Shame to the Core

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In his informative book SHAME: Free Yourself, Find Joy and Build True Self-Esteem [pgs. 47-48] — which involves the various forms/degrees of shame, including the especially emotionally/mentally crippling life curse known as “core shame” — Dr. Joseph Burgo writes:

“When brain development goes awry, the baby senses on the deepest level of his being that something is terribly wrong — with his world and with himself. As the psychoanalyst James Grotstein has described it, ‘These damaged children seem to sense that there is something neurodevelopmentally wrong with them, and they feel a deep sense of shame about themselves as a result.’

“Throughout my work I have referred to this experience as ‘core shame.’ It is both intense and global. Under conditions that depart widely from the norm, shame also becomes structural, an integral part of developing child’s felt self. Rather than feeling beautiful and worthy of love, these children come to feel defective, ugly, broken, and unlovable.”

I exist daily with a formidable combination of adverse childhood experience trauma, autism spectrum disorder and high sensitivity, the ACE trauma in large part being due to my ASD and high sensitivity. [I self-deprecatingly refer to it as my perfect storm of train wrecks.]

Coexisting with and seriously complicating this vicious combination is the abovementioned “core shame”.

While my father had an ASD about which he wasn’t formally aware, my mother had suffered a nervous breakdown or postpartum depression around the time I was born. It likely would have excluded my having received that abovementioned very-crucial shared/joyful interaction with Mom.

It all would help explain why I have always felt oddly uncomfortable sharing my accomplishments with others, including those closest to me. And maybe explain my otherwise inexplicable almost-painful inability to accept compliments, which I had always attributed to extreme modesty.

Dr. Burgo’s “core shame” concept could help explain why I’ve also inexplicably yet consistently felt unlovable. Largely due to ASD traits that rubbed against the grain of social normality thus clearly unappreciated by others, my unlikability was for me confirmed.

Perhaps worse, my avoidance of social interaction with and even simple smiles at apparently interested females, especially during my youth and early adulthood, was undoubtedly misperceived as snobbery. The very bitter irony was that I, while clearly finding most of those females attractive, was actually feeling the opposite of conceit or even healthy self-image and -esteem.

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While I don’t know the precise/entire cause-and-effect of my chronic anxiety and clinical depression, my daily cerebral turmoil mostly consists of a formidable combination of adverse childhood experience trauma, autism spectrum disorder and high sensitivity, with the ACE trauma in large part the result of my ASD and high sensitivity. I self-deprecatingly refer to it as my perfect storm of train wrecks.

More recently, I’ve discovered yet another and perhaps even more consequential coexistent psychological condition — “core shame” — that’s seriously complicating an already bad and borderline bearable cerebral-disorder combination.

Such coexistent conditions, or multiple-train-wreck perfect storms, are real and cause great suffering. ACE abuse thus trauma, for example, is often inflicted upon ASD and/or highly sensitive children and teens by their normal or ‘neurotypical’ peers — thus resulting in immense and even debilitating self-hatred and shame — so why not at least acknowledge that consequential fact in a meaningfully constructive way?

Therefore, it would be very helpful to people like me to have books written about such or similar coexistent cerebrally-based conditions. … As it currently is, The Autistic Brain fails to mention the real potential for additional challenges created by an autism spectrum disorder coexisting with thus exacerbated by high sensitivity and/or adverse childhood experience trauma.

The book Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology and How You Can Heal, on adverse childhood experience trauma, fails to mention high sensitivity or ASD. That was followed by The Highly Sensitive Man, with no mention of ASD or ACE trauma.

Lastly, Dr. Joseph Burgo’s book Shame: Free Yourself, Find Joy and Build True Self-Esteem — on the various forms/degrees of shame, including the especially emotionally/mentally crippling “core shame” life curse — is quite revelatory. It, however, mentions little or nothing about ASD, ACE trauma or high sensitivity, let alone includes any of them as potentially complicating conditions that can coexistent with and even be exacerbated by core shame.

My problem: I don’t know whether my additional, coexisting conditions will render the information and/or assigned exercises from each [not cheap] book useless, or close to it, in my efforts to live less miserably. While many/most people in my shoes would work with the books nonetheless, I cannot; I simply need to know if I’m wasting my time and, most importantly, mental efforts.