How To Free Yourself From 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 something that. That may be really impacting you in your life in a negative way. And you might not even be very aware of it. And it's an invisible force that tends to influence certainly the way you feel, but also the way that you think and the way that you perceive yourself and the world around you and what's possible for you. And many people are so used to this experience, it's so common for them and might only be the. The only thing they really know, that it becomes invisible. And that's part of why it can be so detrimental and why it's so valuable for you to be here today to learn about what it is. And even more importantly than just knowing what it is and having a name for it, how to shift it, how to change it, because that's what this show is all about, is liberation. More freedom for you to be you in the world. So what is that force? Well, there's different labels for it, but one that seems pretty accurate is called toxic shame. Toxic shame. Now, you might hear those two words and say, wow, this sounds like an episode that I'll go listen to later and try to get away from it. And I get it, it's unpleasant. But I'm going to encourage you to stick with me today because on the other side of this is going to be a greater sense of lightness, liberation, freedom, fun, joy, connection, love and confidence. So know that by going into this, the goal is to get to a much better place. And. And we really can. None of these things are death sentences. If you have been running a pattern of toxic shame for a long time, that doesn't stop you from doing something different and doing something different relatively quickly. So that's we're gonna get into in today's show. Are you ready? Okay. So take a full breath in and let it out and smile. And here we go, so what is toxic shame? Well, so let's break it down. Shame is this feeling. It's a feeling and a perception. So thoughts as well, that I am somehow bad, inadequate, and not worthy of love and connection. And a lot of behaviors might come out of that. Maybe you withdraw. That's one of the first impulses with shame, right? Is to withdraw is to hide something. To hide, hide ourselves, to not be seen, not be known. And so we tend to feel like I'm unworthy of connection. And then we tend to isolate and say, well, I'm not worthy. It's almost like, too painful to try to connect because we're so convinced when we're in this shame state, we're so convinced that the connection is not available. Even if someone is saying, like, hey, I like you. I don't feel like that way about you. If they were to say that, we might not even be able to let it in. We might just be like, oh, yeah, okay, great, great. But inside, the feeling doesn't stop. It's like the machine has started, and the emotions are starting to just cascade down, and we just can't stop them. That's what shame can feel like. And there are many triggers that you might experience for shame. These are circumstances or interactions or events that can occur that your emotional response might be shame. So maybe if someone says, you know, that was a stupid thing that you did. What's wrong with you? You might feel shame. Someone criticizes your work, hey, this wasn't very good, what you did here. Maybe you feel shame. Someone says, hey, I don't want to. No, I don't want to date you. No, I don't want to be your partner. You might feel shame. Maybe you're with a partner and you're having a challenge with your sexual experience. You're not able to connect, or you have challenges with the actual. Maybe it's an erectile dysfunction challenge or something around the actual being able to. Maybe both. You want to be physically, sexually connected, and then for whatever reason, there's something happening there and you're not. This is a common trigger for people. There's a lot of triggers around sex, actually, and sexuality that something can happen and we feel shame. Breaking up with somebody. You might say, I'm such, you know, I feel so bad. And the experience of it might be really obvious, and it might be more subtle. Like, you might start thinking about, oh, man, what would my partner's friends think of me? What would my parents think? What would so and so think? You imagine people judging you you might not be totally aware, but that is shame. You're just experiencing the shame through this kind of imagining of other people judging you. There might be you actively criticizing and judging yourself, too. Now, sometimes people make a distinction between shame and guilt. And the common one in the psychological field is guilt is I did bad, and shame is I am bad. Now, definitions and trying to put things into boxes is always a little funny when it comes to human emotion and experience. I mean, it's pretty blurry in my clinical experience in psychology and now coaching with people. I mean, it's like guilt or shame, I don't know. But I feel terrible and I'm, like, beating myself up. Okay, well, generally what I find a distinction, helpful distinction is guilt tends to have a desire to repair the connection. And once we've done that, we feel great. We feel okay. So maybe like you were, you know, places that I might feel guilty is, let's say if I was a little tired one evening, a little more irritable or short with one of my kids, and I said something, you know, like, I don't know, I get maybe a little immature, and I'm like, well, I'm only not doing that because you didn't do this or whatever, and I'm a little short with them or critical or something. The next morning I might say, hey, you know last night when I was giving you a hard time about making that mess or whatever, you know, that was me. I was in a. I was feeling tired or low resources, and, you know, I'm sorry about that. And then, you know, I apologize, and they water under the bridge and we move on. I feel fine. So that's an indication of guilt, right? You know, there's a way to repair. There's a pathway to atone. And sometimes you might not even need to apologize. You might just be saying, you