The Neuroscience of Shame

Shirley Davis March 9, 2020

What happens in the brain to make shame benign or

toxic? What parts of our brains are injured by chronically
being shamed by our caregivers, and how does that
change who we are?

These are a few of the questions I will attempt to answer

in this piece. Some of the terms regarding regions of the
brain may be new to you, so I will give you a brief
description of them, and links so you can research them
yourself.

The Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) and

Shame

The autonomic nervous system is the part of our nervous

system that controls and regulates the internal organs
without the need to think about it. There are two branches
to the ANS, the sympathetic and parasympathetic
nervous systems.

The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for

connecting the different organs of our bodies to our brain
through our spinal cord. When we perceive danger, our
sympathetic nervous system causes us to prepare to
fight, flight, or freeze by increasing our heart rate, as well
as blood flow to our muscles, and decreasing blood flow
to organs such as the skin.

The sympathetic nervous system, as we can see, is

excitatory to the body.

The parasympathetic nervous system is comprised of

nerve fibers or cranial nerves. The primary part of the
parasympathetic nervous system is the vagus nerve and
the lumbar spinal nerves. Upon stimulation, these
important structures increase digestive secretions and
reduce the heartbeat.

The parasympathetic nervous system, as we can see, is

calming to the body.

When faced with shame, the brain reacts as if it were

facing physical danger, and activates the sympathetic
nervous system generating the flight/fight/freeze
response. The flight response triggers the feeling of
needing to disappear, and children who have this
response will try to become invisible. They will literally
look smaller and their expressions become blank.

In comparison, the fight response expresses itself as

verbal and behavioral aggression by the embarrassed
person towards the other who caused them to feel
ashamed.

The freeze response is what normally occurs when people

are faced with trauma where they feel trapped and
powerless. The freeze response allows us to survive
situations where intolerable things are happening to us.

The freeze response to shame has negative

consequences too.

The freeze response upsets our ability to think clearly,

which results in beliefs that we are stuck in a situation
where we have no power because we have something
wrong with us.

It can cause us to believe that what is happening or has

happened, is our fault. Clearly, in most cases, situations
such as childhood trauma and adult rape are never our
fault. We have become victims of violence.

Shame: What Infants Learns

From birth, we humans are hardwired to interact with our

caregivers. We seek close connections with them to
survive and to aid our brains to develop.

Soon after birth, we begin storing in our brains how our

needs are met by our caregivers. These important
interactions between our caregivers and ourselves are
stored in our limbic system, in a structure called the
amygdala, allowing responses from our caregivers to be
stored in implicit memory.

(I have described the limbic system, the amygdala and the

hippocampus in another post (click here). Please follow
the links I am providing for further information.)
Through the information we store in our brains about the
responses of our caregivers, we develop anticipation of
the trustworthiness of relationships based on our early
experiences.

In short, we learn to interpret life through the lens of the

messages we learn from our caregivers.

Shame is an emotion that can save children from injury or

death, by engraining into their brain an appropriate
response to danger. A good example would be a child
running into the street.

When children are told “no” by a caregiver to stop them

from running into the street, the sympathetic system (the
excitatory response) is activated triggering the
fight/flight/freeze response.

The child (hopefully) will freeze and then because their

sympathetic nervous system is on high alert, they will
begin to cry.

If the caregiver immediately goes to their child and gives

them calming reassurance, the child’s parasympathetic
nervous system becomes activated and the child’s arousal
will subside.

The child in this scenario grows up with the propensity to

follow what they were taught about the danger and how to
recognize it. When faced with perceived danger, they will
be able to draw on what they learned that day from their
caregiver and respond appropriately.

Also, when they feel shame for doing something wrong to

someone else, they immediately recognize their actions
and do what they need to calm their triggered
sympathetic nervous system’s response.

However, what if the caregiver uses toxic shame to control

their child.

In this scenario, the caregiver says “no” often and does so

to meet their own needs and not to help their child. To
make matters worse, they never or rarely follow up their
message with any calming reassurance.

In this case, when the child’s sympathetic nervous system

is triggered, they enter a state of arousal. They feel fear
and freeze at first, and then begin to cry. However,
because there is no reassurance, the parasympathetic
nervous system is not triggered and does not do its job of
calming them down.

The Threat to Relational Bonds in Adulthood

A child exposed to toxic shame has a conundrum. Their

brain experiences the arousal of the sympathetic nervous
system and the acceleration of the parasympathetic
nervous system at the same time.

The result is that as an automobile, they sit and spin their

tires unable to move forward in their understanding of
other relationships they encounter later in life. This is
because the toxic shame experienced in childhood
impacts the hippocampus, another part of the limbic
system, responsible for consolidating memory.

In childhood, our hippocampi have internalized into our

memory how we should respond to situations where we
feel uncomfortable or uncertain. If we were mistreated,
our hippocampi internalize negative messages about
ourselves and what we can expect from others.

The effect is that later in life when we encounter

uncomfortable situations, that our hippocampi think is in
any way similar to what we encountered in childhood, we
feel shame. This triggered response then sends us
spiraling into a complicated dance of arousal and fear that
adversely affects how we form new relationships with
others.

The late Dr. John Bradshaw, in his book, Healing the

Shame that Binds You stated the following:

“Prolonged shame states early in life can result in

permanently dysregulated autonomic functioning and a
heightened sense of vulnerability to others. Their lives are
marked by chronic anxiety, exhaustion, depression and a
losing struggle to achieve perfection.”

The Important Work of the Insula

Toxic shame, a term first coined by Sylvan Tomkins in the

early 1960s, can cause many mental health issues
because it generates the formation of low self-esteem,
anxiety, irrational guilt, perfectionism, and addiction.

