April 29, 2024 • 48 mins
As a human, you have most likely felt shame to some degree. Although it is a normal human protective emotion to keep us safe on a societal level, shame can become toxic when it persists and when we internalize the critical narrative from that shame.
Toxic shame shows up in many ways, however, the way it shows up physiologically is understood the least, but the most telling. From posture, dilated pupils, tense muscles, to inflammation in the body, headaches, and diseases, it is possible to visibly see shame on a person’s body. This is a result of the body protecting itself, and there is no shame in that. However once it becomes maladaptive, and absolute “I am” statements start becoming permanent fixtures in rumination, one’s perception of self shifts, which can eventually cause serious mental and physical health issues.
On today’s episode, Elisabeth and Jennifer discuss how toxic shame differs from regular shame, how toxic shame shows up, what happens in the body when it does, where toxic shame originates from, how shame and pleasure shows up in those with a history of childhood sexual abuse, and what you can do to recognize and repattern toxic shame with Neuro-Somatic Coaching.
Just as toxic shame is developed, it can be undeveloped, by learning how to recognize when and how it shows up in the body, then repatterning the neural pathways in real time using NSI tools, and allowing repressed emotions to mobilize.
This episode is filled with knowledge and insight you don’t want to miss. Tune in for this and more!
Topics discussed in this episode:
- The difference between guilt and shame
- Difference between regular shame and toxic shame
- How toxic shame affects posture
- How shame is a protective response
- What is shame inflammation and its correlation to disease states?
- Why mobilizing the body is crucial to process emotions
- What is emotional attunement?
- Overcoupling of shame and pleasure in the case of childhood sexual abuse
- The types of body boundary violations
- What to do if you are having a toxic shame response?
- Why it’s important for practitioners to understand when a client is in a shame response
- Repattering shame in real time
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:08):
The other day I had a conversation with someone and
said something which inadvertently was
hurtful to the person. I
realized, they came to me and
told me about it. Cognitively I understood, it's no big
deal. I made a little mistake,
repaired the damage and was
(00:32):
going to go on about my day. Then after that
conversation, I started to notice I
felt really heavy. My joints were a little bit swollen,
I was having some digestive issues.
I felt like my voice was a little bit
tight, a little bit high pitched. My throat was kind of
(00:54):
hoarse. I realized, as I was sitting down to try to
work on some stuff, I was getting a lot of brain fog.
I realized, Oh! I'm in a shame
response. That's what it feels like somatically to
experience shame in your body, even when you don't know cognitively
you're moving into that shame response. Shame is
(01:15):
this really human emotion we all experience, but
with complex trauma, it can become toxic, chronically
dysregulating, and
harmful to our health.
Welcome to, Trauma Rewired, the podcast
that teaches you about your nervous system, how trauma lives in the
body and what you can do to heal. I'm your co host, Elizabeth Christoph. I'm
(01:38):
the founder of, brainbasedwellness.com, an online community where we use neurosomatic
tools and emotional processing to create behavior,
change trauma resolution, and improve resilience. I'm also
the founder of, Neurosomaly Somatic Intelligence Coaching. I'm
your co host, Jennifer Wallace. I'm a Neurosomatic Intelligence Practitioner
working in peak somatic experiences
(02:00):
bridging this to your nervous system. I'm
also an educator for the, Neurosomatic Intelligence Coaching Certification.
Toda,y we're exploring toxic shame,
one of the elements of classic CPTS.
We hope you enjoy this conversation. One
(02:20):
of the first important things I think to start to distinguish is
just the difference between guilt and shame.
Guilt is when I did something bad
or I did something wrong, kind of like that conversation
I was referencing. It's just a little moment where
you can go back and you can repair. Shame,
(02:41):
however, is an I am emotion. Guilt,
as I did. Shame, as I am, I am bad, I
am the mistake. Shame can last for a few hours
or even a few days. As with all emotions, it serves
a purpose. It's protective, keeping us connected to the people
in our lives, to our herd, to our important relationships.
(03:03):
It's really a society driven emotion. But, there's
toxic shame that goes much deeper than that. It's really at the core of who
we are. Toxic shame is not just that I
was bad, but I am
worthless at my core from that constant conditioning of
the shame loop. Because it's so deep, it becomes
(03:25):
toxic, to our health and to our nervous system health and our
behaviors. That's what we are going to really dive
into today. How Toxic Shame it disconnects us from ourselves, the physiological
implications and the impact on our nervous
system. Shame is
such an interesting emotional response from the body-
an interesting physiological response in the body.
(03:48):
We just talked about the inner critic - I think the inner critic
and toxic shame both have another element
to them that's just like a regular experience of a
critic, of the inner critic voice, or a regular experience of experiencing shame.
Yet the
complex part of this
(04:10):
is, when it does get toxic. As you were saying, like, I am worthless
to my core. Just as we talked about an inner critic,
there's a lens that shifts here. It's not just. " Oh,
I'm experiencing shame". In this
particular instance, it just goes everywhere into our bodies,
our homes and just everything that you look at now has a
(04:33):
lens of toxic shame.
Shame, is a normal
emotion, and it's trying to keep attachment safe for
social safety. So let's talk about that.
Everyone experiences
shame because we belong to a herd. We belong
(04:54):
to a collective. That's what we've been talking about all season, in
Season Three. It's part of being human is to
experience shame and to experience
each other's nervous systems, to be part of a collective and part of a tribe,
part of our herd. Recently,
I experienced someregular shame. It was a really
(05:17):
new experience for me. I could
feel that I had done something wrong.
I did not behave in the right way.
When that became a
conversation with the person who I was not really
behaving well with, thankfully, that person is regulated
(05:40):
and can understand with a higher level of altitude, my nervous
system, and what I was experiencing. So, in our
conversation, as things started to get worked out, it was like,
didn't totally shut me down. I didn't experience freeze
dissociation. I did not go into the all of I am
worthless. I was able to just move it through my body and
(06:02):
really compliment myself on the back and like, oh, I
just experienced regular shame. Ordinary shame is
going to arise in response to a specific event or a perceived
wrongdoing. Toxic shame, on the other hand, is chronic
and deeply ingrained. And it may not always
feel continuous, but it can resurface intensely
(06:23):
when it does get triggered. And there are a couple
of key differences here. Um, they
both could negatively impact the sense of self.
When toxic shame erodes
self worth over time. S,o it's
(06:45):
also somewhat disproportionate. Right. We can see that
with the inner critic, there's a disproportionate level
of shame to what the experience was.
The durations could change, too.
As with regular shame, you could get through that maybe even in
a couple of hours, maybe just that day, and just this experience time
(07:07):
as you're processing. But toxic shame, it's not
like ordinary shame. Toxic shame persists, and it
really colors the lens of an individual's
overall self perception.
That's why it becomes
toxic. Really looking what do we mean
(07:29):
bythe word, toxic? You hear the word thrown
around quite a bit. Toxic relationships, toxic shame. But,
in this context, we're talking about chronically
dysregulating in a way that is so
overwhelming to our nervous system that we can't adapt and come
back to regulation and safety and homeostasis,
(07:51):
and that is actually harmful to our health.
That's what happens for those of us with, CPTS.
Toxic shame, as you mentioned, has an enduring
component - this enduring sense of worthlessness, and
a deep, deep belief that we are fundamentally bad
or flawed or wrong or crazy, and
(08:11):
that really impacts our
physiology a lot of the time.
We're exploring these chronic health outcomes.
Usually developing during our childhood, when we're
still shaping our concept of ourself and we're
very susceptible to our nervous system adapting to
(08:35):
keep us safe and socially connected. We
internalize these critical messages about
ourselves, then as we bake those
into our own neural architecture, that leads to
more threat all of the time, because we have that
belief about ourselves that we're protecting against. There's always
(08:56):
this constant social threat of being abandoned, of being
rejected, of people really seeing who we are. So our
system is really primed in that protective
way, and it can drive then a lot of our behavior,
this excessive rumination on what other people are thinking
about us and overplaying conversations and then getting the
(09:17):
activation in the nervous system as you replay that conversation over and over
again, the perfectionism that we talked about with the inner
critic and the way that that either shuts us down or drives us into
overdoing and over performing so many big fears
of how we'll appear looking foolish, that we start to guard ourselves
and are very rigid with ourselves and how we show
(09:39):
up and the emotions that
can be triggered by shame, the anger that can come with it,
or the emotions that can be repressed by it. There's a
whole emotional component that can happen
with shame being toxic in our body as well.
