“These rules are not written on the refrigerator door. However, they are the operative principles that govern shame-based families… They continue the cycle of shame for generations.”
John Bradshaw
Buy the book: Healing the Shame that Binds you
Learn more about Bradshaw: Website
It was the most humiliating moment of my life. I was in the 7th grade and running late to my algebra class. PE just ended, and I had a habit of waiting until fewer boys were in the locker room to start changing back into my normal clothes. This time the boys took longer to leave, so I was running especially late. Running to get to my next class, I felt in my gut that something terrible was about to happen.
Of course, I showed up late to class, sweating and panting. The room was eerily quiet, and everyone turned toward me. I looked around the room and saw that there was only one desk available. I made my way over and sat down.
Unfortunately, I didn’t sit for long…
That chair was not made to hold obese children who weighed 218 pounds. The moment I sat down, I knew immediately that something was off. The chair began to shake, the legs began to bend, and my soul began to sink. I knew there was no turning back. The desk flattened to the ground. And my self-esteem with it.
Yep… I literally broke the chair.
Stuck on the ground, unable to move, and completely helpless, I became the bullseye for darts of laughter and ridicule that were thrown from every direction.
As shocked as everyone else in the room, my kind teacher finally helped me up and found another chair for me to sit on. “These chairs are always breaking,” he said… It was such a tender and compassionate lie… He tried to take control of the class by having us open our books to the lesson of the day, but none of us could stop giggling or thinking about what just happened.
The only lesson I learned that day was that I was fat, ugly, and undesirable, and that everyone would always laugh at me.
Shame
I have been bound by shame for most of my life, and I really had no idea. Shame is the unbearable belief that we are innately bad, faulty, inadequate, never measuring up, and unworthy of love. While outside circumstances and events reinforce it, shame actually starts in the family.
You would think I went home that day and told my parents about my distress and pain and humiliation about breaking that chair. But no. I didn’t say a thing. I went home and kept it to myself and pretended like nothing ever happened. Why?
Family Rules
I love my family and have a deep respect for my parents. My parents were at every concert and sporting event. They were at every major celebratory milestone of my life, from the kindergarten honor student award to the graduation from graduate school to the birth of my kiddos. They were there in person, front row, early. For any of you who had the privilege of hearing my dad give the father of the groom speech – yea – you know my parents have incredible and huge hearts. My parents are awesome. At the same time, they weren’t perfect. And all of us can learn to honor our parents while also not pretending that they are perfect. Like many of you, I grew up in a family that didn’t share about feelings. We didn’t have uncomfortable conversations. We didn’t acknowledge or talk about the obvious and painful elephants in the room – like the fact that all of us were overweight, or that we were all minorities, or that my parents were addicted to cigarettes, or that puberty required much more than a 30 minute conversation. Meeting financial and physical needs is not the same as meeting emotional needs.
“Shame is the unbearable belief that we are innately bad, faulty, inadequate, never measuring up, and unworthy of love. While outside circumstances and events reinforce it, shame starts in the family.”
All families, whether they know it or not, have unspoken rules that keep the family system in balance. These rules are formed because of shame, and therefore pass down shame from one generation to another. No one sat us down and explained these family rules. They were unspoken, unintentional, and unconscious. They were reinforced through words and actions, and none of us really knew they existed.
Let me be very clear. This post is not about blaming our caregivers. Nor am I blaming my parents. It’s about being honest with your lived experience and about learning to approach yourself and your caregivers with compassion. Healing is never about blame, it’s about moving toward acceptance, boundaries, compassion, and a trust in redemption. My parents could have written this post about their parents, and their parents about their parents, and my kids about me. Parents who experience toxic shame growing up and never heal from it inadvertently pass down shame-based family rules onto their kids.
In his book, Healing the Shame that Binds You, Bradshaw gently ushers us into this broader understanding of how our families have rules that foster toxic shame. If you can only read one book in my entire collection, you should read this one. It’s a classic in recovery literature, and it’s a real gift for anyone looking for answers to break free from their secret life of addiction, depression, and loneliness.
Here are seven unspoken rules you might have had in your family (my own paraphrasing):
- Don’t have needs. You were expected to control all your feelings and desires. You were supposed to be happy and pretend like nothing bothered you. You were to never be an inconvenience to others. Needs were a sign of weakness, and you avoided asking for help (and perhaps still do).
