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.
? As if to imply he’s part dragon 
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