How Shame Devalues the Self and Reviving the True Self

One of the commonalities in nearly all of the people I see as a therapist is the shame they feel about who they are as human beings. And to clarify, shame is the sense that "I am wrong, defective, worthless." Shame is often confused with guilt, which is the sense that "I did something wrong." There is a huge difference - shame is about who we are, guilt is about what we did. And to confused things, we can sometimes become shame-filled about things we have done or not done if those actions are seen as a reflection of who we are as people.

Margarita Tartakovsky, over Psych Central's World of Psychology blog, offers some insights on shame from Darlene Lancer's book, Conquering Shame and Codependency: 8 Steps to Freeing the True You.

One of the cool distinctions is the four selves:

• Ideal self: “who we believe we should be”
• Persona: “what we show to others”
• Critic: “our inner shaming voice”
• Devalued self: “the result of the critic’s shaming”

This is the material, the selves, I often end up working with in clients. I don't if the book is good, but the suggestions in this article for working with these selves on your own are good.

Overcoming Shame to Connect with Your True Self 

By Margarita Tartakovsky, M.S.
Associate Editor

Each of us experiences shame.

“[I]t is part of our human condition,” writes author and therapist Darlene Lancer, LMFT, in Conquering Shame and Codependency: 8 Steps to Freeing the True You.

Without good coping skills, we may feel like failures when we don’t meet our own or others’ expectations, she writes. In fact, shame can even prevent us from being our true selves. Shame often starts in childhood. It can even get passed down from generation to generation. 

Shame thrives in families where kids must keep secrets about such as issues as addiction, infidelity or poverty, to keep up appearances.

Teachers might shame kids for their academic performance. Parents might shame kids for expressing feelings such as anger or sadness.

Shame can camouflage our true self, because it can lead us to manufacture false selves, according to Lancer. These are the:

• Ideal self: “who we believe we should be”
• Persona: “what we show to others”
• Critic: “our inner shaming voice”
• Devalued self: “the result of the critic’s shaming”

For instance, if your parents or caregivers rejected or denied certain parts of your real self, you might’ve experienced shame and created an ideal self. If sadness wasn’t accepted in your family, then you might imagine being the “family hero,” a “tough kid” or a “good girl,” Lancer writes.

This ideal self provides an imagined sense of acceptance and worth. But it also alienates the real self, because, after all, it’s a false self. People may pick professions, partners and lifestyles to garner others’ approval.

Before she was a therapist, Lancer pursued a law career. “I unconsciously thought that being a lawyer would gain my parents’ respect, since they didn’t support my original career goals — one of which was to become a therapist.”

We also bend for our inner critic. We suppress our real feelings and anything else that doesn’t conform to the ideal. So we force ourselves to think different thoughts, to feel different feelings and do different things. When we inevitably don’t measure up to our ideal image, we’re stricken with shame. But as Lancer writes, “In actuality we’re expecting the impossible — to become someone other than ourselves.”

In Conquering Shame and Codependency, Lancer includes valuable and practical strategies for overcoming shame and becoming our authentic selves. She notes that “getting to know our real self is a process of uncovering and discovering.” These tips from her book can help with this process:

Check in with yourself on a daily basis.

Ask yourself what you’re feeling and what you want today. Ask yourself what you’d like for the future. Consider what your body, mind, heart and soul need. Then figure out the steps you can take to respond to these needs.

Write about your interactions.

You also can review your interactions every day. Lancer includes these additional questions to explore: “Did you ever avoid saying what you were really thinking or feeling? What kept you from doing so? Did you make decisions based on your values?”

Write about your feelings.

Be honest about what you’re feeling, and know that you can express yourself fully on the page. If you were shamed for having certain feelings — such as anger or sadness — know that any feeling you’re experiencing is valid.

Explore your values.

“Knowing our values helps us make decisions that are right for us,” writes Lancer. Look within and write down what’s important to you – not your parents, partner or anyone else.

