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hey guys I'm Heidi PRI welcome back to my Channel or welcome if this is your first time here today on this channel I want to do a deep dive into the experience of toxic shame how it develops and how it can lead to Chronic
Heidi Priebe explains how toxic shame develops from early co-regulation failures, making core emotions shame-bound and leading to chronic emotional dysregulation, and how to reverse the cycle.
Key Takeaways
- Toxic shame makes people feel wrong for their emotions, not their actions, which is why it is so damaging.
- Emotional dysregulation can stem from shame-bound emotions in ordinary upbringings, not only overt trauma.
- Suppressed emotions and shame-driven coping create a compounding cycle that feeds chronic dysregulation.
- Healing involves reconnecting with core emotions, reframing coping patterns with compassion, and building regulation skills gradually.
What the video covers
- Toxic shame runs counter to healthy shame's purpose: instead of signaling a behavior to correct, it tells the person their authentic emotions themselves are wrong.
- Core emotions (anger, sadness, joy, excitement, disgust, attraction) arise involuntarily, so shaming them makes a person feel fundamentally wrong, since only responses to emotions are controllable.
- Healthy emotional development depends on co-regulation: caregivers name feelings, validate them, and teach concrete strategies for managing them, which becomes adult self-regulation.
- When caregivers respond to certain emotions with rejection, disgust, or contempt, those emotions become shame-bound and are suppressed or pushed out of awareness.
- Suppressed emotions don't disappear; they stay in the body and reappear as dysregulation, which compounds the original shame.
- Shame-based regulation strategies (fawning, people-pleasing, perfectionism, self-isolation) often bring new shame, creating a self-reinforcing cycle.
- Toxic shame drives withdrawal from co-regulation, because the person fears that showing their inner experience will trigger rejection.
- Recovery requires reframing maladaptive patterns as coping adaptations rather than moral flaws, then slowly reconnecting with core emotions.
- The process is gradual, involving naming feelings and finding strategies to integrate them, often best supported by a skilled therapist.
- Change happens through a series of small, repeated steps over years toward an earned secure state.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to Toxic Shame and Emotional Dysregulation
- 02:20Healthy Shame vs. Toxic Shame
- 04:32Core Emotions and Why They Matter
- 06:24Early Co-Regulation and Emotional Development
- 08:48How Caregiver Rejection Creates Shame-Bound Emotions
- 13:00Shame Cycles, Self-Isolation, and Compounding Shame
- 20:00Reversing the Cycle: Reframing and Reconnection
- 27:00Gradual Steps Toward Earned Secure Attachment
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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difficulty regulating our emotions I will put a link in the description of this video to another one I've done that goes over toxic shame what it is how to recognize the signs of it in your own life if that term is brand new to you
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you can go check that out and then come back here but for the rest of you who are already familiar with this term what we're going to do today is dive really deeply into how toxic shame develops how
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it builds on itself as it develops as well as how it leads to Chronic difficulties with emotional regulation now the reason I feel really passionately about this topic among other reasons is because I think that a lot of people who struggle with
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emotional regulation issues tend to think that the only way that can happen is through having some very overtly traumatic background so if on a day-to-day basis I really struggle to understand what I'm feeling to communicate what I'm feeling to find
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healthy coping mechanisms and outlets for my feelings I might think something terrible must have happened to me in order for me to have arrived here and while that absolutely can be the case having various forms of trauma can and
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usually do lead to emotional regulation difficulties you don't have to have an overtly traumatic past to have difficulty recognizing and healthy expressing your emotions a big factor that can lead to the suppression of healthy emotional expression is the
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experience of having certain emotions becoming shame Bound for you at a young age which warps your ability to experience those emotions directly it also warps your ability to deal with those emotions directly which leads to Chronic disregulation so today what we're going
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to talk about is what it means to have a shame bound emotion or multiple shame bound emotions and how it can lead to a wide variety of experiences both inner and outer that compound the original sense of shame we feel and make it
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difficult to self-regulate now to start us off I want to be clear about what I mean when I say the term toxic shame versus what we might think of as is healthy shame so when we look at the evolutionary purpose
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of Shame what it's designed to help us do in a very neutral way is alert us to the fact that something we are doing is likely to get us ostracized from our social group so shame inside of a
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healthy social environment actually just helps us monitor our own behavior to make sure that we're behaving pro-socially if I get really angry at someone in my kindergarten class and then I kick them and then somebody shames me for it I'm going to learn okay
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the action of kicking is wrong I shouldn't do it and then I'll internalize that sense of shame in the future and this is actually a pretty good use of Shame it's an emotion that kind of alerts us to the fact that it's
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time to inhibit some Behavior or action that we might want to take because it's not going to help us behave pro-socially now when we're experiencing toxic shame shame is actually running counter to its intended programming so rather than
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helping us monitor our Behavior to keep us in connection with others toxic shame tells us that we are a mistake that our authentic emotions are wrong not our actions our emotions and so we believe that we are the thing that must be
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inhibited in order to keep ourselves in connection with other people the problem is that we are not in control of the core emotions that we feel so if I start to believe it's not the kicking that's wrong it's the the anger that's wrong
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now I'm on my way to developing toxic shame because I can't control when anger arises in my body all I can control is how I choose to deal with that anger and I can deal with that anger in more
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pro-social ways or more antisocial ways but the anger itself is a perfectly normal and healthy emotion to have and the entire gamut of core emotions that we all experience are very important for healthy psychological functioning so those emotions are usually something in
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the ballpark of anger sadness excitement Joy disgust attraction or kind of moving towards energy all of these things are really important for us to feel on a daily basis and all of them do arise inside of our bodies on a daily basis so
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if we somehow internalize the idea that feeling one of these feelings is wrong we're going to start to feel like we are wrong because we can't control the fact that we feel these feelings again all we can control is how we handle them so in
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order to start exploring how toxic shame develops we're going to look at our early experiences of co-regulation and how they help us understand our own inner experiences For Better or For Worse so when we are very young we don't
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yet have language for these emotions that are chronically popping up inside of us and it's the job of our parents or our caregivers to help us get the ER language for what we're feeling and also help us understand how to express our
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feelings properly so this is the process of co-regulation when we're co-regulating with someone we're kind of showing somebody our insides in an unfiltered way and we're receiving feedback from them on how they're making sense of our internal experience and
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this is very important particularly When We're Young because when I am 2 years old and I don't know what this feeling in my body is whatever name my parent consistently gives that that feeling is what I will come to know it as so this
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emotion kind of Rises up inside of me let's say it's sadness and my caregiver looks at it and they go hey that's sadness and now I have a name for this feeling and already naming it might start to change the feeling a little bit
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maybe it feels kind of looser and I have less anxiety around it just based on the fact that it's being seen and acknowledged and then in a healthy caregiving environment the next step is the caregiver tells the child here's
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what we do when we feel sad so here are some actions we can take in the real world that will allow that emotion to dissipate over time and then we return to a state of Regulation your parent goes hey I notice you feel sad when we
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feel sad sometimes we cry sometimes we reach out and talk to someone sometimes we give ourselves a bit of a break and then we also figure out how to do things differently so we don't feel sad like this next time we're in the same
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situation so now what the child has is both a proper name for their emotion and a bunch of strategies they can turn to for managing that feeling and this becomes the way that we self-regulate as we grow up so that child grows into an
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adult who when they feel sadness popping up is able to name for themselves hey I'm feeling sadness right and already that starts to change I guess I could take a little break and have a cry I guess I could go talk to a friend I
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guess I could look at what led to this feeling and figure out what I can do to make sure that it doesn't happen again like this in the future and now there are these strategies that allow the direct experience of the emotion to
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dissipate and change and dissolve back into a regulated state so this is how early healthy co-regulation becomes a clean and easy experience of self-regulation as an adult secure adults who have accurate names and strategies for their emotions become
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low-level disregulated several times a day just like everybody does but the difference is that they're usually able to quickly identify with their feeling and take the appropriate actions to resolve or Express or change that feeling and return back to a
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regulated State now toxic shame enters the scene initially when early experiences of co-regulation go wrong and this doesn't have to be malicious often the reason that early co-regulation experiences go wrong is not necessarily because the parent was abusive were terrible but because they
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were just a little bit emotionally illiterate themselves or there were certain emotions that they didn't know how to regulate through so it wasn't possible for them to pass down the accurate information to us and this can be more than enough to turn certain
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emotions into shame bound emotions so we're going to look at how that process develops when you have an emotion let's say it's anger because I know anger is one that a lot of people have shame binds around if anytime that feeling
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just naturally pops up for you as a child your caregiver meets that feeling with a sense of rejection so maybe they look at you with disgust when you feel anger maybe they show contempt towards your anger maybe there's some way in
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which they overtly reject you or ignore you when you express anger now what's going to happen is shame is going to come online and it's going to go hey I've noticed when we feel this feeling it tends to lead to rejection so since
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it's my job to inform you of which things are going to lead to rejection from your social environment anytime anger pops up shame is going to pop up too so the reason we call this a shame bound emotion is because it's kind of
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like the emotion itself is stuck inside of a layer of shame we can't access it because shame has come and covered it up so effectively that we no longer feel the core feeling itself and this is what I would call a simple shame bind this in
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and of itself is enough to develop toxic shame because you're now feeling like a feeling which is a core part of who I am is wrong or bad a go I am wrong or bad in ways I can't
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control but simple shame binds are not the only type of Shame binds you can also have what I like to call a complex shame bound emotion so this is what happens when we're not only rejected for feeling something in our early
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environments we are also given the in correct name for our feelings so let's say when I have anger pop up my caregiver tells me that's selfishness what you are experiencing is a bad feeling and it's the feeling of being
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selfish and now when I have anger pop up shame also pops up it binds it and it tells me a story the story it tells me is you are behaving selfishly which in reality may or may not be true but the
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problem is I have internalized the wrong name for my raw emotional experience or let's say every time I feel sad I have a caregiver who tells me you're being dramatic or pathetic and now when shame pops up to cover that feeling of sadness
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because it gets me rejected it tells me the story you're being pathetic and that's the story that my conscious mind believes to be the truth or let's say last one anytime I feel Joy or excitement pop up I get told you're
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being annoying and disruptive and now shame comes to cover that and it not only Cuts me off from the core feeling it also tells me the story that I am being annoying now the problem is that all of these stories are not true to the
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internal experience it's possible that you can be angry and selfish at the same time it's possible that you can be excited and annoying at the same time but the experience of behaving in an annoying way is not the same as the
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feeling of excitement the experience of behaving in a selfish way is not the same as the experience of anger but now we've internalized these negative things about ourselves and we associate them with emotional states that we can't control because again every person going
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through their day-to-day life feels pretty much all of the core emotions on a daily basis it's just a matter of to what degree we're tuned into them so the problem is that if we have the wrong words online for our emotional
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experiences we're going to struggle with self-regulation because now instead of having this happen feeling comes online I name it and then I find ways to deal with it in the outside world until it dissipates what happens is emotion comes
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online shame comes to cover it up and now we are feeling multiple things that pose a problem one is the shame itself shame is a very disregulated experience so when we feel shame we tend to need to comfort ourselves in some way around
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that shame this in and of itself can be a very big task for the emotional system to chronically be dealing with but where it gets even more complicated is if you have a complex shame bound emotion so sadness comes online and shame comes
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online and goes hey you're being pathetic now what you're going to do is start taking actions that are in alignment with what you believe the emotion is so if I am sad the actions that I would take to resolve that emotion directly
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are almost the polar opposite of the actions that I would take if I were being pathetic if I were feeling sad the emotions I would need to take are probably in the realm of seeking out comfort and rest and support if I were
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being pathetic the appropriate actions to take would be toughening up compartmentalizing my feelings and taking some sort of action that pushes down my feelings of distress the problem is that if those are the actions I'm taking every time I feel sad I'm
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actually creating an environment that is less comforting for myself airo my sadness is getting bigger same goes for let say anger if every time I am angry I have shame come up and tell me the story you're being selfish now what I'm going
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to do is look around my environment and try to figure out okay who do I need to apologize to or fawn over when in reality the anger was there to tell me where I needed to set boundaries so what
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I'm doing is inviting more of the energy that caused me to get angry in the first place into my life by taking responsibility in the place of setting boundaries so again because we have the wrong name for our emotion we're taking
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the wrong action when it comes up this leads us to a point where we start feeling chronically disregulated but we don't have an explanation for why we feel disregulated the real reason we feel disregulated is twofold one we're
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chronically dealing with feelings of Shame which is a very emotionally taxing experience but also we start to feel incompetent when it comes to managing our feelings because if we do not have the right names for them we're not able
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to resolve them directly so it can start to feel like well my emotions just don't make any sense right I keep experiencing that feeling that I call selfishness and then when I do the actions that should work to resolve selfishness I end up
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feeling worse and more selfish in a kind of repetitive Loop because in reality once again you have the wrong name for that feeling so you're taking an action that does not work to resolve it so now we start to feel helpless and
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overwhelmed to manage our emotions because again we don't have access to the raw direct experience of them in an accurate way those emotions that we don't express ress the anger that we don't know we're feeling stays in our
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bodies and our bodies stay angry the sadness that we don't experience consciously stays in our bodies and our bodies feel sad and so now we have these inner experiences of strong emotions that we can't figure out or make sense
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of but we still need to find a way to emotionally regulate ourselves in order to go on living our lives so we might get fixated on whatever we can find mind that makes us temporarily feel good if I
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feel kind of chronically bad in ways that I don't understand but I notice that every time I eat a certain meal I feel better for a little bit I might get really fixated on what I'm going to eat
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at all times because maybe that's the only time where I have a brief sense of comfort and reprieve from the shame and disregulation that I feel all the time or maybe I find that when I adhere to a
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really specific and rigid schedule I'm kind of able to emotionally regulate around that consistency I start to think of emotional regulation as getting really rigid about whatever it is that makes me feel good because I don't understand the
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cause and effect related to my own feelings I don't understand that for most people emotional regulation means feeling all of your feelings as they come up and then dealing appropriately with them because it's impossible to understand that if your feelings are
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shame bound and you're not directly or consciously experiencing your core emotions the problem with this type of self- soothing self soothing that is not directly related or responding to the emotions as they are rising in your body is that it can create shame double binds
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so what does that mean if the only way I know how to regulate and give myself some comfort around this mess of emotions in my body that I don't understand is to binge eat or to drink by myself or to stick to a really rigid
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and specific schedule all of these activities could actually lead to social ostracization because all of them fall outside of the realm of what the average secure person does to regulate their feelings so this can actually create new forms of Shame and this is where the
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experience of toxic shame starts getting complex this is what I call a shame double bind I'm flooded with shame in my system I don't understand why I assume it's just some sort of flaw with who I am I'm chronically disregulated because
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I don't have a means of directly resolving my emotions as they come up and so I turn to compensatory emotional regulation strategies like getting really fixated on certain things that are guaranteed to give me a momentary reprieve from my shame but those things
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in and of themselves can cause more shame due to their consequences maybe I stop liking the way that my body looks or feels feel s because I'm chronically eating or drinking to try to numb out the shame and now I have new shame on
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top of my original shame that my shame management strategy has resulted in or let's say I'm embarrassed about how rigid and fixated I am on certain things in my life and I don't want anyone to get too close and to see how obsessive I
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am about certain routines or habits that I have and so now I have Shame about my lifestyle so the thing that I'm trying to do to escape my shame is actually creating new forms of shame in my life
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but without having access to what I'm actually struggling with there's no real way to make that cycle end so I can start to feel as though I am just crazy as though my emotions just make no sense because I might be aware of the fact
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that from the outside someone could look at my life and go well if you're struggling with these things with let's say overeating or drinking too much or being really rigid or obsessive about something why don't you just stop doing
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that and because I don't know why I'm doing those things in the first place I might start to feel like well I just have these Character defects I just have these compulsions I don't understand when in reality we just don't know how
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to regulate around our core emotions because we don't have access to them because they have become shame bound but by this point where we have shame regulation strategies that are leading to more shame probably what we're doing is self-isolating quite a bit so we're
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cutting ourselves off from co-regulation because we're telling ourselves the story my emotions don't make any sense to me or to other people so if I tried to show people what was up for me I would probably just get shamed even
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further for the fact that my behavior makes no sense and I might get labeled as things like lazy or weak or whatever it is and that would just lead to more shame so this is the point in the cycle
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where shame becomes extremely maladaptive because it's no longer functioning to keep our authentic selves in connection with other people the only way at this point to stay in connection with other people is to develop a false self so a social Persona where you
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pretend for short periods of time to be a perfectly regular perfectly regulated person and then when disregulation comes online instead of staying present in your connections and working through that disregulation directly by working things out with the other person or by
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doing self-regulation strategies you withdraw and turn to your maladaptive coping mechanisms because that's the only way you know how to deal with disregulation because again you don't have the language for what's actually going on so one problem you're
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chronically dealing with is the fact that you're disregulated because the emotions you don't have an awareness of don't get dealt with and live on inside of you and disregulated your system but another problem is that your life stops
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making a lot of sense and it gets really hard to make wise decisions for yourself because the shame bound emotions the ones that you have learned to either push down or misidentify were actually there to give you really important
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pieces of information and you are missing those pieces of information if you're not able to be consciously aware of those feelings air go you're going to really struggle with making decisions in a way that makes sense so an example of
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this let's say I have a shame bind around anger as soon as I feel anger my system pushes it right down and tells me something like now it's time to feel guilty or to Fawn now what might happen
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is I might find myself in a pattern of relationships where I am being spoken down to or treated very poorly but anytime anger tries to come up gets pushed down and I go into an appeasement response with my partner and I might be
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absolutely baffled at why I keep ending up in unhealthy relationship after unhealthy relationship ship and the fact that I can't seem to identify these warning signs or notice in the moment when things are going AR might become another source of shame I might know
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that from the outside it looks like I just can't figure this out I just cannot seem to find healthy Partners or end up in healthy relationships and again I might internalize that as a character flaw there must just be something wrong
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with me I let people walk all over me when in reality I'm just not in touch with the anger that is there to inform me of the fact that my boundaries are being crossed that anger is really important for discernment when it comes
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to choosing partners and navigating relationships or let's say my system immediately comes and hops on Joy or excitement when I feel it and pushes it down because I internalize that as if I am excited and sharing it with people I
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am being annoying and disruptive now I might start feeling chronically depressed and not understanding why I can't motivate myself to just get up figure out what I want out of my life and go for it because that emotion of
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excitement or lust or that moving towards energy has been shame Bound for me so I'm unable to take signals from my own body about how to motivate myself and which direction to move towards and again I might just internalize something
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like well I'm just a lazy piece of crap I just don't try hard enough I just can't seem to motivate myself like other people can because there's something wrong with me and those stories about ourselves once again can lead to
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withdrawing and to pulling away from any forms of co-regulation because we believe that if we showed ourselves to someone else they would just go well why don't you just do the obvious thing just get up in the morning and do something
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or just get out of that relationship and find a better partner we can often see the patterns that we're stuck in but not what led us into those patterns and what what would have to change in a given
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moment when a pattern is playing out in order for us to put a stop to it and pivot in a New Direction so again we start to tell ourselves an untrue story about our inherently flawed nature that story causes us to isolate further and
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the more we isolate and the more we don't allow ourselves to be seen and to co-regulate with other people the more we need comfort the more we need connection and the more we turn right back to those same maladaptive coping
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mechanisms in order to soothe ourselves in the absence of interpersonal comfort and true deep co-regulation so this is where we end up in a really toxic Loop where we might have no idea how to make the changes we
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need to make in our lives because the core emotions that we would need access to in order to get out of this Loop are inaccessible to us and the way that we start to reverse this cycle is we learn
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to get back in touch with those core emotions and in order to do that we probably need to work with what Alice Miller who was a famous late psychologist would call an enlightened witness so an enlightened witness is
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someone like a therapist an author friend who's been through the rounds of their own toxic shame who's able to give you the type of language for your experiences that you have lacked your entire life and it's worth noting that
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at this point in your life where you're Bec becoming aware of this toxic shame patterning you probably have much more complex experiences than you did when you were 2 years old so the type of emotional co-regulation you need in
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order to get back in touch with those core emotions needs to come from someone who has a much more advanced psychological vocabulary which again is why I think the best person for this job is a really intelligent therapist not a
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therapist who is going to treat your symptoms and your symptoms only but a therapist who is going to help you get in touch with the core emotions that are driving your neurotic or obsessive patterns of thinking and behaving so the
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first step in this process of reversing this cycle of toxic shame is to take the inner critic offline as much as possible and learning to observe yourself as a person who makes sense I really think that the most isolating thought that
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toxic shame leaves most of us with is the idea that our feelings don't make any sense when that is not true your emotional experience itself in a raw way is absolutely identical to the raw emotions that come up for every single
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person on this planet we all have the same core emotions at the switchboard the problem is that you got some wires crossed you learn to name things incorrectly or to suppress some things for the good of fitting in into your
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early caregiving environment and then a whole bunch of things that we just talked about snowballed out of that original miscalculation but the cool news is that you are not inherently broken flawed weird messed up or any of those things
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you might be telling yourself at your core you just developed compensatory mechanism on top of compensatory mechanism for trying to regulate yourself when you did not have access to skills that would help you regulate directly so one of the first things it
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can help you to start working through is giving yourself some Grace understanding and compassion around all of these things that have developed as a result of believing that one or more of the core emotions that everybody has in this
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world are inherently wrong and that you are bad for feeling it if you can start to understand how many things grew out of that initial misunderstanding you're going to be able to to give yourself a lot more grace and stop thinking of the
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patterns of behavior that you're ashamed of as moral flaws and start seeing them for what they are which is your best attempt at coping within a system that you once couldn't make sense of and the next step that you're going to want to
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work towards is getting back in touch with those core emotions and slowly removing the shame bind from them so this can be done with the help of someone like a therapist or a support group who can help you have experiences
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of those emotions directly without that initial shaming environment so finding places where you can express things like sadness or anger or excitement or attraction without being shamed in response and the more we're able to do this and the more we're able to get in
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touch with those core emotions that we have suppressed quite deeply for a lot of us the more we're able to learn the appropriate skills for resolving those emotions so so someone like a therapist can sit with you as you experience your
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anger and help you figure out what the appropriate actions are to take to resolve that anger non abusively or they can help you bring that sadness to the surface and help you understand how to move through it without getting stuck in
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it and this is often a very long process because again these feelings are often very strongly repressed in us so it can also take someone like an enlightened witness of whatever form to let us know things like hey you're saying that
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you're feeling let's say sad or depressed right now but your physiology is very tense you actually look pretty angry to me why don't we try that on for size why don't we try moving into the emotion of anger and just see how it
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feels see if that feels more true or hey I noticed that every time we get close to this topic that it would be very normal for you to feel grief around you quickly change the topic and start talking about something more upbeat I
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want to see if we can go to that topic and sit with that sadness for a little bit and they're going to be able to help you contain these emotions so that you're now having the experiences you didn't have as a child you learn this
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feeling comes up we name it and we start to find strategies for dissolving it and integrating it into our lives so that we can return to a state of emotional regulation and now as the day goes on every time a feeling comes up we're able
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to recognize it eventually deal with it appropriately and return to regulation and this is how we eventually end up in a state where we are self-regulated adults there is no world where we just don't feel anger sadness lust excitement
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Joy all of these emotions that are core to The Human Experience most of us experience them daily and so if they are shame bound and we're always pushing them down calling them the wrong thing and taking counter actions we are going
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to be disregulated daily and it doesn't mean that we necessarily had something terrible happen to us it just means a few things went wrong early on that caused us to internalize the wrong idea about our own emotions and that now on a
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daily basis bring up this inability to regulate around them this is what it means to have toxic shame so the CO's notes on reversing this process is that we need to eventually get back in touch with the core experiences of those
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emotions what they feel like in our body how to recognize when let's say anger is rising up in me how to recognize the difference between anger and selfishness and how to work to resolve things directly rather than sending them
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underground into this convoluted system of giving ourselves Comfort around the wrong things where everything ends up kind of coming out sideways and making our lives harder and harder to navigate this is the process of eventually reversing that Dam downward spiral of
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toxic shame and turning it into an upward spiral of emotional literacy and emotional competence all right I am going to leave this at that for today this has been a lot of information and in the future we're going to break this
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topic down into much smaller pieces and start working with individual parts of the shame healing process one at a time because in reality that's what it looks like this process does not get reversed overnight it gets reversed through a
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series of Tiny Steps that you take over and over and over again over the course of years as you work your way towards an earned secure State as always let me know any comments feelings questions you have coming up in the comment section of
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this video I love you guys I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and your inner children and all their little core emotions that arise and I will see you back here again really [Music] soon
Topics:toxic shameemotional regulationco-regulationshame-bound emotionsemotional dysregulationattachmentself-compassioncomplex traumafawningtherapy