know what? I was a little out of character there, A little not following my values. And you know what? I'm going to show up differently tomorrow. And maybe that's it. Maybe that's all that's needed. And then you feel better about yourself. So that's guilt. Guilt's like a little. It gives you a little boost or course correction about how to behave and what you want to change, and you feel like you can change it. And then, boom, you feel better about yourself once you've made the change. And that's why it serves a very healthy and helpful function. What people often call guilt is actually this intense kind of shame, right? Cause there's no repair option. It's Just like, that was terrible of you. You're so bad. And then with that sense of badness, you just feel like, oh, I'm unlovable, I'm worthless. It's a really painful, sinking, collapsing, tight pain. It's hard to bear that experience. So that's shame. And there's kind of no way out because it's like, oh, I could apologize. Well, you've already done it. You know, you can't go back, or it's too late, or it was still so bad of you, right? So we might call that guilt, but that's really shame, because you're basically saying, I'm a bad person. There's no way out of this now. That's shame. So what's toxic shame? Well, it gets worse, my friend. Stick with me, though. You're doing great, and we're going to get to the other side of this together. But toxic shame is shame, which we've already covered, but there's no trigger. So imagine that, right? Shame is something that arises when you have those triggers that I was describing, giving some examples of earlier. Imagine having that shame with no trigger. It's just kind of there all the time. You just feel like, I am bad. You're prone to feeling that way all the time. Now you might say, is it all the time? I don't know. It's pretty extreme. But maybe it's like there are so many triggers that is basically all the time. So making eye contact with someone, sharing in a group, speaking up, asking for something, doing my work, being with my family, whatever it is, all those things, you're prone to feel shame during that. So that's when it started to get into the realm of toxic shame. Shame for no specific reason, shame when you haven't even done anything yet, just shame for being who you are. That's toxic shame. Do you know what I'm talking about? Have you experienced this? Are you experiencing this? And maybe it's not so intense for you. Maybe it's only shame in certain environments or certain instances or certain triggers, and that's okay. Wherever it is, you're in the right place. And I'm glad that you're here with me. And I respect and acknowledge you for having the courage to look at this and face this and change this. So what do we do with this? How do we navigate our way out of this? Well, one thing to start with is shame is built into the human experience, right? The emotions that we feel, anger, sadness, shame, desire, these are things that all humans experience. So to some degree, shame is Unavoidable. You're going to experience some of it as a human. That's just part of welcome to the human experience. There's all the feelings here and all the things that we get to do and have and share and experience. What's different from person to person and from culture to culture is what the shame is about. So the feeling might be the same, but do I feel shame because of my height or not? Do I feel shame because of my weight or not? Do I feel shame because of the color of my skin? Do I feel shame around if I've had a partner or not, or how many people I've had sex with or all these things that actually varies a lot based upon your particular culture and subcultures that you're a part of. So, for example, if you're in one culture and let's say you're a certain age and you haven't had a sexual partner, you might feel shame. You know, I'm a loser. I'm a virgin. How terrible of me, right? Someone else in another culture might be the same age, also a virgin, and not feel shame. Maybe they feel a sense of pride. Maybe they feel a sense of like, hey, I'm saving myself, or I am pure, or whatever the perspective is, right? So depending upon what culture you're in and subculture you're in, that may or may not trigger shame. You know, your weight may or may not trigger, you know, certain cultures, you know, you might. You have whatever your weight is and your body shape is, you might look at it and say, oh, man, I feel shame. I'm so not good. And someone else might have the exact same body and say, look at me, I'm proud. Like, I have enough food to eat well and feed myself and my family, and I'm proud of that. So different circumstances, different culture, entirely different experience. So what we want to look at is the messages that you got about what makes you not okay. Now, at first, if it's toxic shame, it's a little more. You have to tease it apart a little bit more because imagine got a global message of I'm bad. And that usually comes. Toxic shame usually comes from generally family, upbringing and receiving the message of blame, anger, dislike, or aversion from people around you. And that could be a high frequency of that or an intensity of that. And the intensity of that is not necessarily how other people would have seen it. It's how your nervous system received it. So a sensitive kid can get a message that's not that intense from a parent, from the Outside, but they feel it. Usually it doesn't happen from one instance. Usually it happens from hundreds, thousands of instances. And small stuff can add up. So maybe the parent was never berating a kid and saying, you're never going to amount to anything. Although that does happen. And that's obviously pretty clearly communicating that message. But it might just be more like an exasperated, what do you want now? And you get that, you know, once a day, five times a week, you know, for five years. It sends a message, your presence is annoying. And so what we want to look at is, what are these messages that we got? And they might have been communicated directly. What, you