Share your real self.

According to Lancer, being vulnerable with others creates connection, builds trust in them and ourselves and strengthens our true selves.

Share your feelings and needs with people who make you feel safe and won’t judge you. For instance, Lancer suggests attending a 12-step meeting, such as Al-Anon or Codependents Anonymous, or working with a therapist.

She also suggests starting to express your vulnerability by sharing a mistake you made with someone you trust.

Shame can stifle our true selves. By seeking supportive resources and delving into your feelings, thoughts and values, you can get to know yourself better, overcome your shame and embrace the real you.


~ Margarita Tartakovsky, M.S. is an Associate Editor at Psych Central and blogs regularly about eating and self-image issues on her own blog, Weightless.

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From the Institute of Art and Ideas, experimental psychologist Bruce Hood (The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity), philosopher Galen Strawson (Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics), and philosopher of personal identity Marya Schechtman (The Constitution of Selves) discuss how we construct our internal narratives about our lives and whether they reflect our lives or actively shape them.

Good stuff!

Life Story - Bruce Hood, Galen Strawson, Marya Schechtman, Hilary Lawson

Published on Oct 30, 2013

Watch more videos on iai.tv

Bruce Hood, Galen Strawson, Marya Schechtman. Hilary Lawson hosts.

We all create internal narratives of our lives. From moment to moment, but also spanning a lifetime. Do these stories of ourselves simply reflect our lives, or do they determine who we are and what we can achieve?

The Panel

Philosopher of personal identity Marya Schechtman joins award-winning experimental psychologist Bruce Hood and critic and philosopher Galen Strawson.

This is an excellent talk from neuroscientist David Eagleman, author of the excellent Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (2011), Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia (2011), and Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (2009), this last one a strange and wonderful collection of short stories on possible afterlives, grounded in the complexity of our human condition.

In this talk, from Alain de Botton's The School of Life in London, Eagleman talks about our multiplicity - that we are in many ways, multiple selves rather than a single unified self. In this model, many of the selves we live through are not even available to our awareness.

"It turns out that almost everything that you think and do and you act and you believe is generated by parts of your brain that you don't have access to."

Excellent talk.

David Eagleman's Secular Sermon on Knowing One's Selves

By Trent Gilliss | Friday, September 7, 2012


During the past week, we watched and listened to a half-dozen or more "secular sermons," as Alain de Botton calls them, from The School of Life in London. These are weekday or Sunday meetings that are rich with singing and presentations by Mr. de Botton himself, as well as a wide array of outside speakers from all types of disciplines. Our task: to find about a minute of audio from one of these secular sermons that gives listeners a more visceral sense of what he's describing:

We've had terrific success by hosting what we're calling secular sermons. Why are we calling them sermons? It's to try and suggest that listening to them is not simply going to be an intellectual exercise, you know, fascinating little bit of knowledge, a way to show off to friends about new stuff you've learned. It's actually going to be something that will hope to steer how you live. So it's didactic, you know, it's explicitly moralistic not in a kind of starched, Victorian way, but in the best possible sense. It exhorts you to a kind of better, fuller life and why not? Why should these pretty quite nice maneuvers only be the preserve of religion? As I say, they really are for all of us.

We ended up excerpting part of neuroscientist David Eagleman's lecture on "being oneselves." Dr. Eagleman holds joint appointments in the Departments of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and is the founder and director of the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law. In this secular sermon, he focuses on how our conscious mind represents only a small portion of who we are: "It turns out that almost everything that you think and do and you act and you believe is generated by parts of your brain that you don't have access to."

He follows by saying that each person is not one singular body, but an amalgamation of many parts that are competing with one another. He likens our brains to conflicted democracies engaged in these internal battles with each other: emotion versus reason, how we make decisions in time and the appeal of right now, and the moral contracts (check out the part about the "Ulysses contract" at the 30-minute mark!) we make with ourselves.

