reach for connection that meets silence, that meets a withdrawal, that meets no response, and when a youngling’s reach is met with nothingness, the core need itself becomes sensed as a fault or failure. This is often shame’s unnameable origin. With no event to point toward, there is only the residue of what did not happen when connection and protection were most needed. The ambiguity here is a fusion of power, protection, connection, and ultimately confusion that leads to shame.
No matter the form, whether explicit in its presence, or implicitly arising through absence, beneath both forms of shame lies an embodied anguish and alarmed aloneness. When the atmosphere of a rupture feels diminishing or confusing and we are left without resolve, distress can begin to emanate, Self-defeat can begin to imbue, and shame thus begins to manifest into a lingering intense sense of Self as holding a wrongness or badness. That is, having no Other to make sense of the distress, the only sense the Self can make is that the fault, or failure, that the wrongness and badness is a fundamental flaw within the cores sense of Self itself.
The Unresolvable Repeat
What cannot be negated is that shame’s emergent insidiousness intensity and its soul shattering embodiment arises from the fusion and confusion in repeated, ongoing, unresolvable misappropriations of power often under the guise of protection and the caregiving position. Indeed, shame’s fragmenting affect cannot simply be placed in its link to power. Rather shame becomes embodied and echoed in Self where the source of predatorial and protective energy are one and the same, where the embodied pull toward orientation, proximity, and attachment are survival based, and when there is a continuation of ruptures that remain unresolved and unresolvable.
Indeed, it is the misappropriation and perpetuation of the power-shame unresolve that creates the disconnecting, disorienting, and disorganising effect on our sense of Self.
Though this be true, what was left unresolved nevertheless remains reachable. Whether shame arrived through the presence of an act, or through the ambiguity of absence, whether it took shape within the family system or within the wider milieus we move within, the reach that first drew us toward orientation, proximity, and attachment endures beneath the harm done to it. It waits still, unmet, for the recognition and return that never came. And so, in our innate knowing of our most authentic sense of Self, shame, however embodied, however echoed, is not the final word on who we are.
A Turning Toward Connection
There is hope in this, and importantly it is hope that requires an Other. For shame began as a movement toward the bond, a reach for proximity, protection, and care. What formed in aloneness may reorganise in co-regulated connection. The repair that once went missing can be met now, and the aspects of Self that were disconnected in order to survive may slowly return to movement within the whole.
With connection, compassion, and contextual coherence, we begin to sense the shame for what it was, an adaptation of a dependent system reaching for care, and for what it is now, a pattern of protection and a younger part of us that longs to be seen, to be heard, and to be authentically held with value and worth. Though it may take time, with the assistance of a truly benevolent Other who is willing to repair even the subtlest of ruptures, we come to sense, from the inside out, that we were never the fault, the failure, or the flaw. It was never our wrongness or badness. We were younglings who needed care, reaching for the bond in the only way available to us.
Shame began as a call toward connection. In connection let us together answer that with nurturance and true care.
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References & Resources
The following references are offered for those who wish to explore the ideas informing this work. Brief annotations are included to support orientation rather than prescribe interpretation.
Benau, K. (2017). Shame, attachment, and psychotherapy: Phenomenology, neurophysiology, relational trauma, and harbingers of healing. Attachment: New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis, 11, 1–27.
This article supports the article’s differentiation of shame arising through presence and shame arising through absence. It is especially useful for the language around the youngling left unseen and unrecognised, and the forms of shame that emerge where non-attending, rather than any definable act, shapes the developing sense of Self.
Benau, K. (2020). Shame, pride and dissociation: Estranged bedfellows, close cousins and some implications for psychotherapy with relational trauma. Part I: Phenomenology and conceptualization. Mediterranean Journal of Clinical Psychology, 8(1), 1–35.
This article supports the article’s understanding of shame and dissociation as closely related protective processes that co-occur within relational trauma. It is especially useful for the language around the failure to see, and the ways aspects of Self become disconnected in order to preserve what connection remains.
Bowlby, J. (1973). Attachment and loss: Vol. 2. Separation, anxiety and anger. Hogarth Press.
This text supports the article’s account of the embodied pull toward orientation, proximity, and attachment as survival based. It is especially useful for the language around the child who, unwanted within the attachment relationship, comes to sense their Self as fundamentally unwantable.
DeYoung, P. A. (2015). Understanding and treating chronic shame: A relational/neurobiological approach. Routledge.
This text supports the article’s understanding of fragmenting shame as a relational process rather than an individual deficit. It is especially useful for the language around shame emerging where presence is available yet the needed response is absent, and around the relational conditions through which a disintegrating sense of Self may be restored.
