Getting to know where shame comes from

This fact sheet is part of a series we created with families who have been through tough times to spark hope and new ideas about how to recognise and manage shame.

We hope these resources have something to offer all families, but recognise they are simply a snapshot reflecting the lived experiences of the families who helped us create them – other families will have different experiences and stories.

We also intentionally create resources that reflect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ways of knowing, being and doing with guidance from our National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Consultancy Group and partners.

See more about how Emerging Minds collaborates with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander practitioners, families and Community.

Emerging Minds acknowledges that families come in many forms. In our resources, the term ‘parent’ encompasses biological, adoptive, foster and kinship carers as well as individuals who have chosen to take up primary or shared responsibility in raising children. Our resources aim to support families and the children in their care. We acknowledge that every child is unique and has different strengths, vulnerabilities and experiences that shape their health and development.

‘In my early days of recovery from alcohol and drugs I had a lot of guilt and shame about my past and the things that had happened when I was in addiction. I really had to try and separate what was mine and what was others, and also separate these two powerful feelings because they both needed to be treated differently.’

‘For a long time, I smacked my children. I didn’t have any good knowledge about parenting to parent differently. And I thought that if they were really “bad” that was the only thing I could do. I had a lot of shame over this as time went on. And that shame did kind of help me reframe how I parented and alerted me to the fact that this is not a good way to parent.’

‘I have the same feelings about smacking my kids but I call those feelings regret. Regret makes us learn and serves a purpose. I didn’t feel like I was a bad person for doing it, I realised I was wrong for doing it.’

‘When my kids were young, their mum struggled with self-harm as a way to manage her distress. The kids love their mum so much and found it hard that they didn’t know how to help her. They just wanted our family to be normal and they felt a deep sense of shame that we were not.’

‘Not being “normal”, being told constantly that you are different to everybody else and that you need to blend in as best as possible so that nobody notices that you’re “not normal”. When you step out of that normal and what you’re supposed to be, and then you get reprimanded for that – whether it’s in the form of being bullied at school or your parent telling you to “shush” while out in public making a scene or things like that – that’s what creates it. Sometimes you will have parents that want to understand but don’t know how to understand. And for a child who’s already trying to work out their own situation, to also have to educate the adult is so difficult and hard to navigate. And you can see that they’re not trying to be stigmatising, but that’s just how they were brought up.’

– KC, young person from a rural area

‘My mother is from a Muslim country and she came to visit us in Australia. She wears a hijab to cover herself. We went to the beach as a family and because of her culture and beliefs she wore her hijab swimming. My son, myself and my mother all felt ashamed. We stood out and were different. People were there in bikinis and we looked different and we could see people looking at us and judging us. My son is living in two cultures and sometimes it is really hard for him not to feel ashamed. But we are determined that the shame will not destroy our foundations and our beliefs.’

‘I had to go to a high school that was well out of my area and lots of kids who went there came from wealthy families that lived in the hills. I was from a Housing Trust area and poor. My mum couldn’t afford to buy a uniform for me, so I used to wear clothes that were the same colour as the uniform instead. This just made it more apparent that I was poor, and the other kids would tease me about my clothes. One day I went through the lost property box and took a shirt and a jumper that were part of the uniform and started wearing them to school. I did this to fit it, to not be noticed as the poor kid. The irony was that I was pretty much stealing to do so. I was ashamed of being poor, but I had no legitimate way to compensate.’

– Renee, reflecting on her childhood, Kaurna Country

‘When I first became addicted to hard drugs I was in a relationship and my ex was using. My kids were varying ages from young to adult. My ex left when things got bad (and when the money ran out and we were going to be homeless) and all of a sudden I found myself single parenting with a habit, no money, scary people who knew me and no supports. Anyone who had been in my life had dropped me.

‘The drugs really cemented for me what I had felt about myself for so long – I was an outsider, I was unpleasant and no good. I’d experienced a lot of stigma over my life because I’m a bit different – I have disabilities and am alternative and queer. So the drugs just reaffirmed for me all the stigma I had experienced.

‘When I saw the full extent of what had happened – I was now an addict, I was scared and I couldn’t parent my children properly, the guilt and shame was huge. It stopped me getting help. It was crushing. Eventually I got help for the domestic violence and in that process the drug addiction came out. I’m so glad it did because that was the first step, as hard as it was, to getting through it.

‘I’ve been clean and sober many years now and that experience showed me that stigma can do much more damage than just in the moment, it can morph into shame and that can influence so many more areas of your life.’

‘There was a lot of intergenerational abuse going on in my home. It didn’t matter what my sister and I did, nothing’s good enough. My mother always makes us feel ashamed: “Why can’t you be like your cousin, who’s done this?”, “Why don’t you get a job that makes more money?” Being told you’re a failure, being told there’s something wrong with you. When I came out [as transgender], there was the whole shame around that which was huge, or not being able to parent when I was unwell and feeling the shame around that because I felt like I was letting everyone down … it’s continued to affect me throughout my life.’

‘A lot of perpetrators of abuse use shame as a form of control because it takes away the self-esteem. It’s really the ultimate form of control, isn’t it? Because shame operates on something so intangible, which is your own sense of self. It’s not to do with material things that can be replaced. If you lose something, you can buy it again, essentially. But if it’s something within the core of your self-belief, that’s much, much harder to regain.’

Read more about shame and guilt, including shame as a form of emotional abuse.