got these bad grades. What's wrong with you? You're such a lazy, bad person now all of a sudden, if you fail at something or don't perform at something, you. You might feel shame. You got the message, hey, you gotta, you know, get straight A's. You gotta do your best on everything or else. And you also might start to see places where you just got that message of there's something wrong with you, or don't bother me, or ugh, aversion, dislike, frustration, exasperation. Maybe just for being around, maybe just for speaking up, maybe just for existing. And this is the underbelly of upbringing and parenting that we might not want to look at. But yeah, you know, there's a shadow side to it. Parents love their kids. Parents also resent their kids. They may blame their children. I would have had a different life. I would have experienced more of this. I would have been more successful in my career, more free or more having more fun or, you know, it's your fault that I'm tired or whatever. And look, and even in the best parents and the best families, that's going to be communicated on some level because no one is 100% one thing. We all have parts and parents get frustrated and they blame their kids sometimes. And, you know, there's a realm in which that happens some, but there's also a ton of love and expression of enjoyment and appreciation and care and all that stuff. And then it kind of, you know, gets the overall. We're looking for the overall message that's communicated, not just one message that happened one time or a handful of times. So what I'm hoping you're doing as you're listening to me right now, is reflecting on your own childhood, your own upbringing, and getting curious about those messages. And you don't need to do this in a very methodical, you know, week by week, chronological kind of way. We're just Getting curious. What arises for you, what comes to you. And the goal here is not to go to the past and fix it and, you know, even have a story as to why. I mean, the story as to why is really only helpful for one reason, and that's for you to see that it isn't reality. This is just an idea. This is just a message that I received and I can choose something else. But we got to see that you learned it somewhere so that you can unlearn it and learn something new and decide for yourself what life is about and who you're allowed to be and what matters for you. I remember I worked with a client in one of my mastermind programs, and she got the message that to say no to her mom and other people, you know, in the family, but especially her mom, was selfish, bad. Her wanting something, even if her siblings got it, if she wanted it too. She was the oldest one and she was a girl, and they kind of told her, like, hey, you know, yeah, your younger brother gets that because he's the baby, but you shouldn't need that. You shouldn't want, whatever, a bike or something like that. And they would, they would shame her and say, what's wrong with you? And you're selfish. And the mom, her mom would even use the word evil and mean. You're selfish. Mean and evil was the language that she heard a lot. So now she's, you know, full, full grown adult and in her workplace or with her family or other people, wants to share, wants to say no, needs to set a boundary, wants to just live and be herself. And there's this chronic sense of shame because she learned, hey, selfish, mean and evil. And I wonder what you learned and how it might be influencing you today and you're not stuck with that. Yeah, that's the message that you got. And I think this is something that's really important for you and everyone to know is there's this very deterministic perception in us and whether it's genetic and biological determinism, like your genes, determine your health, determine your reality, determine your life, which is false. There's a whole field of epigenetics which talks and looks about how the genes and which ones are expressed at what time and to what degree is determined not by some clockwork mechanism in the DNA that just unfolds. It's actually a very dynamic system that it's responsive to your environment, to your perceptions, to your emotions, to your beliefs that determine the physical unfolding of your body and your health. So whether it's biological determinism or people kind of have a personality determinism that's, that's set into place by their upbringing. So if I got this message when I was young or I had an abusive parent or whatever the scenario circumstance was, it's like, and therefore I'm going to struggle in relationships my whole life, or therefore I'm not able to connect with people, or therefore I have this disorder, or therefore this. And this is how it is because of the past. And that is unfortunately extremely debilitating. And also, unfortunately, it becomes true. It's a self fulfilling prophecy. And as long as we believe that's the case and it becomes the case and we say aha. You see? And that's exactly what it's about. It's about being right. It's about being certain. Because of the pain of the past, because of the shame. It feels bad. And we want to have a sense of certainty because the certainty allows us to know how it is and that gives us something to hold onto. And it also helps you not take risks in life. Because if you were to put yourself out there, and maybe you get love, but also maybe you get rejection. And if you got rejection, you're afraid of feeling the shame. So I'm just gonna tell myself I'm stuck, that I don't have to feel the shame. Well, at least not the harsh shame right after rejection. But I still feel this chronic shame in the background. So pick your poison. And I say, let's shift this. Look, the past doesn't equal the future. You can create something radically different and radically new. And it's gonna start with you right now. Because whatever message you got when you were 10 or 5 or 15 or even a year ago, whatever it is, you are the one who's perpetuating that. You are the one who is carrying that and carrying out the shame. It's internalized in something probably