Self Esteem and the of Shadow of Shame

Low self-esteem often takes root in the deep undercurrent of an unsafe childhood. Abuse and neglect are obvious markers, although its causes are often more discrete. Low self-esteem can be bound up in the deep recesses of shame. Shame is a complex cluster of feelings that can be difficult to grasp. Constellations of trauma that gives rise to shame can lie dormant in the psyche for a long time and appear later, taking the mask of anxiety and depression. Shame can sometimes be companioned with a feeling of disliking our body or feeling uncomfortable in our own skin.

When shame arises, we can feel assailed by a sense of not being good enough or being unlovable. This often goes together with the feeling of wanting to be out of sight, like a deeply uncomfortable self-conscious anxiety. Sometimes, there is an urge to cover up shame with drinking or drugs, or other addictions. There is sometimes another part of the self that feels confident and strong that protects the shamed part, and we might believe this to be who we are. When these types of defences operate, it can be a shock when shame rears its vulnerable head.

Shame may not feel present all the time. It creeps up in relationships, in social situations and in places where we have to be visible. Shame is stealthy, it sneaks up on us, we often don’t know it’s there. Shame leads to avoidance. We just know that we just don’t want to do the thing. When investigating the resistance, we might find that we don’t want to talk to people. There might be a fear being excluded and ignored. The sad thing is that this it often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as avoidance leads to isolation, and then we are left out.

My client Mary*(fictitious character) came to therapy with social anxiety. Mary is a white British cis gendered woman in her 30’s who identifies as queer. Mary revealed how she can’t bring herself to attend her partners friend’s birthday party. She feels terrible about it, and it was causing problems in her relationship.

“I won’t be able to talk to people”, said Mary. “I just freeze, I won’t know what to say, it makes me feel sick”. Mary imagines that her partner’s friends won’t like her, fearing they will judge her, dislike her and think she is not good enough. This leads to Mary not attending social engagements, thus creating the problems that she wanted to avoid.

Over time, as I explored this with Mary in depth, we moved towards her buried feelings of shame that resided in her body and psyche. We uncovered a subtle sense that her partners friends reminded her of the children that bullied her when she changed schools at age 8. Nobody liked her in her new primary school because she had a different accent and wore different clothes. Mary spent a lot of time in the library. She had one or two friends but avoided large groups. In high school, she was often ignored. Mary had a sense that she was attracted to girls, but homophobia was rife in her school, and she didn’t dare explore her feelings.

By the time she went to college, she was exposed to a wider group of people. Mary’s confidence grew as she came to discover that she was liked by her peers. She dated women and made friends. Mary’s intellect and creativity had a chance to thrive. It was not until her late-20s that she came to wonder why sometimes she felt completely fine and other times she felt crippled by a sense of overwhelming anxiety.

We worked together to look at the roots of this. It took time to establish trust. At first, we needed to work on the anxiety. I offered tools to help her to reduce her panic attacks. Over several sessions, Mary began to uncover childhood memories. She shared how other children picked on her. They said she was ugly. Mary began to get in touch with a deep loneliness and longing. Why didn’t my parents help? She wondered. Both Mary’s mother and father worked and because Mary’s grades were good, they didn’t worry. They knew that Mary had one or two friends and thought she was shy. Being disliked at school felt so uncomfortable she didn’t want to tell anyone, so she kept her own deep dark secret.

As an adult, her secret sat like a lump in her chest and her stomach. However, Mary had mostly forgotten about the pain of her primary school years, now that she had a thriving career, a partner and friends. The shameful feelings arose like anxiety that appeared in social contexts. Mary hated large groups. This proved to be particularly difficult when she attended conferences at work and when she had to meet her partner’s friends.

Mary needed to tell her story, feel the feelings, learn to nourish her own inner child. We did this through visualisation, body awareness and self-care practices such as journaling. Drawing her feelings helped Mary to access some of the deep layers of self-disgust that she had internalised. Deep blues, greys and beige in thick crayon were criss-crossed with red lines, which represented the wounds where other children had called her names. She drew another image which looked like a tree trunk where the wounds were still incorporated, but they connected to the earth and the sky and were held by the body of the tree.

Together we worked with guided imagery to comfort her lonely and lost inner child. Mary also carried out these exercises herself at home before going into social situations. This work took time and was very tender. Mary needed to grieve for her lonely childhood. Gradually, she began to feel that she had more energy and started to take more risks. Little by little she began to feel more able to go into group situations.

My work with Mary demonstrates how clusters of shame can reside within the unconscious, causing feelings of anxiety and fear, together with the sense of not being good enough and wanting to hide. Mary needed to experience safety and kindness within the therapy container, so that she could talk about what happened to her in her childhood and process the feelings. Through sharing her childhood experiences in therapy and learning tools to sooth and comfort her inner child, Mary gradually found that her comfort zone became wider, and she was able to take more risks. Gradually, Mary began to feel more confident in social situations.

*Mary is a fictional character, made up from my experience of working with clients who present with social anxiety in my practice