Healing Toxic Shame

Welcome to Shrink for the Shy Guy. This is the show for you. If you are sick and tired of being held back by fear, self doubt, social anxiety, shyness, anything that's stopping you from you being you. I'm going to share the most powerful tools and resources that I've been discovering over the last 15 years on my journey to eradicate social anxiety and instill confidence, first in myself and then in every single person that I meet on my journey. You're going to learn these tools and how to apply them in your life now so that you can become the most free, powerful, bold, authentic version of you. Hey, welcome to today's episode of the show. Today we're going to be talking about, no doubt your favorite topic of conversation, perhaps at a dinner, definitely on a date, which is toxic shame. Oh, yeah. Nothing turns on the ladies or the guys, the gentlemen, like toxic shame stories. No, you know, you probably don't want to talk about that on a date. You probably don't want to talk about that with anybody. Any sort of shame, we don't want to talk about. We want to hide it. That's kind of what the definition of shame is, is hide it away. So we're gonna not hide it away. We're gonna talk about it today in this episode. It's gonna be profoundly relieving for you. Whether you experience toxic shame or you don't even know what that is. You'll discover that in a moment. But any sort of shame, this will be extremely useful for you. And if you are, if you have a pulse, then you experience some shame sometimes, or if it's toxic shame, then you kind of experience it almost all the time. And either way, it's gonna be a very beneficial episode for you. So I'm excited to be here with you. Are you excited to talk about shame? I'm excited to talk about shame. Let's do this. So what is toxic shame? Before that, we have to define shame. Shame is a feeling and a perception combined together that is very noticeable and strong. And the perception is one of badness. There's something bad or wrong or not right, not okay, not enough, not adequate, defective, whatever word you want to use to point towards it. It's that sense of wrong or bad. And then with that comes a feeling of insecurity and almost imploding because I am not worthy because of this badness. And the thing I'm not worthy or not enough for is love, connection, belonging. I'm not worthy of attention. I'm not worthy of support. I'm not worthy of receiving any of those things from you. When I'm in shame, and so I implode emotionally and energetically. I collapse upon myself and almost try to hide. I mean, I might literally leave Shame. When you want to run, that's shame. And get out of the situation. That shame, it could be fear. And also shame has that same pull to get away. You want to cast your eyes down. It's very hard to make eye contact when you're experiencing shame, because it's like, gonna see me, they're gonna see my badness. And there's all kinds of things that might trigger that feeling of shame, depending on what you learned, you know? So it could be you did something really. You did something really bad, really hurt somebody, maybe that'll trigger shame. And if you're a nice person, though, it doesn't have to be something, quote, really bad. I mean, you could have just shown up five minutes late, or someone wanted to tell you for an hour about all their problems, and you didn't want to sit there and listen to it, so you said, hey, I gotta go do something else. You know, Sorry to hear that. I'll see you in a little bit. And then they're like, oh, I'm sad. Okay, you're leaving me. Oh, shame. Or someone's upset with you because they wanted you to do this. Instead, you did that. You should have called your sister, your parents, like, oh, why don't you make up with your sister? You should be like this and that, and you don't want to be like this and that. And then you feel shame, Right? So disappointing people, upsetting people, saying no to people, all that can trigger shame. If you're a very nice person, getting rejected, receiving a no, failing, the list goes on. So we could be in shame a lot of the time, but if you are a super achiever in the world of shame, you don't just settle for lots of triggers throughout the day. You say, why don't I just experience shame all the time? All the time. That's what toxic shame is. You experience shame basically much of the day, and there's no trigger for it. It's just your existence is the trigger. You being here is the badness, which is awful. It's awful, by the way. And the good news, and the reason I can have some levity here is because it's not true. And you'll see that as you listen to this episode and notice, just get really curious about the part of you that wants to fight for it being true. What's up with that? Why do you want to advocate for your own awfulness? So we'll put a pin in that. Come back to that later in the episode. But what creates this sense of badness all the time? Well, pretty much always. There's probably some exceptions here and there is that you received messaging consistently from early years. So usually it's in the family of origin, parents, older siblings, whoever else might be around, grandparents, aunts and uncles, whoever's raising you, a consistent messaging from at least one of them. And all it takes is one, especially if it's a dominant figure like a mom or a dad, that you're bad. Not just occasionally or if you do something really naughty, but like all the time. And they might not have walked up to you and said, you're bad all the time, but you just got that message. They were upset with you all the time. They feel like they had such dislike or disdain for you. And it might have been some pretense of a