Shame as a State of Being

When healthy shame is transformed into toxic shame, it is called the 'internalization process'. The healthy feeling of shame is lost, and a frozen state of being emerges, whereby a person believes himself to be flawed and defective as a human being. This transformation involves three dynamics: first, the identification with shame-based models; second, the trauma of abandonment and the shame binding all one's feelings, needs and drives; and third, the interconnection and magnification of visual memories or scenes; and the retaining of shaming auditory and kinesthetic imprints.

The Abandonment Trauma
The word abandonment, as used here, goes far beyond the ordinary understanding of that word. I include the notion of physical desertion, which is the most common usage of the word. In naming our demons, we have to stretch the old meanings of our words.

To expand the meaning of the word abandonment includes various forms of emotional abandonment: stroke deprivation, narcissistic deprivation, fantasy bonding, the neglect of developmental dependency needs and family system enmeshment. My definition of abandonment also includes all forms of abuse.

Alice Miller, in her powerful book, The Drama Of The Gifted Child, has described the paradoxical fact that many good, kind, devoted parents abandon their children. She also outlines the equally paradoxical fact that many highly gifted overachieving and successful people are driven by a deep-seated chronic depression, resulting from their true and authentic selves being shamed through abandonment in childhood. 

This is the "hole in your soul" phenomena. Alice Miller's work has expanded my understanding of the abandonment trauma. She does not use shame as a major organizing principle of her work. However, it is easy to see that the loss of authentic self-hood with its accompanying depression is another way to describe toxic shame. When one is abandoned, one is left alone. This can happen through physical absence as well as physical presence. In fact to be abandoned by someone who is physically present is much more insane.

A child needs the presence of both parents. For a boy child to break his mother bonding, he needs a father to bond with. Bonding involves spending time together, sharing feelings, warmth, touching and displaying desire to be with one another.

The following is a general outline not meant to be absolute. A very young child cannot understand that his dad is a sick alcoholic. Children are limited in logical ability. Their earliest way of thinking is through feelings (felt thought). Children are also egocentric. This doesn't mean they are selfish in the usual meaning of that word. They are not morally selfish. They are not even capable of moral thinking until about seven or eight (the so-called age of reason). Even at that age their thinking still has definite egocentric elements in it. Children are not capable of pure altruistic behavior until about age 16.

Egocentric thinking means that a child will take everything personally. Even if a parent dies, a child can personalize it. A child might say something like — "If Mommie had really loved me, she would not have gone to God's house; she would have stayed with me." We give time to those things that we love.

The impact of not having one's parents' time creates the feeling of being worthless. The child is worth less than his parents' time, attention or direction. The young child's egocentricity always interprets events egocentrically. If Mom and Dad are not present, it's because of me. There must be something wrong with me or they would want to be with me.

Children are egocentric because they have not had time to develop ego boundaries. An ego boundary is an internal strength by which a person guards her inner space. Without boundaries a person has no protection. A strong boundary is like a door with the doorknob on the inside. A weak ego boundary is like a door with the doorknob on the outside. A child's ego is like a house without any doors.

Children are egocentric by nature (not by choice). Their egocentricity is like a temporary door and doorknob, in use until strong boundaries can be built. Strong boundaries result from the identification with parents who themselves have strong boundaries and who teach their children by modeling. Children have no experience; they need their parents' experience. By identifying with their parent, they have someone whom they can depend on outside themselves. As they internalize their parent, they form a dependable guide inside themselves. If their parent is not dependable, they will not develop this inner resource.

Emotion Abandonment and Deprived Narcissism 
Children need mirroring and echoing. These come from their primary caretaker's eyes. Mirroring means that someone is there for them and reflects who they really are at any given moment of time. In the first three years of our life each of us needed to be admired and taken seriously. We needed to be accepted for the very one we are. Getting these minoring needs is what Alice Miller calls our basic Narcissistic Supplies.

These supplies result from good minoring by a parent with good boundaries. When this is the case, the following dynamics take place.
1. The child's aggressive impulses can be neutralized because they do not threaten the parent.
2. The child's striving for autonomy is not experienced as a threat to the parent.
3. The child is allowed to experience and express ordinary impulses, such as jealousy, rage, sexuality, defiance, because the parents have not disowned these feelings in themselves.
4. The child does not have to please the parent and can develop his own needs at his own developmental pace.
5. The child can depend on and use his parents because they are separate from him.
6. The parent's independence and good boundaries allow the child to separate self and object representation.
7. Because the child is allowed to display ambivalent feelings, he can learn to regard himself and the caregiver as "both good and bad", rather than splitting off certain parts as good and splitting them from the bad.
8. The beginning of true object love is possible because the parent's love the child as a separate object.

Drama Of The Gifted Child
What happens if the parents are shame-based and needy? What happens is they are unable to take over the mirroring narcissistic function for the child. Furthermore, the fact that the parents are shame-based is a clear signal that they never got their own narcissistic supplies Such parents are adult children who are still in search of a parent or an object who will be totally available to them. For such parents, the most appropriate objects of narcissistic gratification are their own children Again Alice Miller writes,
"A newborn baby is completely dependent on his parents and since their caring is essential for his existence, he does all he can to avoid losing them. From the very first day onward, he will muster all his resources to this end, like a small plant that turns toward the sun in order to survive."

