Character Disorders Of Shame

Narcissistic Personality    
The narcissistic personality disorders are:
"Grandiosity, extreme self-involvement and lack of interest and empathy for others, in spite of the pursuit of others to obtain admiration and approval."

The Narcissistic And Borderline Disorders
The Narcissist is endlessly motivated to seek perfection in everything he does. Such a personality is driven to the acquisition of wealth, power and beauty, and to find others who will mirror and admire his grandiosity. Underneath this external facade there is an emptiness filled with envy and rage. The core of this emptiness is internalized shame.

Paranoid Personality
The paranoid defense is a posture developed to cope with excessive shame. The paranoid person becomes hyper-vigilant expecting and waiting for the betrayal and humiliation he knows is coming. The paranoid person interprets innocent events as personally threatening and lives constantly on guard.

The self of the paranoid experiences "feeling hopelessly defective". The sources of the paranoid's own sense of deficiency are blamed elsewhere. It's as if the inner eyes of shaming, contempt and disdain are projected outward. Wrongdoings, mistakes and other instances of personal failure cannot be owned by the paranoid-type personality. They are disowned and transferred from the inner self to others.

Criminality In General 
Most criminal behavior is "acting out" behavior. "Acting out" is also called reenactment. What this means is that a criminal offender was once victimized in much the same way as he criminalizes. Children from violently abusing families, children from families where high voltage abandonment takes place, suffer terrible victimization. They generally either take on a victim role and reenact it over and over again, or they identify with their offender and reenact the offense on helpless victims (as they once were). This reenactment is called "repetition compulsion" or the urge to repeat.

Physical Abuse
The physical offender was usually once a victim who was powerless and who was humiliated. Parents who physically humiliate and abuse their own children were typically abused when they were young. They have never resolved the internalized shame in their own lives. Their own childhood traumas are embedded in a series of inter-related memories. These original scenes become reactivated by their own children and compel reenactment like a Pavlovian trigger. 

Parents who are about to abuse their own children are simultaneously reliving scenes in which they were also beaten, but they relive the scene from the perspective of their own parent as well. They now play their parents' role.

Why would parents, who were once abused and beaten children, want to play their parents' role? This answer lies in the dynamic of identification. Offender identification closely runs with the phrase "identification with the aggressor". When children are physically hurt and in psychological pain, they want out of it as quickly as possible. So they cease identifying with themselves, and identify with their shaming oppressor in an attempt to possess that person's power and strength. In forming the identification with the parent, one becomes at once the weak bad child and the strong transgressor parent. The internal image of the abusive parent triggers the old scene and mediates the process. Physical abuse can trigger compulsive reenactment of the abuse either toward oneself, one's spouse or one's children. Internalized shame maintains the process. It compels the reenactment.

The victims of physical violence may also remain victims. Studies on what is called "learned helplessness". In essence, arbitrary, random and unpredictable beatings create a state of passivity in which the victim no longer feels that there is anything that she can do. A negative belief system is adhered to. The person no longer believes she has a choice.

A simpler explanation for the bonding to violence is the fact that as one is beaten more and more, one is shamed more and more. The more internalized shame, the greater is the belief in oneself as defective and flawed. The more one believes one is defective and flawed, the more one's choices diminish. Internalized shame destroys one's boundaries. Without boundaries one has no protection.

Sexual Abuse
Sexual abusers are most often sex addicts. Sometimes they are reenacting their own sexual or physical violation. Sexual abuse generates intense and crippling shame, which more often than not, results in a splitting of the self. Incest and sexual abuse offenders are fueled by internalized shame. The perpetrator of the assault or violation also is shame-based. Such acts are acts of power and revenge, of impotence and fueled by shame . . . that scene of forcible violation is a reenactment, a transformation of a scene of equal powerlessness and humiliation experienced by the perpetrator at the hands of a different tormentor. The victim, the target of revenge, is confused with the source of the perpetrator's shame. By defeating and humiliating the victim, the perpetrator is momentarily freed of shame. The victimization could be incest, molestation, rape, voyeurism, exhibitionism, indecent liberties or phone calls. In every case there is an acting out of shame and a victimization of the innocent.