In our intro, you
(10:02):
opened up with some of the experiences that you
were actually having in your body, I mean, there's a real physiological
effect with shame. And firstly,
it's immobilizing, right. Shame is immobilizing. It's a
heightened parasympathetic state. It's
contraction, turning in to the body and
(10:24):
shutting down. It's primary
feelings are," I need to disappear".
Then, dissociation. Feeling small, playing small and hiding in your life,
leads to the inability to use voluntary
behaviors. We can't get into
(10:44):
those higher order systems of thinking that we talk about shame
also, it has a posture to it. The emotions of shame
have a direct effect on our posture. We call this,
through the lens of NSI a, Collapse Posture. This
is eyes down, rounded spine, constricted
pupils, head lowered, striated
(11:07):
muscles of the face between, like, I'm
not going to say that part. When even when we're looking at clients, we could
see this internal drawing in, turning
into the body. It's very round. Nina
Bolt says, when someone is locked in a posture of an emotion,
you cannot change the emotion without changing the posture.
(11:30):
I love this because this really
is the connection of, like, the nervous system in its, in
its fluidity and how our posture is going to change
based on the emotions that we're experiencing. You wouldn't be
experiencing shame and then leading with your heart, shoulders
down and back with your head up. It's all going to be
(11:52):
turned downwards. There could be some felt senses of
the body, like rubbery legs. You may feel
like faint, lightheaded, and a real inability to
move. This could cause nausea,
ringing in the ears, a loss of perspective
and feeling as if you are like being cut
(12:15):
open. It
can be painful because it doesn't always live with itself.
Yes. The posture is so
recognizable and interesting to explore because
we know posture comes from our brainstem. These
(12:35):
reflexive trauma responses come from our brainstem. And so our
posture is so much a reflection of that
response that's happening in our brain and then
being embodied through our posture and
shame is really linked with freeze
primarily because, remember, it's trying to protect
(12:56):
us from doing or saying something that might sever
our social attachment. So a lot of the time, that immobility that you
talked about, it's because it's trying to protect us
from. From taking an action or using our voice that
could be dangerous at a social level. And
so most of the time, this is linked with that freeze
(13:20):
response. The freeze response is so interesting, because
there's both an activation and a
parasympathetic part of that as well. The parasympathetic system
puts the brakes on your ability to mobilize. So,
we'll feel in freeze, an activation manifest, like a racing heart
rate, sweaty palms or the tension
(13:41):
in our muscles and that collapsed posture. But at the same time,
we're also getting a big parasympathetic activation
that will take
away our vocal abilities, keep us from being able to move,
actually, over time, slow our heart rate down.
And so you're experiencing both. Right.
(14:04):
Freeze is different from fight and flight, where we're mostly
going into an activated state. Now, we also
have this shutdown part of this reflexive
response- this was originally referred to
as, crouching. You can see that in the posture, when
you think of that, really curled in posture, but it's the complete absence
(14:26):
of movement, except for maybe some breath or
a little bit of muscle tension, but it's in a healthy isometric
contraction. Freeze is meant to be
pretty short lived. Then we'll freeze,and then we'll move into our next
reflexive response of running or fighting, but with
shame. If it's continuously being activated, we might be re
(14:48):
experiencing that freeze response over and over again. We're getting
activated and we're getting shut down at the same time
with big sympathetic activation and parasympathetic activation.
This
is going to have an effect on the body, in the inflammation part
of the body. Right. What does that feel like? Well, you've
(15:11):
talked about it a little bit today - a heavy sinking
feeling. It's the feeling of feeling bloated, but you
have no idea kind of why. And yet you've. We talked about
this with, Doctor Perry Nicholson when we explored chronic
pain and emotions. We talked about the idea of shame-flammation,
that there is research that
(15:32):
says there is a higher inflammatory response with shame.
And once we realize that, we were like, oh, my God, this is
such a big discovery in our lives. This gives language
to a felt experience inside the
body that has really not had a lot of. Has
not had a real cognitive something for us to
(15:53):
hold on to, to understand, because it is a response coming
from the body. We talked about the
inner critic and development, having attachment that through the lens
of complex trauma, shame is exaggerated
because we need that connection and
it just only furthers as we move into our adult
(16:16):
lives. This is
really interesting. There have
been studies about self blame
- reporting the greatest increase in a shame response, and
it shows the greatest elevations in pro-inflammatory cytokine
activity, while levels of guilt and general
(16:38):
negative emotions were unrelated to cytokine changes.
Shame-flammation, it's inflammatory
markers increase with the emotional experience of
shame. If we are constantly experiencing
shame, then there is an ongoing inflammatory response in the
body that can lead to a disease state. We
(17:01):
work with our tools every day to help
create a new physiological experience in the
body. And not only that, but it's back to having the awareness
of understanding, oh, this is
shameflammation. This is a response that coming from inside
of my body. And it's the neuroto's that help help
(17:22):
improve the health of our nervous system.
Totally. It was such a huge moment for me
when we started to find those studies, because we
would talk about, oh, I'm in shame. We felt it. We recognized it
somatically. We knew when we were bloated and heavy and puffy that there was
shame going on, and then there were these studies being like, yeah, actually
(17:45):
there is more inflammation with shame than almost
any other emotion. And that was so
wild to research and to
understand it that way. I want to
really kind of lay out for people what's happening here, because
this is the toxic part. This is the part that's creating
(18:07):
that toxic environment inside of our body that harms our health.
So with all protective trauma responses,
with all stress responses, there's inflammation. But again, it's heavier
with shame. What happens with inflammation or stress
response is that our immune system really goes into. Into
hyperdrive. First our HPA
(18:29):
Axis will get activated, and then we start producing more
cortisol. And then that cortisol response happens. And
then the immune system starts producing inflammatory
proteins that circulate through the body and try to find and
take out any kind of invaders or pathogens or unhealthy cell
growth. Normal levels of
(18:50):
inflammation is good. It's healthy - it's the way that our immune system
heals our body. But, when we have
chronic inflammation, our immune system is over
producing that, over overproducing those
inflammatory proteins going too much into the inflammatory
response, and those proteins actually start to damage our
(19:12):
own body tissue, which is where we get things like
autoimmune disease, because our body is sending out these proteins,
and they're looking for something to attack, and they don't find
anything. So, it sends them out again. They don't find anything, it sends them
out again. Eventually, they're going to start to find
something and that can become your own tissue.
(19:33):
When the body, the immune system, starts attacking itself,
that is autoimmune and a chronic inflammatory response
is really at the heart of autoimmune dysfunction. On
the flip side of that, what can also happen, IF that doesn't happen?
Our immune system gets really exhausted and depleted, because
it's working on overdrive all of the time. Then
(19:56):
it starts not being able to do its job as well, it
can't fight off pathogens, or fight off cells it
doesn't want to be there. Then you're more likely to get
sick, have a heavier viral load, or maybe even experience
cancer. Like me.
We've recorded so
(20:18):
many conversations on emotions, particularly
throughoutSseason Two, that I can't
recommend enough, because Elizabeth is
really linking the disease state to repress emotions.
Just let that sink in
for a moment. Like she just said, cancer, is an autoimmune response. That's what
(20:39):
we had, that's what we experienced. Then
I experienced the shame of getting a diagnosis.
That brought on shame, because I really felt like
I was going to lose my herd, lose my tribe, lose
my family and my friends that I really needed the support of
at a time when I was in need. A heavy diagnosis.
(21:00):
You know, shame is
a protective emotion. It's the emotion
that comes to the front to intentionally repress
other emotions. So, the question really is,
what's underneath of this shame? What's underneath
shame, that it doesn't feel safe for
(21:20):
me to experience? Maybe, you
really feel deep down, you want to
cry or express some anger, but you can't. You literally can't
get those tears to come up. Then you experience shame.
You feel shame because you can't express the
emotions that you're holding on to.
(21:42):
Or maybe you do process the emotions, but then after
that experience of experiencing your emotions, you feel shame.
Emotional processing requires
mobility. Just like we said, with shame being a
heightened parasympathetic response, you don't have a lot of
mobility. When we lock up with freeze and shame,
(22:04):
it's hard to process an emotion. We really, we can't do it.
I mean, when you think about somatic emotional expression
work, that those are motor pathways.
Our diaphragm has to be mobilizing for
those breaths and gasps. Our vocals have to be able to
(22:25):
express sound. We have to move our body
and move that energy through the body. And when
we're frozen up, we, we can't, we can't have that emotional
expression. That really affects our long term health because when our
body is bracing and holding in
all of those emotions, we get a lot of muscle tension, we get
(22:48):
a lot of changes to our posture, like you were talking about,
that can create chronic pain in the
body. It can be very energy costly, a lot of fatigue
that comes from that. I think we talked in one of our lives about,
emotional expression is just a normal physiological
process, just like sneezing. Think about if you needed
(23:10):
to sneeze and you were trying not to, how hard
you'd have to work, how much tension in your muscles, how much energy that
takes to suppress that natural body mechanism.
