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I think humanity is going through an era or a period characterized by a very sharp contrast. On the one hand, we have governments and organizations that are totally unscrupulous, unashamed and lacking in morality. And on the other, a society that is highly moralistic, not to say that in some cases it can lead to what we might call "the tyranny of virtue".
Today, in the age of bien-pensance, of political correctness, where everything has to be put into perspective, who counts, who dares to reject any ideological precept whatsoever, and vilified on social networks, in the media, these people are not criticized objectively for what they say, or for what they think, or for what they do, but for what they are, i.e. they are rejected as a person. The aim is to exclude and ostracize them.
Do you know why it works? Because the tyrants of thought play on a very sensitive chord, one of the most primitive and destructive of human emotions: SHAME. And I'm not talking about moral shame, I'm talking about unfounded shame, commonly referred to in the literature as toxic shame.
Before going any further, I'll briefly explain the difference between the two. Moral shame, in fact, is very similar in feeling to guilt, particularly when we think we've transgressed a moral principle, or caused harm to others through no fault of our own, or failed to meet a moral obligation, or in any case what we consider to be moral.
For example, a young parent who becomes aware of having neglected certain essential needs of his child at a certain time, because he was going through a difficult period. As a result, he sees that his child's school results and physical and mental health have been significantly affected and degraded. At some point, he may feel morally ashamed of having failed in his responsibilities as a parent during this period.
But toxic shame has nothing to do with morality. It's an overwhelming, destructive feeling. It grips you, it overwhelms you to the point of paralysis. All it takes is any external trigger that has nothing to do with it, and then you'll have an exaggerated, completely disproportionate reaction.
For example, you ring your neighbor's doorbell to give them their parcel, which was mistakenly delivered to you instead of them, and there you hear the neighbor behind the door telling you that the little girl had just fallen asleep and that she can't open the door for you. She suggests you come back later in the day. Immediately, you're extremely embarrassed, you start apologizing in a really exaggerated way, you repeat the word sorry hundreds of times and then you text her to apologize again and again. You're so embarrassed that you feel like disappearing on the spot. But there's no need to. You haven't transgressed any moral principles by knocking on your neighbor's door, and you haven't caused any harm to your neighbor or her child. These things can happen; anyone can make a mistake.
But this amplified, disproportionate feeling is simply a manifestation of a repressed emotion that generally goes back to childhood, that of toxic shame of traumatic origin. In other words, it's a structural shame that's part of a person's psycho-affective make-up. Toxic shame refers to a chronic feeling of inadequacy and devaluation, accompanied by a sense of powerlessness. In fact, it's the negative self-image perceived in others.
In a study published in 2014 in the academic journal "Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences", 60 female students agreed to take part in an experiment to test the impact of shame and guilt on their cognitive abilities and memory. The experimental set-up involved comparing their cognitive performance under different conditions, including neutral ones. It was found that shame- and guilt-related conditions were associated with lower cognitive performance than those recorded under neutral conditions. Moreover, feelings of shame were a significant precursor of impaired memory performance.
Going further in the study, we saw that the results obtained by people with a history of shame were worse overall than those obtained by people with no history of shame. The researchers suggest that there is a significant interference of this structural shame on cognitive and memory capacities.
Another finding is that shame is far worse than guilt in terms of its impact on results. Shame significantly affects our mental health, our relationship with others and our relationship with ourselves. Imagine if you could deactivate the debilitating effects of toxic shame, you'd significantly improve your overall well-being, your relationships with others, your relationship with yourself, your self-esteem and your self-confidence. But first we need to understand the nature of this toxic shame, its origin, and above all how it manifests itself, in order to deactivate it.
Shame is difficult to verbalize because it is an early emotion that has been recorded in autobiographical memory as a set of conditioned, internalized emotional responses. In other words, it was internalized even before the acquisition of language. For simplicity's sake, I'll call it a first psycho-affective core. Then layers and layers of maladaptive beliefs and schemas were superimposed on top. A conditioned response refers to the way training is processed in the brain in the face of external and internal stimuli that remind you of that primitive feeling, of shame.
The early emotional experience of shame and humiliation will directly affect our sense of personal security, our sense of belonging. So it will trigger survival responses. Humiliation is an extremely distressing experience for a young child. Young children are in a state of extreme dependence on their parents. Humiliation tells the child that he or she is not worthy of love, and the immature young brain will interpret these experiences as threats to survival. It's not an episodic experience that generates maladaptive patterns, it's their repetition, it's the overall environment that influences a person's psycho-affective development.
These early experiences are stored in implicit memory, that part of our memory which records information in an unconscious way. You simply don't remember how you integrated it, such as learning to speak, walk, eat, etc., into your daily life.
To try and understand this "Toxic shame" and its manifestations in adulthood in concrete terms, it appears as forms of emotional flashback, and is referred to in the literature as shame attacks. These shame flashbacks have nothing to do with moral shame; they are an emotional response conditioned by trauma.
Let's take an example to illustrate this idea: You have to present a project in front of your work colleagues and in the middle of the presentation, you suddenly discover that you've made a tiny, completely insignificant spelling mistake on one of the pages. No one has flinched, yet you're paralyzed, suddenly stunned, and feeling extremely embarrassed, as if it were the end of the world, as if your life depended on it. You're seized by a sudden urge to disappear, and perhaps you start to sweat, find it hard to breathe, even struggle to find the words to continue your presentation.
Anyone could eventually face this kind of situation and experience a little temporary discomfort without it taking hold of their true being. But when you experience an emotional flashback of toxic shame, your body's reaction is completely out of proportion and has nothing to do with the little typo you failed to correct. Hence the reactions in your body, and the emotional intensity felt during this flashback will block any reflection that may occur. It's the opposite of logical, objective reflection; it's a catastrophic generalization of all attributes perceived as negative.
Try to think it through and take it seriously. Try to observe these emotional flashbacks, and then try to ask yourself the following questions: what makes you think objectively that you're no good at anything ? Can you name any qualities you're proud of that are based on objective evidence? This will certainly not solve the problem of toxic shame, but it's a start to deconstructing it.
Then there's another aspect we can work on: the somato-sensory aspect, because it's anchored in the body. The aim is to break down the systematic identification with this shame and free oneself from biases impregnated by experiences of early humiliation. Another interesting tool is to use the symbolic representation of the inner child, the part of the body that has witnessed the traumas of abandonment, humiliation and rejection.
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