Babies are born feeling joy, fear, sadness, and other primary emotions. But we are not born with shame. The belief we are inherently bad is not part of our original vocabulary of emotions. We had to first feel disapproval from someone else. Maybe we cried too much or broke something or hit a sibling.

Shame arises when we interpret the disapproval as being directed at us as a person, not just at our action:

“You are a bad child” vs “Hitting your brother is bad”.

A new reality is revealed to us:

The possibility that there might be something fundamentally wrong with us. Something rotten. Something that evokes disgust in others. That makes them turn away from us.

Shame can only exist in the presence of a relationship. It is a social emotion. By its definition, shame only exists when there is an “other” to give it to us.

Shame is relational.

In terms of evolution, to be shamed is to risk rejection from a group. Our nervous systems believe we must remain within the herd at all cost in order to survive. To be alone means inevitable death. There is a good reason why the feeling of shame feels so viscerally unbearable at every level. We are hard-wired to fear rejection.

Over time and with enough enforcement, we no longer need a literal “other” to give it to us. We learn to perpetuate it onto ourselves. It might come in the shape of our inner critic (“You are worthless”). It might come in the shape of avoidance and self-censorship (an intense fear of feeling shame). It might come in the shape of overcompensation and approval-seeking (the need to prove ourselves). Eventually we even learn to feel shame about feeling shame.

From a group perspective, shame is an easy and effective self-propagating mechanism to enforce group values, norms and expectations in order to maintain stability and predictability within a community. Makes sense. We don’t want group members thinking its okay to murder or steal from others. But when it is routinely used to stamp out all individuality purely for the sake of enforcing blanket conformity – when shame becomes habitual and endemic within a community, when it becomes the main driver of human behaviour, it becomes toxic not only to individual group members but the healthy of the group itself – just look at the world we live in.

Because shame is a physiological survival mechanism, it does not respond to logic. And once it is deeply embedded into our core beliefs it becomes part of who we are.

You cannot think or reason your way out of shame. Chronic shame permanently changes our brain-wiring.

Chronic shame is trauma.

Being neurodivergent means our brains do not conform. We think differently and act differently to our group’s norm. We are the ends of the bell curve. Therefore, we are the prime targets for shame from the communities we grow up in whether that’s family, neighbourhood, or school. Neurodivergence, internalised chronic shame and trauma go hand in hand.

But our brains can be rewired. We know about neuroplasticity. We can change our core beliefs. Our nervous systems can heal and our instincts can be soothed.

We can escape the cycle of chronic shame. But it is hard. It takes time, effort, and deep often painful inner work. And we can’t do it alone.

The antidote to shame is self-compassion. But we cannot develop self-compassion without first experiencing reliable relational safety. We need to first believe that someone else truly believes we have inherent worth, irrespective of our actions and outputs.

For some it is a trusted therapist, for others a whole community, or even a faith. It could be a beloved pet or it could be a new found connection to nature or a deep sense of the unconditional love of the universe. This is distinct from receiving approval, which is always in response to achievements and outcomes.

We need someone to care for us and accept us for our true selves, and to cast doubt on our belief that the core of us is bad. We can then internalise this as self-love and self-acceptance. It is reversing the process of internalising shame.

It requires us to not only face our true selves, but to show it to others. This may feel impossible when we have spent a lifetime hiding our true selves and running from it. Ironically, what we need to help us through it is self-compassion, the very thing we don’t yet have.

But don’t be disheartened. All it takes is a tiny seed. A seed of doubt, however faint, that deep down we might not be tainted, or bad, or an anomaly. A suspicion that we might have just as much value as anyone else.

A seed of hope.

Hold onto it. Surround yourself with others who will not step on it, but will help you to nurture it. In time, it will bloom.

And you will be in awe of yourself.