Where does our shame come from? We certainly are not born with shame, just as we are not born with beliefs about our worth or lovability. If there is any default setting for us at birth, it is that we are valuable and loved.

Figuring out our shame origins can be an important step in one’s process of working through shame. This means getting a better sense of your shame origin story: often that can start as something like “I was always the stubborn one in my family” or “no one understood me” or “ I was a pain in the ass” as a kid. It could also be a story about being the favorite, which of course means someone else wasn’t, and the burden of being preferred or held up as the gold standard is the underlying story (for example, I can’t complain because I have it so good).

We can internalize these family or self myths as truth. Our simplified version of these messages can become so concretized that it’s hard to imagine them as myths, myths of course being stories, which are not true or only have incomplete truths. The function of the myth is to explain some phenomenon that otherwise doesn’t fully make sense or has some undesirable explanation.

For example, “I was always the stubborn one in my family” may be the myth adopted because one’s parents felt challenged by a child’s determination and did not know how to set healthy limits on it. Instead of a story about the parents’ own uncertainty or insecurities, which might have been too painful, the story emerged around the child’s “stubbornness” locating the problem within the child. The myth is co-created – first by the parents and then absorbed by the child.

The child then takes the myth to adulthood and whenever his determination gets activated, it also comes with a sense of shame. To manage the unbearable sense of shame, which has now been bound up in the experience of determination, the adult might easily back off of his position even though the situation may warrant holding steady, or perhaps express his determination indirectly, through being passive aggressive or subversive.

There are as many shame origin stories as there are people, each one unique and specific to each individual’s personal history, circumstances, temperament and culture. We all have one because we all have shame, which we need in order to navigate relationships, know when we have crossed a boundary or have been violated in some way. However, there are times that this shame origin story gets overgeneralized, and our shame is triggered in situations that lead us to respond in ways that do not serve us well. To explore more about how shame shows up in adults, read this and to learn more about my approach to working with shame, read this.