reason, like, well, because you didn't do this and you upset me and you did this and that and they blame you and. But it's just so persistent or the dislike seems so strong now. If you could zoom out and have the perspective and maturity of an adult during that time, you'd say, wow, that's not about me. I wonder why Mom's so angry. I wonder why she's not taking charge of her life and she's blaming her child all the time. I wonder why dad is, you know, drinking so much or whatever's going on in the home. And I've worked with clients where it's full on abuse. And other times it's more mild. Maybe it's just high achieving type A parents who are like, we need you to be the best so that you're safe in the world like we are. Oh God, don't let me down. And they use it's fear, but it manifests as a lot of judgment and disapproval of you. So you don't have to have the most intense upbringing to experience the sense of toxic shame. You'll just know it because you feel bad about yourself a lot of the time. Maybe all the time. That sucks. I'm sorry. But there's good news. The good news is that toxic shame is not permanent. It's good and bad news that it has a name. Because when people give a name to something, it gives them something to identify so they can resolve it. Oh, this is not just me. This is a thing. Okay, I can address that. The bad news, the downside of the name is that people Tend to bind it and think that it's more real and solid than it is. I see this all the time with social anxiety. I have social anxiety disorder, as if it's something that is built into their DNA. You don't have social anxiety. You do social anxiety. You are practicing social anxiety. It's not some pathogen in your blood. It is a active process that you are engaging in and so you can do something different. And it's the same thing with toxic shame. You don't have toxic shame. You are shaming experience. And who's shaming you are shaming you. So what you've done is you've internalized, which means you've taken in the voice of this. I'm just going to say parent. Maybe it's not a parent, but you get what I mean. This voice of this toxic parent, or at least that energy of theirs. I don't know if there is a person toxic, but that. That disdain or hatred towards you or dislike of you is. Is toxic. It's like poison to a young nervous system. And ultimately the path to freedom is to reject and purge out that poison. Like a firm fu. No to that messaging. I defy that. F you don't tell me that I'm, you know, not, not worthy. Like, it's like there's a reclaiming of power in the process, and then you can start to shift it. But in order to shift it, you have to see that it's something that you're. You're currently engaged in. Now, a lot of times there's a blur for people where maybe especially their parents are still alive or they're around them or other things they. They don't realize it's them doing it to themselves. Because, like, no, my parents do disapprove of me still, and they tell me, but how old are you? 20, 25? 30? 35? 40? 45? 50, 55, 60? Can I get a 65? Any 70s, 70s in the house? 75, right, whatever. I don't know how old you are, but when do you take the mantle? When do you take the mantle of adulthood, total ownership of your life, and say, you know what? My dad can think this about me, still probably does, but why am I buying into that reality? Why am I continuing to tell myself that one of the biggest responses I get from clients is, well, it just feels true. That's just how it is. And so when they say that, what I hear is, I am still living in mom's reality. I am still living in dad's reality because it feels true. Because you're still perceiving it through that lens of badness. And why. Why are you continuing to hold that perspective, continuing to imbue that one perspective, that one reality with truth? Have you ever wondered about that? And this is true for other types of shame as well. Like, you get shame just, oh, if I make a mistake or if I don't know what to say in a conversation, those can be triggers for shame. And then why do I shame myself after those experiences? Or in the case of toxic shame, why do I do that all the time? What do you think? What are you curious about when you hear that? What do you become aware of? The thing that I've found is we really want to have a sense of stability or certainty or control in life. Very close to our primal survivor animal nature is survival, right? Just make it, make it through this, make it the next day. And that's so deep in all of nature, including humans. And one way that we feel that sense of solidity or certainty or predictability or control is not just, you know, your environment around you, but within yourself. And there's a solidity of knowing how it is. This is how it is. This is how the world works. This is who I am in it. There's a sense of stability and order and therefore, hopefully, control and knowing how it is. Like, this is my place. I. I don't know a lot about this world, but I know where I am and I know who I am. And who I am is a terrible, awful person, apparently. Dang. Well, at least I know who I am, right? And so we have that and we hold to that. It's like holding to a piece of driftwood out in the ocean. It doesn't really help you sail anywhere, but it maybe keeps you alive. And ultimately, what's underneath that usually is some sort of trauma, right? And it's like, I don't want to go there. I don't want to feel that. I don't want to heal that. I don't want to address that. But if we're not willing to feel it and heal it and address it, then we stay with that perception. So that's how we start to shift this is we acknowledge that it's me doing it still. I'm the one who's carrying it forward. And I want to