Do you avoid having people over because of the intense shame you feel about the state of your home?

Shame shows up in many ways and is a direct result of childhood and life experiences. It’s an emotion that comes up automatically when you’ve experienced trauma. The intensity, how long it lasts, and your ability to transform it depend on many factors. Because it’s such a big topic, I’ll be writing about it for the next few months.

Over the years, I’ve seen shame come up in all of my clients. Sometimes, just having me in their home triggers so much shame that they struggle with having me back. The embarrassment and the sheer, intense vulnerability of being seen are just too much. When you go out and see friends or allow yourself to be vulnerable to a trauma coach, they won’t see your home. That part of you can stay hidden. Being in someone’s home is highly personal, and seeing their physical space adds another visible layer of the effects trauma has had.

What is Shame?

There are many definitions, each describing the emotion as being intensely painful and uncomfortable. Brene Brown states that “shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.” It comes up when we are seen in a way that we don’t want to be seen.

Shame is a primary response to a traumatic event (too much, too soon, too fast, too intense, for too long, or not enough). It can dissipate with love, care, and support. It can also turn into toxic shame if we continue to go out of our way to hide instead of changing or continuously having others make us feel bad about it.   Our inner critic becomes even stronger around the unwanted parts, and this constant protection puts you on high alert,  getting stuck in sympathetic mode (fight or flight) or dorsal (freeze or fawn).  Reconnecting to your body and breathing and decoupling from your mind are the first steps to taking your power back and dissolving the toxic shame that lies within you.

What does it look like?

There are common patterns that show up with shame: feeling like you are not good enough or not worthy. Brene Brown reminds us that “shame drives two big tapes in your mind: ‘Never good enough’ and ‘Who do you think you are?’” These inner voices are a direct result of being shamed for your behaviour, feeling shame because of a traumatic experience that has happened to you, or both. The effects trauma has on someone often outweigh the traumatic experience itself.  The role of shame is to protect, however, when it turns into toxic shame it ends up making you feel like there is something inherently wrong with you.

When this cycle begins at a young age, because of family or community dynamics, you can’t express yourself authentically because it’s not safe. If you do you will be critized, shamed, punished or scapegoated. This then creates another level of shame because you learn to  shame yourself on top of being shamed by others (the inner critic).

Our emotions create feelings that are then followed by actions, beliefs, stories, and behaviours. What usually follows is hiding out and making ourselves small. It binds to other positive emotions and dulls their intensity s. Fear and anxiety increase, creating a wall of protection. For some, this looks like being chronically defensive, emotionally unavailable, or developing harmful coping mechanisms like drinking, drugs, binge-watching TV, emotional eating, and shopping.

Oh my, this is a lot to carry! Luckily, there are ways to release shame and transform it into healthy shame and empowerment. I will explore this a bit in this blog and go deeper in next month’s blog.

The family dynamics of shame

Often, families with unresolved trauma and dysfunctional ways of coping become shame-based family systems. Shame is meant to control others in the family through blaming. Making a family member the black sheep makes it easier to draw attention away from oneself. It’s a way for someone to deny their own shame. When this happens often to a family member, they begin to attack themselves and develop an inner critic.

This toxic shame never goes away. It’s not like other flash emotions (like anger) that come and go quickly,and that signal the need for a behavioural shift. Instead, it lives inside your head and your heart, dictating every move out of fear because if you are not on guard, then you are likely to be attacked. This pattern of protection and the inner critic cause you to disconnect from yourself, others, and the world. This bridge between our interpersonal world and the outside world is lost, and you are left alone on an island of protection. This bridge can be rebuilt through setting boundaries, healing from the pain, and learning how to love yourself.

What is healthy shame? Healthy shame stands on guard instead. It makes us feel bad when we have made a mistake and encourages us to seek responsibility and repair.  As normal human emotions, shame is short-lived and less intense. You recognize the harmful behaviour, but don’t judge your entire personality. There is no longer an inner critic that dominates. It becomes ok not to be perfect. We can own up to our shortcomings versus going out of our way to hide them at all costs. Rather, the feeling of shame becomes a small nudge to pay attention and to check in if you are in alignment with your values.

