Trauma is anything that incapacitates our nervous system’s ability to cope, leading to overwhelm. The nervous system is a delicate interplay of wires and interconnected fibers that easily become welded or combustible given the right environmental circumstances.
Developmentally speaking, the human infant is one of the most ill-equipped energetic beings in terms of survival without a caregiver. As infants, we are delicate and helpless. We need a caregiver who is responsive to our needs to survive. Part of developing a secure attachment is a caregiver who responds at least 50% of the time. When parents accomplish this, children are often resilient and capable and become adults who ideally have the capacity to form stable interpersonal relationships. When this attunement is not present, when the parent is abusive, neglectful, and ill-equipped to cope with the parent-child bond, the child learns implicit messages of shame. These messages might include, “I am not good enough to receive this love and care that I need to survive.” If this misattunement is chronic and repair is inconsistent or lacking entirely, trauma is the net result.
Traumatic shame becomes hardwired into the child’s nervous system. This misattunement often becomes encoded in implicit sensory fragments that reappear interpersonally throughout the child’s life. It is a felt sense, deep under the diaphragm, a lump in the throat, the heart dropping to the stomach, shoulders slumping, mind spiraling: “Why am I never good enough?” Most people think shame is just an emotion. Folks with a history of childhood trauma might say that it feels like an embodied, confusing, desperate cry for survival.
Shame is a physiological reaction to a ruptured attachment system. In an abusive system, where too many instances of this in a young child’s life occur, the child learns to create distance from the emotional entanglement of traumatic shame by dissociating from the pain of misattunement from a caregiver. Dissociation, numbing, and going out of our bodies keep us alive. It helps us survive the trauma, thereby often molding shame and trauma as one. Those wires become crossed in an entangled web of confusion, disbelief, and shock, and replay in a sequence of having the same arguments in adult relationships over and over again, and never knowing why. This mismatch of wires is why shame is a common reaction to interpersonal threats in relationships.
As childhood trauma survivors, the infrastructure of our neural pathways is structured around the fault lines of our ruptured parent-child attachment systems. We never learned that relationships were not a place for survival. Our survival needs warp our perception of reality, so our relationships become battlefields. In reality, healthy relationships are places of safety, community, regulation, play, and connection. A key part of trauma recovery is realizing that acceptance is an unburdening of shame and a developing of new, chosen fault lines between the events of painful past learning and shame so that you can regulate the intrusive material brought on by the painful past learning and have the relationships we want to have as adults.
Shame and trauma are separable. Trauma is a bad thing that happened in the past. Just because a bad thing happened does not necessarily suggest that a person is inherently bad, wrong, broken, defective, or negative. Going one step further, if shame is “I am something bad” or “I am not good enough,” you, as a grown adult, can choose whether to feel that way. An adult with negative intentions toward you is no longer responsible for that decision. They don’t call the shots anymore. You don’t need to hold on to them to survive. You don’t need to anticipate shame in situations anymore. At one point, it kept you alive. However, relationships no longer have to be battlefields. Believing you’re not good enough is not a survival strategy you must hold onto. It seems easier because, if we are the bad thing, we can at least try to work to make ourselves feel worthy of the love we didn’t get. This hardwired pattern is the misinformed process of a child trying to make sense of something nonsensical: a parent who is unable to love and care for them. Part of acceptance is accepting that you can let go of such a hardwired neural pathway. Accepting that you can let go comes after grieving what you didn’t get. It’s not easy to disentangle years of faulty wiring. It’s hardwired for a reason. It kept you alive. Shame was your armor. Now, regulation takes its place. Shame provides a faulty defense mechanism. Regulation puts you on solid ground.