It's the same with emotional expression. It's a really high
energy cost to our body all of the time, then
that constant over depletion of our energy
(23:34):
to repress or suppress all of that can also lead
us into some maladaptive behaviors because we're trying to
get regulation in another way, or we're trying to
keep that emotion repressed through the
behavior. So we might find ourselves binge eating
or social media scrolling or numbing out in all kinds of
(23:55):
ways that can then be harmful to our health as
well. When we don't get to express the
emotion and move it through the body and mobilize that energy, we're not
completing our stress response. -crying,
stomping, shaking, these are all very
natural ways that the body completes that activation of the
(24:16):
stress response and lets our nervous system and our body come
back into a rest and digest or recover states. That ability
to modulate between those states. When we
don't have the tools to cry, to
emote, to scream, to move, we never get that completion.
This affects our hormone health, because we stay in those heightened levels of
(24:38):
stress, chemicals, adrenaline and cortisol going through the
body, we start to experience the
protective outputs of a threat bucket that's overflowing because
we don't get the stress relief. So the stress is just building up, building up,
building up. That could look like migraines,
cardiovascular issues, all kinds
(25:00):
of outputs, chronic fatigue that are coming from
that inability to regulate our stress
response. The roots of
toxic shame are like everything rooted
in our development and often attached to chronic
misattunement. Children need attunement,
(25:21):
and we're going to talk about what is attunement and why we need it
and how this chronic misattunement does lead
to shame about ourselves. So, what is attunement?
Attunement is the reactiveness we have to another person.
It's the process by which we form relationships.
If you've ever seen an orchestra before,
(25:43):
they start playing, they start tuning their instruments, they're tuning to one
another. They're feeling the other sound,
because they are coming together.
That's what we're doing in relationship. We are coming
together. When we are developing, if we have
parents that are incredibly stressed out, if we're learning that our
(26:05):
attachment might get severed for some reason - remember, this is our literal
survival! We start changing different things.
Dan Siegel says, when we attune with others, we
allow our internal state to shift, to come, to
resonate with the world, the inner world of another.
This resonance is at the heart of the importance of feeling
(26:28):
felt that emerges in close relationships. Children
need attunement to feel secure and to develop well. And throughout
our lives, we need attunement to feel close and collect
connected. So, say a
parent is not seeing that a child is
upset or crying or feeling stressed and doesn't go to them
(26:50):
to nurture them and hold them and let. Let them know, like, hey, I
see you. I feel you. This is
where mis-attunement leads to the toxic
shame, because, when we don't feel seen, heard,
or felt, we are going to start looking at other
ways to be outside of ourselves, leading to chronic self
(27:12):
abandonment and just trying to get those needs met. And all the
while, just those narratives. I am bad.
I am fill in the blank. That's what starts happening for
little children. In adult relationships,
attunement might be an adult who always says
something. Or mi-sattunment might look like something
(27:34):
like, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine. Another person
can feel the nervous system, but the person who's experiencing it
can't talk about it. They can't express their regular feelings. You shut
down with just this robot responsive. I'm fine. It's fine.
Everything's okay. You
know, when I think about that response,
(27:57):
I used to say that response a lot. It's fine. I'm fine. I'm okay.
I didn't know how to express my emotions. I didn't feel safe.
It felt more safe to push those emotions down
and to not understand them. And at the same
time, I wasn't able to secure connections
(28:18):
that I felt really safe in because I didn't feel safe
internally. It becomes
kind of bigger than you
- it's like what you want the most is connection, but
you can't get there. In a way, you become the person that's
like you block yourself.
(28:41):
Absolutely. It's really
just like we talked about in the inner critic episode,
that if we're developing in this environment
with caregivers that are chronically misattuned
and yet we're seeking that attunement for our emotional
expression, our nervous system regulation, we become hyper
(29:04):
vigilant about changing ourselves,
about that internal critic voice so that we can change
ourselves. There must be something wrong with me because I'm not getting my needs
met at a survival level that's very dangerous for
my little developing nervous system. I'm going to
internalize that it's my fault and that there's something
(29:26):
wrong with me. Over time, as we continue to develop
in that environment where we don't have anyone attuned to our
needs, that just becomes a
deeply ingrained, well worn path to go into this.
There's something wrong here that I need to fix
about myself because we can't, as
(29:48):
children, grasp the fact that it doesn't have to do with
us. When we talk about all this, we're not talking
about this to put blame on the primary caregivers. There's a lot
of structural reasons and systemic reasons, why
a caregiver might not have the capacity to attune to
their child. If you're a single working mother, if you're an immigrant, if you're
(30:11):
dealing with a bunch of other social stress - there are so many things that
would cause a caregiver to not have the social support they need and
the financial stability that they need and the
time to be regulated, to be attuned. This
is still the outcome that the child still
doesn't get the attunement that it needs. These
(30:33):
reflexive responses and deep wounds
of shame get really baked
into the nervous system.
I think there's an opportunity here for us to
say as well, that emotional neglect
is also an ACE Score.
(30:54):
If we are not being emotionally
attuned to, and that can feel like perceived
neglect, maybe it is actual neglect.
Either way, the shame
response, it's coming. Perceived
or real, that shame responses is here with
(31:15):
us. And, you know, one of the things that we talk
about on here a lot is sexual
abuse and the over coupling of shame and
pleasure. You
know, a lot of times for a
little developing nervous system that is
(31:38):
experiencing sexual trauma in the
pleasure center, in our genital
areas, it's going to get
very confusing as we grow up.
This shame that I experienced from this
early developmental trauma in my pleasure center,
(31:59):
can feel shameful as I grow up as a sexual being.
As a sexual human in the world. In
the case of sexual trauma and early childhood
sexual abuse, I really do think this has another
layer attached to it in the realms of shame because of
that coupling - overcoupling.
How can
(32:22):
I experience pleasure and shame at the same time? Then
that puts us into really dangerous places
as adults, as we are exploring our sexuality.
We had a great conversation
about fawn and sexual fawn with, Luis
Mojica in Season Three. At the beginning, if you go back
(32:44):
and just like we were talking about ACE Scores,
if shame
is protective, that layer
of protective shame is going to come on. When
our sexuality, our sexual organs or our sexual
experiences, our bodies have been violated.
(33:05):
Then the body, as we were
just talking about a minute ago, can become over coupled with arousal.
The pleasure gets over-coupled with shame
and woven in together so intrinsically that
it can be really hard to learn how
to live a pleasurable life when you are also experiencing
(33:27):
high levels of chronic shame. It goes back
to jumping and standing still at the same time.
So, how can we live a pleasurable life
when we have had experienced this
overcoupling with shame and our bodies?
Yes, absolutely. No wonder, so many people
(33:51):
also are afraid to experience pleasure. That's
a whole practice in and of itself. Also,
whenever I'm experiencing pleasure, there's
also a shame response occurring in my body and all of
the physiological components that come with that, including the
inflammation. When we recorded our episode on Shame,
(34:13):
I talked about this a little bit then, but as we were looking at
these studies linking the increase in the
inflammatory cytokines with shame,
I just couldn't help but start thinking
about sexual abuse and what's happening
there. When
(34:36):
we think about the inflammatory response, it's a little bit different than
just bracing. It's this deep internal
protection of something invading your body -
that's how my body defends against that
internal injury. Then, it's part of my real threat
response. It made me wonder about that overcoupling
(34:57):
of a body boundary violation
with the shame response. If that has something
to do with the link of why there's so much inflammation with
the shame response, that our body boundary violations
can lead to that deep internal threat response.
We know, too, from
(35:19):
a lot of somatic literature, that when we can't set
boundaries ourselves, our body will do it for us. And
that inflammation is our body protecting us first and foremost.
If it goes on for too
long, it creates disease. But, if this happens a lot
in development, those same experiences where we
(35:41):
experience shame - maybe we were being
abused or we were taking on the shame of our abuser, we were
having an experience that brings that shame on. We knew
that it wasn't socially acceptable. So we have these big shame experiences
and at the same time, we're experiencing body boundary violations. That
inflammatory threat response,
(36:01):
yes, it gets overcoupled
with the pleasure. It also gets over-coupled with body boundary
violations and then boundary violations in general.
