The Shame Spirals

Are to be expected, but they don't last forever

Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. If you are someone who has been high-masking and / or you grew up in a high control religion, there is a good chance you deal with some chronic shame (and if you are both—like me—congrats! you have won the shame lottery). I don’t have all the answers for how to cope with shame, but I thought I would share some of my real-time thoughts on it for today’s post. As always, this is a reader-supported newsletter and I cannot express my gratitude enough that I get to write about these topics in such a great community. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

I am a few years into my healing journey and I’ve detailed a lot about it right here in this newsletter—getting diagnosed as autistic, setting boundaries with family members, leaving Christianity and Christian publishing, coming out as non-binary, experiencing both talk therapy and somatic therapy. I’ve written about nervous system regulation and unpacking behaviors learned from high control environments. 

Today I don’t have a ton of words in me but the few I have all seem to be swirling around the idea of shame, and what it does to a person—especially if they don’t know that they live every day with chronic shame. 

RuPaul puts a picture of himself as a small child as the background image on his phone and reparents himself every time he looks at it. So I’m going to do that too. Hi baby DL, it’s ok you are safe with me now!

//

I grew up an evangelical pastor’s kid, and shame was an essential component to the entire project of Christianity (and getting me to commit to it for life). I was told constantly in childhood how Jesus died for MY sins, and that it was my job to make up for that the rest of my life. In evangelical land, even babies are born with a sin nature (which . . . wtf, ammiright?). At age six I was immensely pressured to be baptized and declare Jesus my LORD and to dedicate my entire life to a deity I had never met (who, apparently, wanted me dead except for his son Jesus’ blood¹). Every year Good Friday would roll around and I would miserably sit through another of my dad’s sermons where he detailed the gory account of Christ’s crucifixion. The shame, the shame, the shame—all of this was because of me. All of this was for me. It was love, it was good news, it was the only way to be a person. To feel deep shame simply for the crime of being born a human.

And the only way to feel better? Christianity had an answer for that one too: try dedicating your life to trying not to be a human anymore. 

Be perfect, like Christ was perfect. Anything less, and you were falling short, missing the mark, sinning against the one true God. 

---

//

I’m 40 years old. I feel like I have learned some things in the past few years, but I have been consistently surprised by the amount of shame I experience on a daily basis. For most of my life I believed that I never experienced shame. I was too busy being “on mission for God” and was pretty hell-bent (ha!) on saving the world for Jesus to process many deep emotions. If I worked hard enough, then I was fine. I was FINE. My mask was firmly on, and I was in a constant whirl of motion. I was too busy to feel shame . . . or so I thought.

What I didn’t know is that if you experience something for long enough, it just becomes the background noise of your life. And it’s not until you start to have moments of not feeling shame that you begin to realize how rare that relief actually is.

---

//

Shame is a wave of feeling, hot and prickly in my jaw and my head and my chest. It is flushed cheeks and thoughts circling rapidly. It feels like I have been caught, like I am trapped and there is no way out. It feels like a deity trying to protect me from harm by encouraging me to hate myself into being better. It feels like love and abuse at the same time. It stops me from wondering what is just underneath the hot wave of feeling that floods my nervous system. It is so powerful, so strong, that I spend much of my day trying to avoid ever brushing up against the current of wrongness running through my veins. Until one day, I decided to let the waves crash over me.

---

//

Last year, I learned I could survive my shame spirals². When my brain started buzzing with anxiety towards the end of the evening I would go to my dark, cool room and put an ice pack on my chest. I could breathe through the waves of shame, the rapid-fire thoughts of terrible news, wondering if certain people hated me, re-playing traumatic scenes from my past. The ice pack truly helped regulate my nervous system, and I could feel it. My thoughts would eventually slow down. My face would get less red and flushed. I could start to breath deeply again.

This gave me a tiny boost of self-confidence. Maybe I was on the right track. Maybe I could calm my body in a variety of ways, even if my emotions felt overwhelming. I could distract myself by playing tetris. I could get a good night's sleep and wake up in the morning feeling better. I could share my thoughts with a trusted person, and suddenly have compassion for myself. 

At first I was terrified when I stopped being able to outrun the shame, and I started to feel it. Decades of it, all at once. Multiple nights a week, breathing through it in my dark quiet little trauma cave of a bedroom. 

I thought it would never end, but it did. I cared for my body as the shame flowed through me, and I slowly began to care for my thoughts as well. Compassion began to creep in. Oh poor little baby. What big feelings you are having! It’s ok, nobody’s mad at you. Big feelings are just a part of being a human! Let me take care of you, and I promise you will feel better in a little bit. I know it doesn’t seem like it now, but I promise. You will get through this, and you will feel better. 

I said to myself all the things I say to my own children when they are in a meltdown, or having a hard day, or when their thoughts start swirling too. I learned to parent myself, slowly, as I engaged with my own kids with curiosity and compassion. And underneath the shame I found:

Myself. 

The parent I always longed for, and the parent I will never have. The one that loves and accepts me unconditionally, and who does not require that I die to myself in order to live. The parent I have been waiting for, praying to, begging for relief. I found what I have always been wanting, and I found it within myself. 

