Heal in Place. Fill your Still. Toxic Shame. Toxic shame eats away at your spirit and soul, crushing positive energy out of us and allowing negative life forces like self-hate to take over. We shrink. We feel like we mean nothing. We feel we are nothing. As a result of toxic shame passed down through generations in my family, I believed that I was unlovable; I don’t matter; everything is my fault; I can’t do anything right; I’m a bad person; my needs and feelings are not important; I can’t be myself around others; I have to hide my true emotions and the real me; I’m never good enough. As Brené Brown states so eloquently, it’s common for trauma survivors to “dress rehearse tragedy” in order to try to “protect themselves” from future trauma. They may run through every scenario they can think of and come up with a plan for how to handle it. They may think, if they act in a certain way, bad things won’t happen. I was addicted to dress rehearsing tragedy. It controlled my every waking thought and guided every bad decision I made and it made me reenact the trauma over and over again. Generational toxic shame passes down through family members because no one is aware of their own trauma. Shame replaces innocence, joy, curiosity and forced everyone in my family to build disturbing walls of protection, blame and defiance. My mom, Dad and stepdad were so full of shame that they couldn’t help but project it onto me. If I hadn’t woken up, I would have passed it on to my children. Toxic shame can turn on a genetic predisposition for depression, addiction, fibromyalgia, gut issues, autoimmune disorders, physical illness, personality disorders, mental illness and the list goes on.
https://www.angermanage.co.uk/shame-test/
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