Toxic parents should elicit moral disgust. It’s disgusting when those who bring a child into this world, abuse, neglect, and maltreat their helpless dependent little ones. However, as the noted author Pia Melody has pointed out growing up with shameless parents makes you carry shame for them – YOU become shame-filled.
This happens through the projection-introjection dynamics of blame-shifting and shame-acceptance.
Projection is a defense mechanism that helps one deal with feelings that are abhorrent and are difficult to face so one attributes these feelings to someone else, usually one’s dependant child, sibling, or spouse.
There is a power play here.
After all, you cannot in their face project onto someone who can literally knock down your irrational accusations.
Introjection Of Projections
When a caregiver’s negative emotions, fears, or insecurities are dumped onto an innocent child, he/she unconsciously introjects or internalizes the projections.
A child in his/her naivety and vulnerability blindly accepts their parents’ distorted views, schemas, ideologies, concepts, etc into their psyche. Introjection is the internalization of someone else’s projection.
The developing child’s mind forms a distorted view of the world and themselves – ‘my parents say I’m stupid, ugly, worthless – so I’m stupid, ugly, worthless, etc.
After all, to a small child, parents are the equivalent of God, moreover, completely believing them ensures one’s survival.
The Distorted Fog Of Introjection
Toxic shame impairs our ability to see reality.
You don’t realize until much into adulthood that your belief system was distorted. The formative years of your life were lived in a fog of gaslighting.
You became a sponge for their negative energy. Unbeknownst, you got sucked into their black hole of toxicity.
Understanding the Defense of Introjection
Introjection and Projective Identification
Introjection often leads to projective identification. British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein introduced this term. Both are very similar and are on a continuum.
Identification occurs when a person not only takes on a belief or voice of another person but slowly becomes that person, replaying the very actions that you found disgusting. This internalized parent affects his/her child even when the parent is not close by.
Like father, like son, or like mother so daughter, works on this principle. Though sometimes we do take on good qualities too. However, that rarely happens in a dysfunctional family.
It can feel quite traumatic many decades later to learn that many of the thoughts and feelings, you were manipulated to experience as a child were distorted untruths. Unfortunately, the effects on your identity and personality development survive into adulthood.
You Become Your Toxic Parent
In a sense, projective identification results in you becoming the introjected-identified object – mother/father, etc. You think, feel, and act like them without you knowing. Your mind has been hijacked by them.
It’s only now I realize how my maternal grandmother made me the receptacle of her unexpressed hostility stemming from her inability to be assertive. She’d gripe about the people who crossed her and like a sponge, I took in her repressed hostility and made it my own.
Only recently, I became aware of my grandmother’s rage-resentment I was holding in my body.
It was through this trauma personality, that I was operating in the world. I became the rage-filled martyr. who twisted herself to please while seething with bitterness and resentment.
Shedding my grandmother’s ghost from my psyche has not been easy. I’ve had to become aware of my patterns of thinking and behavior and consciously change how I react.
Empathy Drives Identification
The reason why children accept the identification is that they are vulnerable, naive, and empathetic.
When a parent projects things he/she can’t handle onto you, the parent experiences a sense of relief. When you see their relief, you believe you’ve done something useful for them.
Then, out of a sincere desire to be helpful, you begin swallowing up their projections. You sincerely believe that you are alleviating their hurts and helping them deal with their problem.
I know, the child-me thought I was helping my grandmother by being her therapy puppy.
However, this kind of appeasing of a traumatized adult ego doesn’t lead to any long-term easing of the problem. Gradually, you become the official scapegoat, taking the sins of everyone. You are robbed of your authentic identity development.
Becoming Unzombified
Eventually, much into our adulthood, many of us realize the utter futility of your sacrifice.
No matter how much we try to empathize and identify with someone else’s feelings for them, that person will remain unchanged. They keep playing out the same program because it’s convenient to outsource their negativity to the scapegoat. They don’t want to do the difficult work of healing.
Realizing we are wasting our time on this thankless task can free us from the never-ending cycle of enabling their dysfunction.
It took me a long time in my twenties to finally realize who my grandmother was and what I was to her – her garbage disposal cum gas station. She’d trauma dump and I’d try to soothe her by being outraged by whoever she was complaining about.
I played this role with quite a few of my family members. I innocently believed it was my responsibility to ameliorate people’s suffering, after all that’s what a Good Christian does. Sadly, they were all covert manipulators who took the convenient way out of dealing with their sh*t.
Introjection and Alexithymia
As time goes by, there is enmeshment and blurring of boundaries. The child doesn’t know where she/he ends and the parent begins.
If for years you took on the feelings, and beliefs of others, while ignoring your own, you develop emotional blindness or Alexithymia.
Alexithymia is characterized by a limited ability to differentiate between emotions and bodily sensations. There is a reduced ability to express one’s feelings and be disconnected from one’s emotional experiences.
To accommodate the projected feelings we ignored and disowned our real feelings. One feels empty and numb and dissociated from our body and soul.
Alexithymia is a general deficit of interoception – the ability to feel one’s body states and emotions.
Insula, Interoception, and Self Awareness
Not surprisingly, alexithymia is associated with specific structural abnormalities in the insula, the main hub of interoception. Other brain regions associated with emotional processing are also affected.
The insula monitors our body for visceral reactions to things and conveys them to our consciousness as emotions. That connection is damaged in alexithymics.
Breaking Free Of Shame-filled Introjects
According to, Bessel van der Kolk:
Trauma is the incomplete biological response to a threat, frozen in time.
After spending years living with other people’s projected feelings, getting in touch with how we feel, can be challenging. Shedding the shameful introjects can be excruciatingly painful.
It means getting to the visceral /felt part of our feelings.
Seeing things and people for who they are is very traumatic. The truth can be hard to bring to light. We need an enlightened witness who will validate what we experienced as utterly unfair and repugnant.
How does one purge out those abhorrent introjects and separate oneself from that false identity?
Via disgust.
The path to healing entails shifting the intense internalized feeling of shame to where it belongs – harnessing the feeling of disgust for the shameless caregivers, family, and adults who mistreated us.
Disgust helps us purge out the poisonous introjects.
The poison remains trapped within us until we are willing and able to feel disgusted. To heal we have to bring to our awareness, the shame that corrodes us from the inside.
Shame and Disgust
Although shame and disgust are often treated as orthogonal emotions, they share some important similarities. Both involve intense visceral feelings.
Furthermore, disgust and shame are overlapping physiological systems. Brain imaging studies have shown that both shame and disgust have been associated with the activation of the anterior insula.
To avoid the unbearable feeling of disgust (primary emotion) for one’s parent one substitutes it with shame. Instead of feeling they are useless, obnoxious people, we feel there is something inherently wrong with us (toxic shame).
We feel dirty and contaminated. When in reality we should be feeling they are contaminated.
Thinking of what they did to you a helpless, naive child should want you to throw up.
Primary Emotion – Disgust, Secondary Emotion – Shame
Disgust is a core or primary emotion while shame is a secondary or meta-emotion that forms in reaction to another emotion.
Primary emotions are immediate, instinctual responses to specific events or situations. Secondary emotions are reactions to primary emotions and are more complex, often influenced by personal experiences, beliefs, and thoughts.
Core emotions have physical sensations to cue us and prepare our bodies for actions. Being abused would have triggered our flight-fight response.
However, because of our dependency on our caregivers, we had to suppress our primary emotions and respond with a secondary acceptable emotion which shows up as freeze-fawn. Wherein we numb ourselves, internalize the negativity, and develop a false self.
The fact remains that feeling anger and resentment keeps us connected to the people who hurt us. However, shifting our emotional state from resentment to disgust helps create distance.
Harnessing Disgust
Our breakthrough in our healing usually occurs when we can regain our sense of interoception in our bodies.
Peter Levine calls this “pendulation” – gently moving in and out of accessing internal sensations and traumatic memories.
I’ve found that physically making a retching motion when thinking of the numerous abusive people in my childhood has been much more helpful than shouting-screaming, hitting in releasing the stuck-frozen emotions.
Our insula is the brain region that is activated when we feel disgust whether physical (rotten food, dirty places) or moral disgust (when people behave badly). When we physically get our bodies to feel disgusted we activate our insula which unfreezes our shame-body which has neural correlates in the insula.
Identifying and processing disgust, no matter how long ago our abuse occurred, can be a turning point for our recovery and a doorway back to our most authentic selves.
Make-Belief and The Brain
Since physical and moral disgust is in the same brain area, it is easier to harness disgust within our bodies. We visualize the person as rotting and feel disgusted physically – as aversion, the impulse to vomit it out of you.
We can trick our brains into believing we are chucking out the badness in us when we make the motion of puking. In his book, Behave, neuroscientist, Robert Sapolsky states: “The insula cortex can’t tell the difference between rotten food and unsavory behavior.”
Gagging is one of the more effective bottom-up ways to release stuck trauma in our bodies.
The Benefits of Expressing Disgust
When disgust is processed, the nervous system will reset to calmer and more regulated states of being.
The action of vomiting, the gag reflex activates our vagus nerve which sets off our parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) system. Expressing revulsion decreases anxiety and shame from trauma.
Feeling disgusted helps oust the internalized abuser in our heads. While jump-starting our numbed-out brain-body system.
Stay Safe, Be Disgusted
To unlock trauma in the body, you have to renegotiate the feelings and sensations you feel within you so that they can be transformed into some other feeling in your body. Physically acting out disgust helps change our narrative of toxic shame.
The brain doesn’t designate whether the experience was real or imagined, as long as the body experiences it and it’s codified in your memory as real. Moreover, once you have experienced enough repetitions, your neuroplastic brain re-wires and changes. This changes our traumatized personality to an empowered one.
When we feel sick in our stomachs for the abuse we endured by people we trusted we are activating our frozen body to feel again. Remember, the key to healing is feeling again.
Hate keeps us tethered to our abusers with visions of revenge while disgust, untethers us from dangerous or damaging people who can potentially harm us or make us sick.
Stay safe, be disgusted.
