Sunday 23rd August
Over the last two weeks, we’ve spent quite a lot of time discussing what shame is, whether we can define it neatly at all, and why something painful isn’t necessarily pathological.
This week, I want to spend some time on what shame actually looks like.
This sounds relatively straightforward, except that shame isn’t always particularly easy to recognise. In fact, this was something I touched on in the first letter when I wrote that very few of us walk around thinking, “I am feeling shame”.
When we imagine shame, we might think about some of the more obvious experiences: heat, exposure, wanting to disappear, replaying something embarrassing we said, or becoming preoccupied with what somebody now thinks about us.
Sometimes shame does look exactly like that.
You say something stupid in a meeting and nobody responds quite how you expected. Your face gets hot, your stomach drops, and for a few fairly excruciating seconds you become painfully aware of yourself in the room.
Fuck.
There it is.
But one thing I have found particularly interesting while reading more widely for this series is how differently shame can present depending on which theoretical conversation we are entering.
From a self-conscious emotion perspective, we might look for the movement towards self-evaluation that we have already discussed. Something happens, and our attention moves towards ourselves.
What does this say about me?
Why did I do that?
What kind of person behaves like that?
Sometimes this can look less like feeling ashamed and more like investigation. We examine what we said, why we said it, whether we secretly meant it, what our motives were, and whether the event has revealed something about our character that we hadn’t previously noticed.
I see this clinically quite often in OCD. Someone has an intrusive thought and very quickly they become preoccupied with what having the thought might reveal about them.
Did I mean it? Why did I have that particular thought? Would a good person have thought that? What if there is a part of me that wanted it?
Of course, not every obsession is organised around shame. But sometimes underneath the question, “What does this thought mean?” is another question entirely: “What does having this thought mean about me?”
In those cases, shame may not be experienced as a clearly identifiable emotion at all. It can feel much more like an urgent investigation into the self.
Paul Gilbert’s work gives us another useful way of thinking about what we might be looking for. His work distinguishes between internal and external shame. Internal shame relates more closely to our own negative evaluation of ourselves, whereas external shame concerns how we believe we exist in the minds of other people.
Do they think less of me now? Have they noticed something? Do they think I’m difficult, inadequate, selfish, weak, ridiculous?
The distinction isn’t absolute because the two can become deeply intertwined. The judgements we anticipate from other people can become our own, and the judgements we already hold about ourselves can shape what we expect to find in other people’s responses.
Developmental and trauma-informed ways of thinking about shame complicate this further, because sometimes shame may not make the self louder at all.
Sometimes, the self becomes considerably harder to locate.
For people whose early relationships involved chronic criticism, humiliation, rejection, threat, neglect, or uncertain attachment, adaptation may have involved learning considerably more than “there is something wrong with me”. It may also have involved learning that certain parts of the self are safer when they remain less visible.
Your anger creates problems. Your needs overwhelm someone. Your disagreement threatens connection. Your distress is ignored, mocked, punished, or creates distress in the person you depend on.
Over time, adapting to those environments can mean becoming exceptionally attentive to other people while becoming less certain about yourself.
You might become very good at reading a room. You know when somebody’s tone has changed. You notice when someone is disappointed before they have said anything. You anticipate what somebody else needs and adjust yourself accordingly.
And yet, if somebody asks what you want, the answer may genuinely be difficult to locate.
“I don’t mind.”
“Whatever you want.”
“It’s fine.”
“I don’t know.”
There may be no obvious torrent of self-criticism here. Sometimes there may be very little feeling at all.
Trauma and dissociation research gives us another lens for understanding this. Shame has been associated with dissociative experiences, while developmental and interpersonal trauma can also involve emotional numbing, detachment and inhibition.
This doesn’t mean we can look at someone who is compliant, indecisive, people-pleasing or disconnected from their emotions and conclude that shame is the explanation (none of those experiences belongs exclusively to shame).
But shame may be one process involved when a person has learned that particular needs, emotions or expressions of self threaten connection, acceptance or safety.
In that context, adaptation may not look like consciously thinking, “There is something wrong with me”. It may look like becoming very good at preventing the parts of yourself that have previously been judged from appearing at all.
I think this is particularly important when we talk about recognising shame.
If we only look for the person thinking “I am bad”, we may miss the person who works hard to ensure they are never too difficult, demanding, angry, needy, visible, or too much.
And shame can move in other directions too. Tangney and colleagues have written about relationships between shame, anger, hostility and externalisation of blame. An unwanted evaluation can sometimes produce an urgent need to explain ourselves, reject the criticism, or establish why the other person has misunderstood us.
Is there an unwanted conclusion about myself here? Am I worried about a conclusion somebody else has reached? Am I trying very hard to prove, conceal, correct or prevent something about myself from being seen?
For three weeks now, we haven’t arrived at one precise definition of shame. Instead, we’ve started building a way of recognising it.
Sometimes shame is fairly obvious. We feel exposed, negatively evaluate ourselves, and become painfully aware of how we might exist in somebody else’s mind.
Sometimes it looks more like investigation. We become preoccupied with establishing what an event, thought, feeling or motive reveals about us.
And sometimes it may be worth noticing what has become less available: our preferences, anger, boundaries, opinions, or even our ability to locate what we feel in the first place.
Of course, this letter isn’t diagnostic. None of these responses ‘proves’ that shame is present. But perhaps that’s a more useful place to start than simply looking for “I am bad” as a primary marker.
So this week, rather than trying to decide whether something is or isn’t shame, perhaps notice what happens to your sense of yourself when something uncomfortable occurs.
Do you become more preoccupied with yourself?
Do you become preoccupied with how you exist in somebody else’s mind?
Or does your own position become slightly harder to locate?
As always, stay curious.
Shoni
Dr Shoni Marshall-Edwards
Clinical Psychologist · AHPRA PSY0004030165
Alba Psychology · Online · Australia and New Zealand