Belonging to the peer group is paramount. One's whole sense of identity is coming together in adolescence. If one has a good foundation prior to adolescence, the sense of self can be preliminarily defined. Identity is always social―one's sense of self needs to be matched by others: one's friends, teachers and parents. Adolescence is the time the brain (frontal lobes) is reaching full maturity. It is a time of ideals, of questioning and projecting into the future. An adolescent needs to have the discipline of mind the philosopher Thomas Aquinas called studiasitas. Studiasitas is a disciplined focus on studies and thinking, a kind of temperance of the mind. Its opposite is curiositas, a kind of mental wandering all over the place without limits.

Healthy shame at this stage is the source of good identity, a disciplined focus on the future and on studious limits in pursuing intellectual interests.

Some emotional abuse is nearly universal. I believe that everyone has been shamed to some degree by emotional abuse. The poisonous pedagogy is quite clear about the fact that emotions are weak. We are to be rational and logical and not allow ourselves to be marred by emotions. All emotions must be controlled, but anger and sexual feelings are especially to be repressed. I can't imagine many people in modern American life who were affirmed and nurtured in expressing their sexual and/or angry feelings.

It is obvious that a major source of toxic shame is the family system and its multigenerational patterns of unresolved secrets.

More specifically these families are created by the shame-based people who find and marry each other. Each expects the other to take care of and parent the child within him or her. Each is incomplete and insatiable. The insatiability is rooted in each person's unmet childhood needs. When two adult children meet and fall in love, the child in each looks to the other to fill his or her needs. Since “in love” is a natural state of fusion, the incomplete children fuse together as they had done in the symbiotic stage of infancy. Each feels a sense of oneness and completeness. Since “in-love” is always erotic, each feels "oceanic" in the sexual embrace. “Oceanic” love is without boundaries. Being in love is as powerful as any narcotic. One feels whole and ecstatic.

Unfortunately this state cannot last. The ecstatic consciousness is highly selective. Lovers focus on sameness and are intrigued by the newness of each other. Soon, however, real differences in socialization begin to emerge. The two families of origin rear their shame-based heads. Now the battle begins! Who will take care of whom? Whose family rules will win out? The more shame-based each person is, the more each other's differences will be intolerable. “If you loved me, you'd do it my way,” each cajoles the other. The Hatfields and the Mccoys go at it again.

Perhaps the most elementary ego defense is denial. In the face of threat, people deny what is going on, or they deny the hurt of what is going on, or the impact on their lives of what is going on.

Robert Firestone has elaborated on Freud’s notion of denial. He describes the most fundamental ego defense as the fantasy bond. The fantasy bond is an illusion of connectedness that the child creates in relation to the primary caregiver, who is shaming her.

Paradoxically, the more a child is violated, the more she creates the fantasy bond. Bonding to abuse is one of the most perplexing aspects of shame-inducement. Abuse is usually unpredictable, a sort of random shock. Abuse lowers one's self value and induces shame. As one loses more and more self-respect, one's world of choices and alternatives is diminished.

Children must have secure attachment bonds. When they do not have such a bond, they create it. Finally one feels one has no choice and often clings to one's abuser. The fantasy bond (really bondage) is the illusion that someone is there for them, someone who loves and protects them. The fantasy bond is like a mirage in the desert. Once set up, the denying fantasy bond functions automatically and unconsciously. Years later, when reality is no longer life-threatening, the fantasy bond remains. This explains why abandoned (abused) children are describe as having a compulsion to protect their parents.

Rage is probably the most naturally occurring cover-up for shame. It comes close to being an actual primary ego defense. It would be, except for the fact that not all children rage. Some children will express rage when they are shamed; others will suppress it and sometimes turn it against themselves.

When rage is used as a defense, it becomes a characterological style. Rage protects in two ways: either by keeping others away or by transferring the shame to others. Persons who have held their rage in often become bitter and sarcastic. They are not pleasant to be around.

Although the rage, expressed as hostility or bitterness, was originally intended to protect the self against further experiences of shame, it becomes internalized. Rage becomes a state of being, rather than a feeling among many other feelings.

Internalized rage foments a deep bitterness within the self. Bitterness destroys the self with its myopic vision and its quest for negativity. Rage often intensifies into hatred. If the person with internalized rage also acquires power, then it can result in violence, revenge, vindictiveness and criminality.

Arrogance or pride is defined as offensively exaggerating one’s own importance. The proud, arrogant person alters her mood by means of her exaggeration. The victims of arrogance are those who are unequal in power, knowledge or experience. The victim feels inadequate around the know-it-all, be-all, proudly arrogant person. He believes he is inadequate because of his lack of knowledge, experience or power. Anyone who is on the arrogant person’s same level simply sees her as arrogant.

Arrogance is a way for a person to cover up shame. After years of arrogance, the arrogant person is so out of touch, she truly doesn’t know who she is. This is one of the great tragedies of shame cover-ups: not only does the person hide from others, she also hides from herself.

Since it was personal relationships that set up our toxic shame, we need personal relationships to heal our shame. This is crucial. We must risk reaching out and looking for nonshaming relationships if we are to heal our shame. There is no other way. Once we are in dialogue and community, we will have further work to do. But we can’t even begin that work until affiliative relationships are established.