- Don’t talk. It’s not that you didn’t talk, it’s that you didn’t talk about uncomfortable topics. You learned to keep your problems to yourself. You didn’t allow yourself to talk about your feelings, for fear of making others uncomfortable. Your parents were allowed to be angry or sad, and yell or cry, but not you. You were hushed. Your caregivers never sought out repair – they didn’t say sorry for hitting or yelling. They pretended like abuse didn’t happen; and no one talked about it. The tv talked more than your family members.
- Don’t mess up. You were expected to be right and to perform well in everything you did. You were expected to shine a good light on the family, which might have meant dressing up a certain way, getting good grades, never missing a day at church, pursuing a career that was chosen for you, or winning at sports. You learned that correction was always going to take precedence over connection. You were a little soldier, and your caregivers ran the show. You learned that being spanked was normal and warranted. You learned to hate silently. You thought you deserved physical punishment. Your caregivers regularly searched your room or invaded your privacy.
- Keep others happy. You unconsciously took on a role/script (the family hero, the little father, the surrogate spouse, the scapegoat, etc). The family’s needs came first, and you felt the most love and connection when you acted out of your role. The role undermined your true, authentic self.
- Don’t ask questions or disrupt the flow. You learned you shouldn’t perceive, think, feel, desire, or imagine the way you do. You had to grow up quickly and push back against creativity and exploration. You learned you had to follow the strict orders of your caregivers at all costs. Your career or spouse was chosen for you. You didn’t ask questions about sex; you hid your sexuality and thought you were the only one who did or thought or felt what you did.
- Don’t feel. Your behavior was more important than your emotions. You swallowed up feelings you didn’t know how to communicate. Your caregivers never shared about their fears, for they were out of touch with or fearful of their own emotions. You did not have an emotional vocabulary more extensive than sad, happy, or mad. You took on a script that told you what feelings you should have.
- Don’t trust. You learned you couldn’t depend on people. You had to turn somewhere else for survival. You learned you had to lie and cover up any mistakes or distressing events. You were too embarrassed to share about the hard things in life, and even more embarrassed for what the reaction might be. You learned one parent wouldn’t stick up for you against the other. You learned you were on your own, and felt unprepared every step of the way.
I feel like I have to say it again – this post is not about blaming our caregivers. The real culprit behind every harmful and unspoken family rule is shame.
Our caregivers, like us, are imperfect, and none of them could have accepted us perfectly and unconditionally. Parents who were shamed and haven’t dealt with their past end up putting conditions and rules on their kids. Why? Because in parenting they finally have a pseudo sense of control, which becomes an arena to act out their insecurity. The underlying problem of shame-bound parents is that their kids’ emotions become threats to the parents; the kids’ emotions trigger the parents’ own unresolved issues and cause a fight, flight, or freeze response. The rules are a way for our caregivers to protect themselves from the shame scripts they are trying to overcome.
“The real culprit behind every harmful and unspoken family rule is shame.”
So how do these rules affect us? Each of us have adapted in different ways. We might dissociate or numb our experiences through addiction, eating disorders, or busyness. We might rage or become controlling. We might employ arrogance or pride. We might criticize or blame others. We might people-please for validation or adopt a false self. We might envy, reenact abusive behavior, commit crimes, or pursue violence. Bottom line, shame kills connection and robs us of seeing ourselves and the world through the compassionate and unconditionally loving eyes of God. All of these are unsuccessful attempts to protect ourselves from feeling our shame. It is in this way you can say shame is the underlying cause of all of human suffering. Surely the Bible reveals as such in Genesis 3. It wasn’t sin that brought heartache into the world, it was shame – the driving force behind sin. (I’ll share much more about that in a future post.)
For me, my super achievement, perfectionism, religiosity, and unwanted sexual behavior were coverups for my shame and the primary side effects of the family imposed rules. I tried to obtain feelings of righteousness and praise through my performance. I often pretended like everything was ok. I looked successful and polished on the outside, but felt empty and lonely and scared and hopeless on the inside. If something was hard or distressing, I countered it by just saying something “churchy.” I had lots of spiritual strategies to become more acceptable in other people’s eyes. I sought validation by climbing the latter, getting good grades, looking polished, and succeeding at music or sports. But every trophy was a bottomless cup of self-worth. Shame existed under the surface of my life, and no amount of external behavior would heal my internal problem.
