1719 || shame spirals

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a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks

about. In a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply, see Capital One dot com slash bank,

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Welcome to the Make Your Dan Bed Podcast. A daily motivation podcast designed to help you

get out of bed every morning with a little company from me, Julie America. If you struggle with

consistency, let's build a little momentum together, whether you make your bed or not.

Good morning, good morning, Sunshine. Welcome to another day of the Make Your Dan Bed Podcast.

Today's resource is John Bradshaw's book Healing the Shame That Binds You.

And in picking up from where we left off yesterday, Bradshaw says that our emotions are the

core of our basic power. Emotions monitor our basic needs and tell us or communicate with us when

we're not aware of those fundamental needs and they give us the fuel or the energy to act upon them.

As he puts it, an emotion is energy in motion. This energy moves us to get what we need.

When our basic needs are being violated, our anger moves us to fight or run. Basically,

anger is the energy that gives us strength. Sadness is an energy we discharge in order to heal,

but because both of those feelings, anger and sadness are uncomfortable, painful feelings,

most people try to avoid them. Discharging sadness releases the energy involved in our emotional

pain, and though that is painful, holding it in is actually freezing the pain. But in reality,

it's all protecting fear, because fear releases an energy that warns us of danger to our basic needs.

Fear is an energy leading to our discernment, our wisdom. Guilt is a shame about morality

it guards our conscience. And it informs us when we've transgressed upon our values.

It moves us to take action and change and do things in alignment with our values.

Healthy shame warns us to not try to be more or less than human.

Shame signals our essential limitations. It limits our desire for pleasure and our

interest and our curiosity. We couldn't really be free without our shame. Quote of all the

masks of freedom, discipline or limits are the hardest to understand. Quote, we cannot be truly

free without having limits. Joy is the exhilarating energy that emerges when all of our needs are met.

We want to sing and run and jump with joy. The energy of joy signals that all as well,

but those of us who have experienced traumas, in relation to these emotions, to these feelings,

to these guides, we become out of touch, we shut down, and it causes a psychic numbing.

To the point where we might not even be aware of what we're feeling or what those feelings are

trying to communicate, Bradshaw then quotes modern neuroscientists like Joseph Ladoo,

Alan Ensure, and Diana Fosha, who have presented compelling evidence that our true sense of self

is based on our authentic core feelings. As we mentioned in a previous episode, our feelings are

the primary motivating source in our lives. Without acknowledging our core feelings, we lose our

sense of self, leaving us to create a false self to show up. Those false selves are based on the

survival skills that we adapt. It's like a script for a play. The script tells us what feelings we

should be having instead of the ones we are, and we learn to accept those scripted ones as

authentic. This denial of emotions is actually sanctified by our most sacred traditions of parenting

rules or religion. In our culture, emotions show weakness. You shouldn't be so emotional.

Don't be so sensitive. Quit your cryin'. Quit your bitchin'. It's unpleasant. It's unsightly.

It's gross. Girls shouldn't yell. Boys shouldn't cry, etc., and so on. And as Bradshaw

reminds us, religion also endorses this poisonous mentality. Anger is bad. It's one of the seven

deadly sins. It will send you to hell. And for a lot of kids, the message becomes, it's okay for

parents to be angry. It's okay for God to be angry, but it's not okay for me. Later in the book,

he talks about how shame is the master emotion, because as it's internalized, all the other emotions

that we feel become bound by it. Emotional shame-bound parents can't allow their children to have

emotions, because the child's emotions trigger their parent's emotions, so this represses emotions

between everybody. And repressed emotions often feel too big, like they'd overwhelm us if we express

them. There's this fear of shame, and that shame would be triggered if we all got to express

our emotions, so we don't. We bind them and internalize them. And it dictates how we respond to

every other emotion. And again, I do encourage you to read this book in its entirety if it's

resonating with you, because there are some specific examples about what happens if you're neglected,

if you're shamed, or if you experience physical abuse, but specifically within family systems.