How does it create clutter in your life?

The different ways shame shows up also play a role in the clutter it creates in your life.

Fawn/Cling

As innate social beings, we have a strong desire to belong, be valued, and be accepted by others. As children, our survival depends on it. If our basic needs of love, boundaries, and safety are not met, we develop unhealthy coping mechanisms as adults. This looks like being frozen and withdrawn in anger because expressing it was unsafe. There isn’t a sense of inner strength that you can do things on your own, meaning clinging to others no matter how bad it is.

With people pleasing and any other form of unhealthy coping, you don’t focus on what you need for yourself. Anger is an emotion that tells you someone is crossing your boundary. If you ignore this and constantly focus on others instead of yourself, things get left aside and build up. Everything from your health, personal finances, your career, and even your belongings. Taking the time to keep yourself in order is last on the list because, most likely, you are also enabling someone else’s irresponsibility. Reconnecting to yourself, your power to say no, and getting to know your needs are the first steps to shifting this pattern.

Attack Self

This is where the strong inner critic comes in and demands that everything you do is “perfect”.  It’s a sense that there is something “wrong” with you and that you’re not good enough, others know better than you, you are bad and you deserve it when something bad happens to you.

What does this look like when we are talking about a cluttered life? For one, way too many products or items to fit a very specific purpose. For example, having a significant amount of cleaning products each basically doing the same thing..  This perfectionism can also look like having an extremely clean home where everything perfectly placed but when you open up the cupboards they are crammed with every item possible to appear perfect or to fill the void that you feel inside of you.

Withdrawing

Often if you attack self and tend to fawn, it’s likely that it’s paired with withdrawing. Here you go within and feel sorry for yourself and spend a lot of time ruminating. This creates a lifestyle of isolating and distrust. From this isolation, lack of connection and support you then lose faith and hope.

Not being present for yourself also means not being present in your spaces. Like with most coping strategies, things pile up. Here, it’s because you literally can’t because you go so within that likely you are in dorsal and frozen, making it hard to get anything done. Guilt and shame then take over, creating a vicious cycle of wanting to get things done but being frozen with shame and fear of not doing it perfectly; you do nothing.

Getting support from someone you trust and slowly rebuilding your sense of self so that you can trust others is a wonderful way to slowly disarm the inner critic.

Denial

If you live in denial, then you are disconnected from yourself and your spaces. There is a sense of numbness, and this often leads to addictions. All to keep that numbness going because to feel is too much. It also means pretending that nothing happened or downplaying it, whether it was something that happened to you or something you did to someone else that caused harm.

This disconnection causes you to literally not see the mess. I’ve had many clients who don’t notice how cluttered and chaotic things are until we’ve cleared and organized things, and they are able to see the difference. Often, they are used to having things all over the place, having grown up in homes similar to theirs. I know for myself that sometimes it’s hard to see how bad things are until I’m removed from a situation or I experience something totally different.

Learning how to connect to yourself, others and your spaces allows you to take ownership of what has happened and what is happening in the present moment.

Attacking others

Instead of going within to attack, lashing out allows a person to not take responsibility and also means denying that anything needs to be addressed. Often, this is paired with rage, violence, contempt, and gaslighting. Being disconnected in a way that you are constantly playing the victim and everyone is against you.

This outward deflection creates chaos in your life and an avoidance of dealing with anything. Likely, you have someone who cleans up the mess after you, literally and figuratively, meaning you don’t have a true sense of your responsibility and someone else’s. You also don’t see the chaos and clutter you create because someone else is taking care of it for you. It’s time for a wake-up call and drastic steps to calm your inner anger and soothe your possibly broken heart. Getting support to release anger in a healthy way is a wonderful first step to shifting your energy to a more loving, responsible way of being.

