Healing Toxic Shame
Understanding Toxic Shame
Toxic shame is much more just an occasional uncomfortable feeling. It's a chronic, pervasive sense of wrongness and worthlessness that burrows deep into our unconscious mind. Unlike healthy shame, which serves as a temporary emotional response to specific situations and naturally fades, toxic shame becomes a persistent companion that dims our light and compels us to shrink in countless ways.
In my coaching practice, I've witnessed how toxic shame stands as one of the most formidable barriers preventing people from living in their full soul expression and sharing their unique gifts with the world.
If you've experienced toxic shame, you know its devastating impact intimately. It feels crushing. It drains your life force, leaving you wanting to retreat from the world and curl into yourself for protection. Many people endure this suffering for decades without recognizing what's plaguing them, which is why simply naming and acknowledging toxic shame can be profoundly liberating.
The Key to Freedom
Beyond recognition lies a transformative insight that holds the key to liberation:
Toxic shame is the internalization of wrongness that was done to you.
Dismantling the Lie
Toxic shame operates through a devastating falsehood: it convinces you that the wrongness lives within your very being. This lie whispers that the feelings of badness and worthlessness reveal something fundamentally flawed about who you are.
But this couldn't be further from the truth.
The wrongness has nothing to do with your essence, your worth, or your fundamental nature. The wrongness lies in what was done to you. When adults repeatedly shame a child to the point where that child develops chronic feelings of worthlessness, that is what's wrong. The conditions that created your toxic shame are what were bad and harmful. Never you.
The Path to Healing
Healing from toxic shame requires a courageous act: you must reclaim, feel, and express your righteous anger toward the people, institutions, or systems that created the conditions for your toxic shame to develop.
We suffer from toxic shame when this natural anger becomes internalized and turned against ourselves. The path forward involves redirecting that anger toward those who committed the original wrong. How dare those adults psychologically wound the innocent child you once were, again and again? How dare that institution, church, or community make you feel like you were the problem?
The Process of Un-internalization
Visualize yourself taking that anger and negative energy currently directed inward and turning it outward toward those who abused and wronged you. Remove it from your body. You are literally un-internalizing the wrongness that was done to you. Since internalization created the suffering, reversing this internalization creates the freedom.
Healthy Expression of Anger
This doesn't mean unleashing years of accumulated pain onto others or perpetuating cycles of hurt. There are healthy, constructive ways to express and release this energy:
Journaling with raw honesty
Physical release through punching bags or pillows
Vocal release through screaming into pillows
Shaking and movement to discharge trapped energy
These healthy expressions allow you to fully feel and move the energy without causing harm to others or continuing cycles of pain.
Overcoming Resistance
Despite what your fearful inner voice might whisper, expressing anger healthily doesn't perpetuate cycles of hurt—it performs the necessary and sacred work of ending them. Anger is the natural response to boundary violations, and being harmed to the point of developing toxic shame represents a profound violation of your right to a full, vibrant existence.
Many resist this work, but I've observed that those most frightened of owning their anger often struggle most intensely with toxic shame. The shame remains lodged in their system because the anger that rightfully belongs directed outward stays internalized, turned against themselves.
Feeling fear about expressing buried emotions is completely normal. Bravery isn't the absence of fear. It's feeling the fear and choosing courage anyway. Healing demands many such moments of bravery.
Beyond Forgiveness
Some resist un-internalizing their anger, fearing it will prevent forgiveness of those who hurt them. But authentic forgiveness only becomes possible after you've fully felt and expressed your righteous anger. Premature forgiveness often serves as a defense mechanism to avoid feeling the anger that desperately needs to be acknowledged and moved through your system.
A Healing Exercise
Try this powerful visualization: Picture a young child being aggressively shamed and emotionally abused by the adults around them. What do you feel as you witness this scene?
Most people feel deep, compassionate sadness for that innocent child and fierce, protective anger toward the adults causing harm.
That compassionate sadness and fiery, protective anger you feel on behalf of your inner child—this is your pathway to healing.
When you can extend the same fierce protection and tender compassion to the child you once were, you begin the sacred work of reclaiming your worth and stepping into the fullness of who you truly are..
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