For most of our lives, if we said we were depressed, someone told us to see a therapist. This meant sitting in a chair, or on a couch, and talking about how or why we were depressed (assuming we had any idea). If the therapist was an MD, we would probably get a drug with that. Either way, after many years (and barely any insurance coverage), we’d typically be no further along.

I’m going to tell you why.

Human brains are very efficient. Our conscious can only do seven things at a time, and our subconscious does the rest–quite nicely, in fact.

To illustrate: the first time you got behind the wheel of a car, you were probably hesitant, looking for the brake, turning the wheel slowly, looking right and left with intent, blinking right, or was that left? But now when you get in the car, everything’s automatic. You might not even remember having turned on the car, and turn it off by mistake (I do that often). Your subconscious is telling you, “I got this–you can think about something else.” Even on the highway!

Your subconscious is just doing this to help you survive, but it doesn’t actually care about making you happy. Why is that important? Because your subconscious also stores nearly everything that’s ever been said to you in your head. This would be helpful if the voice in your head were saying, “Yes, that’s exactly how to spear a deer.” But it’s not good if that voice is saying, “You’re an idiot! What the heck made you think that was okay? Do you even have a brain?!?”

These statements and reactions literally become voices in your head–experiences stored in your brain’s amygdala (the part of your brain where trauma is stored). In order to get rid of your depression, you have to get rid of them. You can’t do this by talking to a therapist about what limited information is in your conscious. It’s like hiring a personal trainer who tells you he can get you full-body results, but then only works on your calves.

The “voices” in your subconscious that haunt you can be there even if nothing particularly bad was directly said to you as a child. For example, if you fell down and got hurt, and cried, and your parents sat there reading the paper like nothing just happened to you, that was them telling you, “You being hurt is not important to us. You’re not important.” In the age of the T.V. and iPad and day care, children are ignored now more than ever, and the voices in their heads are, “I’m not important. I’m not worth anyone’s time, so I’m not worth anyone’s love.”

Over time, these messages (vocal or not) that you’re not important result in what’s called Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD), which is recognized and widespread (there are support groups on Facebook and elsewhere, and this book by Pete Walker is one of the authorities on it). Worse, every time you hear a similar negative comment or experience now, your amygdala will bring up the memory and you’ll re-live the shame all over again. In fact, you re-live all of this shame constantly, and the new experiences pile onto the old ones and a snowball of shame follows you daily—hence, your depression. Experts like Gershan Kaufman and John Bradshaw refer to this, I think appropriately, as a “paralyzing internal monitoring.”

I mentioned the word “shame” above, and since that’s going to be the critical word in this article, let’s understand its meaning. There are two types of shame: good (i.e. healthy), and bad (i.e. toxic). Many languages have a word for good shame and bad shame, but English only has one word (and we associate the word with the bad kind). Good shame is, for example, when a baby throws a toy at your head, and you look hurt, and the baby thinks, “I hurt him, so I shouldn’t throw things at his head.” Another example of good shame is a toddler trying to slide down a flight of stairs who falls and thinks, “I can’t slide down a flight of stairs right now, or I will get hurt; maybe later I can figure it out.” It’s how a child learns his or her boundaries, and it’s the essence of survival.

Good shame is the permission to learn and improve, and why Brené Brown’s “The Power of Vulnerability” is so accurate and wildly popular.  Good shame is the permission to be human, to be imperfect.

But then there’s toxic shame. Toxic shame is when a child is shamed simply for learning his or her own boundaries. If our imperfections are not accepted by our caregivers, our imperfections lead us to being toxically shamed, and we will naturally decide to do anything to avoid feeling that toxic shame again. If our boundaries are constricted, we never learn what they are–and end up fearing this unknown. 

When a child is toxically shamed by a caregiver, she thinks she has no self worth (this is permanent if it continues during childhood). Children need to know that they will be loved whether or not they become a pro golfer, or get an A on their exam, or make the hockey team. They need to know that a parent’s love is not contingent on performance or perfection.

I will go further into this in later posts, but for now just know that a child will not love him or herself if he or she did not feel loved unconditionally by his or her caregiver during childhood. Without unconditional love, the message the child internalizes is, “I’m not enough.”

If you are depressed, toxic shame is the root of it. The first task is to identify in what ways you were toxically shamed, which you can do yourself. If you see someone who is very fat walk by you, do you think, “Gross?” If you do, you were toxically shamed about your body. Walk around for a few days and examine your reaction to people’s choices, appearances, or behaviors, and therein lie your sources of toxic shame.