As he puts it, a family system has components, rules, roles, and laws. And that creates a

dynamic homeostasis for your family unit. He also digs into how dysfunctional family units use

their members to maintain the balance. The more dysfunctional the system, the more closed and

rigid each role in the family becomes. Basically, you have to play these roles to keep balance,

or else you might be abandoned, abused, kicked out, hurt, or exiled for just existing in the system

without following the scripts that your quote-unquote caregivers have become comfortable with.

But the part that really stuck out to me in this section was when he said, quote,

eventually scenes of shame become interconnected and magnified. As the language, imagery,

and scenes associated with shame become fused together, the meaning of shame is transformed.

You no longer feel shame, you start to think I am shameful. Shame is no longer one feeling

among many, but comes to constitute the core of yourself. Internalized shame creates a frozen

state of being. Shame is no longer an emotional signal that comes and goes to communicate. It is a

deep abiding, all pervasive sense of being defective as a person. This core of defectiveness forms

the foundation around which all other feelings about the self will be experienced. Gradually,

over time, this frozen feeling of belief recedes from your consciousness so that now it's just your

identity. You're not a person who feels shame, you are just a shame-based person.

And once you internalize the shame, you will get wrapped up in what Kaufman terms the internal

shame spiral. As he describes it, a triggering event occurs. Maybe you were trying to speak up

and someone said something critical that triggered you. When that trigger happens, you're suddenly

a meshed in shame. And the eyes turn inward, basically creating an internalized experience

that the other person can't really see. Sure, they might see you blush or look down or get

embarrassed or walk away, but you internally are experiencing a flow of shameful feelings,

endlessly triggering each other from past experiences. The participating event is relived internally

over and over, causing that sense of shame to deepen, to absorb other neutral experiences,

which means it starts to feel like everything about you is shameful. And maybe you are misincused

before, so you start to make excuses for past parts of you that felt neutral before, but now

should probably be a part of the shame spiral. Until finally, your entire self is engulfed in

the shame. This is how shame becomes paralyzing. Quote, the spiral is one of the most devastating

aspects of dysfunctional shame. Once it's in motion, it can cause the reliving of other shameful

experiences and solidify your shame further within your personality. As you internalize shame,

the fear of exposure becomes magnified intensely. Exposure now means having your essential

defectiveness as a human being being seen, so to be exposed now means to be seen as irreparably

and unspeakably bad, so you must find a way to defend against this exposure. You become defensive,

and you build strategies of transference, and as you do that, internalize shame becomes less and

less conscious. And so instead you've created a shame-based identity, both freezing and magnifying

the depth of the shame itself, and you've created an autonomous shame activation, where shame can

become triggered and completely derail you all on its own. Bradshaw then discusses how the shame

becomes internalized through our schooling, through our homelives, and through religion. As he puts

it, one of the most insidious and toxically shaming distortions of many religions is the denial

of secondary causality. What this means is that according to some church doctrines, the human will

is inept. There is nothing a man can do that is of any value. You are born a sinner. Of himself,

man is a worm, only when God works through him does man become restored to dignity. But it's never

anything that a man does of himself. He talks about how this is an abortive type of mentality,

that when we turn to God to have power over us, it gives up our agency. And this abortive

interpretation sees man as totally flawed and defective and only capable of sin.

This type of religion practice creates a shame-based core, thus denying our humanity, the depth

of humanity that comes from emotions, and the ability to feel those emotions in productive

and human ways that help us feel more connected, rather than more disconnected, and help us escape

these spirals and create something from them, rather than feel like we are lesser than, and like

it's our responsibility to constantly escape that. For me, being able to attribute my internalized

toxic shame to the way I was raised, to the culture of religion, and to the care of my caregivers,

it is easier to understand what parts of me were just there for self-preservation,

versus what parts of me were trying to communicate something they never got to communicate.

As always, you can access all of the resources from today's episode in the show notes if you're

interested. In the meantime, just know I love you so much, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your

day, and I will talk to you tomorrow while you make your damn bed. Goodbye, cutie.

I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day, and I'll talk to you tomorrow while you make your damn bed.

With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so

passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about

no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week

to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about.

In a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply, see CapitalOne.com slash bank, Capital One

NA member FDIC.