Talk: Toxic Shame & Self Love

Hi, I'd like to speak to an aspect of trauma that impacts the psyche, and that's toxic shame. Toxic shame occurs when we internalize overwhelming sensory experiences of powerlessness, rejection, and shutdown, and that becomes a fabric of our inner narrative of who we are. So examples might be sexual assault, being invalidated for our feelings, like when we're young being told not to cry or that you can't feel something, or with the shutdown of constantly just not even being responded to or addressed. So this internalization into our narrative can result in just the belief of, I'm bad, I'm worthless, I'm a fraud, I'm inadequate, I don't belong, and I'm not lovable. Now toxic shame is different from just kind of regular shame.

Regular shame and guilt are evolutionarily adaptive and helpful for at least our species or they've been shown to be so far, because guilt is basically that behavior was bad. Shame is I am bad. And both of those and little doses can be okay. So guilt, you really do something that's wrong, and then you feel the yuckiness of, ooh, that hurts someone. I don't like the consequences.

That feels icky, I'm not going to do that again. That's going to keep us from harming other people and keep our civilization and our families and our relationships strong. And the same thing with shame, it just keeps us connected to the certain overarching principles of our cultures or our communities of like, this is okay, and that's really not okay. That's outside of our belief system, right? The toxic shame is different because it gets woven into an understanding of who we are.

Now not always, but often these kind of early messages that accumulate into toxic shame get wired in pretty early on in our development. And it's a response to misattunement in relationships or neglect, right? So an overwhelming scary experience, or just having someone not really see us and recognize our needs, can feel incredibly big to a little one's brain that's still under construction, right? Because a human brain doesn't actually mature until about the age of 26. So as young ones are growing up, they don't quite have the ability to internalize pain or suffering as being separate from themselves.

It all just kind of gets mixed into the soup of who they start to understand themselves to be. And misattunement is really a big one. Misattunement results in kids not being seen or feeling loved. And that's something, particularly because their brains are so new and still under construction, they need to be taught and shared with. While it might be the truth that they are wonderful beings of light, it is something that we have to actually learn through relationship and experience that we have worth in value.

And that requires little ones being delighted in. It requires little ones knowing that they just light up someone's life and that they're going to be heard regardless of what their experience is. Otherwise, they start to stuff it and press it, and it translates into shame. So going back to yoga, the yoga sutras say, yoga chitra, yogas chitavritti nirodha, tat adrashu aswarupayvashtanam. So yoga is the calming of the fluctuations of the mind.

And when the mind's calm, the true self can be seen, right? The truth is that you, those little ones, are luminous being of excellence. You don't have to do anything for it. You just already are good. You are not your mistakes, right?

But the sutras also say that when our minds are connected to the murkiness, to the ignorance, to the confusion, that's what we start to personalize and see ourselves as. Our yoga practice can help us cultivate an understanding that we are our unchanging, full awareness and light, and that we are not just our behaviors. We are not just our mistakes. We are not our parents' neglect. We are not their illness or their disconnection, right?

But we are, in fact, luminous beings of excellence. And your yoga practice can be a space of healing, offering yourself time, space, attention, to not just calm. Calm means great, but not just calm, but to actually explore and invite all of you onto the mat unconditionally, with love and attention, can be so reparative. And eventually, you get to invite all of the rest of yourself into your life, right? This approach may not fix everything, but it definitely can set the foundations of you separating yourself from your mistakes or your past bad experiences that were overwhelming, that gave you a false understanding and set you closer to really knowing the clarity and the truth and the goodness that is already here.

So I'm going to suggest as support for this that maybe you take this into the loving kind, or you explore our loving kindness meditation. There's also a number of other talks on yoga anytime that touch into these issues. Dr. Melody Moore has some wonderful talks. Explore this. Remind yourself as often as possible that you are good, and see if you can connect into it with your sensory experience of all the ways you can feel life and vibrancy and ease.

Yeah. Thank you, the light in me sincerely recognizes the delight, the divine light in you. Namaste.