Toxic shame steals our souls. It robs us of our joy, spontaneity, and our light. In today’s Best Day Blog, I will show you how to calm the chaos within and convert that darkness into light! In this article, I will share seven steps to heal toxic shame with you.

The Difference Between Shame and Guilt

Before we get started,, I want to go over the difference between guilt and shame because many people confuse the two. Guilt is primarily external when we feel that a choice or behavior isn’t working or isn’t reflective of our best self. Shame is internal and is making a mistake and believing that we are, as a person, a mistake. For example, think of a relationship. Someone who has guilt might say,, ‘I can see how I didn’t listen to my gut when getting into a relationship with that person. In the future, I will have a plan in place to follow my heart. This is somebody taking responsibility for their part and accepting that they are perfectly imperfect. Additionally, they keep the internal self intact by committing to putting a plan in place. 

On the other hand, shame occurs when a person talks down to themselves about their decisions. Their inner dialogue contains phrases like, ‘I’m so stupid! I’m such an idiot! I’m to blame for everything!’. As you can see, there isn’t an objective assessment. They have taken on too much blame and are treating themselves as though they have no inherent value or worth unless they are perfect. They have no personal grace, which belittle and destroy the core self. 

Shame is the internal belief that who we are is a problem. In my previous article, “What Is Toxic Shame,” we learned that this core belief comes from the trauma we experienced as a child.

The 7 Solutions: How To Heal Shame 

Step 1 To Heal Toxic Shame

We need to develop self-esteem and a sense of self that we never had. I have a video on YouTube called ‘How to Love Yourself’, which will help you develop self-esteem and self-love. While these are valuable skills, ultimately, healing comes when we learn to recognize that at our core, we have worth. This worth is not based on what we do or achieve. Inherent worth is not a by-product of doing something. It is simply a truth we are born with. 

Step 2 To Heal Toxic Shame

Whether the shame was placed on us directly or indirectly, we carry shame that doesn’t belong to us. To learn how to give it back, I invite you to visit www.thegreatnessu.com. I have a free masterclass called ‘Your Journey to Emotional Authenticity,’ which provides you the first step in turning that shame-based emotional misery into Emotional Authenticity. I also invite you to the Resources page on my website. You will find my Journey book titled- “How To Give The Pain Back.” So make sure to head over and start your journey to give the shame back.

Step 3 To Heal Toxic Shame

We have to develop our morals and values, needs and wants, and negotiable’s and non-negotiable’s. I talk about this a lot because it is crucial to developing your sense of self. You might think you know what yours are, but most likely, you are unaware that they are your parents and not your own. To help you separate yours from your parents, I have three videos on my YouTube Channel. All three can be found in my Codependence Playlist, and they all start with ‘Codependence Recovery.” 

Step 4 To Heal Toxic Shame

Learn how to be, not to do. Toxic shame creates ‘doers’ because toxic shame is about our parent’s inability to separate telling us we were bad as a child (‘You’re defective!) from the bad action (‘Your choice was imperfect!’). We all created false, maladaptive “doer” personas to get our parents to acknowledge our inherent worth. 

I devote a whole chapter in my book, ‘Your Journey to Success,’ showing that life will come to you when you learn the process, I suggest. When you know how to let that happen, ‘being’ makes things happen much more quickly than ‘doing.’ 

Step 5 To Heal Toxic Shame

Learn how to stop self-abandoning, which means you have to start facing your addictions. Most of us are addicted to something in life – food, drugs, pills, pot, porn, CBD, alcohol, shopping – and as much as you want to justify your addiction by saying it’s genetic, this isn’t true. We now know that genes only mean we have a predisposition for a particular ailment. For the gene to activate,, it requires the right environment. Addictions are trauma-based and an attempt to soothe intolerable emotional pain. While it may be true that this addiction runs in your family, what it means is that your family is stuck creating the same emotionally toxic environment. 

This is an essential first step to help you get into reality if you suffer from an addiction. To help you further,, I invite you to read addiction specialist Gabor Mate’s book ‘In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts.’

In addition, make sure to head over to my YouTube channel and my Worst Day Cycle playlist. This series will help you navigate the process of healing the pain so you can arrest the addiction. 

Step 6 To Heal Toxic Shame

Shame can be equated to a virus sequestered in the dark. If we let it fester and grow,, it can become all-consuming. The disconnect from our inherent worth must be brought into the light. Only then can we begin to heal. Joining a 12-step or self-development group are excellent source of light. In groups, you can bring your false self and begin to shed it by sharing your fears, pain, and shame as the first step towards healing and becoming your true, authentic self.

