Many people seem to need to feel shame, however crazy that sounds. Allow me to make sense of this seemingly nonsensical statement. Common sense seems to suggest that shame is a terrible feeling to have and most people avoid it like the plague. But sometimes the feeling of shame is better than the alternative.
Guilt, shame, humiliation and embarrassment
First, I need to define shame and other elements that are cousins to shame: guilt, embarrassment, and humiliation. I have previously written about shame and its feeling-based cousins. These four concepts are related to some degree but drastically different in their cause, operation, and ultimately in their elimination. These four concepts, which we should call “feelings” have different emotions associated with them:
- Guilt: sadness
- Shame: fear
- Humiliation: anger
- Embarrassment: joy
All of these feelings have to do with the individual but they also have social implications and social history:
- I feel guilty, which is sadness, when I realize that I have done or said something that has been harmful or hurtful to someone or to some piece of property.
- I feel shame, which is anger, when I believe that I have done something that is wrong in someone else’s eyes. Shame leads to hiding because it seems to the individual that some unknown person thinks that there is something wrong with him.
- Humiliation, which is fear, is a purposeful act of denigration that the individual has received, always in a social situation. Humiliation has at its root that there is something wrong with the person.
- Embarrassment, which is joy, because one can laugh at him/herself for something that they have said or done.
An important fact is that there is some kind of restraint in the expression of the four basic emotions associated with these feeling. In other words, in all of these experiences the individual feels called upon to keep the underlying emotions to him/herself. Sometimes, this keeping these feelings private is for protection because the environment is not conducive to expressing the underlying emotion. Humiliation, which occurs mostly in childhood social situations always produces anger in the individual being humiliated because the social situation surrounding humiliation does not allow for anger. It may be even danger to express anger. Thus, the humiliated person will keep this anger private, which may be to his benefit and safety in the moment but detrimental to him in the rest of his life.
The relationship of shame to humiliation
Shame, i.e. the feeling that something is wrong with me, is not a natural feeling. It comes most directly from having been humiliated in childhood (and to some degree later in life; but primarily in childhood and somewhat in adolescence). Importantly, humiliation is a conscious, purposeful attack from another person who demeans you in some way. This is why humiliation is about a real event, a real person, a real situation. The person who humiliates me usually (but not always) is purposely seeking to demean me in some way, perhaps the way I speak, walk, or my family of origin. I remember feeling humiliated when I was doing a show-and-tell presentation, perhaps in about fourth grade. While I was speaking, someone said that my zipper was down. I immediately zipped my pants up only to be greeted with a classroom laughing at my situation. In this case, the kids did not intentionally humiliate me, but I “felt” humiliated because I could do nothing to prevent their laughter and my consequent thinking that “there is something wrong with me.” A later experience occurred to me in high school after football practice when we were all showing together. While I was showering, I heard a good deal of laughter from the other boys in the shower room, turned around and saw that someone was urinating on my leg. This individual happened to be the strong football tackle on the squad while I was the rather weak football end, and not particuallry good at football. In both of these experiences I felt humiliated, i.e. something is wrong with me” kind of feeling with one of them being unintentional and one clearly intentional.
I just spent some time with a patient about his lifelong feeling of shame, i.e. not being good enough. As we explored the history of his feeling shame, he recalled how his mother was the primary instigator of this feeling. Evidently, she had a distinct tendency to criticize all of her children, whether for being a bit overweight to how they spoke to the grades they got in school. My patient, Tom frequently felt inadequate in her presence. Unfortunately, this experience of being (unintentionally) humiliated by his mother led to a feeling that there was “something wrong with him leading him to a life where he was constantly on guard for potential criticism.
Humiliation in childhood leads to the experience of shame in later life because the person has remained fearful of being humiliated again, which is tantamount to feeling that there is something wrong with the person. While humiliation is real coming from a real person, shame in imaginative and is coming from an imagined person. A shame-inclined person has experienced the feeling of humiliation accompanied by the fear that something is intrinsically wrong with him/her. If I have not been humiliated in life (which almost never occurs), I will not be inclined to shame. With Tom, as we tried to unpack how he developed this shame-based life, it became obvious that his mother was “projecting” her own felt inadequacy (for some unknown reason) onto her children who she saw aa a reflection of herself.
There is no value to humiliation and there is no value to the shame that results from either of these experiences. However, when shame gets into one’s psyche, it is very hard to dislodge. Hard, but not impossible. We will deal with this momentarily. Before we examine the cure of shame, we need to look at the very different concept of guilt.
