Shame shapes identity long before diagnosis. Learn how it distorts the mirror, hijacks relationships, and why empathy, not confrontation, is the antidote.
Show Notes
Episode Details
Season (Thread): 2
Episode number: 15
Release date: 2026-10-22
Hosts:
Natasha Stavros, PhD — author of The Unmasking Diary and Burning Inside Out (coming to a bookstore near you in December 2026)
Sarah Liebman — licensed marriage and family therapist, ADHD-diagnosed, special interests all things neurodiverse
Audio Engineer and Composer: Noah Smith
Director: Linda Highfield
Duration: 00:30:09
Audience and tone: Educational, conversational, supportive; stigma-free exploration of neurodivergence, diagnosis, and self-understanding using personal experience as a case study
Summary [AI generated, human edited]: Building on Part 1 on the mental and biophysical health behind autistic meltdowns and shutdowns, this episode unpacks how shame shapes autistic identity, and what happens when it goes unaddressed in relationships. Shame is not a core emotion but a modifier that binds to core emotions (joy, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust), becoming “unhealthy” when it overwhelms the underlying emotion and drives survival reactions instead of reflection. For late-diagnosed autistic adults, identity often forms around distorted external mirrors of caregivers’, teachers’, and peers’ reactions to who they are and how their neurodivergent behavior is a moral failure, until a diagnosis offers a corrective lens. In relationships, unaddressed shame operates like a constant poop-throwing contest: everyone goes into survival mode, power dynamics entrench, and connection becomes impossible. The antidote to shame is empathy, not direct confrontation, and creating enough space to ask: whose shame is this, and where did it really come from?
Key takeaways about shame and how it shapes identity and relationships:
Shame is not a core emotion, rather it is a modifier that binds to core emotions (joy, sadness, anger, fear and disgust). It becomes destructive when it overwhelms the underlying feeling and drives survival reactions instead of reflection.
For late-diagnosed autistic adults, identity is often built around distorted external mirrors that read neurodivergent behavior as bad character; a diagnosis can be the first tool that makes it possible to question that story.
Direct contact with shame causes shutdown in anyone – neurodivergent and neurotypical; the clinical antidote is empathy that creates space from the shame, followed by the deeper work of tracing whether it’s intergenerational, emotion-bound, or never yours to begin with.
[This section is AI-generated, human edited].
Resources and References
Lewis and Stevens (2023) conducted interviews with 32 autistic adults with reasonable differentiation in identity, however – notably white (as opposed to people of color) – and found that autistic meltdowns and shutdowns may outwardly involve:
Feeling overwhelmed by informational, sensory, social, or emotional stressors;
Experiencing extreme emotions, such as anger, sadness, and fear;
Losing logic, including challenges with thinking and memory;
Grasping for self-control, in which participants felt out of touch with themselves;
Finding a release for emotions, often described as an “explosion” of external behaviors or self-harm; and
Minimizing social, emotional, or physical harm by avoiding triggers or self-isolating when possible.
Participants shared examples of internal meltdowns, in which external characteristics of meltdowns were camouflaged. Participants also suggested that meltdowns may serve a functional role in regulating emotions and making one’s voice heard (Lewis and Stevens 2023)
What is shame?
As an emotion: shame is a modifier of basic emotions: happy, sad, disgust, anger, fear, and surprise that can result in people’s behavior moving between attack self and attack other, and denial or withdrawal (Lyon-Rubin method). Neuroscience argues that emotions represent a constructive process as part of a “meaning-making mechanism that integrat[es] incoming sensory inputs from our external senses and the body, i.e. exteroception and interoception.”
As an emotion and a social construct, shame is recognized as being both adaptive and maladaptive in the process of forming identity. Shame shapes identity through core memory formation and has potentially long-term effects on psychopathology like anxiety and trauma. Shame affects more than our psychology, it affects our relationships through influence on sociocultural factors like social and moral norms, stigma and discrimination, public humiliation, collective conformity, and cultural variability. It also affects institutions through healthcare culture, burnout, leadership, medical education, organizational secrecy, and public policy.
