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I’m Andrea Giles and you’re listening to the Heal From Infidelity podcast, episode number 213, The Hidden Weight of Internalized Shame.

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Hello and welcome to the Heal from Infidelity podcast for courageous women learn not only to heal from their spouse’s betrayal, but to become the boldest, truest, most decisive and confident versions of themselves ever. If you know there’s more for you than the life you’re currently living but don’t quite know how to get there, you are in the right place. Stick around to learn how to create a life that will knock your own socks off. Is it possible? It is, and I’m here to show you how I’m your host, Andrea Giles. Are you ready? Let’s dive in.

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Hello everybody. Welcome. Welcome back to another episode of Heal from Infidelity. Hope you’re doing well. We are going to do a deep dive in shame today. It’s been something that I have noticed so much coming up for my clients. It’s something that I’ve noticed sometimes coming up in me and I thought, you know what? It’s time to go deeper to talk more about this and shine a bigger light on it, and I think that every single one of you, whether you are the one who maybe was betrayed or that maybe did the betraying would benefit from listening to this. It’s an important one, so I’m going to go ahead and dive in. Okay. Have you ever had a moment when you’re just minding your own business, doing your thing and something small happens, a glance, a silence, a tone, and suddenly you feel like you’re not enough?

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You go into it. You go into I must not be enough. That sinking feeling in your gut is not just insecurity, we call it sometimes insecurity say that we don’t have confidence, things like that. But what if it’s actually something more deep and a little bit more veiled and hidden, internalized shame? We’re going to be unpacking today how internalized shame keeps you trapped in painful cycles, especially after infidelity and what real healing can look like when you stop believing shames lies. Okay, so what is internalized shame? Guilt says, I did something wrong. Shame says I am bad. Even if we don’t feel guilt, even if it’s something different, let’s say that we make a mistake somehow in some way where we just are being an imperfect human. Shame will take you straight to see, I am bad. I’m just bad, and I’m going to give you a lot more examples today.

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Okay, so just hang with me. I’m going to give more examples about what this looks like so you can recognize it within yourself. When shame becomes internalized, it stops needing external judgment because your own mind becomes enough of a punisher. It’s an identity virus. It’s like a false story that attaches to the nervous system and dictates how you interpret everything. I love thinking of it as an identity virus. It’s heavier than just like a thought that crosses your mind. It can be something that feels like it lives in you, that you can’t get rid of it, that can attach to the nervous system and again, dictate how you interpret everything when it shows up, when you’ve been betrayed or betrayed someone else. Shame can make you believe that your entire identity is a failure rather than something painful that happened to you or through you, something that you did or something that happened to you.

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How does this form, so how it forms is through early conditioning. It can be through criticism, unpredictability in our home life tried to be too much of a parent, too young. Many of my people that I’ve worked with took on way too much of a burden of having to parent way too young, and this responsibility led them to feeling over responsible and when anything went wrong, taking on that as if it’s their problem, as if it’s their fault. Sometimes it’s through emotional neglect or abuse of any kind. It can be formed through societal or religious messages about being too much, about being too emotional, not pure enough, worthy enough, as if you have to keep striving to just be worth something or worth enough. Major betrayals in childhood and on into adulthood can rupture our feeling of belonging and safety and our psyche’s logic is that if I can find what’s wrong with me, maybe I can control it next time.

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It’s very protective, but it becomes very self punishing and we can be on an endless quest to figure out what is wrong with me because we want to not hurt, right? We want to make it so it doesn’t happen again. How does this show up in adults? It shows up in adults by overperforming. If I just do enough, I’ll fine be okay. People pleasing if others approve, I can outrun my shame, control or defensiveness. I can’t risk being seen as weak. Again, collapse and hiding. It’s better to stay small than to be exposed, so not really letting people see you hiding chronic comparison. Everyone else seems more healed, more together, moving quicker than me, whatever the case may be, and if I were more healed, I would be more together. A sneaky thing about shame is that it’s not loud. It’s more sneaky. It sounds like your inner narrator just telling the truth when really it’s lying to you.

