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

By David McElroy · June 15, 2022

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.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts