The Connection Between Trauma and Shame
Shame is one of the most painful aftereffects of trauma. Unfortunately, it is also the least talked about. Even long after the event has passed, many trauma survivors are burdened by shame. Consciously, trauma survivors know that they didn’t cause or deserve what happened, yet shame is present and oftentimes, immobilizing. It may show up in everyday moments, making them feel like “too much” or “not enough,” struggling to trust others, shying away from connection to others, or constantly criticizing themselves.
What makes shame especially difficult is that it often feels like a personal flaw, even though it is a survival adaptation. The brain tries to stay safe by inducing shame. And the emotion itself prompts the person to hide, thriving in privacy. The more someone feels shame, the more they hide it. The more they hide it, the more they feel that there is something fundamentally wrong with them.
In this blog, we will break the silence and the secrecy. We will explain how shame and trauma are connected in the brain, the body, and the nervous system, and explore the ways shame once protected the person. From this understanding, trauma survivors can begin to release the belief that something is wrong with them.
Psychological Overview of Shame
Shame is often confused with guilt or embarrassment, but it is a very different emotional experience. Guilt rises when we understand that we’ve done something wrong. As an emotion, guilt is connected to behavior, and it can motivate change or repair. Embarrassment, on the other hand, is social, often temporary, and eased with reassurance. Guilt says, “I did something bad/wrong,” while embarrassment says, “I made a mistake.”
Shame is completely different. It is far deeper, more consuming, and more closely tied to trauma. Shame says: “There is something wrong with me.”, hitting at the core of identity. Instead of focusing on what happened, shame convinces a person that they, as a whole, are the problem. They are the ones that are unworthy, unlovable, or fundamentally flawed. This is why shame is so corrosive and persists long after the trauma itself.
Shame also has a particular felt-sense in the body. Many people describe collapsing inward, wanting to hide or disappear, and a sudden loss of energy or the ability to speak. Physically, shame can prompt a person to avoid eye contact, have a heavy or sinking feeling in the chest, and experience a tightening in the throat or excessive sweating.
From an evolutionary perspective, shame developed as a social survival mechanism. For early humans, belonging to a group was critical for safety and survival. So shame served as an internal alarm to shrink, submit, repair, or retreat when faced with the possibility of rejection or punishment. In threatening environments (such as abusive or neglectful families), this mechanism becomes overactivated and internalized.
Shame is also deeply tied to the nervous system. It often pulls the body into a “shutdown” mode described in Polyvagal Theory. Instead of mobilizing energy to run or fight, the body collapses and disconnects. Other times, shame can trigger hyperarousal or freeze, especially if it’s linked to past moments of danger or humiliation.
Shame through the Polyvagal Lens
Shame can easily be misunderstood as a personal weakness or a character flaw. But, from a polyvagal perspective, shame is primarily a physiological state and a nervous system reaction, and not just a psychological/cognitive concept. Shame reactions typically fall into two biological pathways:
Dorsal vagal shutdown (collapse): A sense of heaviness, fog, numbness, or wanting to disappear. The body conserves energy and pulls inward.
Sympathetic activation (panic): A rush of anxiety, heat, racing thoughts, or an urge to escape. The body prepares to protect itself.
These reactions are not defective, nor are they personality traits or weaknesses. They are neurological survival strategies that have been shaped and fortified by past experiences, especially traumatic or chronically stressful ones.
Many people assume shame is a thought like “I’m not good enough” or “I’m disgusting.” But polyvagal theory shows that shame is physiological first. The nervous system shifts into a defensive state, and the brain follows by creating a story that matches the body’s sensations.
This is called state-dependent meaning-making, where the nervous system experiences a state and then the brain simply creates a story to explain why.
Why Trauma Creates Shame?
Shame in trauma survivors doesn’t come from logic; it comes from the way our brain and nervous system have evolved, and is trying to make sense of what was an overwhelming, frightening, or confusing experience.
The Brain Blames the Self
One of the most important roles of the brain is to perceive and make sense of what it perceives. So, when something traumatic happens, the brain automatically searches for an explanation and a story. What happened, when, and why. But trauma is often senseless or impossible to understand, especially for children.
When the brain searches for an explanation, but no clear cause can be found, it turns inward and deduces that it must be the reason why it happened, or at least partially to blame. For adults, this often means feeling ashamed that the thing happened to them, that they didn’t defend themselves or act differently, or that they made decisions that led to the traumatic experience.
For children, this instinct is even stronger. A child depends entirely on their caregivers for safety and connection. If a caregiver is abusive, unpredictable, or emotionally unavailable, the child cannot accept “My parent is unsafe.” That truth would be too threatening to survival. Instead, the brain chooses the safer narrative, which is that the child is the problem, and if they do something differently, maybe the parent will love them. This is how shame becomes wired into identity. Research on adult attachment highlights that those with unresolved early attachment trauma show significantly higher levels of shame, suggesting that relational wounding often becomes deeply integrated into identity.
The Role of the Nervous System
Shame, aside from being an emotion, is also a biological state. During a traumatic experience, the body can go into freeze, fawn, or collapse responses. These reactions are automatic and try to self-protect the best they can.
But, later on, as the brain tries to create a coherent story about what happened, shame can arise. Trauma survivors often misinterpret these nervous system mechanisms as personality flaws or personal failures. They may feel shame about what they did or didn’t do. A freeze response may become “I should have fought back,” collapse may translate into “I’m weak,” or dissociation may be “I let it happen.”
Shame is a Protective Strategy
Although shame feels painful, it originally develops as a protective strategy, especially in children. For a child living in an unsafe environment, believing “I’m the problem” can feel safer than acknowledging that the person they are dependent on is hurting them. Shame allows both a child and an adult in a traumatic situation to maintain some (imagined) control and connection.
If it’s my fault, maybe I can change.
If I stay small, maybe I won’t be hurt again.
If I take the blame, maybe they’ll stay close.
Over time, this survival strategy becomes internalized, and the child grows up with shame as a core belief about themselves. Starting as a protective mechanism that helped them survive and adapt, shame slowly turned into a lens through which they perceive themselves.
Types of Trauma That Commonly Produce Shame
Although shame can emerge from almost any traumatic experience, certain types of trauma are especially likely to create the belief “Something is wrong with me.” This belief forms because the nervous system, the developing brain, and the social environment all shape the meaning of what happened.
Some of the most common trauma experiences that leave a deep imprint of shame are:
Childhood emotional neglect and criticism
Sexual abuse or violations of bodily autonomy
Domestic violence and exposure to it
Bullying, humiliation, and social exclusion
Traumatic failures like accidents, performance drops, freezing in crisis
Medical trauma and body-based shame
All these types of trauma may result in a core message of self-faultiness, either by the person as they are, or by their actions. Nonetheless, there are no rules, as trauma is highly complex and individual. Oftentimes, for various reasons, it can even go unnoticed and untreated. If you want to check if you have unprocessed trauma and experience its symptoms, you can take our unprocessed trauma test.
How Shame Shows Up in Everyday Life
Shame is rarely loud. It often comes up in everyday life and habits, from self-talk to relationship difficulties and decision-making. Shame works by convincing the person that they are the problem, so they often try to mask it and work extra hard at “showing worth.” Core shame wounds frequently hide beneath behaviors that seem functional, responsible, and even successful on the outside. It can show up as:
People-pleasing
Overachieving
Perfectionism
Avoidance
Isolation
Hiding authentic self
Harsh inner critic or self-sabotage
Emotional numbing or collapse
Hypersensitivity to criticism or rejection
Chronic anxiety, depression, and low self-worth
Final Thoughts
Shame is the survival strategy the nervous system used when situations got overwhelming, risky, hurtful, or confusing. It’s not a flaw, a weakness, or a personal failure; it’s the body’s instinct to stay safe, connected, and belonging. Even when the environments were harmful or unreliable, the brain had to make sense of the experience, so it turned on itself as the best way to “control” the situation and protect itself from the same, a similar, or greater pain.
When survivors learn how trauma shapes shame, they can move away from the belief that something is wrong with them. They can start seeing the unconstructive patterns they use as intelligent strategies that once ensured their survival. Healing shame requires far more than positive thinking. It requires modalities like EMDR, which are especially designed to help with trauma and its symptoms. Healing starts by releasing the body from the survival states that maintain shame, and at EMDR Therapy Nashville, we have the tools to guide you through the process. So, reach out to start your healing.
Resources
George, C. (2025, April 19). Attachment, shame, and trauma. Brain sciences. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40309886/
Shapiro, F. (2016). EMDR and the treatment of complex PTSD. ShiftGrit Counselling Group. Retrieved from https://shiftgrit.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/EMDR_and_the_Treatment_of_Complex_PTSD.pdf