From Toxic Shame to Freedom

An essential resource for the library of every pastor, chaplain, recovery counselor and facilitator, marriage and family counselor and school counselor. In addition, individuals struggling from toxic shame will find this a very practical, user-friendly guide out of the morass and into freedom and honor as a child of God. Toxic Shame exhibits itself in a wide array of fashions, get-ups and garbs. It loves darkness and thrives on secretiveness. As a result, it diminishes one's openness, transparency and humility while simultaneously feeding one's pride, fostering guardedness, secretiveness, and presumptiveness. It is these dark, secretive aspects of toxic shame that gives it power - power to entrap and imprison one in a dungeon of their own creation. Because it operates under the cloak of darkness, it evades discovery, identification and examination. Being well hidden within our subconscious, one must aggressively track it down by becoming familiar with its many alluring and distracting behavioral cover-ups. The etiology, or origin, of toxic shame is varied - some coming from inherited shame that is passed on from one generation to the next; some is acquired environmentally when we are shamed by others; some through our identification with a hero or model who are themselves shame-based; and last but not least, the shame caused by our own errant behaviors that have continued unchecked, long after we recognize their destructiveness and ignore the guilt thus induced. Whatever its etiology, shame once internalized becomes toxic, and commences to destroy one's self-worth, shattering one's self-image, or identity, and unraveling one's core reality. The good news is that the shackles of toxic shame can be broken, the dungeon opened, and the pathway to freedom and honor as a child of God a reality. In this book, the reader will discover this pathway to freedom, that is well marked by employing the familiar 12-Step model of recovery.