The secret is to find one that focuses on living in the solution and not victim-blaming.

Shame expert Brene Brown says that those who have taken part and attended groups are better able to create a reorientation towards their pain and imperfections and, therefore, have more resilience to shame. 

If you haven’t found a group that focuses on solutions, I invite you to try my Perfectly Imperfect private group coaching. You can find more information here: www.tguprivategroup.com.

Step 7 To Heal Toxic Shame

Forgive yourself. You are perfectly imperfect. You are pure joy, love, and light. There is nothing bad or defective in you – you are always of worth. You feel the opposite because your perfectly imperfect parents, or caregivers, placed their unhealed pain, lack of self-forgiveness, and shame on you. This isn’t their fault. It’s due to a society that has refused to teach about the importance of Emotional Authenticity.

No one can blame us for something we weren’t aware was happening. For example, creating a maladaptive persona to cope with the trauma and shame we all experience, So do not blame yourself now. You have simply been doing the best you could with what you have known at the time. However, now that you have new information for the first time,, you have a choice. You can choose to develop Emotional Authenticity and learn to do things differently. You can now choose to heal. 

As we know better, we can do better, and as we learn more,, we can do more. You are learning about the tools available to you. You can use them, or you can choose not to? Today is the first day in your life that you have this choice. Will you choose to develop the skills to help the same and how to forgive yourself? 

Additional solutions:

1- My book, Your Journey To Success

2– My Complete Emotional Authenticity Method

3– My Perfectly Imperfect Private Group

4– My Private Coaching

Learn more here:

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGUlnk0x98A[/embedyt]

In today’s Best Day Blog and accompanying video, I will help you transform the emotional misery of toxic shame into Emotional Authenticity by bringing awareness as to how toxic shame creates the false self.

Toxic shame is an internal separation from ourselves. It’s where the false self is born, and it is the third stage of The Worst Day Cycle.

How is Toxic Shame Created?

It starts with our parents. Not because they were bad people, but because all parents are perfectly imperfect and human. Because of this, parents can communicate with their children in a way that creates toxic shame by not being able to differentiate between the child doing something imperfectly or being something imperfect. As such, we grow up believing that if we make a mistake, we as a person are the mistake. 

Toxic Shame Creates ‘doers,’ not ‘be-ers

Toxic shame makes us ‘doers’ and not ‘be-ers’ because we inadvertently learn that who we are ‘being’ is bad, rather than just being that what we were doing was imperfect. Therefore the doing becomes a false self. We only know how to ‘do’ because to ‘be’ us was a mistake. 

We must learn to just ‘be’ because underneath the ‘doing’ resides the anger and rage, and it wants to come out. When we can be, the rage is released, and healing occurs. 

Shame expert John Bradshaw describes it this way:

‘Toxic shame is a rupture of the authentic self that necessitates developing a false self. With a false self, intimacy is impossible. In toxic shame, the self becomes an object of its own contempt, an object that can’t be trusted. A toxically shamed person is divided within himself and must create a false self cover-up to hide his sense of being flawed and defective. You cannot offer yourself to another person if you do not know who you really are. A shame-based person will guard against exposing his inner self to others, but more significantly, he will guard against exposing himself to himself.’

Toxic Shame leads to Codependency.

The second sign of toxic shame is codependency. Most toxic shame is given to us when we are much too young to be aware of it before age 3. It’s not just what our parents did to us. It’s also what our parents didn’t do when they weren’t emotionally available. Often, when our parents couldn’t provide what we needed at the time we needed it, we were left feeling an emotion – sadness, pain, anger – and this is where codependence is formed. Our parents taught us to believe that others make us feel a certain way. In reality, no one can make us feel anything. We are always in control of how we feel and can make a choice. 

Additionally, our parents do not teach us how to discover our morals, values, needs, wants, negotiables, and non-negotiables. Instead, they require us to adopt theirs.  

Because of this, we are all chameleon-like in our adult lives, taking on the traits of others and being dependent on them to define who we are. 

Toxic Shame Creates Self-abandonment

When we become a chameleon, we lose who we are. One of the main ways we abandon ourselves is through toxic relationships. Toxic relationships happen because we experience these sorts of relationships in our childhood – we all remake the relationships we see in childhood because we are stuck in toxic shame. 

Another way we self-abandon is through addiction. Work, food, alcohol, drugs, pot, pills, sex, porn, gambling, shopping, tv, social media, sugar – they all have their core in shame. Many addictions have now been normalized in society – alcohol and overeating are two of the most common. 