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It might not be a really violent voice in your mind. It might be just a matter of fact. You must just not be enough, just matter of fact, and it is just a liar. It’s a liar. It’s lying to you. A concept I want to teach you right now is about the shame loop. Shame is cyclical. It starts with a trigger and it ends with disconnection first with yourself, then with others. What this does is it confirms that loop, it makes it stronger. It confirms that the very thing that you feared is true. It’s real. It makes it more real, it gives it more teeth. I’m going to give you some examples so you know how this works. Okay? Example number one, we’re going to start with a bet trade partner, since more of you than not are on that side of things. Okay? You’re eating dinner, you’re sitting there at the dinner table, you’re eating dinner, and you see him kind of sneaking glances at his phone.

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Seems a little more distant than usual, and then you start to feel triggered by that. You feel a trigger. You feel some activation. By triggered, I mean activation, your nervous system feels activated and you might start to feel a little bit anxious and then shame kicks in. Shame turned on, switch on. I knew it. I’m still not enough. He’s not paying attention to me, he’s not listening. I’m not enough. I’m not worth him paying attention to, I made this nice dinner and he can’t even pay attention to me or the family during this dinner. Maybe he’ll never really get it. I’m still not enough. The defense in collapse here is you either shut down or try harder to be lovable. Okay, so maybe shut down or over function kind of into this fawning place trying to make it extra nice or trying to have a conversation, but it’s more fear-based than actually wanting to connect from curiosity, what comes next?

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Disconnection. The emotional distance grows first with you. You start shutting down to yourself. You start judging you, gosh, what’s my problem? Why can’t I just stay calm? Why do I have to do this? Right? And then we start disconnecting from them and then it confirms our initial fear. See, they don’t really want me. I’m unlovable, and we carry that shame. Sometimes I call it the cloak of shame. It feels like a big heavy cloak, almost like a wet cloak. It gets wet and heavy like a wet towel, but kind of feels like it’s covering your whole body. And then what began as a small cue becomes a full identity crisis. Shame hijacks your nervous system into proving its own story. True. And how terrible does that feel? Right? Then you just feel so terrible. What started as a small activation can turn into a full blown attack on ourselves.

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Alright, example two, this is around the betraying partner. Your spouse brings up the betrayal again, it feels like a trigger. You start to feel anxious, you start to feel uncomfortable. Shame is activated. You’ll never be good enough to make this right. You’re always just going to be a failure. No matter what you do, it’s not going to be enough. Your defense or collapse can be going numb with drawing going into the silent treatment, or it can go into justification and defense. You’ll never forgive me anyway, we already went through this. Why do you have to bring it up again? And the previous example, we’re not asking from real, genuine curiosity to try to connect. Okay? We are trying to protect. We’re trying to protect. There’s a very distinct difference between being uncomfortable and asking questions from curiosity to try to connect with someone in a vulnerable way, even though it’s uncomfortable taking that risk and doing what I’m describing here, which is not coming from a vulnerable stance, it’s coming from a self-protective stance.

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It is not trying to connect. And then we go into disconnection where we are beating the crap out of ourselves. Our partner feels unseen, unheard. They’re saying, I don’t know if I can keep doing this. If you keep responding in this way, and then we feel even more like a failure, we feel more like we’re just going to continue messing it up. There’s no hope here. And then we have that confirmation. See, I just destroy everything. I screw up everything. I’m just an F up. Okay, shame masquerades as punishment, but it’s really avoidance. The more you self condemn, the less room there is for genuine accountability or repair or anything else for that matter. The more we self condemn and punish ourselves, we’re not making any room for the kinds of things that are actually going to heal this, and we are avoiding the more risky things of vulnerability, of stepping into our higher selves to have better conversations with ourselves and with others, and just confirming more of the same and punishing ourself even more.

