Fear and shame

The two most dominant emotions that dictate my experience of the world are fear and shame. Upon processing this realization, I’ve come to the conclusion that while these two emotions may seem to be unrelated at first thought, they are actually quite intertwined in my internal landscape. Fear and shame are both uncomfortable emotions that signal a high degree of alarm—one needs to enact change to alleviate them. However, these two internal alarms are triggered by and about opposite circumstances.

Fear is an emotional response triggered by perceived threats or dangers in the external environment, often related to future-oriented events. On the other hand, shame is a self-conscious emotion arising from negative evaluations of one’s own actions or characteristics, typically stemming from past-oriented events. In other words, fear is to future and other, as shame is to past and self. Fear sends the message that the world around me is not safe, while shame sends the message that I am inherently wrong.

Growing up, fear and shame were both used as a powerful means of control over me. These two emotions were heavily instilled by my primary caregiver to mold me to be the person she wanted me to be. When I would display behaviors or interests that she didn’t like or approve of¹, they were often met with a severely shaming response. Most of these behaviors or interests did not warrant such a response, as they were my genuine experiences and did not harm others, but this association of specific behavior or interest with shame was heavily engrained in me by these repeated experiences. Over time, I learned that almost any expression of self was shameful. Shame is not a comfortable emotion, so I avoid it. In order to avoid it, I learned to avoid any genuine self-expression.

Fear was similarly used to control my behavior, albeit in a more indirect way. Through osmosis, I learned that the world was unpredictable and dangerous. This was also instilled in me by my primary caregiver², who was incredibly overprotective and controlling³. She would not allow me to interact with the world and see how it responded for myself. Instead, she made herself my liaison to the external world—she made me go through her to experience life. This made my world appear to be very scary and unpredictable, both because I wasn’t allowed to directly interact with the external world and because her behavior was scary and unpredictable. Because that’s all I knew, I thought that’s how the world worked. If that’s how the world works, then I am scared of it. To avoid fear, I choose to not interact with the world, and instead keep to myself and what I know.

Both fear and shame dictated my behavior growing up, inhibiting me from interacting with the world in ways that I wanted to. When both the external world is bad, and I am bad, that leaves me with not much else to do but live in my own world, in my own reality. So that’s what I did.

There are many ways that dissociative disorders may present in someone’s life. While the stereotypical presentation of this disorder is that one may experience “out of control” behavior that’s “not like them”, for the most part, I experience the opposite. I am an incredibly reserved and behaviorally-inhibited person—rather than behaving in ways that are out of my control, I tend to have subdued behavior, where I may want to do something, but I am so controlled by fear and shame that I do not allow myself to.

My very rigid, controlled upbringing did not allow me to feel safe about who I am and how the world works. Fear and shame have dominated my internal landscape, severely inhibiting my self-expression and ability to interact with the world. In recent years, however, things have gotten much better. I am substantially more self-assured now, and I understand how the world works. Nothing about me is inherently wrong, and interacting the external world can bring a lot of joy in my life. I’m rewriting my beliefs about myself and the world and am doing much better now because of it.