Chronic Shame May Link Childhood Emotional Abuse to Destructive Thought Patterns

A 2026 study suggests chronic shame may connect childhood emotional abuse with rumination, emotional avoidance, and difficulty accepting painful feelings in adulthood.

Mind

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A new study in the British Journal of Psychology examined how childhood emotional abuse may be connected to unhealthy patterns of thinking and emotional coping later in life. The researchers focused on shame as a possible link between early emotional mistreatment and what they call aversive cognitive perseveration, which includes brooding over negative experiences, trying to push away unwanted feelings, and becoming upset about having those feelings at all. The study involved 93 university students who completed measures of childhood maltreatment, shame, and these thought patterns, along with a laboratory task designed to trigger feelings of shame. The results mainly supported a relationship between higher shame and greater use of these negative thought patterns. Childhood emotional abuse was associated with these patterns indirectly through long-term or trait-like shame, rather than through the immediate shame response measured in the experiment. An unexpected finding was that participants reporting moderate to severe childhood emotional abuse showed lower immediate shame and perseverative thinking after the laboratory rejection task, which the researchers cautiously suggested could reflect altered stress responses. The researchers stress that more work is needed to understand these relationships and how they might inform psychological treatment.

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