First Steps to Releasing and Shifting Shame

1. Take some time to identify the areas where you feel shame in your everyday life.
2. See if you can make the connection to the experience of where it started.
3. What shame reaction did you develop from that experience?
4. How does this shame reaction affect:
   1. Your relationships
   2. Your spaces
   3. How you spend your time
   4. Your ability to create the life you want
5. Who can you unpack this shame and coping mechanisms with?
6. What part can you let go of?
7. How can you transform the emotion into empowerment and also change the story of what you think and feel about yourself?
8. What activities, hobbies, practices, books, and exercises can you do to build your sense of self and your worth and be more connected to your power?
9. Now, is that story true of what someone said about you? Or was it them dumping their shame on you?
10. What do you want to tell yourself now?
11. Celebrate the changes you’ve made!

Releasing shame takes time, and with it, you can also release the clutter in all areas of your life, making life flow with ease, joy, and grace.

Photo by Romario Roges on Unsplash

Tonia Cordi is a transformational life coach and teacher who works with people who want to change, grow and heal. Her 5 step process allows individuals to declutter their life, reconnect with themselves, their life purpose and heal from trauma. You can learn more about her approach on website or youtube channel.

Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Tonia Cordi

Tonia Cordi is a decluttering trauma coach and teacher who works with people who want to change, grow, and heal. Her five-step process allows individuals to declutter their lives, reconnect with themselves and their life purpose, and heal from trauma. You can learn more about her approach on her website or YouTube channel.

What does this have to do with life clutter? TONS! In my work decluttering with people over the last nine years, I noticed that most of the time, their clutter is caused because they are reacting from a place of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. It’s those reactions that become habits, they have a story connected to them which began from a challenging or traumatizing experience. In order to cope with that experience, your nervous systems went into protective mode, and you developed a way to feel safe. Most of us cycle through the same reactions over and over without ever stopping to ask questions or examine if those reactions serve us or are necessary anymore. 

Your F Type and your Nervous System

Our nervous system has an innate automatic response that allows us to react in four different ways. It’s what keeps us safe and aware of a threat, and it judges our ability to respond to danger. When you are outside of your window of tolerance, and your nervous system is on alert for perceived danger, you will move into an f type. Your nervous window is your ability to deal with stress without going into sympathetic (fight or flight) or dorsal (freeze or fawn). Being able to know when you are in these states is the first step to stopping your reactionary cycle and finding better ways to respond that don’t create life clutter.  

The 4 f types:

Flight: You see a perceived threat and flee or go into hyperactivity or seek distractions.

Fight: You suddenly respond aggressively to something threatening.

Freeze: You feel helpless, so you numb out, disassociate, or collapse.

Fawn: You respond to threats by trying to please or help to appease the attacker at the cost of your own needs.

These can also be defined in how we feel and how we behave in the diagram below. Each is a piece of information for us to see how our reactions to feeling unsafe create our clutter.

When we are triggered by situations consistently, we can slip into one of the f types regularly. For example, many of us live a stressful life of working long hours, are always on the go, and never sit still long enough to know how we actually feel. Living in this activated state and being stuck in flight, as noted in the example above, means that you have not completed the cycle to get back into the ventral vagal. It all starts with a trigger (i.e. situation, environment) that pulls you out of the ventral vagal, where the nervous system perceives the situation as a threat. If you are not aware of the state you are in and don’t have daily activities or strong habits that automatically get you back into ventral vagal, you are unable to calm your nervous system. This ongoing activation causes illness through chronic stress and, as a result, reactionary behaviors that create clutter, chaos, and overwhelm in your life. 

Getting to know the different f types, what it looks like when you are outside of the ventral vagal, and connecting it to past trauma or challenging experiences will help you gain clarity and clear your life clutter. 

For example, if you tend to be in flight mode, you most likely start a task and don’t complete everything, from folding clothes to tidying the kitchen. What is the trigger that pulls you away from that task? Is there an overall sense of anxiety making it hard for you to stay still long enough to finish something? Does this task remind you of a previous experience where you were unsafe so you want to avoid those feelings and emotions? Asking yourself these questions when you are calm and supported is a great way to get some clarity on your reactions and clutter.

