Unbinding Shame From Other Emotions

by Bret Lyon, Ph.D., SEP

The session was not going well. I was demonstrating to the group how to work with a mother suffering because her son had been left back in school. Nothing I did seemed to work. After an excruciating 30 minutes, I gave up. “I don’t think I’m really helping you right now. I’m truly sorry.” She politely agreed that it hadn’t helped much. “It did help a little, I guess,” she said, trying to soften my embarrassment. She had calmed down a bit, benefiting from simply being able to talk about the situation. But the kind of calm and peacefulness I had hoped to help her achieve was far away.

Later that night, I went over the session in my mind. Willing myself to avoid getting frozen in shame, I tried to concentrate on what had gone wrong. Then it came to me: My client was experiencing at least two emotions at the same time. Our contract was to work on her shame about her son’s being left back. But she was also having a strong experience of grief for both herself and her son. The action tendency of shame is to freeze and hide. Someone in shame tends to circle around in endless loops of rumination. The action tendency of grief is to cry and grieve. We grieve for what has happened, putting it in the past. Shame, on the other hand, keeps everything in the present. We experience a shameful incident, as we experience a traumatic incident, as if it is happening right now. What I hadn’t done in the session was separate her grief—which could be invited to discharge in tears and sadness—from her shame, which had to be worked with quite differently.

We are quite capable of experiencing two, three, or even more feelings at the same time. This truth seems uncomfortable for many parents who try to help their children with their feelings. For example, Billy, very upset, comes in crying and tells his mother that he hates Bobby. Mother responds, “You don’t hate, Bobby. Bobby is your brother. You love Bobby.”

Billy probably does love Bobby. But at that moment, he hates Bobby as well. Children do not seem to have the same problem that adults do around emotions. For a child, emotions come in bunches and they don’t have to make sense. They just are. Billy doesn’t worry that his momentary hatred will get in the way of his love.

Nowhere does our lack of tolerance for complex emotions cause more trouble than when shame is present. Emotions are designed to move through us and then leave. In fact, the word emotion comes from the Latin word emovere, which means “move out,” “move away,” or “remove.” When emotions are bound with shame, they get stuck and we don't move on. To get a grasp on and begin to process any emotion when shame is also present, we need to separate it from shame. As Sheila Rubin and I explain in our book, Embracing Shame: How To Stop Resisting Shame and Turn It Into a Powerful Ally:

"One of the great insights of Silvan Tomkins, the father of modern shame theory, is that shame is a binding emotion. Shame works by binding with and interfering with other emotions. The fact that shame binds with emotions and feeling states is a major reason why shame is so powerful and so hard to track and heal.

Shame is designed to keep us out of trouble by lowering the intensity of other emotions and hampering our tendency to complete their associated behaviors (for example, grieving, reaching out to others, or setting boundaries). When shame binds with anger, fear, joy, curiosity, or grief, those emotions cannot complete themselves, and we can become caught in a maze of feelings with no end. Emotions are designed to move through us and then leave.

We’re meant to experience various emotions, have them affect us for a while, and then feel other emotions in turn. It’s like a magician drawing a string of multicolored handkerchiefs from their sleeve or hat, one following the other in a smooth progression. But when shame binds with an emotion, the magic of the human emotional system stops working. It gets stuck. And that’s how we get trapped in shame."

The action tendency of shame is to freeze, hide, and disappear. When shame freezes us, we can’t access the natural healthy action impulses of our other emotions, like anger, grief, and fear. We often feel stuck or confused and unable to take action. To make matters worse, knowing that we’re not living with the joy and vitality we want to have can bring us even more shame. For this reason, it’s important to learn how to untangle shame from the other primary emotions so they can complete and we can live in a fuller, more productive, and more joyful way.

As a healing shame specialist, I was focused on shame in working with the mother I referred to in the beginning of this article, and I didn’t pay enough attention to her grief. Most people, and most helping professionals, have the opposite problem: They work with the more obvious emotion and they miss the shame hidden in plain sight. The first step in separating shame from other emotions is to realize that both shame and grief – or anger, or fear – are there and each needs to be worked with separately.

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