7 Ways to Fight Debilitating Shame

“I cannot—will not—let my supervisor see me cry,” said Alice*, who was having difficulties at her new job. “It would be humiliating.”

“I just wish I could go backwards in time and undo the whole thing,” said Matt*, after an evening that started with a happy hour ended with him lost, drunk, without his wallet or keys, and unable to find his way home.

“I don’t want anyone to know what happened,” said Howard*, recently fired from his job. “It’s just not anyone’s business.”

“I would never let anyone outside the family know that my husband was abusive,” said Lianne. “I know it’s not my fault, but I don't think that’s how other people see it.”

What do these four people have in common? They are each struggling with feelings of shame.

The dictionary definition of shame is “a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior.”

More than almost any other emotion, most of us try our best to hide both our shame and the behavior(s) that led to it from others, and even from ourselves—even when the behaviors really are not our fault. According to Patricia deYoung, who wrote the book Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame, shame itself hurts, but having it exposed to others can be unbearable. So we find ways to hide it, compensate for it, undo it, and otherwise try to pretend both the feelings and the experiences that lead to them don’t really exist.

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In her introduction to Brene Brown’s book I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t), Harriet Lerner (author of Dance of Anger) writes, “Shame is a profoundly debilitating emotion. It drives our fears of not being good enough. We can learn to feel shame about anything that is real about us – our shape, our accent, our financial situation, our wrinkles, our size, our illness, or how we spend our day.”

Brene Brown herself, who spent years researching shame, writes that while humiliation can make us feel bad, shame causes us to shut down. Humiliation, like when a teacher announces a kid’s grade in front of the entire class and says she’s stupid, can hurt. But humiliation, Brown says, can be worked through. Shame is when the kid actually begins to believe that she is stupid. At that point, it is difficult to work through the feelings. The child who feels shame will cut herself off from contact with others.

DeYoung writes that shame is a complex combination of emotional responses to ourselves, others, and feelings that spiral out of control. There are neurological, interactional, and internal factors that impact shame. She and numerous other authors talk about the physiological components of shame, which can include blushing, rising heat in the body, and a physical impulse to hide.

Psychotherapy helps with shame in part because it provides, often over time, a new relationship in which we learn that we are not as bad as our sense of shame has led us to believe. Becoming part of a group of people who have suffered similarly can help as well. Alcoholics, drug users, and their children, spouses, and other family members often all suffer from shame, whether or not they have done something wrong. Victims of abuse and harassment also suffer from shame, even when they know that they did nothing wrong. Shame makes it hard to get help at times. Groups like AA or AlAnon, as well as The #MeToo and TimesUp movements have developed in part to help members learn that they have no reason for shame.

But there are also some things you can do to help yourself feel better at a moment when all you really want to do is run away.

1. Allow yourself a few seconds to simply breathe and feel grounded right where you are. If someone is intentionally shaming you, they are counting on knocking you off balance emotionally and intellectually. So a great coping mechanism and a terrific way of quietly resisting is to stop right there, in front of them, and center yourself. Using a mindfulness technique, such as counting to four as you breathe in, then again to four as you breathe out, and paying attention to nothing but your breathing for three or four breaths, can make a tremendous difference in your ability to ground yourself.

2. Try to imagine the face of someone who you know appreciates you for who you are. The shame will attempt to destroy that link, but try to think about what they would really say to you if you told them how you were feeling. It should be someone who you know will support you through difficult moments – someone who does not see you as all bad simply because you have done something wrong and who, if they were there, would be able to help you sort out whether or not you have done nothing wrong at all!

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3. Leave the situation as soon as you possibly can, and go for a walk or do some other kind of activity that will help you calm your body’s physical reaction to shame and help take your mind off of the moment long enough to help you reset.

4. Contact a friend or loved one. Shame is isolating, and isolation feeds the feeling of shame. So reach out to someone who can help you both ground yourself and connect to all of the different parts of who you are in the world. When I was doing the research for my book on women’s friendships, I found that one of the important things friends do is to help us manage our emotions. And one of the keys to dealing with shame is to recognize that it is just a feeling that needs to be managed!

5. When you are feeling calmer, talk with someone who can genuinely help you sort through your own part in the situation. Taking responsibility for whatever you might have done, even unintentionally, while also holding the other person accountable for their behavior – even if it was also unintentional – will not only help with past feelings of shame, but will also help you respond to future experiences.

6. Along the same lines, try to see if there is anything you can learn from the experience. This isn’t the same as saying, “I’ll never do that again,” although that is part of learning. But can you understand something about yourself, other people, and certain kinds of situations that will help you in the future?

7. And finally, remember that shame is simply one of a wide range of emotions that are part of every human’s experience. You are not bad if someone shames you, and you are not bad if you have done something that shames you. You are simply being human. Now it’s time to move forward, remembering what you have learned from the experience, without beating yourself up for it.

* names and identifying info changed for privacy

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