Sunday 16th August
Last week we started with a question that was difficult to answer on purpose:
What exactly do we mean by shame?
We briefly looked at a few different positions on shame: shame as a self-conscious emotion, shame as something relationally and socially determined, and evolutionary accounts that ask why humans might have developed the capacity for shame in the first place.
This week, we’ll start to make things a bit more concrete. We’ll start exploring the movement between an event, and the story we internalise about it.
Imagine you’re having dinner with a few friends. You’re halfway through telling a story when someone turns to the quieter person at the table and says: “Wait, what were you saying before? I missed it”.
That’s it. Nobody has criticised you or has asked you to stop talking. The conversation continues on very naturally. But you notice the internal noise gets louder:
Fuck, have I been talking too much?
I have, haven’t I?
I always get overexcited and do this.
Maybe I’m not a good listener overall.
They probably find me selfish, or exhausting.
Nothing particularly large happened. Someone else was simply brought back into the conversation, and yet we have extracted a large amount of information about ourselves from it.
Importantly, though… maybe you were talking to much (ouch, I know). Perhaps your friend was waiting to hear the rest of the other person’s story. And somewhere along the way, your self-diagnoses became lengthier. The story got meaner.
This movement has been particularly important within research on self-conscious emotion. Researchers including June Tangney, Jessica Tracy, and Richard Robins have explored the different ways we self-evaluate following mistakes, failures, and social transgressions.
You may have heard one version of these ideas reduced to:
Guilt is “I did something bad.”
Shame is “I am bad”.
This distinction is useful at a glance, but this shorthand can make the boundary look considerably cleaner than human experience tends to be.
Guilt and shame can occur together, and shame can also be quite brief. You might experience a pang of global negative self-evaluation (“I’m such an idiot”) after misinterpreting someone and responding more bluntly than you’re comfortable with. And be eating a cinnamon scroll twenty minutes later in your lunch break. Identity has not been defined ongoing, and you’ve decided on when and how to deliver your apology.
The presence of shame doesn’t necessarily tell us that something has gone psychologically wrong. Sometimes feeling bad about ourselves is informative, and this is where another conversation about shame becomes useful.
Other people’s evaluations have mattered enormously to human beings. Evolutionary accounts, including work by Daniel Fessler (and separately, Paul Gilbert’s social position accounts) ask why species as dependent on other people as ours, would have developed such painful sensitivities to social evaluations in the first place.
Our ability to cooperate matters. Belonging matters. Connection matters.
And sometimes discovering that we have violated an expectation held by people who matter to us, needs to be uncomfortable enough for us to pay attention. So I am wary of the idea that shame is inherently evidence of dysfunction, or that all shame is ‘toxic’ that should be ‘healed from’ (thank you, social media).
Shame can be painful without it necessarily being pathological.
Imagine you have behaved selfishly towards someone you care about. You both realise it, and you feel exposed, uncomfortable, ashamed. That discomfort may be signaling a value-breach. You apologise and repair what you can, and try to behave differently ongoing.
Sometimes, things can get complicated. Behaving selfishly may become:
Why did I behave like that?
Am I selfish person?
Do I do this more than I realise?
Maybe other people can see something about me I can’t.
I don’t deserve friendships or relationships.
I might be a harmful person.
Notice how the story evolves?
Unlike my earlier example about the cinnamon scroll which highlighted temporal shame, sometimes our shame stories evolve and become chronic and pervasive over time.
And I don’t think the answer to shame is to insist that nothing we ever do has any bearing on who we are, or that what we do isn’t that impactful. Sometimes there is a pattern, sometimes feedback is useful, and sometimes we need to repair something.
The clinical question I am interested isn’t:
Does this say something about me, or nothing at all?
Rather,
How quickly am I deciding what it says?
How much of me does it come to explain?
How fixed does that explanation become?
When our stories get bigger, often we follow them. We start behaving in response to it. We self-monitor more carefully. We over-explain. We over-apologise. We over-compensate. Or we withdraw altogether.
Suddenly shame isn’t simply an unpleasant feeling following an uncomfortable moment. It can develop rigid protocols ongoing.
And importantly the standards we evaluate ourselves from don’t appear out of thin air (we’ll spend considerably more time with this idea later in this series).
Families, professions, communities, and cultures help teach (and reinforce to us) what is admirable, embarrassing, selfish, respectable, excessive, acceptable, and shameful.
Sometimes those standards help us live alongside one another and protect relationships and communities. Sometimes they exclude, stigamitise, or demand things from people at enormous cost.
We are still in the introductory part of this series, so we will explore these ideas once we’re further along. But if you take anything away from this letter, it’s that sometimes shame can signal a genuine mistake, a values breech, or the need for repair; sometimes it’s temporary, and sometimes it’s part of that same old story travelling beyond the moment requires.
As always, stay curious.
Shoni
Dr Shoni Marshall-Edwards
Clinical Psychologist · AHPRA PSY0004030165
Alba Psychology · Online · Australia and New Zealand