In order for grief to be resolved several factors must be present. The first factor is validation. Our childhood abandonment trauma must be validated as real or it cannot be resolved. Perhaps the most damaging consequence of being shame based is that we don't know how depressed and angry we really are. We don't actually feel our unresolved grief. Our false self and ego defenses keep us from experiencing it. Paradoxically, the very defenses which allowed us to survive our childhood trauma have now become barriers to our growth. Fritz Perls once said, “Nothing changes ‘til it becomes what it is.” We must uncover our frozen grief.

I remember my paternal grandmother ridiculing me because I was in hysterics over my dad going out to get drunk. He had just had a fight with my mom and left the house in anger, vowing to get drunk. I began to cry and was soon out of control. I was ridiculed and shamed by this grandmother. I was told that I was a "big sissy" and to get hold of myself. I've never forgotten this experience. Years later I still carried the unresolved grief.

The greatest tragedy in all of this is that we know grief can naturally be healed if we have support. Jane Middelton-Moz has said, "One of the things we know about grief resolution is that grief is one of the only problems in the world that will heal itself with support." (For a clear and concise discussion of unresolved grief read After the Tears by Jane Middelton-Moz and Lorie Dwinell.)

The reason people go into delayed grief is that there's nobody there to validate and support them. You cannot grieve alone. Millions of us adult children tried it. We went to sleep crying into our pillows or locked ourselves in the bathroom.

Delayed grief is the core of what is called post-traumatic stress disorder. As soldiers come back from the war, they have common symptoms of unreality: panic, being numbed-out psychically, easily startled, feeling depersonalized, needing to control, having nightmares and sleeping disorders. These same symptoms are common for children from dysfunctional families. They are the symptoms of unresolved grief.

Shame-based people are egocentric. I compare it to having a chronic toothache. If your tooth hurts all the time, all you can think of is your tooth. You become tooth-centered. Likewise, if your self is ruptured, and it is painful to experience your self, you become self-centered.

Shame-based people relate everything to themselves. A recently married woman thinks that every time her husband talks about being tired, he is tired of her. A man whose wife complains about the rising price of food hears this as an attack on his ability to be a breadwinner.

Personalization involves the habit of continually comparing yourself to other people. This is a consequence of a perfectionistic system that fosters shame. A perfectionistic system demands comparison. “He's a much better organizer that I am.” “She knows herself a lot better than I do.” “He feels things so deeply. I'm really shallow.” The comparisons never end. The underlying assumption is that your worth is questionable.

There is no way you can learn any task or skill without errors. The process of learning has been defined as “successive approximation”. Watch children learning to walk. They literally learn to walk by falling down. Each time they fall, they adjust their balance and try again. Each failure creates a successive approximation. Finally they can walk.

Mistakes are a form of feedback. Every error tells us what we need to correct. As we correct each mistake, we get nearer to the behavioral sequence that works best.

As a teacher I know that students who fear making mistakes have trouble learning. They are scared to tackle new material because of the possibility of not understanding it. Such students go on to take the first job they are offered. They often stay in that job for a lifetime. They are too scared to get a new job because they would be faced with new procedures and challenges. They won't get new and advanced training because the inevitable mistakes are just too painful.

Again McKay and Fanning say it beautifully:

Framing mistakes as necessary feedback for the learning process frees you to relax and focus on your gradual mastery of the new task Mistakes are information about what works and what doesn't work They have nothing to do with your worth or intelligence. They are merely steps to a goal.

I suggested earlier that codependency and toxic shame were the same reality. In looking at relationships, the word “codependency” defines the problem very accurately. The phrase: “adult child” also help us see the problem.

Having no authentic self, you look for a relationship with the only self you feel you have, your false self. If you are a victim, the only relationship you know anything about is with a persecutor. The opposite is true if you are a persecutor. I was my mom's Surrogate Spouse and the Family Caretaker. As my mom's Surrogate, I always looked for women I could take care of.

What this amounts to is a re-enactment of the fantasy bond I spoke of earlier. The fantasy bond is an enmeshed co-dependent entrapment. It's based on the bond permanence that was set up by the abandonment trauma. Once fantasy bonded, we only have one relationship, and we repeat it over and over again.

The way out of all of this is through the original pain and Inner Child work, the basic grief work. Our bond fixation resulted from our authentic self being fixated and frozen by the unresolved abandonment trauma. Each time we reenact with a new fantasy bond relationship, we are trying to do the grief work. We choose the same kind of person in order to have another chance at resolution. Each new partner represents aspects of one or both of our parents. We try to make our partner into our parent(s) so that we can resolve the conflict and move on. Since we are no longer children, it never works.

The only way out is to do the legitimate suffering that the grief work demands. To do this we have to give up the false self and leave home. That is the only way we can gain our true self.

When I counsel people in destructive relationships, they usually are relating through their disowned parts. Generous men often marry selfish women; perfectionistic women marry sloppy men; nurturing women fall in love with emotionally unavailable men. Instead of learning from each other by incorporating their disowned selves, they live with these selves expressed in their mates. Since each disowns the part expressed by the mate, they are judgmental and angry about that part in their partner.

The integration of all the parts of self is primarily a process of self-acceptance. Wholeness and completeness result from total self-acceptance. Wholeness is the mark of mental health. Total self-acceptance means that every part of our self is okay. It's equivalent to unconditional love.