TW Incest, human trafficking, prostitution, rape
(no description but analysis of impact)

Ever since we started healing in therapy, shame became a primary focus. In fact I think it must have been three days in that our therapist told us about shame and asked if there was anything we were ashamed of. Shame being sneaky, we told him high and loud that no, we were ashamed of nothing. As he wasn’t born yesterday, he told us what shame was and as it turned out, we were in fact ashamed of a heck of a lot of things, once we understood what shame was. Shame as it turned out was the feeling of being bad. A bad person, not good enough, not enough, unworthy. He asked us to make a list and a list we made. We were ashamed of being stupid, ashamed of not being good enough, ashamed of our father having passed, ashamed of never making our mother proud, ashamed of our weight, ashamed of our shame. The list was endless. We remember our question after writing this list, “ok, good, now we know we’re ashamed, now what?” He explained that shame was an emotion that was usually passed on from people to people. We are not born ashamed, we are made to feel shame by other people. Unlike other emotions (like joy, anger, fear, sadness), which come from within, shame comes from others looking at you with their value system (and importantly, not yours). The shame we feel comes from situations where the other person (usually feeling shame one way or another) shamed us. So we had to dig deep and find out where and when our shame came from.

From very early on in our therapeutic journey, the focus on shame became a focus on who gave us that vision of ourselves. I think the easiest analysis we had was about being stupid or dumb. It was so obvious that it came from our parents. Both our parents were incredibly smart people, who built their entire value systems (how valuable they are) on being smart. They both became doctors. They both were praised for how well they understood a whole bunch of things. They both had a very high IQ. They made children together they encouraged to learn and develop the same kind of “smart” they valued. They ranked their children in their head by how high their IQ were. The issue was, you see, we weren’t that smart according to the standards my parents had set for us. We didn’t skip a class. We didn’t need special support to go through school (unlike our “more intelligence siblings”). We weren’t interested in learning to read and had a very hard time learning things by just reading them. It was much easier to repeat things over and over again. Our mother didn’t see in us the things she praised herself to be for the longest time and it made her petty. The image in the mirror (what she saw of herself when she looked at us) wasn’t pleasing to her eyes and wasn’t validating her self-esteem. So she repeatedly and all over our life made us feel to be stupid. We felt lame for being stupid. So very very stupid. And there was nothing in the entire world we could do to prove her wrong. Our grades were high, she’d find a way to say it didn’t mean we were smart. She hadn’t done anything to make them high (unlike our siblings who she helped do their homework every night for their entire school years). We got into law school, it wasn’t congratulated, it’s just university. Everyone gets in. Alright then this year’s grades will please her? No. They didn’t. Next year maybe? They were even higher, top 15 of the university. She was a little bit surprised and maybe proud but it was still hidden behind the surprise (as if it was surprising considering we weren’t smart). I will stop here, the list could go on forever. The why we were so ashamed of ourselves for being stupid was very clear. What to do you see? What to do? We defined our value system. Is being smart something that gives more value to someone? No. It’s good, it’s a gift, it’s amazing and it should be celebrated. But being born dumb doesn’t mean you have less value. Human value is human value. From that point on, we refused her words. Every time we felt her creeping in, we yelled back: “these are NOT our values. What you’re saying isn’t true.” We reclaimed the power of our value system.

Later on in life, we learned that shame is also a very social emotion, which means that it tends to control social spaces. By that we mean that shame dictates who shows up and who hides, it dictates what is acceptable and unacceptable socially. But as a social emotion, it is also linked with values of a group and those values can change. The social group you hang out with can change too. Meeting other people with other values can suddenly make that shame feel pointless and useless.

