Shame

The consequence of prolonged separation-stress

Shame arises from a disturbance of recognition, when you suddenly encounter an affective mismatch. If you predicted and expected a shared emotional state but instead, experience a sudden stress—a shock-induced deflation, you will experience shame.

Unregulated shame lies at the heart of all psychopathology and underpins suicide.

Shame in the personality begins during early toddlerhood. Our first forays to separate from our caregiver and explore the world, needs to be met with mutual, attuned affect. But if the budding self returns from exploration in excited elation, expecting to be met with a mutually attuned, joyful response and instead, is met, not only with an absence of a smile but the presence of strangeness in the caregiver’s face that suggests a negative emotional state, the young toddler internalises and represents the absence of contact as shame-humiliation. Repeated loss of feedback from adequate mirroring, attunement, and timely re-attunement from the caregiver lays the seeds for shame at the core of the self.

Edward Tronick (1989) demonstrated that mismatches are ubiquitous and it allows infants to develop interactive, coping, self-regulatory skills and enable the child to maintain engagement with the social environment in the face of stress. And the capacity for interactive repair contributes to the security of attachment. Caregiver responsiveness upon reunion after an attachment break is critical to the reparative process of emotional regulation. If the caregiver is approachable and responsive, the child’s attachment system re-activates, deflation (which indicates separation stress) is inhibited, and shame is metabolised. As a result, the child recovers from the injury to their esteem and sense of self and recovers from shame.

Small and unavoidable doses of shame assists the individuation process because it involves acute awareness of one’s separateness from others. But young toddlers cannot manage shame induced by separateness without the support of their caregiver. John Bowlby observed a “bitter” separation protest to broken attachment ties, which equates to shame-rage, a humiliated fury. Recent infant mental health research has supported Bowlby’s observation that young toddlers experience anger rather than sadness to separateness. Young toddlers can’t self-regulate and so separateness becomes an unregulated, hyper-emotional condition which precipitates an explosive (or implosive) sense of self fragmentation.

It is crucial during the early toddler phase for the caregiver to support their child’s separation and individuation by gradually disillusioning the child of their merger fantasy; that is, the illusion that the child and caregiver are one and symbiotically attuned. This process is riddled with shame and requires sensitive and timely re-attunement and repair following separateness, lapses in attention, and mis-attunements. But a caregiver who is more concerned about their emotional needs than that of their infant provides psycho-toxic care (Spitz, 1964)—the caregiver is only emotionally accessible when the child is in a state that mirrors the caregiver’s needs and so the child’s real emotional state is not seen, supported and modulated in a way that can be metabolised by the child. Psycho-toxic care is a major factor in the genesis of the shame-based personality. Repeated early failures of attunement creates a belief that one’s emotional needs and expressions are somehow unacceptable and shameful.