Toxic Shame Creates Blame

We cannot take responsibility and, therefore, we blame instead. We blame how we feel on others – ‘You made me think, feel or do…’, which often happens in relationships. We also blame ourselves a lot for the shame. Phrases indicating toxic shame are ‘should’ and ‘could’ – ‘I should have known’ or ‘I could have done this instead.’ This simply isn’t true – in every moment, you are doing the best you can with the knowledge you have, and as you gain more knowledge, you can make different decisions – you are not to blame. 

When you blame yourself, that is the child within you hearing your parent’s voice saying, ‘You could/should have done better. You are to blame!’. Please recognize that this is your inner child’s voice. Listen to it, and release the blame.

Toxic Shame Requires Secrecy

We hide who we are. Brene Brown talks about this and likens shame to how a virus grows. When you put a disease or virus in a petri dish, put it in the dark, and it consumes the dish. However, when you bring it back into the light, it dissolves – the light heals it. This is the same with your shame – keeping it in the dark, it grows and multiplies behind a layer of secrecy. But, if you can bring it to the light and share how you feel, you can heal. 

We even hide our genuine emotions by labeling them with other emotions – we call fear, anger, we call fear stress! Fear is always one of three things: the fear of rejection, inadequacy, or powerlessness. So, whenever you see someone who is angry, you see one of those three fears coming through them. 

Many of us also simply feel numb – in fact, studies show that up to 70% of people don’t know what they feel and recall feelings of numbness. This numb feeling is simply a dissociation method because we cannot begin to deal with what we truly feel, so we’ve checked out and left our bodies. 

When we are in our toxic shame, we cannot be in relationships because we always show up as the toxic shame-based self rather than our authentic self.

Solutions to Toxic Shame

This isn’t a quick solution. However, the following will help:

My book ‘Your Journey to Success’ will introduce you to The Worst Day Cycle and how to heal from it so you can start living as your authentic self. 

Go to my YouTube channel and visit my Worst Day Cycle playlist. Look for five videos titled Reclaim your authentic self by becoming trauma-informed. In particular, video four talks explicitly about shame.

Also, I have a video called ‘7 Steps to Heal Toxic Shame on my YouTube channel, which will go even more in-depth into this topic. As well as this, I have a codependence recovery playlist that will help you to discover your morals and values, needs and wants, and negotiables and non-negotiables. 

I would also encourage you to sign up for my free masterclass, which will give you the basics of turning emotional misery into Emotional Authenticity. It’s called ‘Your Journey to Emotional Authenticity’ and is available at www.thegreatnessu.com. 

Additional solutions:

1- My book, Your Journey To Success

2– My Complete Emotional Authenticity Method

3– My Perfectly Imperfect Private Group

4– My Private Coaching

To learn more, watch this:

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak_1rfWVE04[/embedyt]

Toxic shame is the underlying sense of feeling worthless. As parents, we are human and inherently, perfectly imperfect. Therefore, as children, we were all shamed. For some, those moments are few. For others, they are pervasive. Some individuals will carry this shame throughout life as a state of being rather than related to a specific event. For example, someone who gets angry will see themselves as an angry person rather than being mad at certain circumstances or events. In these cases, this person has lost their authentic self and has become the false shame-based self.

If you would like to see an example of how easily shame is placed on us as children, make sure also to check out the video ‘What is Toxic Shame’ on my YouTube channel. In the video, I show you photographic examples of myself as a child and how my mother’s emotional condition created shame in me as an infant. Remember, as children, we mirror our parents’ emotional condition and effectively become whatever it is our parents are feeling. Parenting isn’t words – effective parenting is predicated on the parent’s emotional availability.

Toxic shaming happens throughout our upbringings. Through seemingly innocuous split-second emotional moments, like giving brief, disdainful glances or exasperated replies. If the shame remained an episodic event, this would be less harmful, but this shame is almost always continuous. The child then internalizes it, and it becomes who they are. The problem is that, as a culture, we still downplay the need for education and taking responsibility for developing Emotional Authenticity. The result of not being taught how to deal with this shame or how to master our emotions has most people living in a state of sadness, shame, and depression.

What is at the heart of toxic shame?

Most of us become parents somewhere between the ages of 16-30. We are still trying to complete our maturation process, make sense of our imperfect childhoods, and figure out our life direction and careers. These are tremendously big questions and require intense emotional investment in ourselves to figure out. Even parenting experts or older, more settled adults who understand the dynamics and the dangers of certain behaviors will not get parenting right because it is an overwhelming responsibility. Therefore, it is only natural that we won’t be entirely emotionally available to our children. This emotional abandonment is at the heart of toxic shame.

