Shame Experiences are Social Traumas
Compassion Focused TherapyShame experiences can operate as traumas, as traumatic memories. Shame experiences are actually social traumas. They are traumatic events to our social bonds with the world and with others. And that's for us as human beings is highly threatening and highly important, highly significant to how we build our self-identity and to how we navigate our social relationships. So what this means is that a shame experience can become encoded in our memory as a traumatic memory.
And if this happens, what this means is that every time there's something that actually triggers and activates the experience of shame, all of this will come rushing back. So we will be transported in a flashback, very likely to that initial event. We will have intrusive images and thoughts about the shame experience. We will tend to avoid thinking about, feeling anything to do with with experience or avoid anything that might elicit shame, elicit negative evaluations, by others and our own shame feelings.
And we will tend to have this hyperarousal experience of feeling startled, anxious, humiliated, angry. Even when a shame memory is from long ago, these memories will be in the background of their minds driving how they feel others see them, and they will tend to believe they are seen by others as inferior, defective, unlovable. So we actually live our lives with a sense of a threatened social self in a much more frequent way than people whose shame experiences didn't have these, traumatic qualities.