Free Healing Your Emotional Self by Beverly Engel Page B

is not only humiliating but also teaches a child to always compare himself with peers and find himself deficient.
Blaming. When a child makes a mistake, such as accidentally hitting a ball through a neighbor’s window, he needs to take responsibility. But many parents go way beyond teaching the child a lesson by blaming and berating their children: “You stu- pid idiot! You should have known better than to play so close to the house! Now I’m going to have to pay for that window. Do you think money grows on trees? I don’t have enough money to
    constantly be cleaning up your messes!” All this accomplishes is to shame the child to such an extent that he cannot find a way to walk away from the situation with his head held high. Blaming the child like this is like rubbing his nose in the mess he made, and it produces such intolerable shame that he may be forced to deny responsibility or find ways of excusing it.
Contempt. Expressions of disgust or contempt communicate absolute rejection. The look of contempt (often a sneer or a raised upper lip), especially from someone who is significant to a child, can be a devastating inducer of shame, because the child is made to feel disgusting or offensive. Having an overly critical parent, one who always finds something wrong with the child, guarantees that the child will be constantly subjected to shame. When I was a child, my mother had an extremely nega- tive attitude toward me. Much of the time she either looked at me expectantly, as though she were saying, “What are you up to now?” or with disapproval or disgust over what I had already done. These looks were extremely shaming to me, causing me to feel that there was something terribly wrong with me.
Humiliation. As Gershen Kaufman stated in his book Shame: The Power of Caring : “There is no more humiliating experience than to have another person who is clearly the stronger and more powerful take advantage of that power and give us a beat- ing.” I can personally attest to this. In addition to shaming me with her contemptuous looks, my mother often punished me by hitting me with the branch off a tree, and she often did this out- side, in front of the neighbors. The humiliation I felt was like a deep wound to my soul.
Disabling expectations. Appropriate parental expectations serve as necessary guides to behavior and are not disabling. Disabling expectations, on the other hand, involve pressuring a child to excel or perform a task, a skill, or an activity. Parents who have an inordinate need to have their children excel are likely to behave in ways that pressure a child to do more and more. According to Kaufman, when a child becomes aware of the real possibility of failing to meet parental expectations, he or she
    often experiences a blinding self-consciousness—the painful watching of oneself—that is very disabling. When something is expected of us in this way, attaining the goal is made harder, if not impossible.
    Yet another way that parents induce shame in their children is by communicating to them that they are a disappointment. Such messages as “I can’t believe you could do such a thing” or “I am deeply disappointed in you,” accompanied by a disap- proving tone of voice and facial expression, can crush a child’s spirit.

    The Mirror That Criticizing and Shaming Parents Hold Up to Their Children
    Overly critical parents can destroy their child’s confidence and self- esteem and devastate their self-image. Instead of motivating children, overly critical comments tend to destroy a child’s will to succeed and his capacity to change, and deprive him of motivation.
    Like Stephen, a child who is shamed by rejection, mockery, or expressions of disgust or contempt will often shrink from contact with others. He may seek invisibility in order to feel safe. He grows up feeling unlovable because he was taught that it was his fault that his parents did not love him, or that his acceptance was conditional—