"And I think the thing for all of us to think about, all the time, is how are we lashing ourselves to the mast. We all have weaknesses and things that we want to do better. And as we come to understand more about ourselves, there's this issue of what can we do to — to combat this? How can we really think hard about structuring things in our lives so we don't do the wrong things? And I think this gives us traction, you know, understanding what's going on under the hood gives us traction on old philosophical problems and ways to think about things.

Just think about the concept of virtue. I think that virtue has to do with the battles between these populations. If you've got a real drive to do something you want it so badly and yet you override that with more long-term decision making, with the parts of your brain that care about the deferred gratification verses the parts that care about, I want it right now. If you have that battle and you're successful, I think that's what we mean by a virtuous person. . . .

I think virtue comes at people's point of struggle, right when the parliament is sort of evenly balanced and they have real decision to make there about which way it tips."

Lenny Moss - Moral Molecules, Modern Selves, and Our “Inner Tribe”

This article from Professor Lenny Moss is in the new issue of the Hedgehog Review. This interesting article looks at how we "hard-wired" to be social creatures, dependent on others for our survival - but we are also fairly "tribal" (ethnocentric) and we often group ourselves into "us vs. them" perspectives.

It's a long and serious piece - this is only the first few paragraphs.

Moral Molecules, Modern Selves, and Our “Inner Tribe”

Lenny Moss

Reprinted from The Hedgehog Review 15.1 (Spring 2013). 

The Hedgehog Review

An Ethos of Ambiguity

We are almost certainly on the threshold of a new understanding of our nature as social beings, which is being provoked and informed by developments in psychology, biology, and the social sciences. Just how we interpret and assimilate these new findings has become a topic of considerable controversy. Inasmuch as morality, however one defines it, has to do with how we treat each other, the stakes of this controversy are raised by its ostensibly moral and thereby also political implications. Less obvious, especially to the public, is the extent to which academic disciplinary statures and commitments are also hanging in the balance.

Our nature as social beings is ostensibly paradoxical. On the one hand, we are unquestionably social in nature. We are born dependent upon the care of others; we crave companionship and often go to great lengths to avoid loneliness. Short of death or physical torture, enforced solitary confinement is considered the most severe and hateful punishment that can be inflicted upon a human being. On the other hand, perceptions of individuality govern our life choices—we are seldom far from consulting our private interests when it comes to making decisions of any consequence. We find ourselves, as individuals, in an ongoing, pervasive, and often strenuous competition with the multitudes for status, recognition, and every good we seek and desire up to and including walking space on a busy urban sidewalk. We thus experience most of our fellow humans, most of the time, as potential impediments to outmaneuver and outdo in order to achieve our ends. The Enlightenment’s late-eighteenth-century “Sage of Königsburg,” Immanuel Kant, pithily referred to this seemingly contradictory state of affairs as our “unsocial sociability.”

How we understand our unsocial sociability, even if just implicitly, is of no small consequence. Those for whom social life is nothing but some minimally constrained expression of Hobbes’s “war of all against all” are prone to act accordingly. For Kant the very possibility of having rational hope for the future of humanity required a story to tell about the place of our unsocial sociability, and all of the historical sufferings and depredations wrought by it, within a framework of possible human “development.” More simply stated, we need a way of understanding “human nature” that allows us to make sense of the evils in human history without foreclosing the possibility of seeing ourselves as moving toward improvement in general, and more specifically toward something like global peace and general human wellbeing. Kant helped himself to a providential outlook but in the form of a theoretical teleology. Kant analogized the human species with an organism that, in effect, undergoes “growing pains” on its developmental path toward maturity. Just as the parts of an organism are always responding to the forces and factors of their immediate environment, and yet all told are contributing to the developmental ends of the organism, individual people live for the most part in their local world pursuing individual ends constitutive of a developmental trend in human history. Kant’s idea was that our unsocial sociability, our individualistic will to get ahead of each other, played out at the macro-level as an impetus for the further cultivation of the species, technologically, culturally, etc. The down side of course was that our unsocial sociability also resulted in massive amounts of human cruelty and immiseration. For Kant, these events, while morally uncondonable, were, as learning experiences, unavoidable parts of human self-development. Only by force of painful experience would humanity learn the value of peaceful co-existence. Sadly, the two-plus centuries since have not easily lent themselves to confidence in a steady, progressive, human learning curve.