It's our body's way of, as we were
little, protecting us from a very
deep violation. What we know about body
(36:23):
and about body boundary violations is that
they live on a spectrum. Someone could look at me cross
when I'm out in public just doing my thing, going about
my business, and could cross a body boundary violation just in
the way they look at me, right? We all know that sometimes
a man will look at us and we're like, oh, he thinks I'm pretty. There's
(36:44):
no threat there. Then, you'll feel a totally other nervous system give
you the same look, and there is a level of threat there - a body
boundary violation. When my body feels that nervous system look
at me and then elicit all of that response,
all of these responses in my body.
I really think that was just important to stop there for a
(37:06):
moment and think about body boundary violations -then, of
course, all the rest. On the other end of the spectrum, is the
physical action being taken on my body without
my body's consent.
And so we've said
many times today, talking about the posture of shame and that really
(37:29):
curling, in effect. That's part of what shame does
as a language that says, don't look at me, do not look at
me, don't talk to me, don't connect with me.
That's really isolating. I mean, that
is a REALLY isolating, dangerous place to be.
It
furthers the
(37:50):
dissociation internally when we cannot connect to
ourselves in real time and when we
cannot attach to other people. Like,
we're saying we need the belonging, we want the belonging. We
really want that. But deep down, even though that is something that
we need in our survival, needing that tribe, needing our
(38:12):
herd, the isolation is the
immobility of the shame is what keeps you being able
to move into that and even going into, like, trusting
support that you may have. It has negative impacts on health,
because we know from season three that relationships and connection are
a major driver of not just our mental. Of
(38:34):
not just our mental health, but our physical health outcomes.
Yeah, it's so interesting because here we have this
response that's trying to keep us connected socially, trying to
maintain our attachments, but it's actually disconnecting us
with those postures, leading to isolation.
At a really deep nervous system level, it's disconnecting
(38:57):
us because we talked a lot in the early part of season three about
how our nervous systems communicate across the social synapse in this
really unconscious way that we're always reading the signals of
other people's nervous systems, their vocal tone, their eye
position, their body posture. When I'm in this shame response,
my nervous system is sending out a signal of,
(39:19):
do not connect with me. Do not get close to me.
I can't make eye contact, I lose my voice, my actual ability
to communicate and connect. I'm curled in on myself.
I'm braced. I'm protected against you .At
this subconscious nervous system
level, I'm now projecting a disconnect from
(39:40):
another person, even though I'm trying to do this
to maintain my connection with others. It can really be
quite isolating when we are cycling through that
shame response. Other people's nervous systems recognize this,
too -when we are dissociated. They know that we've left
the space that the connection has been severed,
(40:03):
so that dissociation disconnects us as well.
Back to attunement. We know when another nervous system is
present with us and when they're not. It's so
important that we, as practitioners, therapists,
coaches, guides and facilitators, look at your client
and know when they are in a shame response. There's another way
(40:25):
we want to be with a person who is in
a shame response, correct? It's not about direct eye contact. It's certain
ways that we position ourselves and there's certain tools that
we're going to want to use with that client to
then help them come out of that shame response. That
kind of leads us into what do we do when we
(40:46):
have this shame response, this toxic shame, or you're feeling that
shame-flammation we're describing. Step one of this process, is to recognize
the shame response, to understand it in
your body. That all starts with a
daily nervous system practice. So you can understand
the nuances of your nervous system to gain the awareness.
(41:08):
When you were
talking, it made me think of a
really key point that you brought up. As practitioners
being able to recognize the shame response and know how to
work with it differently because there's something called the, Backdraft Effect. This is
(41:28):
when someone is in shame, if we push into that, we
try to connect to them too much. We try to
talk about the shame or really force them
into intimate conversation or in looking at it, it can make the shame
worse. It's this idea of when you have a fire
and you bring air and light in, it actually makes the fire get bigger. That
(41:49):
has been shown to be very much the case with clients that are
in shame. We need to have other ways of working with somebody.
Not talking directly about the shame, using sensory signals
of the nervous system, maybe having them sit so
they're not having to make direct eye contact with us, working around at a
very subtle nervous system level to move
(42:12):
out of the shame rather than just talk. That is really important.
I'm really glad that you brought that up. Also,
remembering for all of us, as we're listening to
this episode and maybe hearing ourselves in it, resonating with it,
that this response is just a reflexive pattern
(42:32):
built into the nervous system. We're neuroplastic
beings and we can re-pattern this with
repetition. We just have to know how to work with the nervous
system and we have to have the tools this response is not who you
are. You can start to separate yourself
from the response so you have more self compassion and
(42:53):
recognize it just as a response so you don't get more shame. Then begin
to really learn the ways to work with the
nervous system to re pattern that response in real time
so that a new reaction becomes. The well worn
path and finding really small ways to
mobilize. For example, it could look like humming. You could
(43:15):
be on a vibration plate, or you could walk. You
could get some sensory stimulus if you're in bed. There are certain tools
that we would use. You know, if you get on site with us and join
us at, rewiretrial.com. you'll find a ton of neuro tools
you
can
(43:37):
use to get you out of this shame response.
It all starts to re-pattern shame in
real time. That's what we want to do. We want to interrupt the pattern
when we are experiencing it.
(43:59):
Another good thing about being on site and being on community is that it can
just be very useful, because sometimes when we're
immobilized and shut down, we can't even think about what do
we need to do. It's easier to just jump on site,
find the shame, find the emotional processing, find that
mobilization that we need, and do it together.
(44:20):
It can just be
so much more overwhelming to have to cognitively think your
way out of something and when it comes to the body, once again, we,
the nervous system doesn't speak our english language. It speaks
in sensory language. I
even do that myself sometimes if I'm starting to
(44:43):
dissociate or I'm in a shame response instead of trying to figure
it out for myself in the moment, because my higher order, this, my higher
order thinking systems are not working great. I'll just
actually go on to the, On Demand Library,click the buttons for shame,
mobility, freeze respons and just
pull up one of your classes. One of Jennifer Simpson's
(45:06):
classes, and do that class soI don't have to try to think my way out
of it. It's not going to be great to try to think my way out
of it. Another really important thing to start
to work with is our InteroceptiveSsystem - the system inside of us that tells our
brain what's going on in our body. We want to
rehabilitate that system because we want to be able
(45:28):
to hear the signals coming from within our body so we know
when we're moving into a shame response. We also want to begin
making those signals safe, starting to interpret them with accuracy, so
we're not perceiving too much threat from those
signals coming inside of our body. That can lead
us into these other repressive mechanisms or
(45:50):
shame responses. When there's so much threat attributed
to those signals, that requires working in a minimum effective
dose. Sometimes, we've got to externally orient at first, because dropping
into the body feels too overwhelming and scary.
Little by little, coupling feeling those sensations
with other neurotools that create safety
(46:11):
in our body and help us regulate and stay present,
starts to re pattern that experience. So now I'm
able to feel those signals and not move into the threat
response. It's so vital -
so important to be able to understand the signals that are coming in and
from your body. Having these higher level of awarenesses that you might
(46:33):
be able to start to connect some dots, comes
from lowering the threat on a daily basis and then starting to recognize
what brings you pleasure and
brings you joy. By allowing yourself to experience
that. When we say pleasure, yes, that can
include sexual, intimate experiences. But pleasure
(46:54):
could also just be like putting your
face in the sun, walking in the grass, going swimming, dancing, or hearing your
favorite song. What do you enjoy?
Then, how can you intentionally engage in
those things? Allow
your nervous system to feel the joy, to
(47:17):
be present with the pleasure in your body that
is going to maybe, maybe for some people
listening to us, that feels so far away and that's okay. We do
workshops around pleasure and experiencing pleasure on your
nervous system, where once again, we start in a really minimum effective dose way. What
clothes do I like to feel on my skin?
(47:39):
What do I like to feel the sensations of? We
start to build on that until we can really touch our
bodies and get into more intimate experiences with, say,
sexual and intimate pleasure.
It's so key starting with
those other ways of experiencing pleasure.
(48:02):
because if we try right away to dive into sexual intimacy
and undoing that overcoupling there, that
can be really setting us up for a
not great experience. Just starting
with that minimum effective dose and making, creating
that safety around experiencing pleasure in the body
(48:24):
just for little bits of time is so powerful, it's so
impactful and leads to a life where you can have
pleasure. It's really worth it. It's really
worth it. Finally, some of the practices
that have helped me the most coming out of and moving
this shame response through my body is vocal practices, vocal toning, and working with my
(48:46):
vocal cords. We do a lot of
those classes on the site where we're just at a really nervous system somatic level,
working with the body to restore
mobility, to get activation and relaxation to the vocal cords so
that it helps your body from a bottom up approach to
come out of that freeze, out of that immobility, from out of that shame
(49:08):
response. Then, the thoughts and the emotional experience
will start to shift just by
changing what's happening in the body with your neurotools. It's really incredible.
