Deep-seated shame makes it hard for me to take my needs seriously

When shame comes over me, I often don’t recognize it. Not at first, anyway.

I often find myself feeling angry and hurt over some small thing. Someone might have insulted me. Someone might have simply disagreed with me. A person might have been rude or belittled me in some way. Maybe some tiny way.

And something in me feels ready to explode. I’m furious. I’m hurt. I feel the need to strike out and hurt whoever is hurting me. I just want the hurting and humiliation to go away. And that’s about the time — if I’m lucky — that I’ll realize I’m dealing with shame.

Someone has pushed one of my buttons. Maybe it was an intentional slight. Maybe not. Either way, I feel shame. Before long, the shame has morphed into a passive form of self-directed aggression. I’m not good enough. I’ll never be loved or understood.

Then my harsh and brutal superego — the imagined channeling of my childhood father’s voice — tells me to stop whining. To stop feeling anything.

“Just get over it,” the voice screams.

And then I hate myself for having needs. I hate myself for hurting. I hate myself for feeling anything. As I simmer in this toxic stew of shame and hurt, I realize I’m not as close as I’d thought to the emotional health which I’ve been seeking for decades.

This seems to happen over and over again.

Every time I think I’ve done enough psychological healing to deal with the world around me in healthier ways, I seem to find another level of damage which I either didn’t know about or maybe was in denial about. It seems as though the deeper I get, the less able I am to go through the motions of living what everyone else considers a “normal” life.

If I had been able to feel all of this when I first started my journey toward emotional health — 15 years ago? 20? 30? — I don’t think I would have been able to deal with it. I would have been a suicidal basket case. I don’t believe I could have taken the raw force of what it all felt like at the time.

So I experienced the pain — and the buried trauma — little bits at a time. Maybe denial has been a necessary defense mechanism as I worked my way through what I could handle from time to time.

But as I stumble my way through the effects of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) — from growing up in a toxic and dysfunctional family — there’s still this harsh and demanding superego inside that screams, “Oh, just get over it.”

My needs and feelings never mattered to anyone when I was a child, so there’s a part of me which still doesn’t believe I deserve to take the complex lingering trauma seriously.

I sometimes feel as though I’m more easily triggered by this shame now than I was years ago. It seems as though it should be the other way around. But in the distant past, I was almost stoic about what I’d gone through. Even after I consciously accepted the dysfunction through which I had lived, I was still pretty numb.

As I’ve gotten to deeper and deeper layers of hurt, though, there’s no numbness which remains. From time to time, it feels as though I’ve ripped open a gaping wound — one which was always there, but didn’t feel painful. And I realize that I’m feeling things which my traumatized little heart and mind and body didn’t know how to feel as a child.

I tell myself that this is progress. I understand that I have to somehow process a lot of things which happened long ago. But there have been times when I’ve felt as though I had logically dealt with everything — that I’d put a nice, neat bow on the box and put it away for good.

But then the shame comes back and announces that it’s not finished with me yet.

I don’t like admitting any of this. I don’t like talking about it. I know without doubt that most people have no understanding or empathy for what I’m dealing with, not because they’re bad people, but because they have no context for understanding it.

Part of me screams that I hate everybody right now. Human beings hurt me, so I need to stay away from everybody. But I realize I have to continue to function in the “normal world,” whether I feel like it or not. Somehow, I have to keep healing myself while I live a functional, normal life. And that’s hard.

I feel as though I was dumped at the top of the atmosphere with a pile of airplane parts. And as this collection of airplane parts falls toward the ground, I have a choice. I can either give up and wait my fate upon hitting the ground. Or I can build a plane — and learn to fly it — while I’m falling.

I keep thinking I’m closer to psychological health than I am. Of course, it’s also true that I keep seeing how dysfunctional most other people are — far more than I once realized — so maybe I’m one of the healthier ones now. It’s hard to say.

For now, I have to be on the lookout for those times when shame takes over and makes me want to lash out at people. I have to keep reminding myself that I deserve to take my psychological needs seriously. I have to quiet that voice that tells me to “just get over it.”

I have to have faith — in the face of my fears — that I’m getting closer and closer to where I need to be, at least in the emotional sense.

I’m still battling shame and hurt — and I’m struggling to become the man I’ve always wanted to be.

Note: The photo above really is me. It’s a faded and damaged print from my baby book. I wasn’t known as a child who cried, but this seems to represent what I really felt like on the inside back then.