Two of the key elements of Kant’s story—the idea that our social behavior is driven by inherent species proclivities and his providential/teleological assumption that we are invested with these proclivities for a reason—may not, on closer examination, look as foreign as one may initially have imagined. In place of talk about inherent proclivities, we now have talk about genes and chemical messengers. In place of a providential account of why (and to what end) we have the proclivities we do, we now have evolutionary arguments about why (and to what end) we have the genes and chemical messengers that we do. How to best interpret the significance of evolution, genetics, and neurochemistry for our understanding of human sociality, morality, and the implications for human conduct, however, is where present controversies first begin.

Read the whole article.

Ronald Cole-Turner: Transcending Evolution - Past and Future Selves

This brief article comes from the Metanexus blog. The author looks at new research that suggests people can see that they have changed over the last ten years, but at the same time they assume they will change little in the next ten years. People seem to believe they will stay as they are in this moment for the remainder of their lives. Or was it this moment, or this one . . . .

Full citation and abstract:

The End of History Illusion

Jordi Quoidbach
Daniel T. Gilbert
Timothy D. Wilson

ABSTRACT

We measured the personalities, values, and preferences of more than 19,000 people who ranged in age from 18 to 68 and asked them to report how much they had changed in the past decade and/or to predict how much they would change in the next decade. Young people, middle-aged people, and older people all believed they had changed a lot in the past but would change relatively little in the future. People, it seems, regard the present as a watershed moment at which they have finally become the person they will be for the rest of their lives. This “end of history illusion” had practical consequences, leading people to overpay for future opportunities to indulge their current preferences.

Jordi Quoidbach, J, Gilbert, DT, and Wilson, TD. (2013, Jan 4). The end of history illusion. Science, Vol. 339 no. 6115; pp. 96-98. DOI: 10.1126/science.1229294

Here is the summary:

Ronald Cole-Turner: Transcending Evolution



Past and Future Selves
January 15, 2013

Are you done changing? Are your values and personality pretty much set for life? Regardless of our age, most of us seem to think so.

According to new research, people generally recognize that they have changed over the past decade. But in the decade ahead? Overwhelmingly, people think their biggest changes are behind them. It’s as if their present state is the defining moment, when values and personality traits are fully realized and fixed forever. The research team, led by Jordi Quoidbach, called this the “End of History Illusion.”

In six studies involving more than 19,000 participants, researchers “found consistent evidence to indicate that people underestimate how much they will change in the future,” according to the study appearing in the January 4 issue of the journal Science. Like most illusions, this one comes with a big cost. Thinking they won’t change makes it more likely they will “make decisions that their future selves regret.”

What’s most amazing about this illusion is that it seems to hold true at all ages. In fact, some of the results suggested that more than their grandparents, young people think they are done changing. This much, at least, was clear to the researchers: “Both teenagers and grandparents seem to believe that the pace of personal change has slowed to a crawl and that they have recently become the people they will remain. History, it seems, is always ending today.”

While the researchers are clearly speaking of the history of the individual, their research raises the question of whether there’s a similar illusion when it comes to human history. For example, do we routinely underestimate the amount of technological change that lies ahead or its cultural and social impact? We acknowledge the profound cultural changes in past decades, but do we underestimate what is coming?

We marvel at the transformations of human evolution, but do we fail to imagine the changes that lie ahead? According to the researchers, "people may confuse the difficulty of imagining personal change with the unlikelihood of change itself." If that is true of the human individual, might it also be true of the human species?

A version of this post first appeared on Enhancing Theology.

