Shame is a great regulator of behavior. From birth, it is not characteristic of a child; it is subsequently instilled by parents, pointing out the discrepancy between how they see the child and how they want him to be. “Good girls don’t fight.” “Boys don’t cry.” “Loving brothers and sisters give in.” "Strong people never give up." It's not because they are villains. Technically, this is the most effective way to cultivate the necessary qualities in a child. After all, he has a need to be part of a group that his parents approve of (“a good boy,” “a strong person,” “a loving brother/sister”), as well as a need for love. And these two needs are intertwined into one: “To be loved, I need to conform.” In practice, of course, everything is more complicated and much sadder. The more strict the parent is in his rules and ideas about what a child should be (so that the parent can accept him), the greater the feeling of shame and inferiority the child experiences. There is nothing surprising here: not a single living person is capable of being able to fit himself into a huge number of strict rules. This is how the feeling is born: “there is something fundamentally wrong with me,” “I am a nonentity, worthless.” The feeling of shame makes you cut off the unaccepted parts of yourself. It is clear that shame targets the most painful thing - the personality - of the child, because it is not his behavior that is criticized, but his very essence, the way he is, his liveliness. What is noted is not the badness of the act, but the discrepancy between the child’s personality and what a truly good child should be. This is experienced extremely painfully, but the little person does not even have the opportunity to challenge or disagree with the parent’s vision. What then is the child’s attitude towards himself? What does he know about himself? How does he perceive himself? Since the main goal of shaming is to conform the child to parental ideals, few people are puzzled by what caused the child’s behavior. The content, the inner life of the child: feelings, motives, experiences fade into the background, giving way to the fact of conformity-inconsistency, that is, an assessment of external activity. What's on the outside becomes more important than what's on the inside. The child’s knowledge about himself is very limited: many feelings and experiences are forbidden, they are repressed, and a kind of vacuum, a kind of emptiness, is formed inside the child. "What do I want? How do I feel? What am I like? What do I like?" - these are questions that are difficult to answer. Such emptiness migrates into adulthood. Growing up, the child who was immeasurably shamed turns into a self-shaming adult. Filled with a huge amount of knowledge about how to “should” and “how to do it right”, “what I should be”, and at the same time a tiny amount of sympathy, love, self-care, perception of oneself as a good and worthy person. Not to mention such “little things” as feelings, knowledge about yourself, your personality. And now shame arises every time the ideal image of oneself (“I should be like this”) differs from how a person perceives himself (“but instead I am different”). How might shame manifest itself in adult life?1. Procrastination.2. A huge number of things started and not completed. 3. Feeling yourself as an insignificant, unworthy person. 4. The need to compare yourself and others. 5. Seeking approval, recognition, acceptance.6. Loss of yourself, ignorance of yourself, your feelings, motivations, desires. 7. Devaluation of others and yourself. 8. Fear of starting something new. How to get out of a strong feeling of shame? 1. Psychotherapy. In general, shame is the main obstacle when working with a specialist. Clients filled with shame have high demands on themselves, while they also reluctantly accept new knowledge about themselves and discovering something about themselves, shaming themselves for it. The big difficulty is to allow something to be in you, to accept it. This work is long, very touching and often, alas, painful. I have this metaphor: as if a person does not want to let a monster into himself, who in fact.