Shame is real. Despite the fact that it’s not something we can physically touch, the impact of chronic shame touches every aspect of an individual’s life, including and especially one’s relationships.
What follows is a narrative about a life diminished by shame. Although the narrator and the circumstances of his experience are invented, the writing is informed by my decades of therapy work with clients who have had an abuse history in childhood and go on to struggle with shame as adults (even if they’re unaware of it).
In other words, the shame behind this accounting is very real, even though the person is not.
Kenneth’s story: ever-present shame has shaped my life
I’m a twin. The lore is, there’s no one closer to you than your twin. No one else who will always be in your awareness. No one else who will so regularly be along with you on the journey through your life. Maybe that’s true for other people, but for me, there’s a presence even closer than my identical brother. And it’s not a someone, it’s a something.
Shame.
Only recently have I come to understand that this shadow—a shadow that has a burdensome weight to it, a shadow that not only blocks the light but narrows my access to feelings of aliveness—is a manifestation of shame.
I’m not talking about the kind of shame I’ve read about, or heard about from my friends from time to time. Not talking about embarrassment, or even deep humiliation when you’re exposed for a screwup on the public stage. I’m not saying those aren’t tough—they sure are. But that’s not what’s been plaguing me for as long as I can remember. Plaguing me so constantly and insidiously that up until kind of recently, I thought that’s just how everyone felt inside.
I’m only in therapy because my wife Carla has threatened to leave me if I don’t get help. She said I was “emotionally unavailable.” It’s true that when I’m under a lot of stress I tend to pull away, but honestly, I’ve kind of felt like that’s a way to spare her. I’d rather be distant than angry.
Except that I guess I end up being angry anyhow.
How shame shows up in my marriage
“Why do you get mad at me when I’m hurting?” she asked me. (And not just one time, but many.)
I pushed back, denied I was mad. But then I’d scoff or roll my eyes or scowl or something, and she’d pick up on it and ask how else was she supposed to interpret my expressions. “Your annoyance is written all over your face,” Carla said.
She’s right, I know she is. I don’t want to be angry with her when she’s vulnerable, but maybe I am. I can’t seem to help it. I don’t want to repeat the destructive acting out-of my prior relationships, and it’s as if all I have access to instead of that is anger toward myself that looks like anger aimed outward.
I resisted starting therapy because I’ve always thought there was no good in dredging up the past. (I’m 48, after all. . .shouldn’t I be free of the past by now?) But I want our marriage to work. We’ve only been married for two years, but when I manage to get really quiet and really still (a state that feels challenging for me), I can acknowledge that I can’t imagine my life without Carla. So I agreed to start counseling.
Can I reduce shame’s intensity without understanding why it plagues me?
“Look,” I said to my therapist on day one, “I know my childhood wasn’t great. On the spectrum of childhoods, it wasn’t the worst, I’m sure, but it was nowhere near the best. But can’t we work on how I show up in my relationship without digging around in my early years?”
The therapist said we could try, and she wasn’t planning on forcing me to talk about anything I wasn’t ready to talk about, but often the unexamined threads of our childhood are causing snags in our adulthood, and that means it could be helpful to do that work.
The thing is, I realized by the third session, that I don’t even have a really good memory of all that happened to me. I just know that a lot of it. . .well, let’s just say it wasn’t good. The details are hazy at best. There was abuse, I won’t deny that. (And maybe there’s a self-protective reason I don’t have ready access to all the details.)
What I do know with clarity is that I don’t want to be unfaithful to my wife. I haven’t been married before, but I have had other serious relationships in the past, and I have a history of infidelity. Yes, I’m ashamed of that, but that’s the kind of shame that feels healthy, you know? Shame with a purpose, I guess you could say.
…the shame that is always with me, is holding me hostage in a way I don’t fully understand but can’t deny, is not because of anything I did or failed to do. It feels as natural and as automatic as my breath.
I’ve read about “shame spirals” in the wayward partner, and that’s what I felt after the affairs. I feel remorse that I cheated on partners (including those I lived with), who thought I was being true to them. Remorse and regret. And shame. But the shame that doesn’t spiral in and out, the shame that is always with me, is holding me hostage in a way I don’t fully understand but can’t deny, is not because of anything I did or failed to do. It feels as natural and as automatic as my breath.
The big difference is that breathing doesn’t hurt. Breathing doesn’t keep me small, doesn’t strangle the joy right out of joyful moments, doesn’t rob me of my genuine voice, doesn’t steal my own chance at empowerment. Shame does all that, and more.
When shame looks like depression
I understand that you can’t know what anyone else’s inner experience is truly like, but all my life, I’ve been a careful watcher of others. Sometimes I’ve felt invisible (or made myself invisible) because I just covertly watch how other people react to situations. I’m not talking about social media and things like that, I’m talking about being around people in natural settings. And it seems very clear that others I’ve known do feel joy, carefree abandon, connection, happiness and the like at celebrations. I can barely fake those.
I see those people, and I see me, and I see myself trapped between walls that continually narrow my ability to engage with the good parts of life. The walls are thick and solid, and now I know that they’re made of shame. I both marvel at how others engage with life, and I’m deeply envious of it. (And then comes the backlash that says: but you don’t deserve the connection they enjoy anyway.)
Once I finally realized that not everyone has a dimmer switch always turned way down on life’s moments, I assumed I was depressed.
My GP prescribed anti-depressants—it took a couple of tries to find one that I tolerated OK—and beyond noticing some mild side effects, I didn’t feel any more alive. I didn’t feel more engaged with my own experience of life. I didn’t notice a reduction in my intense belief in my unworthiness, in my own aggressive self-distancing from others and from my relationship with myself. At best, my inner self-critic would take a short break while it cracked its knuckles and gathered steam; at worst, it viciously pummeled me without reprieve. And again, the critic wasn’t punishing me for something that I did or didn’t do; rather, it was torturing me for who I am, just for being me.
