In toxic divorce situations where a vengeful mother tries to turn her son against the boy’s father, it has the lethal effect of confirming his Oedipal fantasies, with lasting damage to the boy’s sense of self and his respect for authority.
Category: Shame/Narcissism
Idealizing Your Baby
Idealizing their baby helps parents cope with the difficulties and deprivations of parenting; more importantly, it conveys a sense of its own “beauty” to the infant, planting the seeds from which authentic self-esteem will later develop.
Self-Consciousness and Performance Anxiety
Extreme self-conscious and performance anxiety (or stage fright) involve the projection of your internal critic into an external audience of observers, each one of them as critical as you are.
The Shame-Based Divorce
When couples who have idealized one another and their marriage divorce, they often engage in a battle about who is the “winner” and who the “loser” who must carry all the shame.
The Biological Roots of Basic Shame
Using some of Freud’s more speculative ideas as a starting point, this article discusses the biological roots of shame as the ‘felt knowledge” that one’s development has gone seriously awry.