Guilt vs shame
Guilt, sometimes called “real guilt,” results in the feeling of sadness. Guilt looks like shame because of the restraint of emotion, but in fact, it is substantially different. Shame is fear-based, i.e. afraid of being shamed or humiliated, whereas guilt is sadness-based. We try to help people to decrease shame, hence decrease fear (usually fear of judgment) and become more guilt-based. That might sound crazy, i.e. “to help people feel more guilt. Feeling more guilt is simply feeling sad. Feeling shame and the accompanying fear is substantially different from feeling guilt, which is sadness-based. The process of feeling guilty is quite simply looking at what you said or done that was hurtful, harmful, or simply wrong. If that person allows him/herself to feel guilt, namely feeling sad, this sadness might remain silent or it might be expressed. If I am able to assess my behavior, seeing my successes and failures, as well as the value or disvalue of what I said or done, I will most certainly become a better person. My character improves, and quite possibly, I might simply learn to keep quiet, think before I speak, or speak carefully. I might govern what I do in the same way by looking at what I did and seeing small or large errors, thus learning to be a better person.
I have suggested that both guilt (real guilt) and embarrassment are valuable for a person to feel. The important thing about embarrassment is that I laugh at myself for something I said or did that did not hurt or harm anyone else. I just displayed my natural, human tendency to say or do things that look funny. If I can laugh at myself, I will not feel ashamed of what I did. Perhaps had I been able to laugh at my zipper being down and then zipped up, I would have laughed at my myself along with my classmates. I could do no such thing in the shower room when I was attacked by another boy. Embarrassment is like guilt in a way because the experience of guilt is about oneself, not about other people, or their real or imagined judgment of him/her. I laugh at myself at having done or said something that was odd or foolish without feeling odd or foolish. I can look at myself as a normal human being who said or did something that was odd in some way.
Simply put, guilt and embarrassment are about me, what I did, what I said, and the results of my behavior. In both cases, the emotions associated with these two feelings, sadness and joy, are a reflection of how I look at myself. If I feel guilt, I naturally feel sadness, which if allowed to run its course, ends. Likewise, if I feel embarrassment, I laugh at myself, see that I am a person inclined to accidents of all kinds as all of us are. I have written previously about how a good normal day is filled with about equal amounts of joy and sorrow because of the successes and failures I have in a typical day. Most of the time these are simple successes, like pouring coffee into my cup, while others are simple failures, by spilling that same coffee on the floor.
Shame and humiliation and their accompanying emotions of fear and anger, ideally occur seldom in a day’s time. Unfortunately, people with a good deal of shame or humiliation in their system are often unable to feel simple guilt (sadness) and simple embarrassment (joy) without finding themselves deteriorating into shame or humiliation. Both of these experiences have to do with what someone else has said or done to me or what they might say about me. Shame is entirely imaginary, whereas humiliation that caused my inclination to shame was quite real. In summary, guilt and embarrassment are good because they cause me to examine myself and improve. Shame and humiliation are bad for me because they cause me to hide myself for fear of judgment or danger. Importantly, all four of these feelings have to do with love.
Love that underlies guilt, shame, humiliation, and embarrassment
People who are familiar with my writing know that sadness, fear, anger, and joy are the four basic emotions all humans have and they serve different purposes. I suggest that we have pairs of emotions, namely:
- Joy and sadness
- Fear and anger
We call joy and sadness “love-based emotions” and fear and anger as “defense-based emotions. But the story is actually a bit simpler than that. Indeed, when we feel anger or fear, we are usually in some kind of defensive posture. It is a little harder to see how joy and sadness are related as “love-based.” Let me explain by suggesting that all of these basic emotions are actually based on love in some way:
- Joy: I love something that I have in the present
- Sadness: I love something that I have lost in the present
- Fear: I love something that I might lose
- Anger: I love something that I have lost in the past
We are interested in creasing love in our lives and the lives of the people we serve. Thus, we think it is important to see that love is at the center of all emotions, and if I can get a handle of the love part of emotions, I will be able to understand, value, communicate, and govern my emotions. Furthermore, I will be able to do the same for the people around me. It is easier to see that joy and sadness are love-based, but it is much harder to see how shame and humiliation are love-based. What was happening to me when I was humiliated in the classroom and in the shower room? I lost something in both cases. What did I lose? I lost a portion of myself. We might say that I lo lose a bit of self-esteem, but I want to be careful about saying that because self-esteem is really self-understanding that then migrates into self-acceptance. Humiliation interrupts this process by suggesting that there is something wrong with me. Was anything wrong with me in the classroom with my zipper down? Not really. Furthermore, was there anything wrong with me in the shower room with someone urinating on me? Not really. But these situations caused this almost immediate feeling that there was something wrong with me. In both of these circumstances I loved myself, but quickly when I was attacked (one intentionally, one unintentionally), I immediately didn’t love myself. Had I had the wisdom that I now had, I would have cried in both circumstances, but had I cried in these situation, it is likely that I might have been humiliated even more. I chose to feel shame, however odd that sounds. And then this “something is wrong with me” stayed with me to some degree, the classroom experience for an hour, the shower room experience for years. Feeling shame protected me, however odd that sounds. I thought I “needed “to feel shame.
