Wow this is a big one. Did you know that each time you admonish your kid they drop their head down on shame even if not literally? And that shame dents their sense of self so that they see themselves as defective!
I know that feeling through and through. Only I didn’t realise how innate it was. So much so that I didn’t even have the awareness that I am recalling shame from the past based on how I was chastised. This is the thing with implicit memory. It’s there but we are not aware. It creates that all automatic reactions in you. It’s the one that makes you feel like you are losing your mind and actually you are in some sense as a part of your brain shuts down.
Shame that is healthy and a shame that can be toxic. Next time you act on your impulse to tell your kid off stop and think of whether there’s a better way of dealing with it for example one that’s less shaming or blaming.
One thing I have recently been doing is enacting a drama for little bubba. He broke a pot that was super expensive but it wasn’t the pot that broke that caused a slight oh no inside of me but that oh my god can’t I just sit and have my chai now without doing yet another thing. It didn’t even take a second I started to laugh and watched how bubba totally loved playing with the soil and then stacking the pieces of broken pot! Wow the laughing totally shifted my mood and I could now have my tea and with lot of time too.
To show bubba the impact of what he has done I will enact it out and I use this for when I might let the beast in me out so that I can repair any rupture. I reenact the whole scene including me telling bubba off and then I explain why I did so without justifying it but instead letting him know that I am still working on better ways of showing him disapproval and setting boundaries. There’s usually a lot of hugging and it’s something we have always done. He will run to me and me to him down to his level always for enacting the scene as well as repair.
Shame can really do much harm and most of us live our lives in shame without ever knowing this.
Being aware of the effects of how you choose to show your child your values boundaries and what’s acceptable starts with you being the model.