If you feel you are not enough, and that without some performance or projected image you will not be loved, your self will rupture. If you believe you are flawed as a person in your childhood, you will worry that you will be abandoned, and so will not feel safe (and feeling unsafe is the worst thing a child could feel!). From this unsafe feeling (i.e. fear), you will react in one or more of the following ways: (1) you will fight, take flight or freeze, or a combination of these, (2) you will build an external appearance of perfection to hide your imperfection, which you fear will result in toxic shame if revealed, and (3) you will seek solace from your loneliness and fear in unhealthy ways such as addition, whether to alcohol, drugs, work, sex, shopping (you get the idea).

Nothing outside of you (drugs, alcohol, work, money, sex, what have you) can possibly get rid of the underlying shame that developed in your childhood. Thus, your responses to your fear of toxic shame (see previous paragraph) only cause you more shame and loneliness, so the addiction/self-destructive behavior continues in response to the continued toxic shame, and in turn the toxic shame continues to reappear, and you have an endless pattern from which you cannot break out.

Something else that childhood toxic shame has likely done to you (briefly touched on above) is that it has had your subconscious develop one or more “protector” personalities that you thought you needed to outwardly show in order to be loved. None of these outward “protector” personalities are actually you—they are false selves that your subconscious believes will help you fare better than your true self. Being someone else, or a few other people–all day long–is extremely exhausting. Typically these protector selves were based on your needs as a child, and even though your childhood paradigm is long gone, your subconscious has stored that paradigm and has no reason to think it’s become irrelevant.

Just imagine the freedom of being yourself all the time!-of not being severed from yourself.

Inter-Family Systems (IFS) is a specific therapy that works to identify your various protector selves, and to help you say goodbye to them. I will go into that further (and many other therapies that work) in subsequent posts.

Now you know that, as a child, you were just doing what you thought you needed to in order to feel safe and in control—whether that was always appeasing a parent, or being invisible, or beating up your younger sibling every day. Whatever you did, it came from that paradigm of your childhood. The problem is, that paradigm doesn’t disappear just because you’ve entered adulthood, or otherwise passed the stage where it was relevant.

It’s up to you to identify this constricting paradigm and get rid of it—to literally break yourself out. You might have to acknowledge your own learned helplessness—your subconscious belief you had no alternatives, and this paradigm is all you will ever have to work with. I find this experiment with dogs to be illustrative of learned helplessness.

Remember that your paradigm was initially created because you were afraid you would not be loved, and you felt that a certain action (or inaction) on your part was the only way you would feel safe. Getting back to the voices in your head: they are voices that toxically shame you.

Toxic shame is the root of all depression, addiction, eating disorders. I will give you much more guidance on that in later posts, but for now,  understand what it is and try to identify how you were toxically shamed. (For now, please do not hold anything against your shaming parent(s), who themselves carried toxic shame from their own childhood(s), and will likely not be able to accept that they may have caused your depression; make this about you taking control, learning to love and re-parent yourself, and breaking the generation cycle).

What next? I’m going to tell you a hard truth: in order to undo these subconscious responses, and get rid of these voices in your head (by replacing them with good voices), you’re going to have to do the work. It can be done, with dedication, in not in too long a period of time (months), but recognize that your wiring must be redone, and that takes repetition, and so time.

In later posts, I will delve into topics such as fantasy bonds, trauma release, and methods that target the subconscious, such as EMDR.

But in order to start to heal, you will need to begin the process of loving and accepting yourself for who you are. You will need to identify your areas of toxic shame developed in your childhood, and re-parent yourself.

You will have to go back into your childhood and see yourself on a swing and go and hug that child, and tell him or her: “You are great, just the way you are, and I love you, for you.”

That’s the first step.

If you’re a parent, this article/series can alternatively be called, “How Not to Screw Up Your Kids.” If you’re single, it could also be called, “How Not To Date or Marry Someone Who Also Toxically Shames You.”

If you can’t wait for another post and want to get started, I recommend first reading John Bradshaw’s Healing the Shame that Binds You (2005), in audio if you can. It’s intense, but worth it. Here’s an audio clip where Bradshaw talks about healthy shame, and how it’s essential to living our lives without fear, shame, secrecy, addiction; I attach it because it was a new concept to me (unfortunately):

Bradshaw also has a lecture and hypnosis re-parenting book called Homecoming that helps with the difficult task of reparenting oneself (it’s only in audio). YouTube also has a 7-part video series of Bradshaw lecturing (after his 1988 publication) on the first half of his book (I recommend going straight to the book, but these videos are certainly helpful).

I realize I have just scratched the surface, but I will delve into the details, and into the cutting edge therapies that you can do for far less money than you spend talking on a couch.

Subscribe to get my subsequent posts as they come out, and I’ll pick a subscriber at random at the end of the month to win a copy of both the Bradshaw and Walker’s books!

Healing starts today.

COVID update: In light of the increase in addiction and relapses since the COVID-19 pandemic began, visit this resource for alcohol rehab and treatment.