As a social emotion, there are things that are a lot more complicated to push away. It takes time, it takes practice and it also takes understanding the feeling inside ourselves. Sometimes it’s shame but other times, it’s coupled with humiliation, grief, despair, self-hatred, anger. Sometimes it’s doubting what we know as if it were smoke we just couldn’t remove, which clouds our judgement. The issue with shame I found was that it creeps in on you, when you’re done saying “fuck you” to one event where someone shamed you, another one comes in to question what you just said and maybe make you re-evaluate your worth. I think the best example we have of this is prostitution and it’s honestly a work in progress. We were trafficked as teens from age 15 to age 17 and then continued prostitution by ourselves from age 19 to age 21 (we were trafficked again around age 19-20 for a few months). We stopped upon meeting our boyfriend. Some of this shame we have faced, especially the one regarding trafficking. We used to tell that to people all over, at work, to our friends. A lot of the times, it was healthy to talk about it. We met other survivors who helped us see that they, like us, were normal people. We participated in several groups that helped us through this shame enormously. It’s a very social topic though, it is depicted all over the place, from insults to movies going through jokes and how people talk about prostitutes you see in the street and the myth of “sex work”. It is enforced by traffickers, clients and all those who benefit from it. Going against this social image of what prostitution is and what trafficking is was very hard but we stood our ground. I think our main goal was to say “we are worthy” and so each time something felt like it was affecting our sense of worth, it just wasn’t true or wasn’t for us. It took us a while to understand that shame was used against us, to shut us up (shame does that) or hide us. The things that are done to prostitutes are so bad that it’s extremely easy to shame us. From dehumanization to shame, it’s a straight road. We also find that often times, Stockholm syndrome played a huge role in all this. We constantly tried to be safer by trying to get in on the good sides of our buyers, rapists and traffickers. There was really no other way we could see to stay safe (running away wasn’t an option). Their feeling that we were sub-par and unworthy and less than became our own as we tried to fit into the mold they created for us. Maybe they would love us if we fit in that mold you see? I honestly don’t think these people are capable of love but at the time, it wasn’t very clear. Their manipulation technics were very powerful. But if shame takes over and hiding becomes the main topic, healing just isn’t possible. I’ll forever remember what our therapist said to us once after we revealed that we had been raped anally but were way too ashamed of it. He said “well, you have got to find a way to talk about it”. He was right. It stayed with us. When something seems completely overwhelming, and shame makes us want to hide, we still have got to find a way to talk about it, to heal it. And shame as it is tends to dissipate and disappear from being talked about. Once it is mentioned with honesty and welcomed without additional shame, it is very healing. However, fighting shame is a commitment you make to yourself. As mentioned, it creeps in from every time you haven’t yelled “fuck you” at.

One of the topics we are still trying to figure out is the difference between shame and guilt. When it comes to us, it is rarely an issue. Guilt is about having done something wrong. Shame is about being bad because you’ve made a mistake. The two don’t have to go hand in hand together. If you take a mistake I would make at work for example, as a legal counsel I review contracts very often. I will sometimes make mistakes. It is something I am guilty of. But it doesn’t affect my self-worth. It doesn’t mean I am lame or bad or stupid or dumb. Far from it. It just means I am human. It happens that I feel them together but as I know a lot on the topic, I work through it inside to figure out what is reasonable and what isn’t. However, other times I feel like shame should go hand in hand with guilt. For example, it is definitely the case when it comes to my abusers. They are definitely guilty of their crimes and are bad because of them. They were cruel, dangerous, criminal. Those adjectives are, I guess, defined by my value system. Rape is not in my value system. They are incredibly bad for having done those things. I guess what is complicated is that I still don’t believe that it should mean they have to hide for what they did, but they can’t be proud of it or gloat about it (believe me, they did that very often). They know (unless they are psychopaths) that what they are doing is wrong and they do it anyway because they feel above the system, or powerful, or simply lame. A lot of them (so many of them) feel so badly about themselves and their darkness takes them towards even more darkness as if that would save them but it doesn’t. Shame brings in a lot of self-harm. Whatever reasoning they have for doing these things, whether it’s the feeling that it’s unimportant, that it’ll just last a minute, or that the girl has seen it so many times, one more guy is nothing and unimportant. Oh believe me, each rape was bad and each one of them is marked in me forever. The body remembers. The mind is shattered. There is no “unimportant” rape just like there is no happy incest. The other day, as I was talking to this guy from work about my brother, he said he had done the slang equivalent of a “stupid and bad thing” in French (une connerie) and I was left stunt as if that was the good qualifier for what he did to me/us. 500 rapes later. Probably not. My brother should feel ashamed. He’s a criminal. But at the same time, when I see my other siblings and my mother struggle with what happened, I wonder where they’re at in their shame and guilt. They haven’t cut ties with our brother, it seems he is still completely a part of the family and shame and denial are going hand in hand, as if our absence is more acceptable than his guilt and criminality. Shame has a tendency to prevent people from showing up for people, whether it is to do the right thing or not doing the wrong thing. It sticks and freezes people in their track with a major “what if” (what if I’m wrong, what if I lose something, what if I’m bad for doing one thing or the other, what if I was bad before). There are lots of questions that are left unanswered with shame because they are simply not the right questions at all.

The issue with feeling shame is that it prevents you from healing but at the same time, if you don’t feel it ever, you’re a psychopath. It’s a feeling that tells you something about what you are doing and whatever that thing is, it’s worth discovering. Maybe it’s your parent’s value system that isn’t aligned with your actions. But maybe it’s a crime and you really shouldn’t be doing this because the entire social system is telling you that it is unacceptable. Or maybe it’s about grief and needing to realign your values with the new information that crushed your soul. If you don’t do it though, you are bound to feel ashamed and stay stuck. There is shame that should tell you that you’re doing the wrong thing, shame that makes you think, shame that makes you realize you need to choose your values more wisely and with more attention. And there is shame that you should discard, shame that doesn’t belong to you, shame that crushes you in your tracks when you need to be valued and feel worthy, shame that is all connected to trauma and that needs to be said “fuck you” to. The question is whether or not you can tell the difference and how you can realign who gets to define you your value (hindsight: you do – but it is very helpful when someone defines that for you first).

