When Feeling Bad Feels Like Love: How Shame Bonds Us in Childhood and Drives Adult Relationships - the cost of carrying shame: why we try to get others to feel what we felt.

In trauma-informed therapy, shame is recognised not as a psychological weakness, but as a protective response rooted in early survival strategies. For many clients, shame functions as a deeply embedded adaptation.

Particularly for those with relational or developmental trauma, the experience of feeling bad may have once served as a pathway to emotional safety, belonging, or perceived control. Children, for example, may internalise shame in an attempt to maintain attachment with a caregiver — believing, “If I’m the problem, then I can fix it.” This belief can create a sense of agency in an otherwise powerless situation.

Over time, this strategy becomes automatic and unconscious. Shame becomes a familiar emotional posture — one that may offer a false sense of control, predictability, or protection from further rejection or harm.

1. Shame as Emotional Survival
For many individuals, shame emerged early in life as a way to make sense of emotional neglect, unpredictability, or abuse. In the absence of consistent care, children often internalize blame:

"If I feel bad enough, maybe they'll stop hurting me."

Particularly for those with relational or developmental trauma, the experience of feeling bad may have once served as a pathway to emotional safety, belonging, or perceived control. Children, for example, may internalise shame in an attempt to maintain attachment with a caregiver — believing, “If I’m the problem, then I can fix it.” This belief can create a sense of agency in an otherwise powerless situation. Over time, shame becomes more than just a feeling — it becomes both the driver of behaviour meant to appease or pacify the adult, and the blanket that muffles the child’s own feelings, needs, and wants. In disconnecting from their inner world, the child learns to adapt in ways that prioritise the emotional needs of others, often at the expense of their own.

2. Shame as Emotional Bonding
Shame also serves as a relational bridge for clients who grew up around emotionally unavailable or self-loathing caregivers. By mirroring the caregiver's low self-worth, the child may have found a form of connection:

"If I feel bad too, maybe we’ll be close. Maybe I won’t be abandoned."

This becomes a form of emotional attunement based in pain. In adulthood, this often translates into relationships built around shared suffering, where self-sacrifice and emotional diminishment feel like acts of love. Feeling bad is not just protection—it’s perceived as love. It becomes a way to stay aligned with others who live in shame. "If I match their pain, they won’t leave me. If I lower myself emotionally, maybe they’ll feel seen and stay." But this kind of bonding through mutual shame always comes at a cost: you lose connection to your own truth in order to be accepted.

3. Shame in Adult Relationships
Unprocessed childhood shame often re-emerges in adult relationships, especially in attempts to correct or reverse earlier trauma. One common pattern is trying to elicit shame in a partner who has caused harm:

"If I can get them to see what they’ve done, maybe they won’t hurt me again."

This is not manipulation, but a desperate (and often unconscious) attempt at repair. The partner may be asked to "carry the shame" that the individual has carried alone for too long. For example, a person may revisit painful events again and again in a relationship—not to punish, but in hopes that if the other person finally feels it, they’ll stop hurting them. This dynamic often mirrors the individual's early life: if someone else won’t take responsibility, the survivor carries it all and tries to distribute the weight later on. This strategy comes from pain, not cruelty. It’s rooted in a longing for acknowledgement and safety.

4. Shame as a Professional Driver
Many helping professionals—particularly psychologists, therapists, social workers, teachers, nurses, and healers—have built careers rooted in the belief:

"If I care enough, maybe I won’t get hurt."

Their professional identities may be shaped by a longing to heal the pain they themselves never received support for. While this motivation can lead to great empathy and skill, it can also result in burnout, over-functioning, or self-erasure. Many have translated their early need to appease or protect into their roles as healers. The desire to help others feel better becomes a way to justify their own existence. It becomes: “If I am of service, then I am safe. If I keep others from suffering, maybe I’ll never be left again.” This over-identification with helping can create emotional exhaustion, blurred boundaries, and difficulty receiving care in return.

5. Transforming the Shame Response
Healing requires differentiating between the child’s survival strategy and the adult’s capacity to choose differently. Shame needs to be met not with rejection, but with gratitude and compassion:

• "Thank you for trying to keep me safe."

• "You helped me survive, but I don't need you to lead anymore."

Shame is not evil—it is frightened. It was once a shield. It was the only strategy the inner child had to navigate emotional harm. Now, the adult self can speak back to it with gentleness: “I see you. I know why you showed up. But I have better ways now.” Clients often benefit from understanding shame as a form of protection that can now be released. As the therapeutic relationship provides safety, clients can begin to develop new internal responses based on self-trust and regulation. They learn that they do not need to carry shame to feel close to others, or to prove that they are good. Healing doesn’t mean erasing shame, but softening around it—letting it be seen, thanked, and gently retired.

Shame is not a flaw to be eradicated—it is a signal, a relic, a memory of how one learned to survive. Through attuned therapy and trauma-informed reflection, individuals can gently retire shame as a guide and replace it with self-compassion, integrity, and a renewed capacity for connection. This is not only healing—it is freedom.