Toxic Shame I met with her many times. Being chronically ill, she ended up in the hospital often. Regardless of what we started talking about – her health, her grandchildren, her attempts to find a place where she could be at home – we always ended up talking about shame. For most of her life, people who claimed to loved her behaved as if they hated her. They told her she was stupid, ugly, worthless, and hopeless. They beat her, they sabotaged her efforts to achieve, they denied her the right of personhood. According to them, she couldn’t do anything right. Certainly she couldn’t “be” right. Her burden of shame…