You can interrupt
shame in real time, you can re pattern your life, reconnecting to
your body and learn what those voluntary mobility drills
(49:30):
are. You could even look at
your posture sometimes to be like, oh, gosh, I'm I'm in a rounded
state. What am I, what am I doing here?
There's so many different ways that this can come into your
awareness once you get into the work, once you get on the site with
us and learn how to activate your
(49:54):
nervous system and the sympathetic response, it's very powerful,
y'all. So, I do hope you'll join us at,
rewiretrial.com. Next week, we'll be
moving right along in our series. So, tune in next week,
and we'll keep going through these characteristics.
See y'all next week. Thank you. Bye.
The other day I had a conversation with someone and
said something which inadvertently was
hurtful to the person. I
realized, they came to me and
told me about it. Cognitively I understood, it's no big
deal. I made a little mistake,
repaired the damage and was
(00:32):
going to go on about my day. Then after that
conversation, I started to notice I
felt really heavy. My joints were a little bit swollen,
I was having some digestive issues.
I felt like my voice was a little bit
tight, a little bit high pitched. My throat was kind of
(00:54):
hoarse. I realized, as I was sitting down to try to
work on some stuff, I was getting a lot of brain fog.
I realized, Oh! I'm in a shame
response. That's what it feels like somatically to
experience shame in your body, even when you don't know cognitively
you're moving into that shame response. Shame is
(01:15):
this really human emotion we all experience, but
with complex trauma, it can become toxic, chronically
dysregulating, and
harmful to our health.
Welcome to, Trauma Rewired, the podcast
that teaches you about your nervous system, how trauma lives in the
body and what you can do to heal. I'm your co host, Elizabeth Christoph. I'm
(01:38):
the founder of, brainbasedwellness.com, an online community where we use neurosomatic
tools and emotional processing to create behavior,
change trauma resolution, and improve resilience. I'm also
the founder of, Neurosomaly Somatic Intelligence Coaching. I'm
your co host, Jennifer Wallace. I'm a Neurosomatic Intelligence Practitioner
working in peak somatic experiences
(02:00):
bridging this to your nervous system. I'm
also an educator for the, Neurosomatic Intelligence Coaching Certification.
Toda,y we're exploring toxic shame,
one of the elements of classic CPTS.
We hope you enjoy this conversation. One
(02:20):
of the first important things I think to start to distinguish is
just the difference between guilt and shame.
Guilt is when I did something bad
or I did something wrong, kind of like that conversation
I was referencing. It's just a little moment where
you can go back and you can repair. Shame,
(02:41):
however, is an I am emotion. Guilt,
as I did. Shame, as I am, I am bad, I
am the mistake. Shame can last for a few hours
or even a few days. As with all emotions, it serves
a purpose. It's protective, keeping us connected to the people
in our lives, to our herd, to our important relationships.
(03:03):
It's really a society driven emotion. But, there's
toxic shame that goes much deeper than that. It's really at the core of who
we are. Toxic shame is not just that I
was bad, but I am
worthless at my core from that constant conditioning of
the shame loop. Because it's so deep, it becomes
(03:25):
toxic, to our health and to our nervous system health and our
behaviors. That's what we are going to really dive
into today. How Toxic Shame it disconnects us from ourselves, the physiological
implications and the impact on our nervous
system. Shame is
such an interesting emotional response from the body-
an interesting physiological response in the body.
(03:48):
We just talked about the inner critic - I think the inner critic
and toxic shame both have another element
to them that's just like a regular experience of a
critic, of the inner critic voice, or a regular experience of experiencing shame.
Yet the
complex part of this
(04:10):
is, when it does get toxic. As you were saying, like, I am worthless
to my core. Just as we talked about an inner critic,
there's a lens that shifts here. It's not just. " Oh,
I'm experiencing shame". In this
particular instance, it just goes everywhere into our bodies,
our homes and just everything that you look at now has a
(04:33):
lens of toxic shame.
Shame, is a normal
emotion, and it's trying to keep attachment safe for
social safety. So let's talk about that.
Everyone experiences
shame because we belong to a herd. We belong
(04:54):
to a collective. That's what we've been talking about all season, in
Season Three. It's part of being human is to
experience shame and to experience
each other's nervous systems, to be part of a collective and part of a tribe,
part of our herd. Recently,
I experienced someregular shame. It was a really
(05:17):
new experience for me. I could
feel that I had done something wrong.
I did not behave in the right way.
When that became a
conversation with the person who I was not really
behaving well with, thankfully, that person is regulated
(05:40):
and can understand with a higher level of altitude, my nervous
system, and what I was experiencing. So, in our
conversation, as things started to get worked out, it was like,
didn't totally shut me down. I didn't experience freeze
dissociation. I did not go into the all of I am
worthless. I was able to just move it through my body and
(06:02):
really compliment myself on the back and like, oh, I
just experienced regular shame. Ordinary shame is
going to arise in response to a specific event or a perceived
wrongdoing. Toxic shame, on the other hand, is chronic
and deeply ingrained. And it may not always
feel continuous, but it can resurface intensely
(06:23):
when it does get triggered. And there are a couple
of key differences here. Um, they
both could negatively impact the sense of self.
When toxic shame erodes
self worth over time. S,o it's
(06:45):
also somewhat disproportionate. Right. We can see that
with the inner critic, there's a disproportionate level
of shame to what the experience was.
The durations could change, too.
As with regular shame, you could get through that maybe even in
a couple of hours, maybe just that day, and just this experience time
(07:07):
as you're processing. But toxic shame, it's not
like ordinary shame. Toxic shame persists, and it
really colors the lens of an individual's
overall self perception.
That's why it becomes
toxic. Really looking what do we mean
(07:29):
bythe word, toxic? You hear the word thrown
around quite a bit. Toxic relationships, toxic shame. But,
in this context, we're talking about chronically
dysregulating in a way that is so
overwhelming to our nervous system that we can't adapt and come
back to regulation and safety and homeostasis,
(07:51):
and that is actually harmful to our health.
That's what happens for those of us with, CPTS.
Toxic shame, as you mentioned, has an enduring
component - this enduring sense of worthlessness, and
a deep, deep belief that we are fundamentally bad
or flawed or wrong or crazy, and
(08:11):
that really impacts our
physiology a lot of the time.
We're exploring these chronic health outcomes.
Usually developing during our childhood, when we're
still shaping our concept of ourself and we're
very susceptible to our nervous system adapting to
(08:35):
keep us safe and socially connected. We
internalize these critical messages about
ourselves, then as we bake those
into our own neural architecture, that leads to
more threat all of the time, because we have that
belief about ourselves that we're protecting against. There's always
(08:56):
this constant social threat of being abandoned, of being
rejected, of people really seeing who we are. So our
system is really primed in that protective
way, and it can drive then a lot of our behavior,
this excessive rumination on what other people are thinking
about us and overplaying conversations and then getting the
(09:17):
activation in the nervous system as you replay that conversation over and over
again, the perfectionism that we talked about with the inner
critic and the way that that either shuts us down or drives us into
overdoing and over performing so many big fears
of how we'll appear looking foolish, that we start to guard ourselves
and are very rigid with ourselves and how we show
(09:39):
up and the emotions that
can be triggered by shame, the anger that can come with it,
or the emotions that can be repressed by it. There's a
whole emotional component that can happen
with shame being toxic in our body as well.
In our intro, you
(10:02):
opened up with some of the experiences that you
were actually having in your body, I mean, there's a real physiological
effect with shame. And firstly,
it's immobilizing, right. Shame is immobilizing. It's a
heightened parasympathetic state. It's
contraction, turning in to the body and
(10:24):
shutting down. It's primary
feelings are," I need to disappear".
Then, dissociation. Feeling small, playing small and hiding in your life,
leads to the inability to use voluntary
behaviors. We can't get into
(10:44):
those higher order systems of thinking that we talk about shame
also, it has a posture to it. The emotions of shame
have a direct effect on our posture. We call this,
through the lens of NSI a, Collapse Posture. This
is eyes down, rounded spine, constricted
pupils, head lowered, striated
(11:07):
muscles of the face between, like, I'm
not going to say that part. When even when we're looking at clients, we could
see this internal drawing in, turning
into the body. It's very round. Nina
Bolt says, when someone is locked in a posture of an emotion,
you cannot change the emotion without changing the posture.
