378- Trauma, shame & guilt

The trigger warning for this entry corresponds to my own stories, starting at the 8th paragraph. 

The French book about trauma and resilience that I read recently mentioned, how after a trauma in which there is a victim and an abuser, the victims often faces either feelings of shame,  guilt, or both, and explained how this occurs. 
I don't want to do an exact translation, nor to plagiarize, but I thought to share, in gist, the content of this chapter, and I'll also discuss about this aspect in my own experience.


When a person is faced with a traumatic event by the hand of another, there is a need to understand why it happened. We want to make sense out of what occurred, why us, and why this person attacked or abused us. The more it's violence and senseless, the more we need to understand. We start to project ourselves outwards, and often can take unto us the abusive trait of the abuser,  as we are in a way, making our own fault. In our attempt to understand that person, we wear their action on us, as if we were trying to wear their gloves. Their violence act doesn't make sense, because we want to believe that humans are better than that, and in our realization that this isn't the case, we accept that we are also inherently flawed, but we take more than we are guilty of : 

We expand what we perceive to be human villain actions to be a general nature (to an extent, it is very violent by our evolution, but this is out of the scope of this entry and the book it was inspired from). As a result, many victims find flaws in their own words, actions, way they responded or dressed, and we almost try to rationalize and excuse the abuser's acts. 

This is a normal stage in a person, first being a victim, before unlearning this guilt or shame. What the book didn't say, is that a lot of our societal and cultural frames of reference made it absolutely normal to victimize people and then to blame and shame them for having been victimized. The counter-trend to stop this victim-shaming & victim-blaming is rather recent in our history, and it'll take a long time until this counteraction can overtake the initial damage - especially when it comes to victimization of women. This is where intersectional feminism is so important in our societies. 

The lived experienced by a man, such as myself, is very different, but we also can suffer this form of secondary victimization - blaming or shaming us for having been victimized in the first place. For instance, in a world where men are supposed to be strong in the physical sense and never show emotion or what is perceived in these societal norms as weakness, we may be shamed for expressing our struggles and difficulties in coping after trauma. This creates its own set of stigmatization,  and whereas women are expected to be both victimized and to talk about it, men are supposed to shut up and "be strong", to "man-up". 

These norms may have been slightly eroded in the past few years, as more men come forward to discuss their mental health struggles, their mental illnesses, but the stigma isn't fully set aside as of yet. A LOT more of us need to talk about it openly, and to break  down cisgender expectations of men=strong, muscly and quiet in the one side, and women=fragile, victimized, and talking on the other. These are, off course, somewhat (but not much) exagerrated illustrations of these problems. 

Any person, man, woman, or all in-between (nonbinary/queer, androgenous etc) can go through trauma, and may or may not develop mental illness/es as a result. Those of us who do aren't specifically weak, not anymore than those of us who do not are inherently strong, as these very notions are vague and one's strength is another's weakness, and that by the very nature of trauma, a person may or may not have the tools to deal with it. I'll keep this to another post. 

So, if anyone of us can experience trauma, and then possibly suffer from subsequent emotions, mental health struggles, or full-blown mental illnesses, then we shouldn't be shamed or blamed - we already have our own phase of these emotions when we try to make sense of what happened to us. We don't need more of it reflected through societal mirrors. 

What about me ? (trigger warning)

You know I experienced multiple traumas - the sheer amount of blog entries on this topic tells you so. 
You know that I suffer from cptsd's (which are categorized as anxiety disorder), and other mental illnesses (depression, other anxiety disordered, phobias). 

Did I experience feelings of shame and/or guilt ? 

Yes and no. I'll start with the no :  I knew that I, as a tiny little person, didn't cause my father to abuse me right before my birth (when he delayed it by beating my mother up when she was having contractions) ; nor as a child whom he continued to abuse. So, I didn't feel guilty for that. As someone who had no other frame of reference, I hadn't even taken on me his guilty actions in attempt to understand them. I knew full well that he was mean to me, only once I saw the counter-example of a loving family (my best friend in class, I already mentioned him: M.)

But, yes, as I also experienced self-stigmatization for a while, a period where I thought that I should have been stronger and left from under his power. Then again, realizing this wasn't a possibility for me, nipped this specific kind of guilt rather fast, thought maybe not at the source. 

Later, and to this day, however, I experience feelings of inadequacy, lacking self-esteem and self-worth at regular basis. I find it hard to accept compliments (though I made progress in this), gifts, or to really practice self-care. Again,  I learned to do them, and to distance myself in small measures, but this is my own kind  of self-shame or self-guilt. It's a form of self-punishment, as discussed in these two entries : 374 & 375. 

