What causes toxic shame to develop during childhood? How can you heal from these deep-rooted emotional wounds?
In Healing the Shame That Binds You, John Bradshaw explores how childhood experiences shape our relationship with shame and offers practical steps for healing. He provides insights into identifying trauma, reconnecting with your inner child, and developing self-love.
Read on to learn how to heal childhood wounds that still sting today.
Healing Your Childhood Wounds
In his book, Bradshaw argues that toxic shame is rooted in our early life experiences, and he shares advice on how to heal childhood wounds and break free from the shame they produce.
Our childhood experiences shape how we learn to process shame, writes Bradshaw—healthy caregivers teach us how to healthily process shame by forgiving our mistakes and dedicating time to lovingly teach us right from wrong. On the other hand, toxic caregivers teach us that our mistakes and sources of shame make us inherently bad or unworthy, and we learn to fear and internalize our shame rather than express it and learn from it.
According to Bradshaw, there are three types of childhood experiences that cause toxic shame: toxic role models, abandonment, and imprinted shame experiences. Toxic shame forms when all three of these experiences are not only present but regularly reinforced during childhood—they’re part of your daily life growing up.
Bradshaw explains that a significant phase of overcoming toxic shame is to heal the wounds of your past that caused your toxic shame to form. There are three steps to doing so.
Step 1: Identify & Grieve Your Childhood Trauma
The first step in healing your wounds is to identify and grieve the childhood trauma that formed your toxic shame and gave rise to your shame-based behaviors—your shame barriers, false selves, and shamelessness tactics. Revisiting these traumas and feeling the pain they caused allows you to mentally process them and release their grief—they will continue to produce toxic shame as long as your grief remains internalized and unprocessed.
Bradshaw says the following factors must be present to process your grief: 1) validation that the trauma was real, 2) support, 3) emotional expression of trauma-related feelings like anger or loneliness, and 4) corrective experiences that fulfill the childhood needs which your trauma denied you. We’ll discuss how to do that in the next step.
| The Role & Process of Grief in Healing Trauma In Complex PTSD, Walker reiterates the importance of grieving your trauma to process it. He adds that doing so not only helps you overcome your trauma, but is crucial to overcome the learned behavior of suppressing your emotions—one of the detachment shame-barriers that Bradshaw mentions. Further, while Bradshaw discusses four elements that are necessary to process grief, they don’t encompass the full extent of the grieving process. Walker outlines the four main phases of grief involved. First, Walker says you must feel sorrow—the original sadness and anger of the experience—and express it by crying. This is likely the first part of validating your experience because you’re seeing the real effects of it. Second, you must express anger over your abuse and what you’ve lost. This step is also important for the validation process—you’re coming to terms with the fact that your abuser was wrong, not you. Third, you must verbalize what you’re feeling currently without censoring yourself. This is likely where support from others is crucial—you’ll need someone understanding and caring to talk to. Finally, you must experience the full range of emotions the trauma caused without needing to cry, rage, or verbalize them. This signifies you’ve healed—you can acknowledge your emotions without them controlling you. Walker doesn’t discuss Bradshaw’s fourth element, corrective experiences. |
Step 2: Discover & Support Your Inner Child
Step two in healing your wounds is to identify your unfulfilled childhood needs and determine how to fulfill them as an adult. This often requires you to build relationships with people who can help you fulfill these needs. For example, if you had a caregiver who never showed interest in you, you would benefit from having a relationship with someone who asks you about yourself and your interests and shows their interest in hearing your answers. These practices can also happen in support groups.
(Shortform note: Researchers explain that the process of identifying your childhood wounds is commonly referred to as inner child work, and the process of repairing these wounds is called reparenting. However, unlike Bradshaw, they emphasize that reparenting can only be done to yourself—as hard as it may be to accept, only you can provide yourself with the things you lacked in childhood. Skills for self-love and self-reliance should initially be taught by a therapist, but then clients must learn to continue these practices on their own—not by leaning on others to provide love and acceptance for them.)
According to Bradshaw, one of the best ways to support your inner child is to rewrite shameful childhood experiences using Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). NLP is a system of tools that help you understand how your brain works so you can rewrite past memories (like trauma) in order to alter your brain function and affect positive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in the present. Essentially, Bradshaw’s use of this practice is to change how you perceive past traumas so they don’t produce shame and cause you to engage in shame-based behaviors.
(Shortform note: NLP was created in the 1970s by John Grinder and Richard Bandler. It’s based on a few different psychological theories, one of which is cybernetics. In a psychological context, cybernetics theorizes that our experiences and behaviors are feedback loops that cause us to perceive and react to future experiences in ways that produce the same outcomes as the first experience. Another theory that inspired NLP is constructivism—the idea that rather than there being an objective reality, reality is constructed by individuals based on their experiences. To learn more about NLP and acquire training, you can visit The Association for NLP’s website.)
Step 3: Nurture Your Self & Lose Your Shame
The final step to healing your wounds is reintegrating the shame-based parts of your identity that you’ve hidden and overcoming your shame-based behaviors.
Bradshaw says that to do so, you must first identify the internalized parts of your personality that you feel shame over—the parts that cause your shame-based behaviors—and learn to accept these selves. First, embracing these selves lessens their ability to control you because their control comes from your desire to hide them. Second, familiarizing yourself with these hidden selves allows you to recognize when they’re being triggered so you can gain control over yourself and your behavior before they do.
(Shortform note: In Rising Strong, Brené Brown reiterates the necessity of identifying your harmful thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to overcome them. However, she argues that before you can start this process, you first need to recognize when you’re having a shame-based reaction so you can gain control of yourself—when you’re in the midst of heightened emotions, it’s nearly impossible to think rationally about their cause. Once you do this, then you can start the rationalization process by identifying flaws in your thinking. After you’ve rationalized your thoughts, then you can identify where they came from (your sources of shame) and how to overcome them.)
Next, you must help these shamed hidden selves become rational by de-escalating the shame-based thoughts, feelings, and behaviors they spark when triggered. One way to do this is to say the thoughts or urges of the hidden self out loud—saying a thought out loud often releases it from your mind. You can also replace these shame-based thoughts with positive ones using affirmations. For example, if your body-conscious hidden part is telling you not to eat, you can use an affirmation like “my body is strong and food is fuel.”
(Shortform note: In Rising Strong, Brown also recommends rationalizing your harmful thoughts and feelings by expressing them and provides a specific exercise for doing so. First, she says, record the initial story you told yourself, regardless of how extreme it sounds—for example, “I can’t eat in public because everyone will watch me and make fun of my weight.” Record all the details you can think of—make it like a story. Then, consider how your thinking might be flawed—which parts of the story are facts and which are assumptions. How might these assumptions have led to an inaccurate story? Is there additional information you need to seek out to gain a more informed perspective?)
Finally, love yourself, including your flaws, and forgive yourself for your mistakes. One way Bradshaw says to practice self-love is to tap into the love you feel for someone else, then direct that love toward yourself and hold it there for a few minutes of concentrated focus. A method you can use for self-forgiveness is to think of your mistakes as lessons for the future rather than calamities—consider what you can learn, what you can do differently, and so on.
(Shortform note: A practice called mirror work shows that practicing self-love while looking into a mirror may help you achieve better results. You can start by looking into a mirror for five minutes, three times a week. During this time, you can practice Bradshaw’s self-love techniques, or as researchers suggest, play relaxing music and repeat affirmations like “I love myself,” “I forgive myself,” and “I’m capable of learning from my mistakes.” Once you get comfortable, you can enhance the exercise by doing it for 10 minutes, five days a week.)
