Quitting the Shame Game
CW/TW mention of treatment trauma
I have spent much of my life in and out of treatment centers searching for healing for my eating disorder, so much so, I wrote a blog about the issue of “compliance” last month. In order to share more of my story, I want to focus on one of the main feelings I experienced during treatment: shame.
As I continued to leave and return in this revolving door cycle, shame infiltrated my mind and convinced me that the inefficacy of prior treatment was a "me problem” and that no one else experienced it. My shame also continued to be fueled by perverse power dynamics that involved ostracizing and humiliation in an environment that claimed to be safe and affirming. I also experienced many moments where my personal trauma was used as a “teaching moment” rather than a private and confidential individual experience.
I was expected to publicly challenge my history of trauma, and when my nervous system was overloaded with fear (in a freeze state), I would be ridiculed for not “choosing recovery.” Dissociation and flashbacks were labeled as intentional behavior — oftentimes I would be ignored and treated in a cold manner afterwards. The clinical director found it to be an opportunity to further publicly announce their opinion that this suffering was all my own doing.
We as clients were trained to monitor the actions, speech, and behaviors of others around us. Group interventions and being told, “I don’t want to be in relationship with you”, was the go to line. This would be encouraged and sometimes initiated by staff themselves. At times the whole process group would entail deconstructing every little detail and behavior of a client. This often resulted in client-on-client abandonment. There was praise shown to patients who would police their peers.
While the shame game was strong and they were able to police our behavior, what they lacked this whole time was what we needed the most — empathy, care, and the understanding of the intersection of the trauma that many patients come in with.
This happened daily, on both a public and private level.
My first experience was at a residential program in California, where it was drilled into me daily that this was all my choice now. Coming in with complex trauma and this being my second round at this location, they came down hard.
I was trained to turn my pain inward to motivate change. I learned to keep my head down, eat the food, do my assigned trauma exposures, and swallow my fear. I progressed – on paper – but at what cost?
The clinicians at this location were not trained in exposure therapy practices. My treatment plan was created from scratch based on their own beliefs that I could plow through my trauma if I just tried hard enough.
“You are just as bad as your abuser” and “you too are a perpetrator” the clinical director would scold me. It was a twisting of my arm into pseudo-recovery.
If I just do the most fearful things related to my history of trauma, I will not be bad, I thought.
The clinical director once taunted me in a process group, and I quote: “Muah, muah, muah. You’re just in love with your trauma. God forbid you be happy for once!” I felt my face turn bright with humiliation and then quickly drain with shame and a deep desire to disappear forever. To this day I am haunted with this person’s voice. I felt completely wrecked, broken, and defective in that moment. That is a despicable way to initiate change in a suffering person. The feeling still carries on to this day and is a constant battle between identifying what is my voice versus my abusers.
My very vulnerable exposure therapy around sexual abuse was made into a group activity. We would sit in a circle and my peers would repeat the words that scared me most in sing-song fashion. Each time I didn’t do the terrifying thing, I was met with the same verbal reprimand in the guise of a reminder: this was “my choice”.
The clinical director would laugh and call me “psychotic” repetitively, and asked, “did you find your people in the psych ward?” Many staff witnessed this abuse and were silent. It was brushed off as tough love, as this was a clinical director who has been employed and revered in the field for decades.
Now, I am left with damage I must work through every day. Voices that are not mine. I fight them. This clinician once told me "I am god, I am love.” Is shame love? Is shame care?
Shame results in great internal struggles, which surely is not the proper support we seek when we entrust our lives to these facilities. How many more of us are going to seek care in what is sold as a safe haven in order to heal years of pain and trauma, only to be met with similar traumas in facilities that are advertised as the best of their kind?
Clients are vulnerable to abusive power dynamics. It was a kind of self-preservation to believe the harsh lies, because where else can you go when you are so medically, emotionally, and physically compromised? My time at this treatment center was no different than the dynamic of an abusive relationship.
To effect meaningful change, we need a complete overhaul of these systems, and those in power and these for-profit corporations must be exposed.
I want to note here that I, alongside others, have been met with attempts at censorship and a cold demeanor from this treatment center when we have tried to speak up about this.
But enough is enough. I, along with countless others, carry the trauma we endured at facilities like this one. We did not leave “treatment” cured. We left hurt, broken and traumatized. At some point the cycle must come to an end and that will only happen if we are able to speak up and are not silenced by shame.