Shame presents itself as a series of negative internal comments. The Inner Critic. You get into situations where the inner critic says you aren't good enough, so you don't attempt it, or make a halfhearted attempt, and fail, and the inner critic says, "See, I told you, you aren't good enough"

There are a ton of variations:

• You are broken,
• you are defective,
• You aren't good enough
• You are a bad person
• you are a one trick pony (a great comeback by the Critic when you try to argue with the Critic with a success.)
• you are a waste of space
• you are unworthy.
• How can anyone like you?
• The people that say they like you are deceived by your outer shell. If they see the real me....

Anything you do well, is *still* not perfect. You will see imperfections no one else notices, and they will condemn you. "You are incomptent. You are an amateur." If you have an eating disorder you can never be thin enough.

There is an argument. "Everybody is broken." My reaction to that is "Oh good. If this is true of everyone, then the situation really is hopeless with no chance of redemption." Brown in her videos sounds like after spending a decade researching this, has found groups of people who aren't living with toxic shame all the time. But her humour on stage says, "But I'm not in that group"

This is almost impossible to treat with talk therapy because the root cause is not Me but one of the parts.

And at one point all of the above was a survival skill. With mercurial caregivers you have to be ready for anything. Ok. If you're reading Fisher, or Walker, or Brown this was mostly review.

But this was yesterday's thought:

Is my inability to find the source of shame because this “I am broken, I am defective, I am unworthy, I am a burden…” is something that I accept as being so much part of my essential core of who I am, and therefore getting rid of it, means I’m no longer Me, but someone else?

And so I ask myself: Do I want to keep living with the Inner Critic? I've contemplated suicide. Most of us on this group have, I think. I have detailed plans for it that make it close to certain that it would be seen as an accident. (No I won't help you.)

So if dying dead seems like a possible answer, why this difficulty to find and release this shame?