(11:30):
I love this because this really
is the connection of, like, the nervous system in its, in
its fluidity and how our posture is going to change
based on the emotions that we're experiencing. You wouldn't be
experiencing shame and then leading with your heart, shoulders
down and back with your head up. It's all going to be
(11:52):
turned downwards. There could be some felt senses of
the body, like rubbery legs. You may feel
like faint, lightheaded, and a real inability to
move. This could cause nausea,
ringing in the ears, a loss of perspective
and feeling as if you are like being cut
(12:15):
open. It
can be painful because it doesn't always live with itself.
Yes. The posture is so
recognizable and interesting to explore because
we know posture comes from our brainstem. These
(12:35):
reflexive trauma responses come from our brainstem. And so our
posture is so much a reflection of that
response that's happening in our brain and then
being embodied through our posture and
shame is really linked with freeze
primarily because, remember, it's trying to protect
(12:56):
us from doing or saying something that might sever
our social attachment. So a lot of the time, that immobility that you
talked about, it's because it's trying to protect us
from. From taking an action or using our voice that
could be dangerous at a social level. And
so most of the time, this is linked with that freeze
(13:20):
response. The freeze response is so interesting, because
there's both an activation and a
parasympathetic part of that as well. The parasympathetic system
puts the brakes on your ability to mobilize. So,
we'll feel in freeze, an activation manifest, like a racing heart
rate, sweaty palms or the tension
(13:41):
in our muscles and that collapsed posture. But at the same time,
we're also getting a big parasympathetic activation
that will take
away our vocal abilities, keep us from being able to move,
actually, over time, slow our heart rate down.
And so you're experiencing both. Right.
(14:04):
Freeze is different from fight and flight, where we're mostly
going into an activated state. Now, we also
have this shutdown part of this reflexive
response- this was originally referred to
as, crouching. You can see that in the posture, when
you think of that, really curled in posture, but it's the complete absence
(14:26):
of movement, except for maybe some breath or
a little bit of muscle tension, but it's in a healthy isometric
contraction. Freeze is meant to be
pretty short lived. Then we'll freeze,and then we'll move into our next
reflexive response of running or fighting, but with
shame. If it's continuously being activated, we might be re
(14:48):
experiencing that freeze response over and over again. We're getting
activated and we're getting shut down at the same time
with big sympathetic activation and parasympathetic activation.
This
is going to have an effect on the body, in the inflammation part
of the body. Right. What does that feel like? Well, you've
(15:11):
talked about it a little bit today - a heavy sinking
feeling. It's the feeling of feeling bloated, but you
have no idea kind of why. And yet you've. We talked about
this with, Doctor Perry Nicholson when we explored chronic
pain and emotions. We talked about the idea of shame-flammation,
that there is research that
(15:32):
says there is a higher inflammatory response with shame.
And once we realize that, we were like, oh, my God, this is
such a big discovery in our lives. This gives language
to a felt experience inside the
body that has really not had a lot of. Has
not had a real cognitive something for us to
(15:53):
hold on to, to understand, because it is a response coming
from the body. We talked about the
inner critic and development, having attachment that through the lens
of complex trauma, shame is exaggerated
because we need that connection and
it just only furthers as we move into our adult
(16:16):
lives. This is
really interesting. There have
been studies about self blame
- reporting the greatest increase in a shame response, and
it shows the greatest elevations in pro-inflammatory cytokine
activity, while levels of guilt and general
(16:38):
negative emotions were unrelated to cytokine changes.
Shame-flammation, it's inflammatory
markers increase with the emotional experience of
shame. If we are constantly experiencing
shame, then there is an ongoing inflammatory response in the
body that can lead to a disease state. We
(17:01):
work with our tools every day to help
create a new physiological experience in the
body. And not only that, but it's back to having the awareness
of understanding, oh, this is
shameflammation. This is a response that coming from inside
of my body. And it's the neuroto's that help help
(17:22):
improve the health of our nervous system.
Totally. It was such a huge moment for me
when we started to find those studies, because we
would talk about, oh, I'm in shame. We felt it. We recognized it
somatically. We knew when we were bloated and heavy and puffy that there was
shame going on, and then there were these studies being like, yeah, actually
(17:45):
there is more inflammation with shame than almost
any other emotion. And that was so
wild to research and to
understand it that way. I want to
really kind of lay out for people what's happening here, because
this is the toxic part. This is the part that's creating
(18:07):
that toxic environment inside of our body that harms our health.
So with all protective trauma responses,
with all stress responses, there's inflammation. But again, it's heavier
with shame. What happens with inflammation or stress
response is that our immune system really goes into. Into
hyperdrive. First our HPA
(18:29):
Axis will get activated, and then we start producing more
cortisol. And then that cortisol response happens. And
then the immune system starts producing inflammatory
proteins that circulate through the body and try to find and
take out any kind of invaders or pathogens or unhealthy cell
growth. Normal levels of
(18:50):
inflammation is good. It's healthy - it's the way that our immune system
heals our body. But, when we have
chronic inflammation, our immune system is over
producing that, over overproducing those
inflammatory proteins going too much into the inflammatory
response, and those proteins actually start to damage our
(19:12):
own body tissue, which is where we get things like
autoimmune disease, because our body is sending out these proteins,
and they're looking for something to attack, and they don't find
anything. So, it sends them out again. They don't find anything, it sends them
out again. Eventually, they're going to start to find
something and that can become your own tissue.
(19:33):
When the body, the immune system, starts attacking itself,
that is autoimmune and a chronic inflammatory response
is really at the heart of autoimmune dysfunction. On
the flip side of that, what can also happen, IF that doesn't happen?
Our immune system gets really exhausted and depleted, because
it's working on overdrive all of the time. Then
(19:56):
it starts not being able to do its job as well, it
can't fight off pathogens, or fight off cells it
doesn't want to be there. Then you're more likely to get
sick, have a heavier viral load, or maybe even experience
cancer. Like me.
We've recorded so
(20:18):
many conversations on emotions, particularly
throughoutSseason Two, that I can't
recommend enough, because Elizabeth is
really linking the disease state to repress emotions.
Just let that sink in
for a moment. Like she just said, cancer, is an autoimmune response. That's what
(20:39):
we had, that's what we experienced. Then
I experienced the shame of getting a diagnosis.
That brought on shame, because I really felt like
I was going to lose my herd, lose my tribe, lose
my family and my friends that I really needed the support of
at a time when I was in need. A heavy diagnosis.
(21:00):
You know, shame is
a protective emotion. It's the emotion
that comes to the front to intentionally repress
other emotions. So, the question really is,
what's underneath of this shame? What's underneath
shame, that it doesn't feel safe for
(21:20):
me to experience? Maybe, you
really feel deep down, you want to
cry or express some anger, but you can't. You literally can't
get those tears to come up. Then you experience shame.
You feel shame because you can't express the
emotions that you're holding on to.
(21:42):
Or maybe you do process the emotions, but then after
that experience of experiencing your emotions, you feel shame.
Emotional processing requires
mobility. Just like we said, with shame being a
heightened parasympathetic response, you don't have a lot of
mobility. When we lock up with freeze and shame,
(22:04):
it's hard to process an emotion. We really, we can't do it.
I mean, when you think about somatic emotional expression
work, that those are motor pathways.
Our diaphragm has to be mobilizing for
those breaths and gasps. Our vocals have to be able to
(22:25):
express sound. We have to move our body
and move that energy through the body. And when
we're frozen up, we, we can't, we can't have that emotional
expression. That really affects our long term health because when our
body is bracing and holding in
all of those emotions, we get a lot of muscle tension, we get
(22:48):
a lot of changes to our posture, like you were talking about,
that can create chronic pain in the
body. It can be very energy costly, a lot of fatigue
that comes from that. I think we talked in one of our lives about,
emotional expression is just a normal physiological
process, just like sneezing. Think about if you needed
(23:10):
to sneeze and you were trying not to, how hard
you'd have to work, how much tension in your muscles, how much energy that
takes to suppress that natural body mechanism.
It's the same with emotional expression. It's a really high
energy cost to our body all of the time, then
that constant over depletion of our energy
(23:34):
to repress or suppress all of that can also lead
us into some maladaptive behaviors because we're trying to
get regulation in another way, or we're trying to
keep that emotion repressed through the
behavior. So we might find ourselves binge eating
or social media scrolling or numbing out in all kinds of
(23:55):
ways that can then be harmful to our health as
well. When we don't get to express the
emotion and move it through the body and mobilize that energy, we're not
completing our stress response. -crying,
stomping, shaking, these are all very
natural ways that the body completes that activation of the
(24:16):
stress response and lets our nervous system and our body come
back into a rest and digest or recover states. That ability
to modulate between those states. When we
don't have the tools to cry, to
emote, to scream, to move, we never get that completion.
