Many adopted and fostered children experience high levels of shame. Shame is a complex emotion that feels desperately uncomfortable for children and usually children will learn to limit behaviours which cause shame. This usually develops within the parent-child interaction.
How it Happens Within Secure Attachments
The parent and child share an attuned connection. Something occurs that causes a break in this attunement, for example, the child pulls the dog’s tail and the parent sets a boundary (“you must not hurt the dog”). This causes the child to feel shame and they may become upset. The parent repairs this break by showing love and acceptance of the child (for example, “I still love you, sorry mummy shouted”). The child learns that it is their behaviour that is unacceptable and they feel guilt for what they have done.
How it Happens in Relationships where Trauma may be Present
However, adopted and fostered children usually have little experience of relationship repair and will often have experienced harsher, frightening or rejecting responses to their behaviours. For these children, their sense of shame continues to grow and they experience themselves as being “bad” or “wrong” rather than their behaviour being unacceptable. This can overwhelm their sense of self leading shame to take over. This shame can be triggered easily, and the child develops strategies to avoid it such as lying and blaming.
As these children have had little experience of relationship repair, they may develop the belief that a break in a relationship means the relationship has ended and they will struggle to know how to fix this. They hold on to the sense that they are “bad” and will do all that they can to avoid you seeing this “badness” inside them. For these children relationship repair is so important, but we can often struggle with this as an adopted or fostered child can appear to hold no guilt for their actions. Your child may struggle to apologise as this brings them back into their sense of shame, which feels so overwhelming and uncomfortable for them. They will struggle to show guilt as they are likely to have had little opportunity to understand that it was their behaviour which was not acceptable and not them as a person.