Self Abandonment & Toxic Shame: The Loneliest Place in the World
When we are little, shame freezes our other emotions to dull them and to keep us small—for the better.
Shame is a word that makes us recoil. It washes over us and floods our bodies with so much discomfort that we have no choice but to run from it. Shame is a master emotion that binds with other emotions such as fear, anger, sadness, and joy. It pushes those other emotions down, suppressing them deeply into our bodies and our unconscious minds so that we cannot feel them to release them and heal from them.
When we have been abused or traumatized in our early lives, shame is our biggest protector. That’s right. I said it. Shame is our protector. Now, who would have thought that? Most of the time we would do just about anything to run from this huge emotion. We want to hide in a cave or totally disappear when we are faced with shame, right? Often, shame becomes our entire personality because we’d so much rather ignore it than lean into it. What we resist persists and the fear of shame allows it to control us and become us until we figure out how to heal it.
The way that shame acts as a protector when we are little is that it makes us “behave” so that we won’t be abused more. Surely, when anyone crosses our boundaries and hits us, yells at us, sexually abuses or emotionally devalues us we are tempted to react in some way. Or, this would naturally be the case if shame wasn’t there to stop us. Usually, when boundaries are crossed we feel anger. Sometimes, we can feel sadness about abuse as well. However, reacting to how we have been abused would potentially cause us even more abuse or possible death. Our abuser might use shame to keep us quiet. They might threaten to kill someone we love if we tattle on them. Shame becomes internalized and toxic (pervasive) from our abuser’s words and actions time and again. Without repairing the rupture to the relationship that abuse and trauma cause, toxic shame, with a life of its own inside of us, steps in with its trusty cape and makes us stay small, hidden, invisible, and safe so that we won’t be hurt more. Shame paralyzes us and freezes our nervous systems so we feel helpless and hopeless so that we won’t do anything else to cause us more abuse.
Now you get to meet your inner bully.
After a while, this toxic shame becomes our inner critic or, as I call it, the “inner bully.” My inner bully looks like a very uptight librarian with her hair severely pulled back into a tight bun, glasses, and a straight-lipped smile. She does NOT mess around! Imagine what yours looks like. It can be kind of fun to imagine your inner bully or other parts as having personalities. This helps with becoming the observer of your inner bully rather than enmeshing and BEING your inner bully. In this way, your inner bully loses its power over you.
Now, this inner bully comes across as very critical. It harps on you to be perfect and to think in black or white, right or wrong, and good or bad. Your limiting (false—think lies) beliefs are created from the toxic shame and what the inner bully tells you about yourself. Messages like: “You are not lovable,” “You are an imposter,” “You are stupid and unattractive,” and “You are a failure.” Other such nonsense can become quite common thoughts we start to believe after being toxically shamed as children. We don’t believe these things consciously for the most part, but we have an entire life under the conscious mind in the unconscious or subconscious mind.
Think of the mind as an iceberg. The conscious mind is only the tip of that iceberg. The subconscious is a huge and massive rock of ice under that tip. A lot of information is stored in that part of the mind, and much of it contains false beliefs. Think of it this way: The conscious mind wants you to be happy; the subconscious mind wants to keep you safe. That is its job. Period. It does not care if you are happy, healthy, or free to be authentic. Its job is to ensure that you stay alive, and it takes it quite seriously, which is good. It just sometimes gets a little carried away with its job. As a child, you needed this kind of protection. As an adult, you don’t anymore.
Once you are conditioned to appease people and to not have any overt reactions to your abuse, you start to self-abandon, and you invite (subconsciously) even more abuse in the form of teachers, peers, friends, lovers, and employers. Your life experiences start to reflect back to you just how much you abandon your feelings to make others happy. This is the birth of codependency as well. (This is where you sacrifice your own desires and needs for another person’s happiness or health over your own.) You might even come to believe something like, “I don’t deserve to be happy” or “I don’t matter to anyone.”
There is so much loneliness in self abandonment and in disconnecting from your body or inner world
Self abandonment is a deeply rooted pattern of neglecting one's needs, desires, and well-being to please others or seek external validation. It can manifest as prioritizing others' happiness and opinions above one's own, leading to a loss of personal identity and a sense of disconnection from oneself. When you can’t connect with your inner self and make yourself “not matter” by ignoring yourself (when you are emotionally unavailable to yourself), and you don’t allow those bound-up emotions to be felt and to flow, you feel very lonely. This loneliness will also be mirrored back to you in relationships where you can’t connect emotionally with someone. When we are emotionally unavailable to ourselves, we simply cannot be emotionally available to anyone else.
