A resource that helped my understand and overcome some of the psychological effects of Thor’s abuse is TheraminTrees’s “overcoming malignant shame” video.
TheraminTrees differentiates between shame and guilt:
Abusers use shame to control their targets. They use it to make their targets feel worthless, defective, or corrupt.
Shaming is an abuse that we’re taught to inflict on ourselves. Targets absorb the hypercritical voices of their abusers so that, eventually the abusers don’t have to say a word.
TheraminTrees on Shame:
Given all the distortions associated with shame it’ll come as no surprise that susceptibility to shame is strongly linked to a range of psychological symptoms and disorders including depression, anxiety, PTSD, eating disorders, substance abuse, self-harming and suicidal behaviour. The evidence is clear.
With its focus on a specific act, guilt serves various psychologically adaptive functions helping to facilitate positive resolution. Meanwhile, with its focus widened to the whole person shame serves various maladaptive functions sparking aggressive defences that block positive resolution and lead to destruction and disorder.
Targets of abuse often have a susceptibility to shame actively instilled into them in their earliest years through constant subjection to shaming. This can develop into toxic or malignant shame where the shame becomes a more or less perpetual state permeating the target’s thoughts, actions and experiences.
For the shame-bound individual the process of overcoming abuse can feel like an assault course because even the steps they take towards health can inspire shame. Of the many kinds of manipulations abusers use on their targets — from gaslighting to infantilising to double binds — shaming is one of the most pernicious.
Different abusers will inject different strains of shame into their targets based on their own hang-ups. Some abusers are obsessed with germs and dirt, neatness and order. Some are preoccupied with body image, sexuality, gender roles, social status. But in all cases the underlying message is the same: there’s something fundamentally wrong with you.
Some abusers convey this message directly, openly telling targets they’re worthless, rotten, degraded. Many abusive religious groups plump for this option teaching targets to grovel to gods and ghosts to forgive them for their wretchedness.
A more indirect method is to set impossibly high standards. Targets are often expected to exhibit superhuman qualities like infallibility, omniscience, telepathy. They’re expected to know exactly what to do and say at any given moment and punished when they inevitably fall short. In healthy environments, it’s understood that each of us is born fumbling and unprepared into a strange and bewildering world. Mistakes are expected as a natural part of learning to navigate that world and seen as a source of growth. Malignant shaming environments make few allowances for inexperience. Mistakes are taken as proof of innate stupidity, thoughtlessness, or deliberate troublemaking. Instead of growing, the target’s world shrinks.
Over time, the abuser’s message is internalised changing from ‘there’s something fundamentally wrong with you’ into ‘there’s something fundamentally wrong with me’. This is where shaming surpasses manipulations like gaslighting and double binds.
Shaming is an abuse we’re taught to inflict on ourselves.
Targets absorb the hypercritical voices of their abusers so that eventually the abusers don’t have to say a word. The shame-bound individual is like a fox that’s been trained to hunt itself to exhaustion while the hounds sit back and enjoy the show. What’s more, the fox often continues to hunt itself long after the hounds have gone. Unlike gaslighting and double binds which stop the moment we cut our abusers out of our lives shame can persist long after we’ve ditched our abusers. Even after their death.