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Example three. This is a self-reflective loop, okay? You are months in, months in, maybe years in, and you get unexpectedly triggered after months of progress and you start to feel that familiar anxiety that you have worked so hard to overcome and shame activates What’s wrong with me? I should be over this. What is my problem? You go into that defense or collapse, you either shut down or you overanalyze and get in a rumination cycle or you push feelings away completely. Maybe you go numb out somehow and then you hide your pain because you’re embarrassed to still have it. You don’t talk about it. You don’t bring it up. You just keep it. You disconnect from yourself. Or maybe you do bring it up, but it’s not in a form of trying to connect, it’s trying to get out of pain. It’s like maybe if I can dump it on them, then I can get out of pain.

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But often it’s hard on the relationship because of the motivation of where it’s coming from that it can feel like an attack to the other person rather than an honest bid for connection. And we can then go into more and more self punishing behaviors, be more and more unkind to ourselves and honestly sometimes more and more unkind to others, and then it just confirms that story. See, I’ll never really heal and with that, and that means I’ll never be good enough. I’ll never be strong enough. How many of you listening know what I’m talking about? I know I’ve thought that before. I’ve thought that thought before. Okay. This version of shame is extra sneaky. It’s a sneaky little bugger. Why? Because this version of shame dresses up as self-improvement. It looks like holding ourselves accountable to this higher standard of growth, but real growth doesn’t shame the parts that are still tender.

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It welcomes them. It wraps their arms around them and says, yeah, makes sense, makes sense that this is still a little bit tender. Makes sense. What do you need? How can I help you? We say that to those tender parts. So again, to summarize this pattern, trigger, there’s the trigger and then shame is activated, and then we move into some kind of defense or collapse and then into disconnection, and then it’s further proof of that initial story. And I want to add one more thing. Another way shame can be a sneaky, sneaky bugger is that when we have that proof that we are X, Y, and Z that will never have this, that I will, my needs will never be met here because I am X, Y, and Z, right? Often we will try to get out of the intensity of that pain by swinging the pendulum over to blame, and so we can be beating the crap out of ourselves and then swing the pendulum so quickly to beating the crap out of our partner and we can swing it back and forth.

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And it’s all coming from shame. It’s all coming from shame. Okay? When you notice the spiral, don’t rush to fix it. You can pause and say, this is shame doing what shame does. This is shame. That moment of awareness is the first step out, okay? Just noticing it. Just saying what this is shame. This is shame. I recognize this. I recognize it, and noticing how it feels for you. What does shame feel like to you? What does it feel like to you? Sometimes shame can feel really, really heavy. Sometimes it can make you feel hot. Sometimes your cheeks can turn red or your ears. We can have a physical symptom where somebody else can it on us. What does shame feel like to you? Notice this. Notice. What does it feel like? Have awareness. Okay? When shame is active, do I feel hot? Do I feel like a collapsing posture?

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I shrink into myself. I could disappear into the floor. Do I notice a critical voice? Next, we’re going to bring self-compassion. Meet that part with tenderness. Please just try. Of course you feel this, you learn to survive this way. You learn to survive this way. Okay, next, contextualizing it. Whose voice is this? Who taught me to feel this way? Feel this way. This is not my voice. Somebody taught me to feel this way. I want to make sure you understand this. Even if somebody didn’t actively say, oh, you’re not enough. Even as children, we want to protect. And often if we are in situations where we feel powerless as a child, we will do anything we can to get some kind of power, to feel some kind of authority over our own life. And often the way we do this is by developing these patterns.

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It’s like, oh, I can protect myself by blaming myself, and then maybe if I do better next time, then I don’t have to feel this way and that gives me a little bit of something I can work with here rather than my parents are jerks or my parents are absentee or I’m being abused. We don’t have that language. Of course we don’t. Don’t have that language. So why would we talk about it in that way? And even if we did as a powerless child, what would we do? And so we do these things to try to grab some power back, but ultimately, even though we’re doing it as a coping mechanism, as a way to get through, it ends up really harming us. Okay? I also want to point out that shame is a universal experience. Everyone feels shame. Nobody gets away from it. No one gets away from it.