Paul Kiritsis - Let’s Pretend and See What Comes Out: Subpersonalities

Followers of this blog know that I have long been a fan of shadow work with subpersonalities. It's a been a while since I have posted anything, but this is a good introductory article by Dr. Paul Kiritsis from his blog, Down the Rabbit Hole.

At a more fundamental level, we are all multiple selves. Whether we call them parts (Internal Family Systems), ego states (Watkins and Watkins), complexes (Jung), or subpersonalities (Psychosynthesis, Voice Dialogue, and others), we all have various selves that are only present under certain conditions, and these parts generally act as coping mechanisms to keep the self-system safe from trauma, fear, and other issues.

Let’s Pretend and See What Comes Out: Subpersonalities

October 5th, 2012 

Subpersonalities (2011) by Chris Stamboulakis

Do you know what a subpersonality is? It’s essentially a part of you or any part which can be personified. It can be the envy you feel when a peer gets the business promotion you were expecting, or the lust you feel when a beautiful stranger happens to brush past you on the sidewalk. It can be the doubt that has plagued you about your ability to perform at competition level or the athlete himself. Alternatively it could be a dogged and persistent phobia such as the fear of heights, a physical condition such as a migraine headache, an idiosyncrasy like sleeping in the nude, a desire, a temperamental quality such as shyness, or the lamentable loss of a beloved partner. A subpersonality can also be a particular doubt or worry that has been plaguing you of late, or the narcissistic fancy you feel when you catch glimpses of your terrific self in a full-length mirror. It can be a specific emotion like anger or love for a particular person, or a detrimental habit like smoking, drinking, binge eating, and gambling that has been with you since God knows when. Fascinatingly, it can even be the intangible inner sphere recognized as the real self by humanistic psychology, the soul by Jungian philosophy, and the spirit by mysticism.

Subpersonalities are usually defined by their propensity to operate on a much more rudimentary, microscopic, and simpleminded level than the individual who might express and give voice to them. The sum of innumerable subpersonalities obviously forms the psychological impulses that we perceive as our personal identity though in and of themselves they are little more than a drop of water falling into the vast and desolate breadth of the Pacific Ocean. These are in fact the same little entities that acquire a level of sentience in acute psychosis and act out independently of the total personality. (We have looked at such phenomena in detail in an earlier post on madness and hallucinations.) All these parts have a story to tell and all too often the story that they tell is one of imperfection, deficiency, imbalance, misery, and lack of insight. This is where they practice of psychotherapy comes in handy. With respect to their efficacy, subpersonalities only pose problems when they remain latent in the psyche. When one draws them out of the darkness and into the light through a conscious dialogue of some sort the subpersonality either thaws out into oblivion or it transforms into a positive and colourful sentiment able to work with the mental ego in creative and constructive ways. Psychotherapy works to disarming these little monsters by giving them a concrete and tangible form. In psychology this is known as concretization, and it allows a personal intellect unfamiliar with boundless qualities and forms to recognize their existence and begin conscious negotiations with them. Over the last century there have been many techniques pioneered to bring one into conscious communion with their subpersonalities: psychosynthesis, Voice Dialogue, fantasy play involving figurines and dolls, sand therapy, active imagination, and two-chair work.

Generally speaking, methods of inviting the unconscious into dialogue are typically broad and vary from therapist to therapist depending on the psychological school to which they adhere, though it appears their similarities far outnumber their differences because nearly all use a form of guided fantasy to inaugurate the fantastical experience. Natural settings are also vital components of the process. With respect to the latter, two of these–the ever-popular active imagination, a technique pioneered by Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), and two-chair work–even adopt special rituals intended to prepare and prime the individual for inner work involving the conscious appropriation of imaginal contents. Even if it’s just imagined or suggested, the physical ritual of dressing in ritualistic garb and paraphernalia or carrying a specific talisman of choice every time one enters into their own inner world for mythical experience binds the whole endeavour to the earthbound realm of everyday life. In this way the individual or client involved knows that the experience is real and that it actually transpired on the physical plane.