The Unmasking Autism Diary: Memoir Excerpt on Autistic Shutdown In Relationships
It’s been really hard lately. I’ve been short with Noah. I was thinking about why.
I think it’s because I resent him. I resent him for not truly understanding or internalizing that the autism diagnosis changed everything. Sure – it gave an accurate name for an experience that I have had for so long, and I have always been autistic. I haven’t changed – at least he doesn’t think so.
That’s not how it feels.
It feels like I have been holding myself for decades, treading water not to drown as I watch the boat with everyone else sailing off into the distance. The diagnosis isn’t just a term to define it, but it is a life saver tossed out to save me. As I grab hold, my body relaxes. They pull me into the boat, drag me onboard, and my body melts with exhaustion.
What is frustrating is that on the outside, I don’t look sick. Although my behavior has changed how I navigate the world and what I do. My husband seems to see this and assumes that I am fine. That my leave from work is just a vacation. That I should somehow continue to take on the emotional and mental tax of running the house and accomplishing things. That my to-do list should get resolved and that I am somehow available for connection.
I can’t help but think that if I had a physically visible illness he would understand what recovery looks like, but when it is mental, there seems to be no compassion for the cost, just unspoken resentment that I have changed and that I’m somehow using my diagnosis as an excuse to not be present.
In reality – I’m teetering on the brink of full shutdown. The only thing keeping me from falling is knowing that my daughter depends on me. She is only four and she needs me to be here to help her grow and navigate the world. Somehow, that helps me muster the energy to do the tasks I need to keep her safe and healthy. Outside of that, I’m completely shutting down.
I think about calling people, but I can’t.
I see the list of things to do, but until it is urgent, I can’t.
Procrastination has never been a habit for me – now it feels like survival.
I’m tired of trying to communicate that I don’t have capacity because every time I’m met with more demand and expectation on how to compose myself.
I am trying, I really am, but what do I do when a full night’s rest only gives me enough energy to get my daughter out the door to go to school? And then – I come home and collapse with exhaustion. My bones are heavy. My thoughts are clouded. Words feel like effort.
And my husband, he interprets this as disinterest, lack of love.
When I try to explain that things will settle once I reduce load, enough to recover, and that right now- it feels like the relationship is an additional load. Navigating his feelings and reactions to me. I’m not disinterested, I’m overwhelmed. My body is so tuned in that it is shutting down for me because I can’t cope.
AI-generated Show Transcript
Disclaimer
This podcast is for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute counseling, psychotherapy, or mental health services. Listening to this podcast or communicating with the host and guests does not form a therapist-client relationship. The information here is not a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your own mental health professional with any questions you may have regarding a mental health condition.
Introduction: From Neuroscience to Identity — What Shame Does to the Self
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:00:00]`
Welcome to Following the Threads. I’m Natasha Stavros, and I’m Sarah Liebman. Today’s episode is the second in our two-part series on autistic meltdowns and shutdowns. Last week we covered the biophysical and mental health underpinnings — and the role accommodations can play as the antidote to shame-based reactions. I shared a story about a recent meltdown and how I saw my husband’s reaction change: he was scared, he didn’t know how to help, and I got scared of what that meant. So eventually I shut down. This week, we are going to talk about how meltdowns and shutdowns shape our identity — and subsequently our relationships. Let’s dive in.
What Is Shame? Core Emotions from Pixar’s Inside Out and Shame Binds
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:01:00]`
Shame is one of our most important core emotions — though the field of core emotions has a lot of debate about what exactly belongs on that list. A really accessible lens for this is the Pixar movie *Inside Out*, which depicts core emotions as joy, sadness, anger, and disgust — based on the work of Paul Ekman, who connects facial expressions and physiological responses to universal emotions. We’ll link to that research in the show notes. One of the most useful ways to understand emotions in the context of neurodivergence and shame is that we have a sensory experience, we perceive that experience in some way, and then we react to it. In the meltdown story Natasha shared last week — seeing her husband’s fear, perceiving that as a threat, and shutting down for safety — that sequence is the whole model in action. Shame comes in after the core emotional experience: it requires the cognitive capacity for self-consciousness. And even babies have some version of this capacity — there’s a classic Tronick still-face experiment showing babies checking with themselves about whether it’s safe to try to get mom’s attention. These capacities are innate and built in.
