Behind Every Great Person Is Another Great Person.

Quality Matters

Our pain often affects the people we love the most, and our shame makes it difficult to distinguish between our hurt and the hurt we cause others.

Processing the emotions of guilt and shame has become a cornerstone of psychotherapy. The significance of these emotions is indisputably linked to relationship fitness. These emotions affect not only the quality of your relationships with others, but also the quality of the attachment you have with yourself.

Guilt and shame have high evolutionary value as well in that they contribute to both the development of a civilized society and to the evolution of its demise, respectively. Guilt and shame are distinct emotions. Guilt means that someone feels responsible for the harmful outcome of an event. If, in reality, they are not responsible but rather have been scapegoated or blamed, shame (an injury), will result. When left untreated or not repaired, shame becomes an introjected -split off - part of the self.

Shame is, unfortunately, something that most humans contend with, and the culture of family dynamics that has come to normalize harmful behaviors, involving at the minimum emotional misattumement, also holds responsibility for this. The injury of shame is exacerbated by society's pervasive lack of skill and capacity to identify these injuries and heal them.

Just like a physical injury, when left untreated, shame results in an infection that can even lead to death. Shame has the power to take a life. All suicides, homicides, and crimes against humanity are caused by untreated shame that has been internalized, worsened by confusion about the feeling, which in turn causes reactive behavioral symptoms involving impulsive behaviors, withdrawal behaviors, and overall intolerance of negative emotions.

Shame clouds judgment and complicates the process of understanding our emotions. People who experience excessive amounts of shame do so on account of held back and repeatedly suppressed feelings of hurt, which is made up of many complex and counter-acting emotions such as sadness, anger, anxiety, and fear.

Shame is hurt that has not been adequately attended to, and it is responsible for the symptoms of all mental illness. Symptoms range from mild to severe and acute or chronic, depending on the type and severity of the condition and the treatment received. The effect of untreated traumas involves symptoms of anxiety and cycles of depression causing insomnia and behavioral avoidance. The symptoms may show up in myriad ways, at the worst end of the anxiety continuum breaks in reality as severe as psychosis.

The emotional pain caused by the bottling up of hurt is so great that to experience relief, our body’s natural defense mechanisms shut down feelings. Unfortunately, it shuts feelings down in an “all or nothing” fashion because the body is not able to distinguish the differences between the quality of feelings (primary core emotions versus secondary reactive emotions). Awareness of the reality of a situation may lead to helplessness or hopelessness.

The net result of varying degrees of emotional numbing is varrying degrees of loss of awareness of empathy for self. The trauma caused by shame impacts society as a whole and mild to severe levels trickle down from generation to generation, becoming the responsibility of individual families to dispel.

When children are raised without empathy, they lose self-respect first and foremost. Parents are often unaware that they don't have the option to choose when, where, and how to express empathy.

When children don’t feel understood, just like adults, they experience confusion. When chronically experienced, confusion leads to disorganized emotions and behaviors and, on the lower end of the harmful continuum, general avoidance of feeling anything but anxiety.

The impact of losing connection to our natural feelings is a loss of connection to the self. And when you can’t fully connect with yourself, then you are less able to connect well with others as well. Children often lose motivation and a sense of well-being. As adults, they develop harmful coping mechanisms as a means of dealing with their feelings, which they heavily rely on, leading them to feel lost.

Harmful habits become regularly relied on coping mechanisms, forms of escape to help deal with ambivalent, unprocessed, and unregulated emotions. These addictive forms of harmful coping further contribute to challenges knowing what to think and feel about self, others and the world or more specifically the situation one is in.

Here are a few of the harmful consequences: general unhealthy lifestyle choices, substance abuse, eating disorders, substance use, addictive shopping, and other heavily relied-on distracting behaviors. What all this amounts to is loss, primarily of one’s ability to regulate and balance emotions and behaviors that contribute to a healthy life. All addictive behaviors (or behaviors engaged in to distract oneself from the experience at hand) are the brain's attempt to survive the profound fear and emotional pain caused by an unbearable sense of aloneness and confusion related to unresolved injuries, wounds, and memories, now scars of broken attachment.