called your, you know, Freud called it the superego. But it's something that you probably carry in there that is, that is carrying out the you're bad. What was wrong with you. And it might, it might use the voice or the tone or the language of your mom or your dad or someone else, but it is who's allowing that part inside of you to run the show, to dominate the scene inside of there. And even if you're currently living with someone who is actively saying these things, you are still choosing to live there. You are still giving them your power. And it's time to choose differently. If you want to be free, if you Want to change this. And it starts with you claiming something right now and saying, you know what? I am gonna upgrade this. You don't even need to know how yet. You don't even need to know all the steps that are gonna unfold. But it starts with the decision. The decision. The choice. Wait a minute. No. I'm gonna interrupt this pattern, and I'm gonna start to bring more of me out. The me that I was told was wrong, the me that I was told was bad. I am gonna start to find my way more onto my own side. And that's how we really begin this process of healing toxic shame. And then the exact how the best pathway is going to be learning the skill and the muscle of what I call omos, being on my own side, where you discover how to treat yourself with more love, more tenderness, more compassion, more care, more empathy. You're essentially re parenting yourself from anything that you might have got growing up. And sometimes the messages are not all parents, right? Maybe it's other kids, right? A ton. I mean, we have a family friend who's got a. Their daughter is 9, and she was talking with her mom. They're a friend of ours. So they told us this recently about how she doesn't want to eat too much because she doesn't want to get fat. She's 9 years old, and she's not, like, you know, morbidly obese or something. She's just like this healthy, young, active girl at 9 who's wanting to start to restrict her eating to not get fat. Where is she getting that message? Her mom and dad aren't communicating that message. She's getting it from peers in school. Right? Where are they getting it? They're getting it maybe from their mom and dad, but probably more likely from the media, from their phones, from the ads they get from the YouTube influencers that they watch, from, whatever. And I know that she's not alone in this. This is extremely common across many cultures in the world, particularly United States. So we must start to challenge this narrative. In fact, that's what I want you to practice as your action step for this episode. So let's get to that right now. Time for action. Action. Action. Your action step for today is to, you know, you've uncovered one or two or three maybe messages that you got about how you're supposed to be, and I want you to pick one or two of them and just actively start to challenge that. You get to choose. Why are you letting some old someone else's reality from an old, ancient part of your life, determine who you are now and what you're allowed to do. Like, why are you still letting mom or dad determine what's okay? Or that kid when you were nine in the playground who said you're fat or whatever. It's like, why is that person? You know, it's 30 years later and they're still dominating your mind like, no, enough of that. Enough. I choose. I decide my reality. Can you feel that inside? Take a full breath in right now and let that charge through you and claim it. And no one can do this for you. I can't do this for you. No therapist can do this for you. You do this, you decide, you claim. And then from that place, you'll find answers. From that place, you'll choose differently. From that place, you're stepping into a new level of energy and resourcefulness. And then the answers will come, the strategies will come. You'll figure it out. It'll come to you. You don't have to figure it out. You'll just start to discover how that starts with that decision. So I hope this serves you. I look forward to being with you more in the future. If you're benefiting from the show, please give it a review on itunes. And of course, if you want to go further, check out my website if you haven't already. Draziz.com,-R-A Z I Z.com you can find out about my YouTube channel there called Get More Confidence. We have weekly videos there as well as events that I run year long, coaching, mastermind programs, all the good stuff. You can dive further with this. But I know this is a common theme that I help people with. And so if you want to really like resolve this shame, there's some key elements of being able to share who you really are in a safe environment. And that's kind of what I spend a lot of my time doing is creating these groups and other environments to really practice this. Because shame is not healed entirely on our own. It's created socially and in connection and it's healed socially in connection. So you want to find a safe place and that could be a great place to start even if you're not part of, you know, my events are a great place to start or my coaching programs. But even if you wanted to start with like a close friend or a family member, but it has to be someone that you know is going to be like supportive of you. If you go to the person who's critical of you when you were younger and you try to be raw and open and tender with them and share something, they might just redouble down on their like, yeah, what's wrong with you? You did mess up that relationship. You're terrible, right? And you just walk away like, ugh, more crushed. So, you know, be aware and find those safe, healthy relationships. And again, if you want support in that, you know, come check out my world. All right, fantastic. Thanks for being with me today. Until we speak again, may I have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that 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 vlogs, ebooks, and training videos related to overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to social confidencecenter.com.