However, recent research using functional magnetic

resonance imaging (fMRI) studies tell an even larger story.

In a paper published in the journal Social Cognitive

Affective Neuroscience in 2014, researchers carried out
fMRI studies on subjects to determine if and where the
brain reacts to shame. The researchers followed an
imaging paradigm originally employed by Takahashi et. al.
that the research team adapted from Japanese culture to
their German culture.

Their researchers showed shame-inducing stimuli to test

subjects as they lay in an fMRI machine to see where in
the brain they saw activation by measuring blood flow.
What they observed changed the way we look at the brain
and its response to shame.

The research team found several vital brain regions

reacted to shame stimuli, including the frontal lobe which
contains both the amygdala and a little known (at that
time) brain structure called the insula.
The insula was once believed to be a brain structure that
was implicated in emotional responses and part of the
limbic system. However, the findings in yet another study
conducted at the University of Melbourne in Australia in
2014, has shed new light on this formerly misclassified
structure.

The insula is now believed to be involved in awareness

(consciousness) and plays an important role in other
functions believed linked to emotion including self-
awareness and interpersonal experiences. In fact,
research has given new insight into the critical role the
insula plays as it is the hub that regulates the interactions
between brain regions that regulate the internal focus of
our bodies and how we regulate our behavior.

When confronted by an unusual and outstanding event,

the insula functions to mark the event for further
processing and then initiates the appropriate brain
region’s response to it.

Impact of Trauma on the Insula

In a previous series on the effects of childhood trauma, I

wrote a post where we examined how childhood trauma
changes the developing brain. We saw how trauma
causes many portions of a child’s brain to not mature
correctly and how this immaturity brings dysfunction and
emotional problems later in life.
A study reported in Neuroscience News speaks on a
research team’s findings of the developmental changes of
the insula in people who had developed complex post-
traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) in childhood.

To refresh your minds, CPTSD develops when children are

exposed to traumatic stress, such as child abuse, living in
a war zone, or chronic physical illnesses. People living
with CPTSD may experience flashbacks, avoidance
behaviors, social isolation, and difficulty with sleeping and
concentrating.

The study I mentioned above was performed using MRI

scans of the brains of 59 children between the ages of 9-
17. Thirty of the children, 14 girls and 16 boys had
symptoms of trauma and 29 other children, 15 girls and 14
boys, had no symptoms of having lived through trauma.
These latter children served as the control group for the
study.

The researchers saw no differences in the brain structures

of the boys and girls in the non-traumatized control group,
but what they saw in the group of traumatized children
shocked them.

The insula structure of the brains of the boys in the

traumatized group had larger volumes and surface areas
than those of the control group and was dramatically
smaller in the brains of the girls. Their study highlighted
two new important new findings.
One, trauma not only impacts the insula of the developing
brains of children, but it also impacts boys and girls
differently.

Two, since insula volume decreases with aging (Shaw et.

al., 2008), its reduction of size in girls with CPTSD
suggests that their insula is prematurely aging due to
traumatic stress.

Since the insula is known to be associated with the

emotions of disgust and shame, one can see why so many
women who have survived childhood trauma grow up to
have such devastating mental health issues as anorexia
nervosa, bulimia, and other eating disorders.

Pulling it All Together

I realize that this article has been highly technical and full
of unfamiliar terminology. However, there is one important
message I want you to take away from reading it. That
message is this; you are neither weird because of the
emotional problems you may be experiencing from
childhood trauma, nor are you without hope.

Like the jpg at the left states, you are not hopeless and
helpless victims any longer. You are survivors and
someday you will become thrivers. It’s a process, but with
the right help and encouragement from therapists and
organizations like the CPTSD Foundation, you will get
there.
Although your brain has sustained developmental damage
from what may have happened to you as a kid, that does
not mean those problems cannot be rectified.

Thanks to neuroplasticity, your brain can adapt and learn

new ways of thinking and behaving. There is a myriad of
different ways to accomplish these brain changes, and our
next article will focus on the different types of treatment
options available to help you overcome the traumatic
events that harmed your brain’s development.

Depression, eating disorders such as bulimia and anorexia

nervosa, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Complex
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder are only a few of the
mental health issues related to toxic shame.

The messages we internalized in childhood or as adults

during a highly traumatic event, both cause feelings of
helplessness and victimization. We see life and other
human beings as potential threats to our well-being and
our limbic systems are constantly on the alert in a hyper-
aroused state looking for danger.

The damage to our self-esteem limits our ability to seek

out and enjoy satisfying relationships and may keep us
from achieving professional success. We may be
consumed with self-hate, rage and feel alienated from the
people around us.

In short, we are terrified. We are afraid to trust someone

else because they might hurt us. We are afraid to reach
for a better job or to seek out a meaningful profession
because we might fail. We isolate ourselves in a cocoon of
anxiety and guilt.

Some of us will become codependent on others because

we feel we must care for others and that taking care of
ourselves is wrong. We may be afraid that once we have
found someone, we must maintain that relationship at all
costs because we will never find anyone else. We think to
ourselves, “No one else will ever want me.”

The isolation, fear, or codependency leaves us trapped in

a quagmire of pain that we need help to escape.

Shirley Davis

My name is Shirley Davis and I am a freelance writer with

over 40-years- experience writing short stories and
poetry. Living as I do among the corn and bean fields of
Illinois (USA), working from home using the Internet has
become the best way to communicate with the world. My
interests are wide and varied. I love any kind of science
and read several research papers per week to satisfy my
curiosity. I have earned an Associate Degree in
Psychology and enjoy writing books on the subjects that
most interest me.