This affects our hormone health, because we stay in those heightened levels of
(24:38):
stress, chemicals, adrenaline and cortisol going through the
body, we start to experience the
protective outputs of a threat bucket that's overflowing because
we don't get the stress relief. So the stress is just building up, building up,
building up. That could look like migraines,
cardiovascular issues, all kinds
(25:00):
of outputs, chronic fatigue that are coming from
that inability to regulate our stress
response. The roots of
toxic shame are like everything rooted
in our development and often attached to chronic
misattunement. Children need attunement,
(25:21):
and we're going to talk about what is attunement and why we need it
and how this chronic misattunement does lead
to shame about ourselves. So, what is attunement?
Attunement is the reactiveness we have to another person.
It's the process by which we form relationships.
If you've ever seen an orchestra before,
(25:43):
they start playing, they start tuning their instruments, they're tuning to one
another. They're feeling the other sound,
because they are coming together.
That's what we're doing in relationship. We are coming
together. When we are developing, if we have
parents that are incredibly stressed out, if we're learning that our
(26:05):
attachment might get severed for some reason - remember, this is our literal
survival! We start changing different things.
Dan Siegel says, when we attune with others, we
allow our internal state to shift, to come, to
resonate with the world, the inner world of another.
This resonance is at the heart of the importance of feeling
(26:28):
felt that emerges in close relationships. Children
need attunement to feel secure and to develop well. And throughout
our lives, we need attunement to feel close and collect
connected. So, say a
parent is not seeing that a child is
upset or crying or feeling stressed and doesn't go to them
(26:50):
to nurture them and hold them and let. Let them know, like, hey, I
see you. I feel you. This is
where mis-attunement leads to the toxic
shame, because, when we don't feel seen, heard,
or felt, we are going to start looking at other
ways to be outside of ourselves, leading to chronic self
(27:12):
abandonment and just trying to get those needs met. And all the
while, just those narratives. I am bad.
I am fill in the blank. That's what starts happening for
little children. In adult relationships,
attunement might be an adult who always says
something. Or mi-sattunment might look like something
(27:34):
like, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine. Another person
can feel the nervous system, but the person who's experiencing it
can't talk about it. They can't express their regular feelings. You shut
down with just this robot responsive. I'm fine. It's fine.
Everything's okay. You
know, when I think about that response,
(27:57):
I used to say that response a lot. It's fine. I'm fine. I'm okay.
I didn't know how to express my emotions. I didn't feel safe.
It felt more safe to push those emotions down
and to not understand them. And at the same
time, I wasn't able to secure connections
(28:18):
that I felt really safe in because I didn't feel safe
internally. It becomes
kind of bigger than you
- it's like what you want the most is connection, but
you can't get there. In a way, you become the person that's
like you block yourself.
(28:41):
Absolutely. It's really
just like we talked about in the inner critic episode,
that if we're developing in this environment
with caregivers that are chronically misattuned
and yet we're seeking that attunement for our emotional
expression, our nervous system regulation, we become hyper
(29:04):
vigilant about changing ourselves,
about that internal critic voice so that we can change
ourselves. There must be something wrong with me because I'm not getting my needs
met at a survival level that's very dangerous for
my little developing nervous system. I'm going to
internalize that it's my fault and that there's something
(29:26):
wrong with me. Over time, as we continue to develop
in that environment where we don't have anyone attuned to our
needs, that just becomes a
deeply ingrained, well worn path to go into this.
There's something wrong here that I need to fix
about myself because we can't, as
(29:48):
children, grasp the fact that it doesn't have to do with
us. When we talk about all this, we're not talking
about this to put blame on the primary caregivers. There's a lot
of structural reasons and systemic reasons, why
a caregiver might not have the capacity to attune to
their child. If you're a single working mother, if you're an immigrant, if you're
(30:11):
dealing with a bunch of other social stress - there are so many things that
would cause a caregiver to not have the social support they need and
the financial stability that they need and the
time to be regulated, to be attuned. This
is still the outcome that the child still
doesn't get the attunement that it needs. These
(30:33):
reflexive responses and deep wounds
of shame get really baked
into the nervous system.
I think there's an opportunity here for us to
say as well, that emotional neglect
is also an ACE Score.
(30:54):
If we are not being emotionally
attuned to, and that can feel like perceived
neglect, maybe it is actual neglect.
Either way, the shame
response, it's coming. Perceived
or real, that shame responses is here with
(31:15):
us. And, you know, one of the things that we talk
about on here a lot is sexual
abuse and the over coupling of shame and
pleasure. You
know, a lot of times for a
little developing nervous system that is
(31:38):
experiencing sexual trauma in the
pleasure center, in our genital
areas, it's going to get
very confusing as we grow up.
This shame that I experienced from this
early developmental trauma in my pleasure center,
(31:59):
can feel shameful as I grow up as a sexual being.
As a sexual human in the world. In
the case of sexual trauma and early childhood
sexual abuse, I really do think this has another
layer attached to it in the realms of shame because of
that coupling - overcoupling.
How can
(32:22):
I experience pleasure and shame at the same time? Then
that puts us into really dangerous places
as adults, as we are exploring our sexuality.
We had a great conversation
about fawn and sexual fawn with, Luis
Mojica in Season Three. At the beginning, if you go back
(32:44):
and just like we were talking about ACE Scores,
if shame
is protective, that layer
of protective shame is going to come on. When
our sexuality, our sexual organs or our sexual
experiences, our bodies have been violated.
(33:05):
Then the body, as we were
just talking about a minute ago, can become over coupled with arousal.
The pleasure gets over-coupled with shame
and woven in together so intrinsically that
it can be really hard to learn how
to live a pleasurable life when you are also experiencing
(33:27):
high levels of chronic shame. It goes back
to jumping and standing still at the same time.
So, how can we live a pleasurable life
when we have had experienced this
overcoupling with shame and our bodies?
Yes, absolutely. No wonder, so many people
(33:51):
also are afraid to experience pleasure. That's
a whole practice in and of itself. Also,
whenever I'm experiencing pleasure, there's
also a shame response occurring in my body and all of
the physiological components that come with that, including the
inflammation. When we recorded our episode on Shame,
(34:13):
I talked about this a little bit then, but as we were looking at
these studies linking the increase in the
inflammatory cytokines with shame,
I just couldn't help but start thinking
about sexual abuse and what's happening
there. When
(34:36):
we think about the inflammatory response, it's a little bit different than
just bracing. It's this deep internal
protection of something invading your body -
that's how my body defends against that
internal injury. Then, it's part of my real threat
response. It made me wonder about that overcoupling
(34:57):
of a body boundary violation
with the shame response. If that has something
to do with the link of why there's so much inflammation with
the shame response, that our body boundary violations
can lead to that deep internal threat response.
We know, too, from
(35:19):
a lot of somatic literature, that when we can't set
boundaries ourselves, our body will do it for us. And
that inflammation is our body protecting us first and foremost.
If it goes on for too
long, it creates disease. But, if this happens a lot
in development, those same experiences where we
(35:41):
experience shame - maybe we were being
abused or we were taking on the shame of our abuser, we were
having an experience that brings that shame on. We knew
that it wasn't socially acceptable. So we have these big shame experiences
and at the same time, we're experiencing body boundary violations. That
inflammatory threat response,
(36:01):
yes, it gets overcoupled
with the pleasure. It also gets over-coupled with body boundary
violations and then boundary violations in general.
It's our body's way of, as we were
little, protecting us from a very
deep violation. What we know about body
(36:23):
and about body boundary violations is that
they live on a spectrum. Someone could look at me cross
when I'm out in public just doing my thing, going about
my business, and could cross a body boundary violation just in
the way they look at me, right? We all know that sometimes
a man will look at us and we're like, oh, he thinks I'm pretty. There's
(36:44):
no threat there. Then, you'll feel a totally other nervous system give
you the same look, and there is a level of threat there - a body
boundary violation. When my body feels that nervous system look
at me and then elicit all of that response,
all of these responses in my body.
I really think that was just important to stop there for a
(37:06):
moment and think about body boundary violations -then, of
course, all the rest. On the other end of the spectrum, is the
physical action being taken on my body without
my body's consent.
And so we've said
many times today, talking about the posture of shame and that really
(37:29):
curling, in effect. That's part of what shame does
as a language that says, don't look at me, do not look at
me, don't talk to me, don't connect with me.
