DAE relate to this?
I only recently discovered and clearly faced that my extended adoptive family were cruel and humiliating and shaming towards me and other adoptees in the family.
What I’m beginning to see more clearly now are more covert forms of shaming in my adoptive family. When we have difficulty feeling connected internally or find it hard to express ourselves, that can be the result of our caregivers not seeing, hearing, mirroring, connecting, or responding to us as kids. And that lack of response can be shaming. We internalize that as meaning there’s something for us to be ashamed about. Because being ashamed of our adopters’ limitations or shameful behavior or appalling parenting would feel too destabilizing when we have to rely on them to survive as children.
What we feel shame about, we avoid.
I was raised in a close-knit religious tradition that was a deep source of identity for most members and participants. I made the most of growing up inside the tradition. It wasn’t all bad, but a lot of it was harmful. As a teenager, I started deconstructing the beliefs and feeling embarrassed by various elements of the culture and belief system. I started gravitating towards peers who had aspirations and standards outside the tradition even though many of us were educated inside the tradition’s private schools all the way through college. I identified with the tradition because of how all-encompassing it was, but I was also ashamed of it. I hated that I went to an affiliated university that was accredited and decent but I knew it existed to preserve the tradition and its culture more than to provide excellent education. Yet, I identified with the tradition enough to make the most of employment and scholarships and sponsorship opportunities. I even built my career partly inside corporations affiliate with the faith tradition. I went to an elite graduate school and finally felt some sense of pride about an institutional affiliation but it was a utilitarian type of degree, not something I nor perhaps anyone had a true passion or resonance for.
Now that I’m building a life apart from adoptive family and apart from that faith tradition, I’m still struggling with the shame of coming from that tradition I had very little choice but to navigate. The tradition also produced fear and shame around exiting and living or working outside its systems. It had a lot of us versus them ideology. So there are parts of me that are genuinely apprehensive about navigating work environments unaffiliated with the tradition even though I did great in grad school with classmates from all kinds of different backgrounds.
I’m amazed by how pervasive the shame and fear are stemming from both adoption, emotional neglect and religious culture.
The worst part of the religious culture was its silence about important issues of justice. Not to mention its outright hateful stances on equal rights for people of all genders, sexual orientation, and racial backgrounds. All very bad and harmful while not held by all members of the tradition.
Here’s Kina Wolfenstein again on the effects of emotional neglect especially the effect of silence and disconnection on kids and people during development:
“There are multiple kinds of shaming responses and shaming experiences that can happen in a relationship. And a lot of the time when we think about shaming, we think of more overt, explicit shaming, like a parent actually saying cruel and demeaning things to their child, which is, of course, very, very damaging. But the other kind of shaming is more about disconnection and lack of response. So if you think about a child expressing themselves, expressing their feelings or their thoughts or their interests or their needs, you know, some kind of authentic self-expression, the way that that self-expression is responded to is the basis for how the child develops a lot of their self-worth and self-esteem and what they learn about relationships, how relationships work. And so if a parent responds by being dismissive or mean or cruel or angry or any of these types of things, those would be more overtly shaming experiences. But the other kind of shaming experience is just a lack of response, a lack of engagement, a lack of connection. No response. No connection is a response. And it’s a response that is internalized as being shaming. Because what the child implicitly learns from that lack of connection and lack of engagement is, I am not worth it. Like, I am not good. I’m not worth connection, I’m not worth being seen and heard. And so that absence of connection is experienced as a rejection of the self on a fundamental level and is internalized as shame. To people who have experienced a lot of this chronic misattunement, they come to expect that self-expression will always lead to this kind of shaming experience. So, if this is your experience, what you learn to do is really keep yourself suppressed and not express yourself and not really be yourself. And so the person becomes really disconnected from themselves. This is another example of how our relationship with self really mirrors relationship with others. The more we experience disconnection from others, the more we become disconnected from ourselves. And we often become disconnected from the same parts of ourselves that were met with disconnection from others. So if your family was really disconnected when you expressed vulnerable emotions, you might become really disconnected from your vulnerable emotions. If your family was really disconnected and shaming, either overtly or implicitly, when you express your passion or your interests, you might learn to suppress your excitement and your passion and keep that part of yourself kind of smaller and contained. And then it is a result of this self-suppression and self-containment that people struggle with depression and they struggle with all kinds of byproducts of not being able to actually express yourself and be authentic. And so these things might not be recognized as shame because this person might not be coming into therapy saying, like, I hate myself or here are all these negative feelings I have about myself. Instead, the expression of shame is how cut off they are from their self. So the disconnection is the shame. The disconnection is the expression of the shame.”
Shame is the experience of being bad whereas guilt is the experience of having done something bad. Shame goes to the core of who we are and how we can become our true authentic selves.
It’s disturbing to see how this gets passed on and how much more vulnerable adoptees may be to toxic shame because of relinquishment and abandonment.
Thought, feelings and experiences are welcome related to any aspect of this post.
Thanks for reading ❤️🩹