Also yes because instead of guilt and shame over having been victimized, it turned into fear of my father's return to my life ; I feared he'd try to abduct me again, so I could fulfill the destiny he'd envisioned for me, or that he'd really have me killed, as he threatened numerous times in my youth. I worked on this aspect of fear, reducing it by setting my FB profile with my real name, just a few years ago. But my fear isn't all gone: my profile is set on private ; I seldom post photos of me in more public social media, and I never ever post videos of me anywhere. I do not tell you who I am on this blog, not linking in in a public forum to tell you this blogger is me, right there. 

The last yes that I want to address, shall have its own blog entry, or several ; after I came back to my native country, and got away from my father, I fell prey to toxic, 1-sided pseudo-friendships, out of the same kind of lack of self-worth that my guilty feelings shaped themselves as. 

So, what did I do, and what can be done, to get out of shame or guilt, induced by traumatic abuse? 

• I think the first important step is to realize feeling like that is a normal stage in our healing
• take the time to reflect, introspect and possibly talking with others, to get an outside perspective ;
• We have to realize who did what : not to exaggerate anything we said, or did, or wore, or didn't. 
• We cannot take the blame for someone else's actions, even when we think that we may have caused the abuse. Even if we had (and this is extremely rare), the person had the choice not to abuse us, and yet they did. It's not our fault, in any circumstance. 
• We have to take the time to understand and for this, we need meaning-based coping : the kind of coping that we come to appreciate, as we make sense out of our traumatic experience, of the abusive words or acts of another. In doing so, we also take that necessary distance between us, the victims, and the perpetrator/s. In doing this, we finally can put the blame on the proper person, the one who did it. 
• Then, we can realize that we aren't only victims, but are survivors : we survived a traumatic experience, or a series of them, no matter what, we are still here.
• We also need social coping : the one where we can count on a support network, of family, or friends ; of therapists ; of support groups for the specific kind of trauma we had, or more generalized groups for trauma survivors. Anything where we can feel like we belong and can feel free to talk about our experiences and not fear any ind of judgment
• Unlearning any drilled-in diminishing, depersonalization or gaslighting that the other did can also help unraveling these lies which then unravel self-guilt and shame. 
• In healing from those, we can learn self-love, in parallel or in another stage, in distancing ourselves from the gavel proclaiming our guilt in our own brain. 
• More broadly, in healing processes, it was found that rebuilding our identity and differentiating it from others can help the stage of separation between "I caused it" and "the abuser did it", because we can clearly and more subjectively define who is each person, and who indeed has acted. It's a boundary to set between the self and the guilty party. 
• In doing all this, you can also see in what ways your trauma may have created a cycle of letting others potentially abuse you, your kindness or any other toxic act that may have caused feelings of shame, guilt and blame. You understand the circumstances which made you more prone to predators' actions, and thus can also see that no matter what you thought you did to cause them to hurt you, you were already hurt and, just like a wounded animal is more fragile to attacks, so were you, and that isn't your fault. 
• Understanding can bring self-compassion : if you weren't you but observing someone suffering from the same feelings, you'd have compassion for them, and it is a required step in anyone's healing process to have compassion, not only toward others but also oneself. In compassion, you near to be patient with the process, with yourself, with your difficulties in healing, but you remain on track and know that you are worthy of healing.
• I personally find that since some of the cultural references are all religiously based victimization and guilt-tripping, that an important component in healing for me was becoming a secular, humanist atheist. This means that I no longer let religious dogma dictate and instill fear of eternal retribution and burning in hell for acts and thoughts I may have had, or my mere human existence. I don't let these dogmas proclaim me as guilty by default, and thus have nothing to atone for. I've always done my best to be kind and compassionate to other living beings, humans or not, alike. Being the best version of myself, without the need to prove and ingratiate myself to god, that figment of human imagination that looms over our soul's eternal damnation. Atheism's my freedom from such guilt, shame and blame feelings. 

Let's end this long unending post with external links :

• Healing from trauma, shame, guilt and blame as part of healing from CPTSD
• Psychologytoday's article on Benefits of a trauma-sensitive approach to healing shame, which, up my research at the end of composition has similar advice
• The RAEDA group's article which also defines Guilt. 

There are myriads of other articles and I only glanced at each of those, offering avenues and advice toward healing. You may find some of my or their advice to suit you more than other, or not at all. We are all different and thus, we have to research our own methods. 

Thank you for reading me, and I hope this gave you some clues to embark on healing from feelings of guilt, shame and/or blame.