toxic shame

Deeply conditioned form of shame that has been linked to your normal, natural human need for affection.

Cannot act upon a normal desire for love and affection without the emotion of shame getting involved somehow.

Encounter a situation where you 'reveal' that you would like to experience some affection, you are overwhelmed by a suffocating sense of humiliation which paralyzes you to act in your own best interest. Affection=Shame.

Hitting on woman = implying some kind of love/affection = shame

To keep shame at bay, avoid expressing any desire for women at all costs

Taken _completely_ out of the game of love

Looking for parental association of affection with shame/guilt/humiliation. Disallow (female?) affection.

Will go through anything (addiction) to avoid the pain of neuroses created by unconcious beliefs - even at the expense of denying themselves something desparate to have (love/affection.)

Serving the pain (addiction) becomes more important than serving the goal.

Actual rejection from woman doesn't provoke the shame -

It's the action of attempting to meet a woman, and what that exposes about yourself (shame) - "emotionally needy guy" i.e. horriby embarassing.

Shameless desire to be loved is incomprehensible - even to deep unconscious mind - the part that controls your involuntary emotional responses to everything that goes on around you.

Exhibiting a desire for affection unmasks the shameful fact that you're a "weakling".

This sets off a cycle of self-loathing that must be shut off quickly and at all costs.

These warped views eventually become rationalized as being superior - "idiots who go around exhibiting their shameful emotional needs like damn fools"

According to Freud, as a child grows, and his ego develops, he is constantly giving of his self-love to people and objects, the first of which is usually his mother. This diminished self-love should be replenished by the affection and caring returned to him.

Shame is often experienced as the inner, critical voice that judges whatever we do as wrong, inferior, or worthless. Often this inner critical voice is repeating what was said to us by our parents, relatives, teachers and peers. We may have been told that we were naughty, selfish, ugly, stupid, etc. We may have been ostracized by peers at school, humiliated by teachers, treated with contempt by our parents. Paradoxically, shame may be caused by others expecting too much of us, evoking criticism when our performance is less than perfect. Some authority figures are never satisfied with one's efforts or performance, they are critical no matter what. Unfortunately, these criticisms become internalized, so that it is our own inner critical voice that is meting out the shaming messages, such as: "You idiot, why did you do that?," "Can't you do anything right?,"or " You should be ashamed of yourself," etc.

Psychologists commonly believe that pathological narcissism results from an impairment in the quality of the person’s relationship with their primary caregivers, usually their parents, in that the parents were unable to form a healthy, empathic attachment to them. This results in the child conceiving of themselves as unimportant and unconnected to others. The child typically comes to believe that he or she has some defect of personality which makes them unvalued and unwanted

when a young child fails to separate her own self-image from that of her mother. This happens roughly between the ages of two and three, often because of a parent’s own emotional problems. A mother’s encouragement of a child’s self-assertion is vital. When the mother suffers from low self-esteem, she has difficulty encouraging her child’s emerging self. The child experiences this absence as a loss of self, creating feelings of abandonment that lead to depression. To deal with the depression, the child gives up efforts to support her emerging self. Instead, she relies on her mother’s approval to maintain the esteem of a "false self."