I’m reading this book that talks about how children in a healthy home environment develop a healthy sense of shame (that is, a conscience and feeling that certain behaviors are wrong) while many children who are raised with a lot of parental anger or negative comments develop “toxic shame” where they believe there’s something wrong with THEM.
Got me thinking about how EVERY time physical discipline of a child (spanking, whipping, beating) comes up somebody jumps in and says “well I was just a horrible child, I needed to be whipped, I was bad, I had to be punished.”
As someone who works with kids and rarely finds a genuine naughty kid who can’t be reasoned with, I was always wondering what made those people so convinced they were horrible, and here’s the answer: those people developed a sense that they were naughty and bad to the core not because of their behaviors (which they should have learned are changeable) but because of the way their parents taught them to view themselves.