Compass of shame

Chronic shame accompanies trauma and (together with helplessness) it seems to be the most destructive feeling we experience. We don’t have 5 steps to end shame. We can just share bits and pieces of insight about this. It’s not going to be enough. We haven’t found a way out of shame yet. Some T’s believe that there is none. We can just try to reduce it and then learn how to live with a certain level of shame and not let it rule our life. Maybe the best thing we can do is to find ways to cope that are not utterly destructive.

Everyone wants to avoid feeling chronic shame. It eats you alive and leaves you with nothing but broken feelings about yourself. Low self-esteem, disgust, despair. No punishment in the world could make up for how bad you think of yourself. Sometimes just being alive and taking up space is a reason to be ashamed. It is the most natural thing in the world that we look for ways to make this more bearable.

The “compass of shame” describes 4 maladaptive directions our attempts to deal with shame can take.

Attack self, attack others, avoid self, avoid other.

 

Attack self

This means buying into all the negative thoughts that come with shame without ever questioning if they are valid. In any given situation you find something negative about yourself that confirms the beliefs you already have e.g. that you are stupid, worthless etc. You find yourself in a cycle of low self-esteem, bad feelings, bad thoughts, without ever noticing that you are actually feeling shame. You just “know” you are a bad person and your whole life seems to prove it.

This will leave you with very low self-esteem and a victim mentality, you will constantly feel misunderstood when others try to talk you out of your conviction.

 

Attack others

Here you usually don’t feel shame at all. But you will find that you do or say things to hurt or shame others, that you are very critical or even go into a rage. Sometimes the target of your attacks is who you perceive as the source of your shame. Making them small makes you feel better, actually safer, around them. You feel anger, contempt, resentment, but no shame. You covered that very well by using blame.

This will be a constant source of conflict in your relationships, that cannot be solved through arguments.

Avoid self

Maybe you manage to keep shame out of your awareness. You just don’t feel it. That can be based on denial or maybe you are distracting yourself from feeling any shame by avoiding your inner experience, anything that could raise the topic of shame. You make a joke and change the subject, pushing everything away that remotely feels like shame. This is not a conscious decision. But if you don’t know why I am writing about shame as a problem at all, you might be going this direction.

This can make you seem superficial and even arrogant and make it hard to have deep, meaningful relationships.

 

Avoid others

Like with “attack self” you buy into your thoughts and feelings of shame without questioning them. But to avoid further shameful experiences you isolate yourself from people. That way you avoid new shameful situations as well as being “found out” as someone who is worthless. You hide so others won’t see it. Again, you might not be aware of shame, you might just feel uncomfortable around people or be hyper-aware of all your small mistakes. Your social anxiety could be based on shame.

This leads into isolation and keeps you from experiencing happiness in relationships.

 

As always, if you have DID you signed up for some extra work:

Different parts of you might use different directions to avoid chronic shame. Classics would be Littles who attack self, Protectors who attack others, high functioning parts who avoid self and hosts who avoid others. But your system will have very individual ways to avoid feeling shame.

 

Think about these and identify what you do. That can also be a mixture of different directions. Knowing that this is the way you are coping is not a solution in itself, but it is a first step. A new awareness of your typical behavior might give you clues, when there is hidden shame in a certain situation. Just that, an awareness that there might be more about your rage than the other person being a moron, can open the door for you to find better ways of coping.

 

More about the theory of chronic shame