"Shame Loading" Is a Tactic of Abusers That Deserves More Attention

I know it’s a fact that I didn’t deserve to be abused by my father. I was a kind kid, and I always did my best to make him happy. Deep down, I’m confident that he knows this to be true. Yet, he refuses to practice the accountability that might have allowed us to maintain a relationship.Regret is a complex and painful emotion. In healthy situations, people acknowledge their mistakes and try to make amends. But in unhealthy situations, the pain can fester for decades.When there’s a situation of abuse against a person who is powerless and innocent, recognition of the act can threaten to erode the identity of the transgressor. How can they go on thinking they’re a “good person,” and recognize that they have selfishly inflicted pain upon a child?They can’t.So, rather than acknowledge their fault, they are inclined to heap undeserved shame upon the person they abused. Through shame loading, they can silence the torment of their own conscience. It allows them to perceive the target of their abuse as something less than human. Sponsor me for $5 a month ❤️ Sponsor me for $4 a month 🧡 Sponsor me for $3 a month 💛 Sponsor me for $2 a month 💚 Thank you! 💙This is different than concepts such as victim shaming or projection. In victim shaming, the general public blames a person for crimes committed against them. This is appallingly frequent in cases of sexual assault.Shame loading is more similar to projection, which is when an abuser accuses a target of the crime they have committed. Projection is designed to escape social responsibility. Shame loading is designed to allow the accuser to escape his own sense of self-loathing.At fifty years old, I’m the proud father of two teenage girls. My daughters are well-adjusted and happy. It brings me great comfort to know that they are still willing to sit down and talk with me. We enjoy activities together. We have a healthy relationship built on trust and respect.I still remember bringing my daughters home from the hospital. I was overjoyed to be a father, but I was also terrified that I wouldn’t live up to the task. By the time I was fifteen, I had already essentially stopped talking to my own dad. I didn’t wish to make the same mistakes he did, but it terrified me that fate might have other plans.My own father and I haven’t talked for twenty-five years. However, I still hear the whisper of his influence. Every now and then my path crosses with a mutual acquaintance, and more often than not they let slip whatever it is that my father is currently saying about me.For many years, he referred to me as “ungrateful.” That’s a common and convenient form of shame loading. Rather than address whatever underlying issues lead to the fact that I don’t want to talk to him, he focuses on disparaging my character. In this way, any conflict between us is assumed to be my fault rather than his.This helps him to maintain his self-image in public.I was recently reading Nobody’s Girl by Virginia Giuffre. There’s a moment where she describes how a man who abused her as a child, “found God.” At that point, this man demanded that she must beg forgiveness for the abuses she endured.It’s a troubling passage for anyone to read, but it provided me with some clarity about the abuser’s mind. I didn’t have to endure the horrific treatment that Giuffre was forced to survive. But in reading about her experience, I did gain some insight.I think many parents get so caught up in the present that they forget their children will someday come into their power. That was something I was always mindful of when I raised my own children. I held myself to a standard of accountability because it was the right thing to do. There are too many mechanisms in the United States that encourage parents to think of themselves as the “owners” of their children rather than their caretakers.Years later, when children grow up and they attempt to talk with their parents about the abuses they endured, the parents are often inclined to accuse them of lying.“You’re crazy. You have mental problems. You were always a trouble maker. We made sacrifices for you. We did the best we could. You are ungrateful.”Sponsor me for $5 a month ❤️ Sponsor me for $4 a month 🧡 Sponsor me for $3 a month 💛 Sponsor me for $2 a month 💚 Thank you! 💙It can be almost as painful to endure these lies as the original abuse. We call this part “gaslighting” but gaslighting is different than shame loading. Shame loading is what allows abusers to get the ammunition they use for gaslighting. They start building a baseless and malicious fantasy about their kids, and this fantasy become so fixed in their minds that they can’t perceive their real children at all.I think there’s a lot of evidence that abusive people endure mental breaks. Perhaps deep down, under all the lies they condition themselves to believe, they still have a conscience that torments them. If they remember abusing an innocent human being, they feel compelled to justify it in order to live with themselves.So, they dehumanize the targets of their abuse. They stop seeing them as they truly are, and replace all positive traits with negative ones. We see shame loading on a national scale whenever a person is killed by the police and the media instantly discusses whether that person had a criminal record.The message that people who indulge in shame loading try to tell themselves is that their abuses were justified because the survivor was a flawed object rather than a person.When this tactic is used by a parent against an innocent child, it’s devastating to the relationship.For my part, I could forgive the things my father did to me. But I’m not going to endure a reality where he insists all his actions were justified or provoked by essential flaws in my character that don’t really exist. On more than one occasion he’s pressured me to “seek help.”Frankly, I find it exhausting that anything I do is interpreted through the lens of failure. Because, in order to recognize my successes, he’d have to acknowledge his own transgressions.Sponsor me for $5 a month ❤️ Sponsor me for $4 a month 🧡 Sponsor me for $3 a month 💛 Sponsor me for $2 a month 💚 Thank you! 💙This is a rejection of the person in order to preserve the ego of the abuser. It’s tragic when you think about it.White supremacy is also an example of malicious shame loading, we see it in every aspect of American culture. When conservatives complain that teaching Black history makes white people feel bad about themselves, they’re basically acknowledging the crime of shame loading.The Black community did not deserve to endure the abuses of this country. Modern racists continue to try and punish the Black community because they’ve conditioned themselves to believe a malicious fantasy about innocent people. Even now, the United States refuses to face accountability for its crimes.This is a self-destructive mindset. Shame loading blinds people to truth. It requires a huge amount of mental energy to maintain. When it’s done on a cultural scale, it represents a complete waste of resources. The only way forward is to stop shame loading and resolve to correct our past mistakes, both personally and culturally.That starts with calling out instances of shame loading when they become apparent. We have to acknowledge that there are innocent victims, and we have to stop enabling the transgressions of unscrupulous men.You all make this newsletter happen! Thanks for your sponsorship! I have payment tiers starting at as little as twenty dollars a year.Upgrade at 30% offUpgrade at 40% offUpgrade at 50% offUpgrade at 60% offI’m so happy you’re here, and I’m looking forward to sharing more thoughts with you tomorrow.My CoSchedule referral linkHere’s my referral link to my preferred headline analyzer tool. If you sign up through this, it’s another way to support this newsletter (thank you).I'd Rather Be Writing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to I'd Rather Be Writing at walterrhein.substack.com/subscribe