What the shame-based mother was unable to find in her own mother she finds in her own children. The child is someone who is always at her disposal. A child cannot run away as her own mother did. A child can be used as an echo; is completely centered on her; will never desert her; can be totally controlled and offers full admiration and absorbed attention.

Children have an amazing ability to perceive this need in the parent(s). A child seems to know it unconsciously. By taking on the role of supplying his shame-based parents narcissistic gratification, the child secures love and a sense of being needed and not abandoned. This process is a reversal of the order of nature. Now the child is taking care of the parents' needs, rather than the parents taking care of the child's needs. This caretaker role is strangely paradoxical. In an attempt to secure parental love and avoid being abandoned, the child is in fact being abandoned. Since the child is there for the parent, there is no one there to mirror the child's feelings and drives and to nurture the child's needs. Any child growing up in such an environment has been mortally wounded by this narcissistic deprivation. This phenomenon can happen in the best of families. Alice Miller writes,
"There are large numbers of people who suffer from narcissistic disorders, who often had sensitive and caring parents from whom they received much encouragement; yet these people are suffering from severe depressions. They enter analysis in the belief, with which they grew up, that their childhood was happy and protected."

More often than not, these narcissistically deprived are talented, gifted, highly successful overachievers who have been praised and admired for their talents and achievements. Anyone looking at them on the outside would believe that these people have it made. They are strong and stable and full of self-assurance. The exact opposite is the case. Narcissistically deprived people do well in every undertaking and are admired for their gifts and talents but to no avail. "Behind all this," writes Alice Miller, "there lurks depression, the feeling of emptiness and self-alienation, and a sense that life has no meaning." Once the drug of grandiosity is taken away, as soon as they are no longer the stars and overachievers, they are plagued by deep feelings of shame and guilt.

It is so difficult for anyone looking at one's success to know how shame-based they really are. As children we were loved for our achievements and our performance, rather than for ourselves. Our true and authentic selves were abandoned.

For many, it takes years to be able to connect with their own true feelings — anger, jealousy, loneliness or sadness. This disconnection with feelings is a result of the abandonment. No one was there to affirm our feelings through minoring. A child can only experience his feelings when there is someone there who accepts them fully, names them and supports them.

Another consequence of this emotional abandonment is the loss of a sense of self. When used as another's narcissistic supplies, a person develops in such a way as to reveal only what is expected of him and ultimately fuses with his own act or performance. He becomes a "human doing" without any real sense of his authentic self. According to Winnicotti, his true self remains in a "state of noncommunication". I described this earlier as no longer being in me. Such a person feels emptiness, homelessness and futility. 

Perhaps the most devastating consequence of emotional abandonment is what Robert Firestone calls the Fantasy Bond and what Alice Miller calls "Bond Permanence". A child who has been denied the experience of connecting with his own emotions is first consciously and then unconsciously (through the internal identification with the parent) dependent on his parents. Alice Miller writes,
"He cannot rely on his own emotions, has not come to experience them through trial and error, has no sense of his own real needs and is alienated from himself to the highest degree."

Such, a person cannot separate fom his parents. He is fantasy bonded with them. He has an illusion (fantasy) of connection, i.e., he really thinks there is a love relationship between himself and his parents. Actually he is fused and enmeshed. This is an entrapment rather than a relationship. Later on this fantasy bond will be transferred to other relationships.

This fantasy-bonded person is still dependent on affirmation from his partner, his children, his groups. He is especially dependent on his children. A fantasy-bonded person never has a real connection or a real relationship with anyone. There is no real authentic self there to relate to. The real parents, who only accepted the child when he pleased them, remain as introjected voices. The true self hides from these introjected voices just as the real child did. The loneliness of the parental home' is replaced by 'isolation within the self.
 
Grandiosity is often the result of all this. The grandiose person is admired everywhere and cannot live without admiration. If his talents fail him, it is catastrophic. He must be perfect, otherwise depression is near. Often the most gifted among us are driven in precisely this manner. Many of the most gifted people suffer from severe depression. It cannot be otherwise because depression is about the lost and abandoned child within.
"One is free from depression," writes Alice Miller, "when self-esteem is based on the authenticity of one's own feelings and not on the possession of certain qualities".

Emotional abandonment is multigenerational. The child of the narcissistically deprived parent becomes an adult with a narcissistically deprived child and will use his children as he was used for his narcissistic supplies. That child then becomes an adult child and the cycle is repeated.

When emotionally abandoned people describe their childhood, it is always without feeling. They recount their earliest memories without any sympathy for the child they once were. Very often they show disdain and irony, even derision and cynicism. In general there is a complete absence of real emotional understanding or serious appreciation of their own childhood vicissitudes and no conception of their true need — beyond the need for achievement. The internalization of the original drama has been so complete that the illusion of a good childhood can be maintained.