That's really isolating. I mean, that
is a REALLY isolating, dangerous place to be.
It
furthers the
(37:50):
dissociation internally when we cannot connect to
ourselves in real time and when we
cannot attach to other people. Like,
we're saying we need the belonging, we want the belonging. We
really want that. But deep down, even though that is something that
we need in our survival, needing that tribe, needing our
(38:12):
herd, the isolation is the
immobility of the shame is what keeps you being able
to move into that and even going into, like, trusting
support that you may have. It has negative impacts on health,
because we know from season three that relationships and connection are
a major driver of not just our mental. Of
(38:34):
not just our mental health, but our physical health outcomes.
Yeah, it's so interesting because here we have this
response that's trying to keep us connected socially, trying to
maintain our attachments, but it's actually disconnecting us
with those postures, leading to isolation.
At a really deep nervous system level, it's disconnecting
(38:57):
us because we talked a lot in the early part of season three about
how our nervous systems communicate across the social synapse in this
really unconscious way that we're always reading the signals of
other people's nervous systems, their vocal tone, their eye
position, their body posture. When I'm in this shame response,
my nervous system is sending out a signal of,
(39:19):
do not connect with me. Do not get close to me.
I can't make eye contact, I lose my voice, my actual ability
to communicate and connect. I'm curled in on myself.
I'm braced. I'm protected against you .At
this subconscious nervous system
level, I'm now projecting a disconnect from
(39:40):
another person, even though I'm trying to do this
to maintain my connection with others. It can really be
quite isolating when we are cycling through that
shame response. Other people's nervous systems recognize this,
too -when we are dissociated. They know that we've left
the space that the connection has been severed,
(40:03):
so that dissociation disconnects us as well.
Back to attunement. We know when another nervous system is
present with us and when they're not. It's so
important that we, as practitioners, therapists,
coaches, guides and facilitators, look at your client
and know when they are in a shame response. There's another way
(40:25):
we want to be with a person who is in
a shame response, correct? It's not about direct eye contact. It's certain
ways that we position ourselves and there's certain tools that
we're going to want to use with that client to
then help them come out of that shame response. That
kind of leads us into what do we do when we
(40:46):
have this shame response, this toxic shame, or you're feeling that
shame-flammation we're describing. Step one of this process, is to recognize
the shame response, to understand it in
your body. That all starts with a
daily nervous system practice. So you can understand
the nuances of your nervous system to gain the awareness.
(41:08):
When you were
talking, it made me think of a
really key point that you brought up. As practitioners
being able to recognize the shame response and know how to
work with it differently because there's something called the, Backdraft Effect. This is
(41:28):
when someone is in shame, if we push into that, we
try to connect to them too much. We try to
talk about the shame or really force them
into intimate conversation or in looking at it, it can make the shame
worse. It's this idea of when you have a fire
and you bring air and light in, it actually makes the fire get bigger. That
(41:49):
has been shown to be very much the case with clients that are
in shame. We need to have other ways of working with somebody.
Not talking directly about the shame, using sensory signals
of the nervous system, maybe having them sit so
they're not having to make direct eye contact with us, working around at a
very subtle nervous system level to move
(42:12):
out of the shame rather than just talk. That is really important.
I'm really glad that you brought that up. Also,
remembering for all of us, as we're listening to
this episode and maybe hearing ourselves in it, resonating with it,
that this response is just a reflexive pattern
(42:32):
built into the nervous system. We're neuroplastic
beings and we can re-pattern this with
repetition. We just have to know how to work with the nervous
system and we have to have the tools this response is not who you
are. You can start to separate yourself
from the response so you have more self compassion and
(42:53):
recognize it just as a response so you don't get more shame. Then begin
to really learn the ways to work with the
nervous system to re pattern that response in real time
so that a new reaction becomes. The well worn
path and finding really small ways to
mobilize. For example, it could look like humming. You could
(43:15):
be on a vibration plate, or you could walk. You
could get some sensory stimulus if you're in bed. There are certain tools
that we would use. You know, if you get on site with us and join
us at, rewiretrial.com. you'll find a ton of neuro tools
you
can
(43:37):
use to get you out of this shame response.
It all starts to re-pattern shame in
real time. That's what we want to do. We want to interrupt the pattern
when we are experiencing it.
(43:59):
Another good thing about being on site and being on community is that it can
just be very useful, because sometimes when we're
immobilized and shut down, we can't even think about what do
we need to do. It's easier to just jump on site,
find the shame, find the emotional processing, find that
mobilization that we need, and do it together.
(44:20):
It can just be
so much more overwhelming to have to cognitively think your
way out of something and when it comes to the body, once again, we,
the nervous system doesn't speak our english language. It speaks
in sensory language. I
even do that myself sometimes if I'm starting to
(44:43):
dissociate or I'm in a shame response instead of trying to figure
it out for myself in the moment, because my higher order, this, my higher
order thinking systems are not working great. I'll just
actually go on to the, On Demand Library,click the buttons for shame,
mobility, freeze respons and just
pull up one of your classes. One of Jennifer Simpson's
(45:06):
classes, and do that class soI don't have to try to think my way out
of it. It's not going to be great to try to think my way out
of it. Another really important thing to start
to work with is our InteroceptiveSsystem - the system inside of us that tells our
brain what's going on in our body. We want to
rehabilitate that system because we want to be able
(45:28):
to hear the signals coming from within our body so we know
when we're moving into a shame response. We also want to begin
making those signals safe, starting to interpret them with accuracy, so
we're not perceiving too much threat from those
signals coming inside of our body. That can lead
us into these other repressive mechanisms or
(45:50):
shame responses. When there's so much threat attributed
to those signals, that requires working in a minimum effective
dose. Sometimes, we've got to externally orient at first, because dropping
into the body feels too overwhelming and scary.
Little by little, coupling feeling those sensations
with other neurotools that create safety
(46:11):
in our body and help us regulate and stay present,
starts to re pattern that experience. So now I'm
able to feel those signals and not move into the threat
response. It's so vital -
so important to be able to understand the signals that are coming in and
from your body. Having these higher level of awarenesses that you might
(46:33):
be able to start to connect some dots, comes
from lowering the threat on a daily basis and then starting to recognize
what brings you pleasure and
brings you joy. By allowing yourself to experience
that. When we say pleasure, yes, that can
include sexual, intimate experiences. But pleasure
(46:54):
could also just be like putting your
face in the sun, walking in the grass, going swimming, dancing, or hearing your
favorite song. What do you enjoy?
Then, how can you intentionally engage in
those things? Allow
your nervous system to feel the joy, to
(47:17):
be present with the pleasure in your body that
is going to maybe, maybe for some people
listening to us, that feels so far away and that's okay. We do
workshops around pleasure and experiencing pleasure on your
nervous system, where once again, we start in a really minimum effective dose way. What
clothes do I like to feel on my skin?
(47:39):
What do I like to feel the sensations of? We
start to build on that until we can really touch our
bodies and get into more intimate experiences with, say,
sexual and intimate pleasure.
It's so key starting with
those other ways of experiencing pleasure.
(48:02):
because if we try right away to dive into sexual intimacy
and undoing that overcoupling there, that
can be really setting us up for a
not great experience. Just starting
with that minimum effective dose and making, creating
that safety around experiencing pleasure in the body
(48:24):
just for little bits of time is so powerful, it's so
impactful and leads to a life where you can have
pleasure. It's really worth it. It's really
worth it. Finally, some of the practices
that have helped me the most coming out of and moving
this shame response through my body is vocal practices, vocal toning, and working with my
(48:46):
vocal cords. We do a lot of
those classes on the site where we're just at a really nervous system somatic level,
working with the body to restore
mobility, to get activation and relaxation to the vocal cords so
that it helps your body from a bottom up approach to
come out of that freeze, out of that immobility, from out of that shame
(49:08):
response. Then, the thoughts and the emotional experience
will start to shift just by
changing what's happening in the body with your neurotools. It's really incredible.
You can interrupt
shame in real time, you can re pattern your life, reconnecting to
your body and learn what those voluntary mobility drills
(49:30):
are. You could even look at
your posture sometimes to be like, oh, gosh, I'm I'm in a rounded
state. What am I, what am I doing here?
There's so many different ways that this can come into your
awareness once you get into the work, once you get on the site with
us and learn how to activate your
(49:54):
nervous system and the sympathetic response, it's very powerful,
y'all. So, I do hope you'll join us at,
rewiretrial.com. Next week, we'll be
moving right along in our series. So, tune in next week,
and we'll keep going through these characteristics.
See y'all next week. Thank you. Bye.
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