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Some of us though have internalized it. Some of us feel it sometimes and go to that, oh my gosh, I’m not enough. I’m this, I’m that. And some of us, it can become quite quite heavy and there’s no judgment in this. There’s very real reasons why you experience shame this way. It’s not to judge. It’s just to bring awareness to it. Okay? Alright. Back to this contextualizing, whose voice is this? Where did I learn this? Why did I adapt to this? Understand that for yourself. Next, reclaim self, speak from yourself. Energy, the calm, compassion observer inside of you. Bring that to the table. Going back to yourself, okay, who am I? Actually, this is a part, I’m experiencing the shame right now, but there’s other parts of me too that experience other things. How can I bring those parts to the shame and bring some compassion to it?

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Next, relational repair. Allow safe other people to witness your truth. Shame cannot survive. Empathy, shame can’t survive. Empathy. Who in your life can you speak this to? Shame thrives in secrecy. Shame thrives with people not knowing. When we start to speak these things that we think are too heavy or too dark, and we have people that can meet it with empathy, it just melts right off. It dissolves. It doesn’t stand a chance. Embodiment, move, breathe, ground. Teach the body that being seen is safe again, shame heals through exposure to compassion from yours and others. Compassion, and it dissolves in the light of truth. I want to say that again. Shame heals through exposure to compassion. Yours and others. It dissolves. It dissolves in the light of truth. Speak truth to your shame. Okay, a couple of quick questions for you to reflect on. When do I feel the strongest urge to hide or prove myself?

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What am I afraid others would see if I stopped performing? Whose voice does my inner critic echo? What would my truest self say to that shamed part of me? As a reminder, shame was never proof that you are broken. It was proof that you cared deeply about belonging and about being safe. Healing shame is remembering that you were never the problem. You are the one who felt the problem most deeply. You felt it. That’s how you internalized it. There was a problem. You felt it the most deeply and you coped with it by turning it into shame and the story that is attached to it. Now, breathe and let the air move through the parts of you that hide, they’re not bad. They’re just tired of carrying the story. They’re tired. They need some relief. Okay? You are not the mistake. Whether you were betrayed, whether you did the betraying, maybe you made a mistake.

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You are not the mistake. Maybe somebody really, really hurt you and betrayed you, but you were not the mistake. You are actually the one learning how to love yourself through those places in you that never believed that you were worth loving. You’re showing yourself what that looks like. All right? Now, if you are interested in giving yourself long-term support in a way that uncovers all of this, that we spend consistent time talking about these dark shadows, bringing them up, talking about them, having witnesses to it, having people that can hear your pain, that can talk about it, that can shine a light on it. I invite you to apply for my program. Get your life back after infidelity. You’ll have an army of witnesses there. You’ll learn the skills to help do this in real time. You’ll learn strategy to bring to the moments when you are in a situation with somebody else to help you dissolve right through that shame and get to the heart of the situation you’re in so much faster, okay?

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This is available to you. Go get your application in. And for those of you who are not, like for my men listening, or if you are interested in couples work, I have a brand new website that is up as of today. It is up andrea giles.com. If you scroll down in my webpage, it shows different ways you can work with me. And in there you’ll see that there is a wait list for my couples and there is a wait list for men’s group that I’m going to be starting. And we’re going to be doing a lot of work around these internalized patterns that we have so that we can shine a light on it and understand how our own internalized patterns interact with others, impact others, so we can heal from the inside out and ultimately heal our relationships, whether you’re staying or going. So you can go get on those wait lists. I’ll be in touch with you and we can get working together soon. Alright, my dears, thank you so much. Take care. And as one more note, those wait lists will also be in the show notes. You can do it on my website or in the show notes. Either way. Thank you so much and take care. All right, bye-bye.

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Thank you for listening to the Heal from Infidelity podcast. If you would like to be kept in the know about upcoming free classes, new podcast episodes, and other ways of working with me, go subscribe to my weekly email. You can subscribe at https://andreagiles.com/lies-about-infidelity/. Again, it’s https://andreagiles.com/lies-about-infidelity/. I will see you next time.