The Myth of Normal 28

worked for a decade, and was being treated for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Although he found the book fascinating, he wrote, “I resist the opportunity to blame my mother. I’m a piece of shit because of me.” I could only sigh: self-assaulting shame so easily moonlights as personal responsibility. Moreover, he had missed the point: there is nothing in my book that blamed parents or advocated doing so—in fact, I explain over several pages why parent-blaming is inappropriate, inaccurate, and unscientific. This man’s impulse to protect his mother was not a defense against anything I had said or implied but against his own unacknowledged anger. Stored away in deep-freeze and finding no healthy outlet, the emotion had turned against him in the form of self-hatred. “Contained in the experience of shame,” writes the psychologist Gershen Kaufman, “is a piercing awareness of ourselves as fundamentally deficient in some vital way as a human being.”[13] People bearing trauma’s scars almost uniformly develop a shame-based view of themselves at the core, a negative self-perception most of them are all too conscious of. Among the most poisonous consequences of shame is the loss of compassion for oneself. The more severe the trauma, the more total that loss. The negative view of self may not always penetrate conscious awareness and may even masquerade as its opposite: high self-regard. Some people encase themselves in an armored coat of grandiosity and denial of any shortcomings so as not to feel that enervating shame. That self-puffery is as sure a manifestation of self-loathing as is abject self-deprecation, albeit a much more normalized one. It is a marker of our culture’s insanity that certain individuals who flee from shame into a shameless narcissism may even achieve great social, economic, and political status and success. Our culture grinds many of the most traumatized into the mud but may also— depending on class background, economic resources, race, and other variables—raise a few to the highest positions of power. The most common form shame assumes in this culture is the belief that “I am not enough.” The writer Elizabeth Wurtzel, who died of breast cancer at age fifty-two in 2020, suffered depression from an early age. Her childhood was traumatic, beginning with a secret deliberately kept from her about who