GRANDIOSITY — THE DISABLED WILL
Toxic shame also wears the face of grandiosity. Grandiosity is a disorder of the will. It can appear as narcissistic self-enlargement or wormlike helplessness. Each extreme refuses to be human. Each exaggerates: one is more than human; the other is less than human. It's important to see that the less than human, the hopeless one, is also grandiose. Hopelessness says that nothing and no one could help me. I'm the sickest of the sick . . . I'm the "best/worst" there ever was.

Grandiosity results from the human will becoming disabled. The will is disabled primarily through the shaming of the emotions. The shamed and blocked emotions stop the full integration of intellectual meaning. When an emotional event happens, emotions must be discharged in order for the intellect, reason and judgment to make sense out of it. Emotions bias thinking. As emotions get bound by shame, their energy is frozen, which blocks the full interaction between the mind and the will.

The human will is intensity of desire raised to the level of action. The will is an appetite. It is dependent on the mind (reasoning and judgment) for its eyes. Without the mind, the will is blind and has no content. Without content the will starts willing itself. This state of disablement causes severe problems. Some of which are:
• The will wills what can't be willed.
• The will tries to control everything.
• The will experiences itself as omnipotent or when it has failed as "wormlike".
• The will wills for the sake of willing (impulsiveness).
• The will wills in absolute extremes — all or nothing.

Toxic Shame As Spiritual Bankruptcy
The problem of toxic shame is ultimately a spiritual problem. I call it "spiritual bankruptcy". I suggested earlier that spirituality is the essence of human existence. We are not material beings on a spiritual journey; we are spiritual beings who need an earthly journey to become fully spiritual.

Spirituality is life-style — that which enhances and expands life. Therefore, spirituality is about growth and expansion, newness and creativity. Spirituality is about being. Being is that victorious thrust whereby we triumph over nothingness. Being is about why there is something, rather than nothing. Being is the ground of all the beings that are.

OTHERATION AND DEHUMANIZATION
Toxic shame, which is an alienation of the self from the self, causes one to become 'other-ated'.
Otheration is the term to describe dehumanization. He says that man is the only being who lives from within. To be truly human is to have an inner self and a life from within. Animals live in constant hyper-vigilance, always on guard, looking outside themselves for sustenance and guarding against danger. When humans no longer have an inner life, they become otherated and dehumanized.

Toxic shame with its more than human, less than human polarity is dehumanizing. The demand for a false self to cover and hide the authentic self necessitates a life dominated by doing and achievement. Everything spends on performance and achievement rather than on being. Being requires no measurement; it is its own justification. Being is grounded in an inner life which grows in richness. The kingdom of heaven is within,' says the scripture. Toxic shame looks to the outside for happiness and for validation, since the inside is flawed and defective. Toxic shame is spiritual bankruptcy.

SHAME AS HOPELESSNESS — THE SQUIRREL CAGE
Toxic shame has the quality of being irremediable. If I am flawed, defective and a mistake, then there is nothing that can be done about me. Such a belief leads to impotence. How can I change who I am? Toxic shame also has the quality of circularity. Shame begets shame. Addicts act out internalized shame and then feel shame about their shameful behavior.

FUNCTIONAL AUTONOMY
Once internalized, toxic shame is functionally autonomous, which means that it can be triggered internally without any attending stimulus. One can imagine a situation and feel deep shame. One can be alone and trigger a shaming spiral through internal self-talk. The more one experiences shame, the more one is ashamed and the beat goes on.

It is this dead-end quality of shame that makes it so hopeless. The possibility for repair seems foreclosed if one is essentially flawed as a human being. Add to that the self-generating quality of shame, and one can see the devastating, soul-murdering power of neurotic shame.