Dorahy, M. J. (2010). The impact of dissociation, shame, and guilt on interpersonal relationships in chronically traumatized individuals: A pilot study. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 23(5), 653–656.
This article supports the article’s observation that shame and dissociation move together within the aftermath of chronic relational trauma. It is especially useful for the language around the disconnecting, disorienting, and disorganising effect of unresolved rupture upon relational life.
Gilbert, P. (1997). The evolution of social attractiveness and its role in shame, humiliation, guilt and therapy. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 70(2), 113–147.
This article supports the article’s account of shame within the hierarchical substrate that dependence imposes. It is especially useful for the language around submission, social rank, and the ways shame once served the preservation of proximity and belonging within the group.
Herman, J. L. (2012). Shattered shame states and their repair. In J. Yellin & K. White (Eds.), Shattered states: Disorganised attachment and its repair (pp. 157–170). Karnac.
This text supports the article’s understanding of soul shattering shame as arising from rupture left without repair. It is especially useful for the language around the reparative reconnection through which belonging remains available even within rupture.
Mills, R. S. L. (2005). Taking stock of the developmental literature on shame. Developmental Review, 25(1), 26–63.
This article supports the article’s developmental account of shame as emerging within the caregiver and youngling relationship. It is especially useful for the language around discipline, socialisation, and interactive repair, and the conditions under which shame remains benevolent rather than fragmenting.
Nathanson, D. L. (1992). Shame and pride: Affect, sex, and the birth of the self. W. W. Norton.
This text supports the article’s understanding of shame as an affective and embodied state before it becomes a conceptual interpretation. It is especially useful for the language around the deflation, the curling under and inward, and the turning away that mark shame within the body.
Panksepp, J., & Biven, L. (2012). The archaeology of mind: Neuroevolutionary origins of human emotions. Norton.
This text supports the article’s grounding of shame within the primary affective systems, particularly PANIC/GRIEF and CARE, and the distress of separation that calls forward the nurturing response of an Other. It is especially useful for the language around the panic of aloneness and the grief of rejection or abandonment as the affective substrate beneath the shrinking submitting effect of shame.
Schimmenti, A. (2012). Unveiling the hidden self: Developmental trauma and pathological shame. Psychodynamic Practice, 18(2), 195–211.
This article supports the article’s account of the aspects of Self that become disconnected where authenticity was met with threat. It is especially useful for the language around shrinking authenticity, appeasing into the Other, and the hidden Self that forms in the service of preserving the attachment relationship.
Schore, A. N. (1994). Affect regulation and the origin of the self: The neurobiology of emotional development. Lawrence Erlbaum.
This text supports the article’s neurobiological account of shame as an early socialising affect arising through misattunement within the attachment relationship. It is especially useful for the language around the sudden deflation from heightened arousal, and the interactive repair through which the affective intensity of shame is metabolised and orientation, proximity, and attachment restored.
Schore, A. N. (2012). The science of the art of psychotherapy. Norton.
This text supports the article’s understanding of what follows where repair repeatedly goes amiss and shame becomes embodied and echoed within Self. It is especially useful for the language around right-brain to right-brain relational process and the co-regulatory conditions through which repair may be offered later in life.
Siegel, D. J. (2012). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
This text supports the article’s understanding of repeated cycles of rupture and repair as developmentally necessary, and of the toxic shame that emerges where disconnection remains prolonged. It is especially useful for the language around integration as the linkage of differentiated elements, and the relational conditions through which connection, continuity, and coherence of Self are formed.
Tangney, J. P., & Dearing, R. L. (2002). Shame and guilt. Guilford Press.
This text supports the article’s differentiation between an action and its impact, and the sense of Self as holding a fundamental fault, failure, or flaw. It is especially useful for the language around keeping the deed separate from the Self, and the route to repair that remains available where ownership is met with steadiness.
Tomkins, S. S. (1963). Affect, imagery, consciousness: Vol. 2. The negative affects. Springer.
This text supports the article’s understanding of shame as an innate affect that emerges within an incomplete reduction of interest and connection. It is especially useful for the language around shame as a momentary shift, and the affective mechanics through which the reach toward an Other becomes interrupted.
Wille, R. (2014). The shame of existing: An extreme form of shame. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 95(4), 695–717.
This article supports the article’s account of the insidiousness of shame that emerges from what is left ambiguously absent. It is especially useful for the language around the youngling met as though they were not there, and the alarmed aloneness within which the core need itself becomes sensed as a fault or failure.