The difference between secure and insecure attachment amounts to differences in quality of experiences receiving healthy emotional relatedness from caregivers. Incident traumas are secondarily responsible for the loss of a basic assumptions about safety in relationship as well - to the self, others, and/or the world, hightened around issues related to the type of trauma (natural disaster or interpersonal trauma) experienced. Insecure attachment manifests along a spectrum: as anxious-avoidant or avoidant-avoidant or disorganized-avoidant behaviors or attachment styles (e.g., forms of coping).

Speaking about relationship trauma, when we don’t receive necessary experiences of emotional and physical safety, particularly from our most significant attachment relationships - most notably - our parental figures - we are at risk of feeling perpetually unattached; detached from the true self we are born with and all its inherent potential.

Fortunately, because relatively straight forward, and unfortunately, because not an emotionally easy ride, attachment science has shown that the most viable treatment, families communities and societies have to change the pervasive pattern of dynamically (self-and-other dyads) destructive behavior, resulting from insecure attachment, is to educate and treat societies leaders. Most essentially these leaders are parents, as they are most directly charged with the responsibility to care for the youngest, most vulnerable members of society among us: our children.

Fundamentally, it is most essential to know that when in the role of a leader or given the responsibility of being a role model, if and when in that role, if and when a child is harmed in any way - be it by neglect or a form of assault (emotionally or physically, directly or indirectly) the injury or disconnection that occurs, must be followed by repair.

And this is where it may feel tricky and where I tend to see, as a clinician, confusion (at a minimum) in parents’ eyes. Repairing an injury does not have to mean relinquishing boundaries. Rather, it may involve helping a child to feel understood and/or to help the child to better understand the situation they are in (this is where it is ok to trust in your child’s adult-like intelligence). More can be explicitly discussed about various events and conditions, but essentially, a form of communication that seeks mutual understanding (apology, forgiveness) must occur.

Attachment repair expresses the value of the relationship. It is highly significant to a child who, above all else, wants a happy and emotionally safe family life and relationships. The experience of relationship repair is so essential that losing it is akin to losing the experience of being a valued member of the relationship, which in turn leads to a loss of self-value. This kind of loss most often begins in the parent-child relationship.

If repair is carried out inauthentically or neglected in value or, worse, denied outright as necessary, emotional and mental health problems ensue. For some children, and this depends on the parent's attachment style (avoidant-avoidant, anxious-avoidant, disorganized-avoidant), negative self-talk and feelings of inadequacy will become masked by the behavioral distractions named above.

Less noticeable are behaviors of accomplishment and overdrive to achieve, as well as generally compliant behaviors. These behaviors are aimed at securing parents’ and society’s approval and when carried out exclusively or in excess reflect a deeper attachment insecurity.

While parental harm suggests a parent struggles with their own negative life experiences, and this is unintentional and unconscious (for the most part), the impact on the child is tremendous.

Children who more frequently experience emotional or physical harm (physical and emotional abuse and neglect) will most likely develop desperate behaviors that manifest as extreme withdrawal, shutdown, and/or humiliating forms of protest and fight for survival, all stemming from their inner sense of unworthiness and shame reflective of their experience of relational abandonment. Abandonment raises profound questions about self-worth, making life burdensome for the vulnerable victim.

Generally speaking, children and parents consciously and unconsciously yearn to bridge the gaps of attachment trauma created by all the missed opportunities for connection and understanding that would have replaced the building of feelings of aloneness and dread. Because we all fundamentally want a life filled with happiness and opportunity, created by a safe base—a secure attachment bond—with our childhood families.

The good news is that the desire to bridge missed relationship opportunities never actually leaves us. The longing for safe connection and understanding to replace feelings of dread is a fundamental aspect of human survival from cradle to grave. The capacity to repair what is broken provides critical meaning to life and matters the most.