In addition, shame bounces off one another. As it’s both a social emotion and a value emotion, it is extremely strong and very damaging. If someone calls you bad and inside your value framework, it is something that you previously integrated as a thing that “could be true”, it becomes ten times worst. They “must be right” resonates so very strongly and saying fuck you when you’re triggered like that feels almost impossible. There are too many instances of people telling you this that are bouncing off one another inside. If it’s someone with authority or someone you trusted, with whom you opened up or felt vulnerable, it can be even worst. Before we had any sense of our value, we once had dinner with the boyfriend of a colleague who has the same issues we had (child sexual assault) and he shamed us the entire dinner. It was almost like his shame showed up as soon as we were in the room. We came out of there feeling horrible and neither he nor we had any idea what happened. It was very upsetting. Once we had a few months of therapy in, with someone for the first time telling us we were worth something, we saw him again and it didn’t happen. His shame was identical but ours had been diminished through healing. It didn’t echo as much in our shame cave. Someone finally believed in us.

There are still things we find out we cannot do and our value system still needs to be changed, especially in how we need everyone to like us (even a little bit). When people are disappointed in us or call us out for having made a mistake online especially, we feel so horrible. It bounces off shame that relates to our porn trafficking trauma and that trauma is so central to our issues that it feels like an endless nightmare. As much as we “push it down” or don’t mention it, it is still the worst thing that ever happened to us because of the humiliation and knowledge these videos are probably still online for everyone to see and it would be beyond socially unacceptable for someone to find them (no matter the fact that it was trafficking and we were minors).

The issue with shame coming and going from one person to another is that if shame becomes the center of the conversation, then the conversation often becomes mute. The dysregulation coming from calling someone unworthy (with whichever word – lame, stupid, mean…) is usually not a way forward. If I take the topic of racism, if you consider that being racist affects your self-worth, you will very likely refuse to work on it. If you consider it’s a social construct that you as a human are affected by and it is something that is against your value system and that you either suffer from or you have privileges through, it is a good way forward. Someone I know said “you can’t leave judgement at the door, but you can choose to study and question your thoughts”. You really don’t have to agree to everything you’re thinking, a lot of it is based on misunderstandings and social fear that is built into you from very young (at an age you had no capacity for questioning it, especially if your parents aren’t informed on the topic). It doesn’t mean it is acceptable at all, it just means shaming yourself or someone for being that way is not helpful in their healing and thinking process.

A recent experience finally reminded us that working through shame also means reaffirming your self-worth and as such bringing up a lot of unprocessed anger (and associated feelings). By that we mean that as younger humans, we didn’t think we had any self-worth so the evidence shown to us through abuse was confirming what we knew and easy to “accept”. It was difficult to claim our refusal regarding being abused when we thought the abuse was legitimate (we were bad people) and we deserved it. No one had ever told us otherwise. But working through shame and our feeling of worthlessness brings up extreme rage which is difficult to deal with. It’s a back and forth as we cannot deal with the entirety of our anger all at once, at the risk of traumatizing ourselves. We have to take it one step at a time and as such, accept that our shame still defines us to a certain extent and being a DID system, for certain parts. The question of self-worth and being actually worthy to be alive and treated correctly shines a bright light on all those who didn’t treat us correctly and that bright light can really be too much for our nervous system. It is a work-in-progress. We also want to extend our sympathies for all of those who are still working through this belief because it really is a sneaky one.

Working on shame has meant one major thing for us all. We rarely shame people now and we try our very best not to. When people feel shame and shame others we work very hard to understand what is going on to manage to stay regulated as much as possible in the conversation. If our worth is discussed, we can fight back more easily. It is a kind of super power. It also means that our friends are safe with us. One of our friends once said “to you I can say that” and then proceeded to explain something extremely shameful to her. Shame has a tendency to request an open heart and an open mind. If you come back with more shame, the person will never come back to talk to you. People are people, their emotions and their inner workings are important (yes, even my abusers are people). If I stand tall with my feet on the ground, it is totally possible for me to fight back and say no to things that don’t meet my understanding of self worth. It also means that if I am reading a book (notably on racism) that brings up a lot of shame for my system, we can stay calm and accept that it is what is happening. We can accept that we need to learn and it’s triggering to us all. We can accept to keep reading. When I thought my shame was my only “thinking pattern” and there was just no self-worth underneath, I couldn’t have read this book. I would have hated myself so fast, I would have just stopped listening or reading. It would have been too hard and too painful to see how unworthy I am. Now I know, it’s nothing to do with my self-worth, but I still need to do better. I hope you see the difference.