When people think of shame they often have one category – shame is bad. But that’s not the case. There is such a thing as healthy shame.

Healthy shame is what keeps us from being the offender. It keeps us operating within our value system. So when you snap at your partner because you’ve had a long day, you feel bad — you might feel shame — because that’s not how you want to be in relationship with them.

Healthy shame comes with appropriate humility. I’m human and I make mistakes. But the key here is that the shame you feel is an experience you’re having, versus an experience of who you are.

Then there’s carried shame. Many years ago I learned about the concept of carried shame from Pia Mellody and it deeply impacted me personally and professionally. It helped clarify so many things for me about how I — and my clients — operated in the world.

Carried shame says that you are bad when you experience and express your fallible humanity. When you experience carried shame you feel worthless, like there’s something wrong with you.

In the wise words of Pia Mellody, “Your own shame says your shit stinks, carried shame says you’re a shit”.

You may have heard the term toxic shame to describe what I’m talking about and that’s an accurate term. Carried shame is for sure toxic, but I prefer the term carried because it’s more accurate. It points to the fact that the shame didn’t originate with us.

Where carried shame comes from

Carried shame comes from our parents or primary caregivers. It’s essentially the energy of shame that belongs to them, but is put on their child and it’s carried by them.

Before I go any further, I want to say more about the energy of shame so you can get a feel of what I’m talking about. Here’s a benign example of how to think about the energy of shame: let’s say you’re in a restaurant and someone starts to berate their server. Think about what you’d feel if that happens. The instinct of many will be to feel a sense of embarrassment, they’ll look away — but the person doing the berating isn’t feeling that. Because that person isn’t owning their shame, they’re being shameless, and the energy of that shame comes off of them and everyone around them can feel it.

Now think of that kind of shame energy coming off of a parent while a child is around. A child who doesn’t have any way to protect themselves from that energy. And so that energy gets absorbed by the child and now they’re carrying it.

In practice, this looks a few ways:

A parent is operating in a shameless way. In other words, they don’t have the healthy shame that keeps them from being an offender. Any time a parent abuses or neglects their child, they’re being shameless. Since they aren’t owning the energy of their shame, it comes off of them and onto the child. That’s one of the reasons why there’s so much shame attached to being abused and neglected. The shame you feel when you try to talk about it is the shame that belongs to the person that hurt you.

Another way this can happen is when a caregiver is overtly shaming. It could come through words spoken — “Why didn’t you get an A?” “Are you sure you want to eat that?” “What’s wrong with you?!” “How could you be so stupid?” It could also come through a facial expression, body language, or other behavior. You see a look of disgust on mom’s face, or dad pushes you away when you try to hug him.

Carried shame can also come by way of mom and dad’s own shame — shame they haven’t dealt with themselves. That’s outside of the behaviors I mentioned above. Like other things, carried shame is passed through generations.

How carried shame shows up

Throughout childhood and into adulthood, carried shame becomes part of how you move through the world. It’s in how you see yourself, how you relate to others, how you respond to conflict, how much space you allow yourself to take up.

As you’re living your life, carried shame can look many different ways, but here are a few I commonly see:

• Staying small, hiding, not speaking up — not using your voice, trying to stay in the background, holding back parts of yourself.
• Harsh self-judgment and inner criticism — being unkind or mean to yourself, usually fairly pervasive.
• Going one-up on others — taking a better-than stance: I know more, I’m right, big anger, being judgmental. It can look like being overly confident on the outside.
• Over-accommodating — keeping the peace at all costs, considering others’ needs but rarely your own.
• Fear — of being seen, being wrong, being too much or not enough.
• Difficulty receiving care, compliments, or help — can feel like you should be able to do it yourself, shame around having needs.

You’ll also notice carried shame showing up in therapy. I see it a lot with my clients and I certainly experienced it myself. In particular, carried shame shows up when we start to work on our trauma. The vast majority of the time, when you start to name what happened to you and then again when you start to work on it, you usually feel carried shame. And sometimes that shame feels so crippling that it’s like it  keeps words from coming out.

And that shame feels like it belongs to you because it’s so strong and you feel it from the inside out.

When you’re talking about something done to you – or not done for you, in the case of neglect – and you feel shame, that’s shame that doesn’t belong to you. It’s carried. It belongs to the person that wounded you. 

This is so hard to get at first because the felt experience in the moment is so strong. But when shame shows up this way it’s always carried shame.

You don’t have to carry the shame

Carried shame is heavy. Reading this post may feel heavy. And I invite you to let yourself feel that heaviness in a way that feels OK to you.

But I want to share the hopeful part of this. Because carried shame doesn’t belong to you, it was never yours and didn’t originate with you, you don’t have to carry it indefinitely.

You can give the energy of that shame back to your parents. It’s no longer yours to carry. It’s not a quick and easy process, but it’s possible.

Photo by Astrid Schaffner on Unsplash