Pernicious Pathways from Childhood Emotional Abuse to Depression Symptoms: The Roles of Trauma-Related Shame, Fear of Self Compassion, and Gender

Childhood emotional abuse is a highly prevalent, yet understudied, form of childhood maltreatment, associated with a wealth of negative outcomes. One such outcome is traumatic shame. Such traumatically-valanced shame experiences may promote aversions to self-kindness and self-compassionate behavior. As this aversion, or fears of self-compassion, is frequent in childhood emotional abuse victims, we sought to explore whether the relationship between childhood emotional abuse severity and depression symptoms severity were serially mediated by trauma-related shame and fears of self-compassion, and whether identifying as either a man or woman, may moderate such associations. A diverse community sample of 467 adults within the U.S. completed an online survey, and questions relating to the constructs of interest. Analyses demonstrated gender as nonsignificant moderator, however the indirect effect of childhood emotional abuse severity on depression symptom severity through trauma-related shame and fears of self-compassion was significant. The indirect effect of childhood emotional abuse severity on depression symptom severity through trauma-related shame was also significant. Findings indicate that the experiences of childhood emotional abuse to be similar for men and women, and that trauma-related shame is a common, important mechanism by which depression symptoms are explained.

•Upon Internal Review Board Approval (#02439r) a sample of adults in the U.S. completed measures for each assessed construct.

•The sample was highly diverse as near even amounts of adult men and women participating, minority racial and ethnic identities were oversampled.

•Using IBM SPSS Statistics (Version 28) zero-order correlations were obtained.

•The Process Macro (Model 92; Hayes 2022) was used to assess the conditional direct and indirect effects through robust heteroscedastic consistent standard errors (HC3) of bias corrected confidence intervals at 95%, around 10,000 bootstrapped samples.

•Gender was assessed as a dichotomous moderator, and other types of childhood maltreatment severity, as well as correlated demographic variables, were included as covariates in analyses.

Future research and interventions should investigate and target trauma-related shame and its relationship to relationship to outcomes of childhood emotional maltreatment, in service to alleviating the many pernicious sequalae that follow for victims of such.

Lastly, though there were multiple noteworthy findings, there are several limitations to the present study.

• The cross-sectional nature of the study, therefore temporality, as well as causality, cannot be determined.

• Retrospective assessment of childhood maltreatment may be prone to forms of recall bias, though a study by Hoeboer et al., (2025) determined CTQ subscale scores to be consistent in predicting depression symptoms across time, robust to mood-states.

• Trauma-related shame was not explicitly assessed in relation to childhood emotional abuse, so there may be other contributing factors.

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The present study was approved by the Miami University Internal Review Board (#02439r)  for Human Subjects research, and the was compliant with the Open Science Framework (OSF).