Trigger vs Flashback

I want to take a pause here and note that the information I’m providing is very brief. This is a huge topic, and my intention is to get you familiar with your f type and start noticing when you are out of ventral vaga. To learn more, I highly recommend this article on the nervous system and what happens to your body and mind. Pete Walker’s book “Complex PTSD From Surviving to Thriving” has great info on the f types as well as how to better understand trauma and tools to overcome it.

I want to explain the difference between a trigger and a flashback. A trigger is the initial situation, environment, or action that causes your body to set off an alarm because it’s similar to a past trauma. The state the body goes in, the emotions, thoughts, feelings, and the story you tell yourself are the flashbacks. The flashback makes you feel like you are in the past, and often, you may not even realize this. You may or may not have a story about it; it can just be a sensation in your body and a feeling. It’s like pushing a button to start a machine. What the machine does is the flashback. 

This can last moments or up to weeks. It is here that we act from a place outside of the ventral vagal and switch into a f type” that comes with feelings, behaviors, and beliefs that have become ingrained in us. These ingrained patterns are coping mechanisms that are specific to us and developed when we originally had a traumatic or challenging experience. 

Getting To Know Your “F Types” And The Clutter They Create

Regardless of what f types you are in, I’ve noticed when working with clients they all have difficulty making a realistic plan, they feel overwhelmed and a sense of shame. In some way there is a sense of holding onto a belief, items, a way of completing a task and a resistance to change. Use the table below to help you identify what state you are in, how you feel and how it might show up in your day to day life.

Supporting Your Nervous System To Stop Your Clutter-Creating Cycle

Staying connected to your ventral vagal means you feel grounded, centered, connected to yourself and others. Find ways to strengthen this state and understand the root cause by widening your window of tolerance through different daily practices, activities and exercises. I created the process below to help you get started as well as a list of daily practices to help you strengthen your nervous system.  

1. Becoming aware that you are outside of your nervous system window.
   • How does it feel in your body? Ie. racing heart, tight stomach
   • What is a red flag for you to signal when you are outside of the ventral vagal? Ie. black-and-white thinking, intense emotions
2. Slow down and breathe.
   • Connect with the part of your body where you feel activated
   • Breathe into that space and observe and allow any stories, thoughts, feelings, or beliefs to flow freely. Do not act in this state!
3. Ask yourself if possible:
   • How am I feeling?
   • What do I need?
4. Use your go to strategy list to get back into ventral vagal. Different strategies will be better than others depending on the situation.
5. Once you are back in the ventral vagal and can make the time to reflect, ask yourself:
   • What triggered you?
   • What emotions came up?
   • What needs were not being met? How can you get that need met?
   • What can you do next time instead of reacting?
   • What support can you get to help process and heal from the trigger ie. therapy, trauma coach, healer, friend etc.
   • What belief, behavior, or reaction did you become aware of that creates clutter in your life? How can you replace it with something that keeps you grounded in ventral vagal and supports your needs?

Strategies to Strengthen and Get Back Into Ventral Vagal

• Singing
• Humming
• Om
• Breathwork
• Shaking
• Tapping
• Meditation
• Physical soothing touch
• Ear exercises see video
• Movement – i.e. walking
• Nature – grounding with a tree or barefoot
• Talk to someone you trust
• Cold shower or cold dip

When you are “outside your window” and unable to think clearly, it’s great to have a go-to list with your most effective strategies to remain in the ventral vagal. Practicing daily exercises that strengthen your ventral vagal allows you to embody these strategies to the point that you don’t have to think when you do go outside the window. Making this a part of your life can be very transformational not only in terms of how you feel but also in terms of having a more organized, calm, and confident life. 

Tonia Cordi is a decluttering trauma coach and teacher who works with people who want to change, grow and heal. Her 5 step process allows individuals to declutter their life, reconnect with themselves, their life purpose and heal from trauma. You can learn more about her approach on website or youtube channel.

Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Tonia Cordi

Tonia Cordi is a decluttering trauma coach and teacher who works with people who want to change, grow, and heal. Her five-step process allows individuals to declutter their lives, reconnect with themselves and their life purpose, and heal from trauma. You can learn more about her approach on her website or YouTube channel.