The helicopter parent who emotionally smothers and enmeshes with their child is one way. This is a parent who uses their child to feed their emotional needs, which sucks the emotional life out of the child. Instead of creating an emotional connection with another adult, these parents need their children to need them and to give them what’s missing in their emotional lives. This is a severely toxically shamed parent who is now doing the same to their child. You often see this with single parents or couples who are not close. The child becomes the surrogate spouse.

Another way parents implant toxic shame into a child is through overly structured parenting. The child is not allowed to be a child and is ‘parentified.’ They cannot make mistakes or show perfect imperfections. If they do, the parents send the message that they are defective rather than the behavior needing adjustment.

What is the other end of the spectrum?

This could either be no structure at home or the parent who effectively counts the days until the child is old enough to look after themselves, telling them to ‘Grow up!’

The following example is difficult to mention, but it needs to be raised—children who are raised by nannies or daycare centers experience emotional abandonment. The child becomes confused about who to attach with, causing shame because they experience repeated abandonment. It would be expected to feel I am saying that if you have to place your child in daycare, I am implying you are a bad parent. However, single-parent homes and having to put children in daycare are just a current fact of life. It is a survival choice. That does not make a parent bad. However, every choice has consequences, and as parents, we owe our children to take ownership that our life choices created situations that emotionally abandoned our children. Denying these facts only increases shame.

In my experience, the most damaging parent is the one who refuses to own and admit that they were imperfect and denies that they imparted some shame on their child—placing themselves in a perfectionist, God-like position is the most abusive form of shame a parent can impart.

A word of caution. For those stuck in the belief that your childhood was perfect and that nothing from your childhood affects you to this day, you are deep in denial of the shame you experienced. (stage 4 of The Worst Day Cycle) This happens in homes where the parents so shamed a child that they are not allowed to experience truth. The child’s soul is sacrificed to glorify the parent. As an adult, admitting their parent’s imperfections would be equivalent to blasphemy and speaking against the diety!

What it is like to experience toxic shame

As author John Bradshaw puts it,

‘When we are exposed without any way to protect ourselves, we feel the pain of shame. If we are continually overexposed, shame becomes toxic. The self becomes an object of its own contempt, an object that can’t be trusted. Shame is internalized when one is abandoned. Abandonment is the precise term to describe how one loses one’s authentic self and ceases to exist psychologically. Children cannot know who they are without reflective mirrors. Mirroring is done by one’s primary caregivers and is crucial in the first years of life. Abandonment includes the loss of mirroring. Parents who are shut down emotionally cannot mirror and affirm their children’s emotions.

If our caretakers have a wounded inner child, their neediness will prevent them from meeting their own children’s needs. Instead, they will either be angry at their child’s neediness or will try to get their own needs met by making their child an extension of themselves. When a child’s feelings are repressed, especially the feelings of anger and hurt, a person grows up to be an adult with an angry, hurt child inside of him. This hurt child inside of them will spontaneously contaminate that person’s adult behavior.’ 

This is the essence of the worst day cycle-we repeat the behavior we have always known and go on to contaminate others repeatedly.

24 Characteristics of Toxic Shame

To help you identify the signs of toxic shame, below is a list of 24 feelings or experiences you may have had or be going through now:

1. Secrecy – fear of exposure, going into hiding

2. Feeling used, treated with little or no respect

3. Feeling like you have little impact

4. Worried about what others think of you

5. Feeling like others take advantage of you

6. Wanting to have the last word

7. Not sharing your thoughts or feelings to avoid embarrassment

8. Being afraid to look, act or sound inappropriate or stupid

9. Being a perfectionist

10. Feeling like an outsider or that you are different or left out

11. Feeling suspicious or like you can’t trust others

12. Not wanting to be the center of attention, wallflower, shy, trying to hide, or withdraw

13. Feeling that you can’t be your true self

14. Losing your identity

15. Feelings of regret

16. Anger, both toward yourself and others

17. Self-loathing, or that you are stupid, a failure, a bad person, a fraud, selfish, not enough, you don’t matter, defective, unlovable, shouldn’t have been born

18. Worry and fear

19. Poor relationships/relationship instability and violence

20. Addiction

21. Can’t say no to yourself or others

22. Triggered and have significant reactions to anything that feels disapproving, critical, judging, or rejecting

23. No ability to set boundaries, or you have excessive guilt for setting them

24. Grandiose, better than, arrogance, workaholics, doers, falsely empowered

What is healthy shame?

