How Shame is Affecting Your Mental Health
You might not recognise it, but it’s there.
It's not very fashionable.
It’s something we don’t feel comfortable talking about, and we often don’t recognise it. Most of us don’t even want to admit to experiencing it.
It can make us feel powerless, isolated and alone.
The affects associated with shame can flood our bodies with powerful chemicals.
We want to run and hide.
In Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame, social worker and psychotherapist Patricia DeYoung argues that shame often lies at the heart of mental illness. It’s mostly unavailable to conscious thought and to words. We often don’t know or understand our shame experiences.
Shame just “is” and we are in it — alone and helpless.
Being ashamed can itself be shameful.
Shame is one of our first social emotions.
It can be a tool for moulding social behaviour and bringing us back to social norms — but it also has the effect of isolating and stigmatising.
Far from allowing repair and renewed closeness, shame sends its victim into a spiral of negative affects, flooding the body with powerful chemicals and…
