On Shame

Someone tells you that you have made a mistake. You understand the correction, perhaps even agree with it, and still spend the rest of the afternoon feeling that something about you has been discovered. The mistake may be small enough to repair in minutes. Explaining why it feels so revealing can take considerably longer.

A useful distinction between guilt and shame concerns where the judgement lands. Guilt tends to concern what we have done; shame more readily extends the judgement to the person who did it. The experiences overlap, but there is a difference between believing an apology is needed and believing the apology will merely delay someone recognising what you are like.

Once that expectation becomes familiar, an ordinary conversation can require two kinds of attention. You listen to what the other person is saying while monitoring what your response might expose. A pause could reveal ignorance. A question might reveal dependence. Even accepting help can feel dangerous if needing it is one of the things you have learned to dislike in yourself. The other person may be having a fairly uncomplicated conversation. You are also managing how much of you is allowed into it.

Concealment can work well enough to become difficult to question. If keeping a need private prevents ridicule, privacy has served a purpose. Repeating it may eventually make the decision almost invisible. You may eventually describe yourself as someone who prefers to manage alone, without noticing how often wanting help still precedes the decision to go without it. What looks like a settled preference may partly be a precaution you have stopped noticing.

There are many ways of learning this. A child whose sadness is repeatedly mocked may become careful about showing it. Someone whose anger threatens an important relationship may learn to smile before they have worked out what they feel. These are possible histories, rather than explanations we can assign to everyone who seems guarded. Repeated experiences can make an expectation automatic, and later experiences can reinforce it, even when the people involved have changed.

The feeling can arrive before an explanation does: heat in the face, a lowered gaze, a wish to make the conversation end. A person may know that the remark was mild while responding as though their place in the relationship is being reconsidered. Understanding the present interaction and feeling safe within it are not always achieved at the same moment.

A particular difficulty appears when concealment succeeds. The person is liked, perhaps loved, but they know which parts of themselves they have kept out of view. Acceptance can then be attributed to the editing. Of course you think well of me; you have met the version I thought you could tolerate. The affection may be sincere, yet it has little opportunity to correct the expectation that made concealment seem necessary.

Achievement can become involved in the same arrangement. Being useful, attractive or exceptionally competent gives someone a reason to keep you around. Those things may also be valued for their own sake. The difficulty begins when a mistake threatens to remove your justification for belonging, so that an ordinary failure at work becomes evidence that the people close to you have less reason to stay. It is an exhausting amount of responsibility to give a successful day.

An image of complete independence or superiority can sometimes serve a similar protective purpose. It would be a mistake, though, to treat every confident or grandiose person as secretly ashamed. Research distinguishes narcissistic vulnerability from grandiosity, and their relationships with reported shame differ. The narrower observation is enough here: when a person's sense of acceptability depends on a particular image, information that threatens the image becomes harder to receive.

A correction then asks for more than a change of mind. Accepting it may feel like agreeing with a judgement the other person has never made. Someone says that your account of an event is inaccurate, and you hear that you are dishonest. You defend your character while they keep trying to discuss what happened. The conversation can deteriorate until their frustration seems to confirm the rejection you were expecting. That is one way the expectation can help produce the encounter it later cites as evidence.

There are also situations in which the danger is real. Some people do use vulnerability to humiliate, control or dismiss others. Keeping something private can be a sensible decision about a particular relationship. We need some way of distinguishing that judgement from the conviction that the concealed part makes us unacceptable everywhere. Otherwise, advice to be more open can ask someone to ignore evidence they have good reason to take seriously.

Shame itself is not confined to withdrawal. It can also prompt an attempt to repair a relationship or reconsider how we have behaved. The concern is what happens when the judgement spreads beyond anything specific enough to examine. If I have hurt someone, there may be something I can acknowledge and change. If being me is the offence, it becomes much less clear what would count as having done enough.

Reflection can become difficult for the same reason. Looking inward is supposed to help us understand ourselves, but a person already expecting to find something contemptible may experience it as another occasion for prosecution. Distraction and overwork can offer relief from that attention. The relief can make the pattern worth repeating, without telling us whether the original judgement was fair.

Recognising the pattern may not immediately change the feeling. Someone can explain why their need for comfort is reasonable and still apologise when they express it. Experiences in which a trusted person receives that need without contempt may gradually make a different expectation believable. So may learning to examine a failure without using it to condemn everything about oneself. Neither change requires offering unrestricted access to people who have handled that access badly.

I think the difficulty is that acceptance asks us to revise an explanation we may have used to make sense of years of experience. If another person can see what we have hidden and still want to remain close, we have to consider whether the concealment was protecting us from something present or preserving a judgement we learned elsewhere. That can be a difficult distinction to make from inside a relationship we are afraid of losing.

Being seen may therefore bring relief and suspicion at the same time. We can want someone to understand us while doubting their judgement when they do. For someone who already believes there is something unacceptable about them, rejection may seem to settle the matter: another person has finally seen what they suspected, and their leaving feels justified. It is that agreement with the imagined rejection that can make shame so difficult to answer.

Further reading: Shame, guilt and narcissism; Shame and prosocial behaviour.