Healthy shame allows for mistakes. It sees them as a gift and our best teachers. Healthy shame has grace, self-forgiveness, and acceptance of our humanity. Healthy shame recognizes when help is needed and that there are limitations to the healing that one can do. It’s creative, and rather than trying to cancel people that trigger us, someone with healthy shame learns about other views.

So, what are the solutions to healing toxic shame? It has been my experience that until we become experts in The Worst Day Cycle and Emotional Authenticity and develop the knowledge, skills, and tools to conquer our trauma, fear, shame, and denial, we will experience topic shame our entire lives.

To provide people with the knowledge, I wrote my book, ‘Your Journey to Success’ which lays out The Worst Day Cycle and how it operates in your life, keeping the toxic shame alive. To help people heal and develop the skills and tools, I created My Complete Emotional Authenticity Method.

Additional solutions:

1– My book, Your Journey To Success

2– My Complete Emotional Authenticity Method

3– My Perfectly Imperfect Private Group

4– My Private Coaching

Learn more here:

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZp7A_T5tnI[/embedyt]

When someone begins to heal from their codependency and trauma, they are bound to feel moments of shame. Whether that’s about past behavior or past experiences, most people will view shame negatively. However, there is a dysfunctional shame, which impedes progress, and healthy shame, which helps us. So today, I am going to be talking about how shame can be beneficial.

Shame can help us move forward for three simple reasons:

1- It clarifies our morals and values.

2- It helps us make amends.

3- It spurs us into action.

It is essential to understand the differences between healthy and dysfunctional shame to move forward feeling empowered.

How healthy shame clarifies our morals and values

When we find ourselves feeling shame after acting in a certain way, we’re telling ourselves what we value and what we see as moral. That sense of shame we feel for going against our morals and values helps us reconnect with our authentic selves.

When we can clarify our morals and values through healthy shame, we can think of and act on plans to rectify that feeling so that it doesn’t happen again. Without healthy shame, we wouldn’t be able to see things this clearly.

How healthy shame helps us make amends

Shame triggers empathy. It helps us recognize how our imperfections affect others as well as ourselves.

Everybody has imperfections – we’re all perfectly imperfect because we’re all human. Healthy shame provides us with an opportunity to accept this humanity and the imperfections that come along with it and act on this knowledge by making amends with ourselves or those that we have harmed.

Healthy shame provides us with a sense of forgiveness and love for ourselves. When we act imperfectly and make amends to whoever was impacted, we establish a favorable opinion of ourselves, turning that pain into self-respect, self-care, and self-love.

How healthy shame spurs us into action

When we do something against our defined morals and values, it can be hard to experience that shame as a positive. However, think about where you would be without it? Adverse action without shame leads to more negative action. With shame, we’re inspired to change and repair the relationships that may have been affected.

When experiencing healthy shame, we’re more likely to initiate a plan to fix the wrong that we are responsible for. As a result, we tend to double down on doing what we can to improve ourselves.

What to do when the shame comes back?

On your road to recovery, you are going to be faced with what is happily referred to as ‘shame burps.’ These are the moments you feel good about yourself and your recovery when a shameful memory suddenly accosts you. It only lasts a moment but can affect you with a full-body reaction and make you feel like you’re regressing. Most likely, you’re not.

These ‘shame burps’ are temporary. They are not an opportunity for you to re-victimize or belittle yourself. Instead, it’s in these moments that your self-respect, self-care, self-love, and acceptance of your perfect imperfections must come in. This is why the ‘shame burp’ is showing up; it’s an opportunity for you to realize that, yes, you’re imperfect, but now you need to forgive yourself.

When healthy shame turns dysfunctional

Re-victimizing yourself following a ‘shame burp’ is an easy way to allow the shame you feel to become dysfunctional. When you keep beating yourself up over past mistakes that you have already reconciled and moved on from, you keep the shame alive.

People often make the mistake of labeling themselves as humble for refusing to forgive themselves. However, we learn that we can be forgiven for our mistakes in almost all spiritual teachings, so why would we elevate ourselves into a God-like position to say that we cannot be forgiven? Doing this is grandiose, covertly arrogant, and incredibly destructive to our progress.

We are human, and we make mistakes. We can all be forgiven, and we all deserve forgiveness, but we need to start by forgiving ourselves.

Enjoy The Journey ??

To learn more, watch the video here: