Shame can be defined as a feeling of inner worthlessness or despair about ever being good enough. For the sexual addict spending precious time, money and energy seeing prostitutes for sexual massage, maintaining multiple affairs or masturbating night after night to pornography, shame about these acts becomes the hidden inner core of feelings which ends up sabotaging relationships, careers and self-esteem.
Shame is the feeling of being defective to the core. Shame is a rampant and very destructive force in our culture. Shame is the inevitable consequence of child abuse.
To feel shamed is to want to hide oneself because of the felt fundamental defect in self. Shame-based people conceal their true selves from others and ultimately from themselves. They commit a sort of psychological or spiritual suicide and instead take on socially acceptable roles beneath which they hide.
The role may be "nice guy", "super-mom", "perfect one", "needy one", "helper", "winner", "loser", and so forth. The core of shame motivates the person to disappear in the eyes of others and to go through life hidden away within the role.
Disappearing to one’s self poses a different problem. The pain of shame is intolerable and exposing one’s self to this annihilating feeling is avoided at tremendous costs to the person. The shamed may distort their perceptions and memory to avoid the horror of the felt inner self.
The shamed may cut off their connection to their own feelings selectively or altogether. The shamed may fill their lives with phony emotion, compulsive and obsessive activity, mood altering substances and experience, or numbing stimulation. In any case, the goal of the shame-based person is the same – to shut off the burning pain of the deep and inescapable knowledge that the self is flawed. And in any case, all such efforts ultimately fail.
People dealing with chronic feelings of shame develop many ways of coping. Often this includes addictions. It is certainly a common route to sexual addiction.
Sexual addicts feel tremendous guilt and shame about their out-of-control behavior, and they live in constant fear of discovery. Yet addicts will often act out sexually in an attempt to block out the very pain of their addiction. This is part of what drives the addictive cycle.
The addict feels shame about what he is doing usually immediately after engaging in sex acts that violate some of the person’s standards.
When shame is experienced chronically, it eventually becomes internalized. This process eventually results in disowning parts of the self:
Dissociation is a common defense employed when a shame-based personality develops.
Dissociation is a learned strategy; it is passed from generation to generation.
If the ultimate response to (toxic) shame internalization is the disowning of parts of the self (splits in the self), then sex provides the single best, easiest, and most available means of transcending the fragmented self.
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Shame: defenses against, reduction of, trauma based.
See also: Codependency