Unwanted sexual behavior became the safe haven for the 7th grade boy who broke the chair and felt powerless and undesirable. Sexual addiction gave the little boy an arena to reverse the role – now he was the one in power, he was the one desired, he was the one who had a voice, and he was the one who would ridicule others. His fantasyland was a land with no rules. His addiction was a relationship that did allow room for his emotions to unravel. It’s devastating how such a God-given and lovely desire for belonging and love can be corrupted by lust, shame, evil, and darkness.
How to Heal
I wonder how things would have been different for me if I did feel safe enough to share with my family about that dreadful day in 7th grade. I wonder how things might have been different if my family members modeled courageous vulnerability. I wonder how things might have been different were my caregivers to teach me to recognize and talk about my feelings. I wonder how things would have been different if I had a grounded sense that I was loved and liked just the way I was, that I didn’t have to perform to belong. I wonder how things might have been different if my anger and sadness and fears and mistakes were welcomed as normal and encouraged to be expressed. I wonder how things might have been different if I was not spanked growing up. I wonder how much safer I would have felt if my church gave me permission to express my questions about sex and why I was overweight or why God flooded the earth if He truly loved us. I wonder how life would have been different growing up if I didn’t feel like I had to become a spiritual soldier to self-protect from feeling less-than.
Shame would have had less power. Addiction would not have had fertile ground to grow in. And faith would have been more authentic.
There is no breaking shame until we do the very thing shame compels us not to do – become vulnerable to emotions, exposure, and potential rejection.
I hope you see now that the primary goal of recovery is the overcoming of shame. And we do that by grieving the stories of our past, validating the harm from our experiences, practicing the sharing of emotions, honoring and processing our triggers, and revealing our authentic selves before God and others.
As we begin to share with others the truth about how we feel and what we experienced in our families, we begin to learn that we are not bad, that we are human and have limitations, that Jesus is never ashamed of us, and that we are not alone in our feeling of loneliness and abandonment and inadequacy. Our parents were victims too.
As we begin to accept and walk in reality and begin to love ourselves and allow others to love us for who we really are, we begin to break free from the chains of shame. While I do not believe entirely with the wording, Bradshaw distinguishes between toxic shame and healthy shame, with healthy shame being a non-judgmental acceptance that you are a human with limitations, that you are not God.
“The primary goal of recovery is the overcoming of shame. And we do that by grieving the stories of our past, validating the harm from our experiences, practicing the sharing of emotions, and revealing our authentic selves.”
At the end of the day, it isn’t so much the pain we suffered that brought about shame, it’s that we were unable to express the pain we suffered that brought about shame. Today I get to “parent” my inner 7th grader, and give him a safe place to express himself. I get to comfort little Alex and remind him that he is valuable and significant and special to the world. I get to listen to his embarrassment and pain and give him my full attention and presence. I get to speak back to him a new truth – “you are good and you are human and you are worthy of love.” I get to look at him and remind him that he is part of this blog, that he is helping others as he continues to make peace with his own story. “Alex, can you love yourself for that?” “Yes – I can love myself for that. I can love myself for me.”
As I continue to heal, I get to be intentional in trying to dispel any rigid rules that may be passed down to my kids. Surely, I will fail. My kids will know and experience shame, at home, at school, and in the workplace. Shame is in the world. On our own, there is no ridding of shame. There is, however, a moving toward greater compassion and acceptance that releases more freedom, belonging, goodness, and love. Today, when I mess up with my own kids and act out of shame, I do my best to take a breather, tell the little 7th grader inside me that he is ok and loved, and then turn to my children with vulnerability and honesty. “Dada is sorry. He did not mean to yell. It is ok to be mad, but we should try not to yell at others. I see that you are crying. It’s ok to be sad. You don’t want to sleep. I get it. For now, let’s take a deep breath together. I’m right here. I am so happy to be your dada. I love who you are just the way you are.”
Shame will not have the final word.
However strong the shame that binds you might be, there is a hope and freedom as you begin to explore the particularities of your story, especially how your family rules shaped your way of understanding the world and yourself. I’m here to support you and walk alongside you. You are worth it. You are loved. You are my reason for writing.
Love,
Alex
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