Inducing a meeting with a chosen subpersonality of choice is not as difficult as it might sound. Firstly, set up two comfortable armchairs equipped with airy and bulbous pillows so that they’re facing one another. One is for you; the other for one of your subpersonalities. If you wish to conjure an earthier, homely, and more personal atmosphere, you might wish to strategically position a small coffee table between the two chairs. Once you have finished setting up, recline yourself onto one of the chairs and start taking deep, oxygen-rich breaths. Ensure that you are completely relaxed and that all the weighty and hefty commitments that keep your mind chained to ironclad problems and worries during the day have spontaneously evaporated like water vapours. Contents gravitating about the unconscious are much more likely to rise to the surface of one’s mind when sentiments inhibiting sensory transaction between the tiers of consciousness like worry, nervousness, angst, and anxiety are completely absent. Allow your chosen subpersonality to come to mind; try visualizing it by giving it some concrete form. Enmity, for instance, might be visualized as a little red demon with a long, forked tail, reptilian skin, ambient red eyes, crooked teeth and stumpy horns. Narcissism might be a handsome blue-eyed youth with blond curls hanging to his shoulders or an animate and lifelike version of Michelangelo’s David. On the other hand grief and loss might be personified as a haggard and ravaged old crone with red puffy eyes and fairly rigid facial expressions that denote withdrawal from conscious participation in the game of life. My own preference is to materialize a physical replica of myself and imbue it with the requisite characteristics of the subpersonality I wish to converse. It tends to work well if you’ve been doing it for a while but for beginners who have little to no experience with this psychotherapeutic technique visualization of one’s entire physiognomy rouses inhibition because image and sentiment are incongruent.

Perhaps the most effective way of initiating a session is to put forth questions like, “I sense that you’re my anger”, “I feel completely disenchanted with you”, or “Why are you the one that’s sitting on the chair and not anyone else?” Naturally the style and manner of the prompts depend entirely on what the circumstances call for. Don’t try to force the dialogue; let it come out naturally as it would if you were speaking to an old friend or colleague. After the dynamic of the situation becomes crystal-clear, invert the process by clambering over to the other chair and usurping it from your subpersonality. Now imagine that you are that inferior personality. Without any inhibitions or reservations, respond to the question or questions posed by your total personality or self. Do it actively, spontaneously, and with little thought. Allow a lengthy dialogue to unfold between your total self and its subordinate personality by moving back and forth between them. Pay close attention to specific gesticulations; facial expressions; the pitch, amplitude, and quality of the voice; and any other physiognomic cues that help form a comprehensive picture of what that subpersonality is about. If you enact the exercise correctly, you should be able to discern an acute contrast between the higher entity which is the integrated “you” and the subpersonality under scrutiny.

There are many things to like about this form of psychotherapy. The technique provides voluntary entrance into an active-passive mode of being recognized as a higher state of consciousness by many religious and philosophical traditions around the world. If the theoretical fruits put forth by practicing transpersonal psychotherapists are to be believed, the insights that become apparent in this state can be used in a practical manner to enrich one’s life. Moreover the gamut of consciousness that experience of this sort is likely to garner tutors mediating therapists in the scientific art of phenomenological objectivity. How exactly might that be? Practicing psychotherapists usually have a wide scope of past experiences and practices they reflect upon in discerning the etiology of problems and neuroses. As helpful as these may be, they become a trap when religiously and rigidly heeded to.  In practice, the psychotherapist must always remember that the psychic anatomy of each individual is unique; a therapeutic technique that works on one individual might not necessarily work on another with identical circumstances. By taking note of to the impermanence of everything and the wisdom of insecurity, the psychotherapist’s chance of making diagnostic blunders and mistakes is reduced drastically. Engaging inner work with subpersonalities cultivates a deeper, wiser, and comprehensive form of scientific objectivity.

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