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:04:51]`
So what I hear you saying is that if you imagine those *Inside Out* emotions — anger, sadness, joy, disgust — as the core emotions, shame is the reactionary response that emerges from experiencing them.
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:05:11]`
Yes — and what’s kind of mind-blowing is that in the Lian-Rubin method, they talk about how shame binds to other emotions. You can have a joy-shame bind: when you feel joy, there’s immediately a shame reaction. So shame doesn’t just attach to disgust or sadness — it’s a modifier of any core emotion. And it can over-modify. It can become the thing we have the most experience with — that sense of feeling joy while waiting for the other shoe to drop.
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:05:55]`
That maps really well onto healthy versus unhealthy shame from last week. Healthy shame is when it’s an appropriate modifier — it doesn’t dominate. Unhealthy shame is when it takes over the core emotion and becomes bigger than it, driving the reaction to an extreme. And what people usually encounter when they first hear the word “shame” is that collapsing distress and despair — which is the unhealthy end. We say things like “that politician has no shame” — what we really mean is they have no capacity to reflect and grow. The healthiest shame is exactly that: it prompts reflection and growth. The unhealthy version drives blame, withdrawal, attack. They’re in reaction to their shame rather than in relationship with it.
How Shame Shapes Identity: The Mirror Problem
*When the external world consistently misreads neurodivergent behavior as moral failure, the internal identity gets built around that misreading — until diagnosis.*
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:07:36]`
Shame forms identity because we are, especially early in life, reliant on our caregivers to tell us whether what we’re doing is working to build relationship or not. If it’s going well, we get valid information. But if it’s not going well — say, a mother with postpartum depression who gives the same flat reaction regardless of what the baby does, or an agitated depression where everything upsets her — then the child’s shame responses are being shaped by inaccurate data. The building of the self requires an accurate enough mirror. We know ourselves through how others know us, how we see ourselves through their eyes. When that mirror is distorted, identity forms around the distortion. And for a neurodivergent child who is highly impulsive or physically active, the mirror they often get from school and family is: you don’t care about others, you never calm down, I can’t trust you, you break everything. The internal experience might be one of curiosity, or even of feeling genuinely uncomfortable and out of control. But because the mirrors reflecting them don’t have those little magnifying edges that say “here’s what’s actually happening,” the self-perception forms around what comes in most.
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:11:34]`
In my case, what was happening is that the external identity was: you’re extremely capable, you can do all these things — and therefore we hold you to a level of excellence in every area of your life, including social, which is probably my biggest challenge. Because I couldn’t meet that social standard, I was cast as a bad person. Mean. Not feminine. A bully. My internal identity didn’t resonate with that story for a long time. But the external shame happened so frequently that it became self-reinforcing. And I know this because it led to a lot of suicidal ideation. It influenced how I viewed myself — and it wasn’t until my diagnosis that I was able to question whether my internal identity was anything other than the external one that had been appointed to me through shame.
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:13:05]`
And what gives me chills thinking about it is exactly that moment of diagnosis. Like: oh, this was actually me all along. I was — I am — a regular human who had regular intentions and goals. And I was alone with that, because what came out on the outside was either people lumping you into this category of “she’s capable at everything,” which meant that when you failed socially, the assumption was malintention. When we go into that magnifying mirror in therapy and say — you had needs that were invisible. Invisible to you, invisible to the culture, invisible to your parents. And what gives me hope, in a pretty crazy world, is how many people are now stopping to think from the perspective of their child, integrating their own shame history, and choosing reflection over projection. That’s the difference that matters.
