Shame is relational
Humans are intrinsically relational creatures. At every level, we are wired for connection with other people. Even from the womb, our nervous systems begin picking up on the feelings of others (especially our mothers, but not exclusively). Eventually, we find ourselves outside of the womb, and interacting with other people. It is from these interactions with other that a sense of self is derived from that social connection which recognizes and validates our feelings and their behavioral expression as real and meaningful to others. In this way, beginning from infancy, we learn that we ourselves are also real and meaningful.
But of course no relationship is perfectly connected all the time. This disconnection is experienced by babies and children (and adults!) as painful, and this pain takes the form of dysregulation in our nervous system. Now, remember that babies (and children up to a certain age) are pre-verbal, which means that what we typically think of as psychological pain is firstly physical, taking the form of uncomfortable tension in the body, alerting us to something that needs attending to in our environment. There is a specific pattern of uncomfortable bodily tension (usually a feeling of “caving in” or a “black hole” in the chest) that results from the nervous system perceiving social disconnection. This sensation which results from perception of social disconnection is what we call shame. Shame is intrinsically relational.
In basically healthy relationships, there is a pattern of disconnection and reconnection. Babies need soothing in some way, they cry, and mom attunes to their needs and comforts them. This pattern builds emotional resilience in children, and the adults that they will grow up to become. By being attuned and attended to, babies and children learn that it is safe to have needs and safe to express them. It creates a deep unconscious “knowing” that “I have needs, my needs are real, my needs matter to others, others care about me, I have value.”
But not everyone is so fortunate to grow up with such basically healthy relationships. When chronic disconnection occurs and reconnection is sought but not met, the baby internalizes a felt sense of not-mattering to others. If existing means to exist in relation to others; if I only know myself as I am reflected in the eyes of the one in front of me, and if I internalize a sense that I don’t matter to them, then it is at bottom an existential experience of annihilation. It is a confusing experience at the most deeply primal level; wandering in the no-man’s land between being and non-being, reality and unreality, living and being dead. This is what is called “core shame.”
Since disconnection is both psychically and physically painful, babies and children who are chronically neglected eventually learn to suppress emotional expression of their needs. If this pattern of neglect:suppression continues to the point of becoming habitual, is goes from suppression to repression, which refers to the pushing of any awareness of needs and their corresponding emotions out of consciousness altogether. This is why people suffering from core shame in its extreme expression have a very flat affect, and they would struggle mightily naming their needs and feelings, because they have lost conscious awareness of them. Their eyes look dead because they feel dead- meaning that they feel nothing at all. They are ghosts upon the earth. This is a common (but not the only) cause of what is diagnosed as clinical depression.
The good news is that that process can be “reverse-engineered.” Core shame and the deep suffering that follows in its wake can be undone by relearning how to identify needs and feelings, experience them, and express them in healthy and adaptive ways, and establishing meaningful connection, firstly with ourselves, and then also with others. The pattern of avoidance of painful feelings is not innate to us as babies, it is a learned “skill,” which means, happily, that it can be unlearned. We can begin attuning and attending to ourselves in a way that we deserved but never received as children. With its deeply insightful conceptualization and targeted techniques, this is a process that Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy is uniquely equipped to help with.
