Shame and Anxiety
It may seem odd to think of shame and anxiety as related but as I have pointed out in a previous article about anger a person who feels ashamed opens them up to other potential problems. Let me explain how this works with anxiety. My friend Richard Pfeiffer, whose workbooks I use in my classes on anger, anxiety, and assertiveness talks about anxiety. He calls a panic attack a “sudden intense surge of anxiety that seems to be coming out of the blue, involving symptoms from heart palpitations to trembling to fears of imminent danger to losing complete control”. When anxiety occurs you try to avoid it and by so doing may start to avoid people, places, events or patterns of behavior. Anxiety ranges from mild to severe. Two secondary problems along with it are dependency and depression. You can become dependent on someone or something to help you with the anxiety, to the point of becoming overly dependent. You can become depressed about the hopelessness of not being able to handle the anxiety.
Don’t feel alone. Anxiety affects about 5% of the American population. Some of the common contributors to anxiety might include overly critical parents, and/or excessively high standards of behavior; a history of emotional insecurity and dependency; cumulative stress. These major contributors to anxiety and include a host of other emotional, relational or physical stress points. So where does shame fit in to all of this?
Shame contributes to anxiety because of the sense that you are not a good person. This creates anxiety in any of the forms listed above. This feeling manifests itself in some of the ways also mentioned above. Depending on how ashamed one feels can give some clues as to how anxious one might feel. The defenses against shame, such as denial and withdrawal, lead people to disconnect with their environment and those whom they love. When one is isolated a personal loss, however its size, takes on greater weight. A life change can be harder to handle, both because there is a thought that it should not have happened and also how well will I handle it.
When you more closely look at yourself to see what your shame level might be you often come up with the realization that you always criticize yourself, that you often compare yourself to others, and that any change in relationship give proof that you cannot hold on to good ones and thereby confirm your sense of shame. When you feel ashamed you fear being alone. You will be whatever someone else wants you to be. You will ignore yourself. Your sense of anxiety is heightened the more you experience disconnection from yourself. You feel anxious that maybe you cannot protect yourself from being seen by others. You also feel anxious that you are not good enough to be seen by others.
Here is where the hard work comes in. You need to learn about these issues and how they work on anxiety in you. You need to accept yourself as you are, complete with anxiety and panic and use any one of a number of good tools to begin to learn how to deal with these problems. This is part of the goal of the course, which I teach. You can learn to distinguish different forms of panic and what their consequences could be. You can learn to retreat when appropriate. You can lean diversion techniques. You can accept that you, like everyone, feel some sense of shame and that that is normal. You can seek support from a person or persons to help you deal and cope with your anxiety. In more difficult anxious moments you may need the assistance of a professional therapist and/or appropriate medication.
Working with anxiety deals not only with coping with it. It also means helping to heal the shame that is within you. Do this with someone who can help. Challenge the shame. Set positive goals based on humanity, humility, autonomy, and competence. These and many other strategies help you to reduce your level of shame and to mange your anxiety more effectively.
Dr. Paul Melrose