The need to feel shame
Why in the world would anyone want to feel shame, much less the original humiliation that caused the person to feel afraid or angry? Simply put, it is easier to feel shame than to feel the underlying humiliation and accompanying “there is something wrong with me” feeling. Feeling that there is something wrong with me is devastating. When I feel this feeling, I would truly want to not live. It is, in fact, intolerable to feel this thing. So when I come into feeling this feeling some kind of inadequacy, I protect myself with feeling shame. It is like, “If I feel this shame thing, no one else will be able to shame me.” In other words, I do it before someone else doing it. In so doing, I am in control of the feeling of shame and not the other (imaginary) person.
This is why shame is so hard to root out. It served me when I was a child when I was humiliated in fact and it shields me now when I imagine that I might be humiliated. However visible this feeling shame might feel to me, in fact, it is a way of my hiding from someone else’s potential shaming or humiliating me.
In some cases this self-shaming comes out is some kind of masochistic thing, like self-harm., More often, however, it is simply an internal mechanism where I hide my feelings, go into myself, and try to soothe the attack that I suppose someone is ready to inflict on me. This is a self-protective mechanism that protects me from perceived harm. It comes due to one or more of the following reasons:
- I would rather shame myself then feel someone else’s shame. In fact, what I am actually shielding is myself from the humiliation I suffered as a child. So, what can I do to get over shame? By the way, if I can get over feeling shame, I will more frequently feel guilt.
- I feel shame to justify my behavior. A patient of mine admits to lifelong “self-esteem” issues” and readily admits to feeling a good deal of shame. But the shame he feels is not so much from childhood as it is from his irresponsible behavior over his life. Specifically, he has not managed money properly and has had a tendency to avoid being responsible in other practical and professional matters, this despite the fact that he is well liked and appreciated in his profession. Simply put, he would rather feel shame than be responsible.
- I would rather feel shame than feel guilt. If I feel shame, I can wallow in “there is something wrong with me” rather than feeling appropriate guilt and accompanying sadness for what I have done.
- I might actually feel shame as a kind of badge or diagnosis, something like feeling, or perhaps even saying, “I’m just a fuckup” rather than actually seeing one or two things that he could actu8ally do to improve his lot in life
- I might feel shame because it is familiar and has served me for many years. This is a little like having a badge of shame but this operation is continuing to do what shielded me in early childhood.
Getting over shame
It might seem that I have painted a picture that suggests shame is unavoidable and unfixable. It is almost entirely unavoidable because we are living in such a shame-based society, but it is most certainly fixable, i.e. healable. The process is the same for any difficult feeling:
- Admit to the feeling
- Understand, best as you can, the origins of the feeling
- Allow the feeling to be there. Call it what it is: shame, i.e. “there is something wrong with me.”
- Note your tendency to hide from it because you feel ashamed of yourself in some way.
- Unfortunately, you will look what you said, what you did, what you didn’t say or didn’t do, how you look together with how you want to look.
- This is a very painful process, but it is the only way you can get through shame, get over it, and find that truly “nothing is wrong” with you.
Doing this all by yourself is the beginning but it is not enough. You need other people to understand your feeling of shame, ideally person or persons who can hear your feelings without judgment, encouragement, criticism, or suggestion. This is a very hard person to find. You probably need a competent therapist. Talk to this person as much as you can about what you think the origins of your feeling ashamed of yourself is. You might need also to talk to them about less than good ways you are coping with shame that I have outlined above.
Find guilt, real guilt, guilt that is specifically related to what you said or did, or perhaps didn’t say or do. Feel sad about your actions. The more you find, feel, and finish (real) guilt, the less you will feel shame. Real guilt pushes out false guilt, which is tantamount to shame. You might find it valuable to write your thoughts down in a kind of journal, but you will ultimately need to share these very private feelings with a competent therapist or wise friend.
As your life become freer and freer from shame, you will be able to tackle the mistakes you make in life by feeling guilt instead of shame. Eventually, the “something is wrong with me” will be replaced with the combination of, “I did the right thing and feel happy” and “I did the wrong thing and feel sad.”