How Shame Shows Up in Relationships — and What Happens When It Goes Unaddressed
*In every relationship — romantic, professional, familial — shame operates mostly on the inside. We’re usually responding to our own shame rather than to what’s actually happening in front of us.*
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:15:39]`
When we were talking about this a few days ago, the image that became clear to me is that shame operates mostly on the inside. We’re often responding to our own shame rather than to what’s actually happening in front of us — like getting gas and spilling it, and immediately going to “I am such an idiot, this never happens to anyone else.” (That was actually from *Zoolander*.) In couples, workplaces, every kind of relationship, we’re all essentially throwing our shame reactions at each other. This person brings out my attack-self. That person makes me want to eat candy at work and not show up. I want to crawl into a ball. Our shame is invisible to us and also incredibly powerful.
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:17:17]`
Right — and one of the expressions that Sarah and I use a lot is: people flinging their poop. You’re just throwing your poop at each other. And at some point it’s: go sit in your own dirty diaper. I don’t need to pick up your poop right now. You need to wipe your own butt. So what happens when shame goes unaddressed in a relationship — when we just keep flinging?
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:18:03]`
What’s happening inside each person is that they’ve gone into survival distress — regardless of their trauma history. And when you’re in survival, it becomes a dominant protest: I need to belong to survive, and this shame is a threat to that survival. Some people collapse. Some people turn into Macy’s Thanksgiving Day–sized balloons. But essentially, when everybody goes into survival, there are winners and losers, there’s no pause, no reflection, and there’s scarcity. In a workplace especially, a leader or a boss makes or breaks whether people can pause, reflect, make mistakes, or be confused. And it goes directly into power dynamics.
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:19:19]`
And this is a little plug — my book *Burning Inside Out* comes out January 12th, 2027, with pre-sales open now. Chapter three unpacks power dynamics and game theory. In the academic literature, power in relationships has been understood as a zero-sum game: when one person has more, the other has less. And so the poop-throwing really does produce a victor — but as Sarah said:
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:20:04]`
Everybody is covered in poop. Did we really win here? War is the biggest version of that — oh great, I killed more of your people than you killed of mine. We both lost, but I lost less, so I’m great. And it plays out in couples, in parenting, in estrangement. Estrangement, I’ll say, can be a very good survival strategy — sometimes it is just a power play and you’ve got to get out of the fling zone.
How to Productively Work With Shame — The Antidote and the Path Forward
Direct contact with shame causes shutdown. The antidote isn’t confrontation — it’s empathy. And empathy creates the space to ask: whose shame is this, anyway?*
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:21:00]`
So: we all have shame, we’re all throwing it around. How do you productively work with it?
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:21:07]`
The most important thing to remember — and I hope I said this last week too — is that unlike those core emotions from *Inside Out*, shame is not something you can simply sit with and work through directly. It’s too intense. Direct contact with it causes a shutdown. It’s like radioactivity: a little bit of it helps treat cancer; a lot of it gives you cancer. Shame operates in that same framework. The antidote to shame is empathy. Think of shame as mortar — it fills in the gaps. When we can work our way back to the moment the shame was on its way in and bring genuine empathy — “wow, that was such a misunderstanding of your intentions” — the person gets a little space from the shame, and the rest of the story starts to come back in. From there, the work deepens: whose shame is this? Is it intergenerational? Is it bound to another emotion — like, I was too excited at my birthday and my mom gave me that look that said, shut it down? The goal is to stop throwing our shame reactions at each other and start meeting each other as people. Shame reactions will happen. But if we can name that as a meeting place rather than a battlefield, there’s a lot more hope for people connecting here instead of on all these simultaneous planes of painful garbage.
Closing: What We Covered and What’s Coming Next
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:23:27]`
Thank you, Sarah — that’s a perfect transition to set the stage for next week’s episode on what disability is, what it costs, and how that affects family dynamics. Please like, share, or comment. We look forward to getting to know you.
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:23:44]`
See you next time.