Teaching Kids to Sidestep Shame

On many occasions during my work with him, I imagined how one of my clients, a boy I’ll call Sam, likely got up on cold mornings and walked into the kitchen of the cramped, subsidized apartment he shared with his mom and younger siblings. As he poured out a bowl of cereal he was reminded by his mother that he’d forgotten to let the cat back in the house “again,” and that he must be “stupid” because he’d been told to do so enough times that “any moron” could remember.

After one such morning with his mother, Sam sat across from me during a therapy session and, after a long pause, looked up. “Did you know that the rings of Saturn are full of rocks and boulders?” he asked. Sam was a storehouse of knowledge, though his lack of participation in class at the therapeutic school where I work, and his apparent allergy to any homework papers, suggested otherwise. Science, in particular fascinated him.

“No, Sam,” I said, “I didn’t know that. Pretty cool that you do though. You’re pretty good at holding onto fact like that.”

As if he’d just bit into the juiciest of lemons, Sam smirked away my compliment. It just didn’t fit with how he’d learned to think of himself. A round peg in a misshapen hole.

“It looks so beautiful and perfect from all these millions of miles away, but it actually is a worthless, orbiting trash heap that gets reflected by the sun.” Sam poked at a wad of silly putty I kept on my desk. He stabbed it, voodoo doll-style, with a push pin from the bulletin board above my desk. His story about the cold shoulder treatment he’d received from his mother that morning, the sudden recital of a lesson about the brutal deception of the “worthless trash” orbiting around Saturn, and his silly putty-gouging were obviously bound together, like a plastic tie around my kitchen garbage.

Sam, and many kids like him, unfortunately learn from an early age that the adults in their lives think less than ideal things about them – sometimes directly telling them so. With enough repetition, these children begin to believe these misdelivered messages. These messages become shame-ridden scripts these kids continue to act out in their relationships with others, effectively blocking them from attaining the quality of connection and overall life satisfaction they deserve. I told Sam he was smart and kind on many occasions, but when you’ve heard “stupid” and “ungrateful (insert demeaning expletive here)” from your most important caregivers – the people charged with watering the seeds of your positive development -- hundreds, if not thousands, of times – you’re going to grow into something stunted and less than flowering.

There is a very important distinction between guilt and shame that is crucial in understanding this problem of child development. Guilt is correctly viewed as a negative self-related emotion relative to a specific behavior one has exhibited. It’s appropriate for all of while we’re growing up to experience guilt when we’ve stepped over the line, when we’ve transgressed against others in our family, school or communities. Guilt is a universal emotion that prompts us to redress wrongs and get ourselves back on track. Kids need guilt in order to keep themselves connected. What they don’t ever need is shame – a more pervasive self-punishment, an identity that congeals around “badness” in some way.

There’s a sense of self-inflicted pain with shame – “I’m wrong/bad/worthless/hopeless/unlovable/stupid (or whatever other all-encompassing negative label our agile minds can conjure). Shame is a preoccupation with the past and a downcast depiction of the future in a way that blocks effective action and connection with others. There’s a fundamental lack for the child (or adult for that matter) in allowing what is (the raw, basic emotional pain) to exist and be fully felt in the present moment. When things go awry – when a child forgets to let in the cat – he or she should feel a pang of regret, concern, or guilt. The feeling should be allowed to rise and fall within them like a wave on the ocean’s surface. That’s natural and it’s what leads us to respond appropriately to the “warning” signal function that emotions are meant to serve. When we let guilt, sadness, fear, anger – the core, basic negative emotions – to rise and fall within our children, they learn that these feelings are survivable and, most importantly, they don’t have anything to say about who they are as people. They are mere energy within that is meant to motivate us to do something to right ourselves.

Recent research suggests the downside of shame. A 2011 study in Psychological Bulletin by researchers at Syracuse University and St. John Fisher College indicated a link between peoples’ experience of shame and symptoms of major depression, and a stronger link for shame than for guilt. Pervasive negative emotions like shame have also been associated with inflammatory conditions such as coronary artery disease. Shame not only hurts, it damages.

In our parenting and caregiving of children, we should remember this distinction between guilt and shame. Guild can motivate kids to take corrective action. Shame serves no good purpose and may contribute toward their spiral into debilitating conditions. A child bent over in shame misses the opportunities for success and satisfaction passing by them in the classroom, playground and even in their own living rooms. What Nobel Prize or Academy Award winner has ever looked out over the audience and cited their experience of shame in their acceptance speech as pivotal in their development toward greatness?

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We as parents, aunts and uncles, teachers, coaches and therapists must work to not let kids link their mistakes and failures to their core identities. It is crucial that we not let transgressions fester and that we not rub salt into their wounds with reactive anger and frustration. We should teach children that while there is bad behavior, there are truly no bad kids.

With regard to their emotional development, children benefit from our efforts to teach them to turn and face the emotional pain of their errors without flinching with avoidance and externalization onto others, and without whipping themselves either. Children need us to model for them the ability to abide by our own negative emotions without hiding or throwing them off on others. When we’re in the check-out line at the grocery store, in snarled traffic, and when chaos has erupted in the household, kids are watching adults carefully for the lessons to be learned. We should teach kids to right wrongs, learn from them and move forward, and to ride the “wave” of emotion without following any self-punitive impulses to beach ourselves.

When we encounter a child whipping themselves with shame, we should immediately intervene to point out the difference between behavior to be corrected and beliefs about themselves that should never be called into question. Sam, my young client, unfortunately had been taught from an early age that he was damaged goods; that who he was as a person was fundamentally flawed. This is not the fault of any child. It is the responsibility of any adult charged with their care to teach them otherwise. There is too much left to unfold in any child for any final judgments of character and worth to make sense.

Sam is now on a different, less shame-filled path. It took positive, corrective input from many caring adults to get things moving in a better direction for him. Unfortunately, I’ve met far too many Sams who never learn to “surf” their pain – far too many who’ve been caught in the undertow of shame.