In recovering from the effects of toxic shame, the idea is to unfreeze or unbind from the shame so that your tamped-down emotions can be set free to be expressed and allowed to move in a flowing way. You have every right to feel angry about being abused, bullied, and mistreated. It is normal to feel sad and disappointed about not having the life experiences, the parents, or the friends you should have and wanted to have as a child. This pain from childhood that has not been expressed or acknowledged often shows up in your present life in personal relationships, jobs, body image, health, and relationship with money.
The beliefs you have carried from back then are still alive and are even more pronounced or evident simply because you have had hundreds or thousands of experiences reminding you that you are “a loser,” “less than,” or “not good enough.” As I have mentioned, these beliefs are false—meaning they are not true. But when we believe these false beliefs from a subconscious level, life mirrors these beliefs back to us as though they are the truth. The subconscious is the one in charge of manifesting or creating our life experiences. The thoughts create the beliefs, creating behaviors that lead to patterns and experiences. Notice your patterns and experiences. These lead you to your beliefs—whether false or true. (The true ones are the goodies, which are certainly in there too.)
Your emotions are your ticket to personal freedom because as we feel them, we can process through the mental and emotional parts of ourselves—the false beliefs and the unexpressed feelings that we have been inundated with by the shame the inner bully has been doling out for decades. Your emotions are allowed to exist and to be felt. You (your feelings) are allowed to matter. Feeling your repressed emotions will not make you into a victim or a martyr, as people will very often think. This kind of message is your shame talking, by the way. Remember, shame will bind with and tamp down your sadness, tell you it’s wrong to feel it and keep it hidden and “bad” so you won’t feel it and ruin someone’s day with it. Shame says making someone upset by your sad or angry, or even joyous feelings is a “bad” and a “wrong” thing to do to someone. Shame is a protector and, when toxic, a liar as well.
So how do we heal?
You make the time to stand in the truth of and feel your feelings, observe yourself with compassion, and make yourself the priority in your life that DOES matter is healthy and allows you to feel a sense of confidence, calmness, clarity, self-assuredness, and self-trust that you might not recall ever having felt before. This is the freedom to be your authentic self, which hurts no one. In fact, it helps others when you stand in your truth in this way. Standing in the light and the expansiveness of your loving nature helps others do the same if and when they are ready to. Your little one who was harmed, belittled, criticized, bullied, ignored, abandoned, discounted, minimized, rejected, or neglected deserves to be seen, understood, held, and heard—by YOU.
Self abandonment is a painful journey of disconnecting from our true selves, often driven by deep-rooted fears of rejection and unworthiness. However, through self-awareness, self-acceptance, and nurturing self-care practices, we can gradually break free from self-abandonment and embark on a path of self-love, reclaiming our inner power and building a fulfilling and authentic life.
If you have been abusing yourself in the same ways that your abusers treated you, believing the false messages your shame has given you, and people-pleasing or making yourself into a pretzel so someone will love you and never abandon you—self-abandoning—then your little one is in deep pain. Feeling your pain helps you connect back in with your little self and birth into a higher, grander version of yourself. Finally, you can stop abandoning yourself, make yourself a priority to yourself, and end up feeling lonely anymore. You can also learn to express your anger and sadness in healthy ways.
You don’t have to confront your abusers, shoot down the post office, or take down City Hall. You can express your feelings to yourself and BY yourself. This is about you loving, supporting, and validating YOU, after all!In our coaching together, I help you learn to reduce your inner bully’s shaming tactics. We uproot, become very aware of, and change the old, outdated false beliefs and toxic patterns that have been running your life for too long and sabotaging your happiness, health, abundance, and freedom.
We rewire your brain, move you onto a new neural pathway, and we work on helping you make new choices to stand in your truth, love yourself fiercely, and have your own back. Healing from self abandonment involves reclaiming self-worth, cultivating self-compassion, and establishing healthy boundaries to honor and prioritize one's own needs and authentic desires. This is the way to emotional freedom and the journey to becoming your true, authentic self.
You really CAN come home to your true self!
