I will attempt to break down the feeling of shame because I am drowning in it and I need to figure out where it came from; if you're experiencing shame maybe this will help you figure it out. (Osdd symptoms mentioned heavily throughout the post, tw for torture and brainwashing mentioned and deconstructed.)
My worst shame is that I wasn't 'strong enough' not to break during the abuse, meaning, after enough of berating, beating, gaslighting, psychological terror and threats, I would break down psychologically, stop resisting, and accept the abuse, believe their words. This is basically a method of brainwashing; you torture someone until they're wounded and vulnerable to the point where they can't resist you, then you plant ideas in their head that they cannot go against anymore, to oppose those ideas would mean re-living the torture that broke them, and humans typically don't want to re-live that or try to go thru such pain again just to break the brainwashing.
Breaking during torture is almost inevitable, for every human being, even adults will break and become unable to endure seemingly un-ending pain or the threat of death or even worse torture if they don't comply. Young children will break into parts and then some part of them will comply with the abuser in order to save that child's life. That's what happened to me, in order to endure the constant cycle of being broken, I split into parts, one part would oblige, another one would carry the pain of the breaking, and another one would still be resisting, not understanding that we were broken already.
The part that broke, and the part that carries the pain of breaking, are in so much shame they cannot stand what happened to them. I'm trying to understand why they cannot accept that there was no other way this could go - if you're a child, and a violent adult corners and tortures you, there's no way to avoid breaking. If the child in this situation has someone who could potentially rescue them - parents, caretakers, a loved person, then they would call out for help, and expect to be rescued. The shame of breaking would then fall on those who failed to make sure the child doesn't get hurt, it's on them that the child was exposed to a dangerous individual who would torment them. Then the child doesn't have to feel that amount of shame, unless the caretakers, are also deciding that it's the child's fault for breaking.
But if the caretakers are normal they would know that a child would break under enough pressure and they would accept it was their responsibility and their shame for failing to prevent it. The child wouldn't have to carry that burden alone. If caretakers were to apologize and to take responsibility and their failure to prevent this, the child's burden of shame could be alleviated, because they would understand someone else was supposed to take care of this.
In my case, there was nobody who would potentially rescue me, so the burden of not breaking was on me alone, nobody else would care or accept blame if I was broken. So in essence I had to make sure to either be strong enough to not break at all (impossible) or to accept that I would be repeatedly broken and I would have to carry the shame for it as well, because the person doing the breaking would simply put that burden on me during the brainwashing phase. It didn't feel survivable, being broken over and over, so I am guessing I had to increase pressure on myself not to break in order to survive, simply because there was no other way, no rescue, nobody would make sure I live thru this. So that's where that insane amount of shame comes from - if I break, I will die, so I can't break, I have to be stronger and resist (impossible). And I guess I believed I could do the impossible in order to survive abuse, and if I couldn't, then I would die.
That kind of shame can only happen when there's nobody else taking responsibility for a child and they know they have to survive on their own, and pressure to survive torture and not break gets sch high stakes it feels like the survival depends on it.
But obviously, I did survive it, and parts of me managed to resist the brainwashing, while other parts remained brainwashed, as there was no other way to survive or resist it. So why is the shame still there? The stakes are gone, but it doesn't feel that way. The feeling of 'if I break I will die' continues to follow because it's unprocessed trauma and it does not get cognitively recognized as what it is, we can't learn from it, it's not stored in the long-term memory, it cannot fade.
It doesn't matter if we broke as a kid. I mean, it matters in the way that it caused us pain, being brainwashed and easy to abuse; but it doesn't matter shame-wise, because we didn't die, there's nobody to judge once abusers are gone, it wasn't fatal, we came back from it, the brainwashed parts are here but that's not our doing, we did nothing shameful, we didn't break because we were 'weak', it was only because we were human.
Only thing that really sucks is that nobody cared about us during that entire process, nobody tried to see what happened to us, to comfort us or even just imply that it was wrong to do this to us, or to acknowledge that the burden of 'not breaking' was not on us to bear. It's like seeing someone setting a piece of paper on fire then blaming the paper for being on fire. Maybe if you prevented that person to light it, then it wouldn't be on fire now, and maybe the paper had nothing to do with it except existing, which is not something you should blame it for. It didn't even make itself.
Writing this down helped me understand it and ease the feeling of shame a little bit, so I will publish it in hope that someone else is helped; I'm sorry I couldn't write it in a way that a normal person would perfectly get it, since I am splintered in parts and I have to look at it that way. We broke and we survived and it wasn't fair but it also wasn't our fault. We were thrown into fire and told off for burning. That sentiment can fuck off.