Overcoming a Dysfunctional Litter
When I was a kid, I was certain that there was something dreadfully wrong with me and my family. I knew from television and what I learned in school that my family was not like other families. And I knew from my own confusion, fear, and unhappiness that I was not like other kids. Everybody [...]
“A good, loving kick in the ass” was another phrase I heard in AA meetings. Usually, somebody said it about their sponsor, when given some tough love by him or her at just the right moment. Or, sometimes a person said it about himself, meaning that he was able to make himself do the next [...]
Recently, I had a conversation with someone about shame, and it got me thinking about some of my own painful experiences dealing with the demon shame. If you suffer from toxic shame, you know what I’m talking about: that burning sense of exposure and inferiority that makes you want to just crawl into a hole [...]
In addition to soothing anxiety and learning to stay on our own side, another important kind of groundwork some of us must learn is to allow ourselves to feel good about ourselves and our accomplishments. If we come from a shame-based background, this can be a difficult lesson to learn. I had this lesson driven [...]
If you find that you have shame issues–if you feel unworthy, unlovable, or somehow less-than other people for reasons you can’t really identify but believe to be true–then what do you do about it? How do you move past shame for good and enter the ranks of the worthy, the lovable, and the deserving? Actually, [...]
When people have toxic shame issues, they often don’t define them as such until they’ve had some help figuring out what’s really going on. They only know they feel that something is wrong with them, that they are flawed or in some way less lovable or deserving than other people. I’ve talked a lot about [...]
Sometimes shame is hard to identify. If we have shame issues, they can be so pervasive and all-encompassing that it never occurs to us that there might be a different way to see ourselves and the world. If you’ve identified some shame traits in yourself–like feeling unlovable, undeserving, and less-than other people–but are still uncertain [...]
If you grew up in a dysfunctional family, and maybe even if you didn’t, it’s important to understand the difference between shame and guilt. Informally, the terms are often used interchangeably. In formal psychological terms, though, the words have vastly different meanings. Guilt is an emotion and as such, is neither good or bad. It [...]
I’ve felt “different” my whole life. As a child, I wasn’t very good at making friends and I got teased a lot. As a teenager, I was painfully shy and awkward. I hated school and felt like a complete outsider, and continued to get teased. (Thank god for drugs and older boyfriends.) As a young [...]
When I was in a group therapy, we talked a lot about the concept of “getting little.” It happens in reaction to stress or fear, and it means that, emotionally, you’ve just regressed to a very young age. Sometimes just being around certain people, or even people who remind you of certain people, or events, [...]