It has been beautiful, heartbreaking, and rage-inducing to process this shift.

And finally, finally, I am allowing myself to feel ALL of those feelings instead of just the “good” ones.

---

//

Maybe it’s the autism, but up until pretty recently I truly didn’t know that we aren’t actually in control of our feelings. We are in control of our actions, but feelings and emotions are ways we process the world. This feels like a basic life truth that some people get and some people (like myself) simply didn’t. And this is how generational trauma works, huh? People who weren’t allowed to express the full range of human emotions as children grow up and demand the same of their children. Until finally, one day, someone stops the cycle. 

And perhaps ends up feeling the generations of pain leading up to that point³. 

---

//

I love to over-intellectualize everything. But healing at this stage of my life looks a lot less like reading tons of books and trying to figure out emotions and how to fix my toxic shame and is more like . . . simply feeling my feelings. Sitting with my complicated and complex and varying emotions throughout the day and accepting them ALL with compassion. Yes, you are experiencing that feeling. It’s a big feeling, and it’s uncomfortable. But it will pass. Don’t bury it, don’t numb it, don’t ignore it. Feel it, breathe through it, and give yourself compassion while you do. It’s really hard work being a human, and you never even asked to be born! 

Sometimes I don’t feel my feelings. Sometimes I would rather distract myself, or pamper myself, or move my body, or be silly, or laugh at a stupid TV show⁴. I am growing in my relationship to my body and my emotions, and I am developing the skills to know what I need and when I need it. I don’t go through my day racking up traumas and then feel them all at night; instead I have moments throughout the day of shame. Of grief. Of anger. Of wonder. Of curiosity. Of irritation. Sometimes one feeling sparks another immediately after. Sometimes it doesn’t. 

But I am now in a moment where I feel less constant shame and other emotions are asking for some attention. Grief, mostly, with flashes of anger⁵. And when I am able to allow myself to be a human who experiences these emotions, eventually I have flashes of the good as well. The wonder, awe, gratefulness, joy, playfulness, whimsy, hope . . . I can identify and notice when I have these nourishing emotions as well. These build up my confidence that I am on the right track, that it is worth it to feel all the “bad” feelings if it makes it easier for me to hold onto the positive ones as well. 

I don’t know what possessed me to write all of this down today. It feels very vulnerable, because for so many people feeling their feelings is probably as easy as breathing air. But to others—perhaps people like myself who were not raised with emotional intelligence or self-compassion or who struggle with alexithymia⁶—learning to accept yourself and your feelings is a vital component to being fully alive to all the world has to offer. Including (especially) the nourishing parts.

I don’t feel shame nearly as much as I did a year ago, and that is pretty cool. Was it fun going through that time last year? NOPE. Am I grateful to have made it out with a lot more tools and tricks to help myself? YES. Am I thrilled to be building up the skills of viewing my thoughts and emotions with compassion instead of MORE judgment and shame? YOU BET. Do I wish I was perfectly “healed” and didn’t have to live through shame spirals anymore? YES YES YES. Do I recognize this as a part of my upbringing in a Religious Authoritarian household? 1,000%. 

Shame has been on my heels a bit this week, which isn’t all that surprising. I am, after all, doing the exact thing I was raised to never do: be honest about the emotional impact of my childhood, especially the hard parts—and I’m doing it publicly. But I now feel as though I have the ability to notice emotions for what they are, and to not let them derail my entire day. I feel shame because I was programmed at a very young age to feel shame simply for the “sin” of being born a human being. But now at 40 years old I can recognize the dynamics at play, and I can start to grieve and be angry about this response that was nurtured and cultivated in me in order to keep me firmly in the evangelical patriarchal fold. 

---

I’m so curious to know how others are feeling these days about, well, feelings.

Do you have a pretty good handle on emotional intelligence? Are you in a phase where certain feelings are demanding to be felt? Let us know in the comments about what has helped you and where you are at. 

1. Even little kids can hear this story 100 times and be like . . . wait, this is the story of the MOST loving God? The one that killed his son? Seems sus. Except, of course, if the people you depend on for your love and care and connection keep telling you over and over again that it’s true. Eventually you might just break down and believe them.

2. I’m just using the words / terms that feel the closest to what I experience. Another word for these big waves of shame could be an emotional flashback. I am not using the terms in the clinical sense, but if these phrases are helpful to folks they can research the actual terms or discuss them with their therapist!

3. I saw a Tik Tok that said something like this and I am embarrassed to say I don’t remember the creator who said it! So if anyone knows, please let me know. This could also be a really common saying and I just heard it for the first time myself!

4.  Sometimes you just need to release stored-up feelings, and you don’t need to spend a lot of time lingering over them. It all depends on what your body is telling you!

5. I recently went to a rage room with Krispin and had the BEST TIME. My body felt so limp and relaxed afterwards, it was pretty cool to see what that kind of somatic release does to me.

6. Alexithymia is common among autistic people and is related to having trouble identifying, understanding, and describing emotions. Here is a great little article on it. To be honest, I think I must have this at least a little bit, but I am slowly getting better at understanding what is happening to my body as an emotion, and what that emotion is.