change this. I want to get more on my own side. And I know how a parent talked to me or what they told me or what their messages were. What are my messages for me now? And when I do this with people, there's Often kind of a void, like because they're so used to relating themselves so badly. Like a file not found. One of those spinning wheels on a Mac like the beach or a rainbow beach ball or in the hourglass on a Windows machine. It's like, just think. Loading, loading must force restart error. So what we do instead is help them direct that type of compassion or love towards someone else. So I'm working with a client, like, how are you with a niece? How are you with a nephew? A daughter, a child? If someone has children, it's great. Can help them access it. But if they don't to the loved one, usually someone younger can be really helpful. You can think of a child that you know in your life, and as soon as you imagine starting to relate to that child in that way, of those messages that you give yourself, most people, it feels really bad. They're like, oh, and you want to do something else and you can do something else. You get to choose, my friend. It's you. It's not happening to you. Something did happen to you at one point in your life, right? But now you are perpetuating it for a sense of certainty, a sense of control or an illusion of control. It's scary to let go of that control. It's scary to step in the uncertainty of, maybe I'm wrong about who I am, maybe they were wrong about who I am, but they were. It wasn't about you. It wasn't your fault. It wasn't your doing. Even if they did blame it on you, like if my kids do something annoying or they break something or, you know, even do something really severe, mess something up, even if I'm upset, there is never that chronic ongoing message of you're bad and I hate you and you're ruining my life and this and that. Like, that's because that's me not taking ownership, right? That's me putting something on them that's not theirs. So what would happen if you decided that you were going to change the narrative, change the perception? And I know it might not feel right at first. It feels foreign. That's okay. Have you ever learned, like, you know, swung a tennis racket or a golf club and you don't play that sport? Feels pretty foreign. I don't know how to do this. Played. Played an instrument, spoke. Tried to learn some words of a language? I mean, that language, a foreign language, sure feels and sounds foreign when you first start kind of, you know, rolling those words around your tongue. But it doesn't mean. Well, I guess I only speak One language. I guess I never play an instrument. I guess I never learn a new sport, right? No, you just keep doing it, and all of a sudden it's no longer foreign. And some people say that's too simple. Aziz, it can't just be that way. You can't just start to consciously choose a different way to relate yourself. I just don't believe it. I don't buy it. That's because you're more invested in the old way, which is order and control. You're unwilling to challenge that old order and step into your life. And you think you need that armoring of shame to keep you safe, because deep down, connection equals terrible pain. I got really close with this parent. This is how they hurt me. I don't want to get close to people. And that's exactly what the shame does. The toxic shame prevents you from getting close to anybody in a deep way because it's like an armor. And it's time to take the armor off. And if it wasn't time to take it off, you wouldn't be listening to this episode. You certainly wouldn't have made it this far. Something would have repelled you. You would have turned it off. So let's talk about how we can do that. Let's turn this into action. Time for action. Action. Action. Your action step is to consciously think about someone that you love, ideally a child, and how. Not just how you talk to them, but what messages would you want to convey to them? And maybe it could be literal things you might say or phrases or words or sentences. But what are the top three things that you'd want to convey to them? Is it if you make a mistake, you're a terrible human? That was at the top of our list. No, no, scratch that one out. Okay, good, good. Right. What is it for you? What would you want to. Just come up with the top three. You don't have to spend. Don't say, oh, I'll do this later, and when I have my notebook, and I'll. I'll give it five hours of thought. No, just, like, come up with them right now. Right now. It's the best time to do the action steps and then see what's there. Then what would it be like to start to transmit that message on purpose to yourself? This is you doing something very, very different. Awesome. So I'm so curious how this lands for you again. If you want to take things further, this is what I do with people. We unpack this stuff. We help them experience whole new lives. Check out my mastermind. Group program, it's go to draziz.com d r a z I z.com and if you've been listening to this show for months or years and making some progress, but really want to just change it all fast, that's the best way to do it. There's also other resources on the website as well, so check it out. Dr. A Z I Z.com Great to be with you today. Until we speak again. May have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level now. You're awesome. Thanks for listening to Shrink for the shy guy with Dr. Aziz. If you know anyone who can benefit from what you've just heard, please let them know and send them a link to shrinkforthshyguy.com for free blogs, ebooks, and training videos related to overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to socialconfidencecenter.com.