Are you Hooked on Fear and Shame?
The conditions of childhood trauma and the repetitive feelings of fear and shame, can leave a disturbing pattern.
If you find yourself feeling bouts of shame and fear or debilitating fear and shame it may be more than what’s happening in your mind.
Often the body can develop a dependency of mood altering chemicals and habitually re-produce them. The states are extremely familiar from childhood and in an odd way this familiarity feels normal. For many trauma survivors, calm and stability feel abnormal.
Our actions contribute to the production of the stress chemicals.
Why is it that some people can’t seem to take the actions they know they should take such as send the email, do the admin, pack the suitcase?
They feel the resistance yet they do not understand the resistance. They try using their will power to make themselves take the action but they still struggle with consistency. Will power is ineffective and unreliable.
What’s happening underneath may be an aversion to calm stability.
Some people might call it self sabotage.
No matter how much somebody says they desire calm stability in their lives such as regular recurring income, healthy joyful relationships, being on time, or experiencing success, one big part of them absolutely doesn’t want this and it’s not apparent to the conscious mind.
As much as someone may desire to be on time to appointments and not experience the stress and drama, they may over-ride this subconsciously.
Why? Their body craves the ‘fix’ they receive from the stress chemicals.
Stress chemicals they likely experienced every day as a child.
Shame feels like ‘home’.
Fear is oh so familiar.
Coming out of this pattern can cause withdrawal symptoms such as restlessness, distraction and boredom.
For someone who runs their own business, they may experience periods of calm and success as boring and may get restless. They may stop doing the income producing activities such as marketing. They may tell themselves ‘I have enough clients, everything is great, I can take my foot off the gas for a while’.
They lose consistency and gradually their pipeline dries up.
What is the benefit of this? (humans rarely do anything to themselves without there being a benefit).
The benefit is they get to experience the chemicals that are a familiar home to them.
It’s like returning to a cosy armchair by the fire after a day of shovelling snow.
They get to experience a ‘crisis’. They get to feel activated.
They get to experience ‘negative excitement’.
Things are definitely not boring now!
And this is the most important place in the cycle to have the self awareness to pause.
If a person jumps into action from this place of fear scrambling to stay afloat, they’re simply continuing the pattern.
Actions taken from a place of fear and urgency do not eradicate the underlying problem.
With the business example, clients dry up and the business owner quickly jumps into an extravagant launch, perhaps slashes prices, and builds a new program. The clients arrive. They feel enormous relief as the problem subsides.
This relief can reinforce the pattern. After a while they may encounter more problems - extra admin or lots of additional hours in client delivery etc. The action served the immediate need to reduce fear, rather than the longer-term needs of the business.
So they ultimately receive what their subconscious wants them to receive - which is a continuous AVOIDANCE of calm stability.
That is what they are fighting.
It’s an exhausting way to live.
Breaking out of the cycle means living from a new nervous system orientation - it’s the ability to tolerate steady action, consistent results, no major crisis and no enormous relief - which can feel strange and flat.
Is this something you struggle with?
Recovery reminders aren’t the healing itself, but they can help anchor us in the new way we’re learning to live. Here are a few I love:
▶️ I am willing to tolerate ease and stability.
▶️ I am willing to discover how good a peaceful life can feel.
▶️ I am willing to let go of the cycle of fear and relief.
About the Author
Mary Toolan is the founder of Scapegoat Child Recovery Ltd.
She works with high-functioning adults who were cast as the family scapegoat and are now navigating life after No Contact, or actively working towards it.
Her work helps people untangle the attachment trauma and identity conditioning shaped by family scapegoating, so they can build a calmer, more self-directed life.
Ready for deeper support?
If you're No Contact (or actively moving towards it) and would like support navigating the next stage of your healing journey, you can learn more about my one-to-one coaching programme here.