It was only after a great deal of therapy that I learned depression wasn’t what was strangling my life force and feelings of vitality. . .it was shame.
It takes huge, exhausting effort to even talk about this, because most of me believes that I don’t deserve to feel any better, any bigger, any more connected and engaged. The shame reminds me that I’m not worthy of what other people are, and only a tiny part of me asks whether that’s true. The rest of me says chronic, pervasive shame is what I deserve.
Loneliness feels like shame’s twin
The disconnection I feel in moments that call for joyful engagement isn’t only a lack of alignment within myself. . .it’s also a disconnection between me and the people I love, the people who love me.
Even though I love Carla more than anyone I’ve ever known, I still feel lonely around her at times. It’s not anything she’s doing—or failing to do—that causes that loneliness in me. I see that clearly. She is warm and loving and engaged and engaging. She is happy to give me space when I need it, and even happier to be leaning into me on the couch when we’re watching a movie. Sometimes I feel a smothering sense of unreality in those moments, though I try very hard to hide it and play the role of deeply present, emotionally available spouse. But it’s as if I always have a veil drawn between me and everyone else, and when Carla so effortlessly moves in to draw close to me—physically and emotionally—the veil is starting to be lifted and I’m terrified of what will happen if it’s torn away completely.
It’s that sort of thing that causes me to feel continually disconnected. And it’s not something I can will my way out of (and boy have I tried).
Shame’s mantra: “You don’t deserve praise; it was just a fluke.”
“Dude,” my brother Darius said to me once, “why are you so negative? Even when you have a reason to be positive?” The context of his comment was this:
I had won an award for a short story I’d sent in to a literary journal, and, uncharacteristically for me, I shared the news with him. Since I use a pseudonym for my creative work, he wouldn’t have known unless I told him.
We’re both in education. Darius teaches English at a private middle school, and I teach history at a public high school. He does a lot of creative writing with his students. So I guess I was proud of the win. Self-pride is so rare in me, is fleeting at best, and I usually end up chastising myself for even feeling it so that it doesn’t last or feel satisfying.
I guess I wanted to share that pride with my twin. Maybe I was longing for connection, and what better way to connect than around a shared interest?
“Oh, wow!” Darius said, clotheslining me with one of his trademark big hugs. “Kenny, that’s fantastic!”
I think I soaked up the merest fraction of a millimeter of his happiness for me and his pride in me before I recoiled, deeply regretting that I’d even told him.
“Nah,” I said, “it’s not a big deal. Hey, got any weekend plans yet?”
“No way,” my brother said. “You’re not changing the subject that fast. When will it be published? Can I read it before then? Tell me everything!”
Weirdly, I wanted to hide. No, that’s not capturing the intensity of the feeling. I wanted to jump out of my own skin and flee. The level of discomfort was that overwhelming. There was nothing but love and pride in my brother’s face, but he was looking straight at me, and I was flooded with feelings of shame, feelings like I’d done something wrong to even dare write a story, submit it to a contest, and then tell someone else I’d won. I was hit with a lightning-bolt thought: the other stories had to have been better than mine. The “win” must’ve been a mistake, a clerical error.
“It was just a fluke,” I mumbled.
“Ken, flipping a coin or tripping on a shoelace is a fluke. Writing a story that’s so good that it wins a contest is not.”
I let out a strangled laugh and my voice came out as a strange, crushed croak. “There were probably only two other entries. One of them in crayon.” This I knew not to be true: the email said there were over one hundred other stories.
“You should be shouting this from the rooftop!” Darius said. “At the very least, I hope this motivates you to keep writing, and keep sending out your work.”
Me shouting this from the rooftop was less likely than me landing on the moon.
Shame has shaped me to be a master of self-sabotage
When I look back on my life, I realize I’ve been steered by an unspoken—but powerful—edict of sorts: Why wait for the devastating effects of someone else rejecting me when I’m so good at it?
There have been numerous examples of opportunities I unconsciously torpedoed, only to chalk those “failures” up as me not being good enough. In my last year as an undergrad, I was encouraged to go to grad school, and suddenly my grades plummeted. My advisor helped me sign up for the necessary exam, and I overslept (oops, drank too much the night before and forgot to set my alarm) and missed it. Even when I feel confident in the classroom with my students now, when it’s time for an evaluation by the principal, I happen to lose my lesson plan and/or my mojo.
I can see now how I’ve shaped my life to stay small, to stay under the radar, to live a life congruent with the message of shame: you are inadequate, undeserving, and unworthy.
Breaking through shame: The missteps I’ve taken to feel alive
I’ve also intermittently abused drugs in the past, sometimes when things have been going well in my academic/professional/personal life and I’m on the cusp of some type of achievement or advancement. Only now that I’ve been in therapy can I identify those periods as another mode of self-sabotage, but additionally, they’ve served as ways for me to feel something intensely while still staying under the familiar, blanketing shadow of shame.
Now that I’m able to honestly assess the patterns of my life, I’ve come to realize that the infidelity and the periods of substance abuse have been attempts for me to break through the walls of shame.
My current work is to learn how to be in relationship with the shame, to understand when and why it holds me back so that I can find healthy ways to loosen its grip and feel more alive.
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Rich Nicastro, PhD, is a clinical psychologist with over 25 years of experience supporting individuals and couples as they navigate betrayal trauma and other emotional challenges. He offers teletherapy to clients throughout the United States. To work with Dr. Nicastro and join his waiting list, please email him at Rich@RichardNicastro.com.
