Free From Shame

Reclaiming your will from manipulative shaming

One of the most manipulable emotions is shame: the twisting and exploitation of your healthy modesty and your noble consideration of others’ feelings toward you.

Introduction

Modesty is healthy; it keeps you grounded and self-aware, considerate of how others may perceive you. However, manipulators use your own good nature — your modesty — against you. They deliberately withhold their approval, and even worse, they relentlessly offer faux disapproval, ridicule, and humiliation to hyperstimulate your modesty and mutate it into toxic shame.

The irony is that approval from people who use it as currency is cheap, unimportant, and meaningless.

In a state of toxically shame-based mental state, you begin to obsess over what others might think of you more than what you feel about yourself. You place other people’s arbitrary standards for you higher than your own.

So, with toxic shame, it doesn’t matter if you know you’re virtuous and innocent, good and pure; the pretend opinions of others about you matter more to you than your own clear conscience. You thus become manipulable. Those who wish to exploit you will shame you, or imply shaming from others, to steer your behaviour where it suits them more than it suits you.

Manipulators are skilled at identifying individuals who are shame-based. And people who use shame tend to be themselves shame-based, since they understand full well the dynamics of shaming, even on a subconscious level alone. Thus, just as they were conditioned from early childhood to respond to shaming cues, so do they instinctively use shame, or the implied threat of shame, to subtly coerce you into submitting to their will. Shaming works on them too… this is why they use it.