Shame: It's Not You; It's Them

For years, as a psychiatrist and professor, I would teach that all emotions have important functions, except shame. Shame was the screw-up of the family, the one we wish could just act like their perfect sibling, guilt, who was polite and cleaned up after all their messes.

Guilt carries the thought, I did something bad, and pushes us to repair the situation. Shame tells us, I am bad, and urges us to hide and deny.

It makes sense that guilt’s the favourite child, as it motivates us to acknowledge the mess and fix it, while shame pushes us to conceal our perceived badness. It’s for this reason that we teach caregivers to discipline their children with, “I love you, but not this behavior.”

But guilt doesn’t beat out shame in all situations. Sometimes we must hide even the most beautiful parts of us.

“To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted,” writes Ocean Vuong, in his book, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

Humans have evolved as a tribal species who depend on group membership for survival. When we sense a threat of getting kicked out of the tribe if we were to fully show up, our survival instincts push us to hide the parts of ourselves that may be rejected.

The amount of shame we feel is not about us but about how rejecting or unsafe our groups may be—or have been in the past.

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The distress of shame pushes us to find a safer community or hide parts of ourselves if we’re stuck in systems we can’t escape.

Like with fear, we can use the presence of shame to signal unsafe situations where we’re at risk of rejection or harm. And also, like with fear, we have a lot of false alarms, especially if our threat detection system learned to be more sensitive early on as an adaptation from experiences of rejection or harm from others in the past. When it comes to survival, our brain would rather be safe than sorry, so false alarms are necessary.

Trauma expert and Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Judith Herman explains, “Trauma is not just a disorder of fear, it’s a disorder of shame.” Trauma and adversity live in the body by teaching our alarm systems to automatically rush into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn as a helpful way to protect us from future threats. Our shame signals can act as either a flee or fawn response. We either flee from potentially rejecting people or we stay by fawning, people pleasing, and hiding parts of ourselves to find safety.

As a queer person, sudden waves of shame often propel me to hide this part of myself when facing certain groups of people that I feel will reject or harass me. My brain quickly and instinctively gives me the message, “You’re bad,” as a shortcut to trigger the fast survival response of shame and hide.

It doesn’t have time to process the longer story of, “This group has been socialized by an oppressive set of values and beliefs from hundreds of years ago that defines the beauty of your love as bad. This has nothing to do with you or how you love but with how rejecting this community is. It’s safer to hide this gorgeous part of yourself as they can’t be trusted with it.”

My shame keeps me safe, but at a cost.

Comedian Hannah Gadsby, who identifies as gay and gender nonbinary, spoke of being raised in Tasmania, where same-sex love was a crime until 1997, in their famous performance of Nanette. "Seventy percent of the people who raised me, who loved me, who I trusted, believed that homosexuality was a sin, that homosexuals were heinous, subhuman, pedophiles. Seventy percent!” Gadsby said. “And by the time I identified as being gay, it was too late, I was already homophobic. And you do not get to just flip a switch on that.”

Gadsby’s mother told them, “The thing I regret is that I raised you as if you were straight. I didn’t know any different. I’m so sorry. I knew well before you did, that your life was going to be so hard. I knew that, and I wanted, more than anything in the world, for that not to be the case. And now I know that I made it worse. I made it worse because I wanted you to change, because I knew that the world wouldn’t.”

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Gadsby now refuses to use self-deprecating humour in their comedy shows to relieve the tension created in their audience when speaking of being marginalized and abused for who they are. They see now that the tension they feel, the deep shame of rejection from both strangers and those they loved, the “damage done to me [that] is real and debilitating,” is no longer theirs to relieve. They’re giving it back to its rightful owner: the dominant society who created it.

“This tension is yours,” Gadbsy continues in Nanette. “I am not helping you anymore. You need to learn what this feels like, because this tension is what not-normals carry inside of them all of the time. It is dangerous to be different."

Shame is an essential—albeit excruciating—signal to alert us to situations where our belonging or safety are at risk if we were to show up fully as we truly are. We need it to survive. But we also need to remember it’s just a fast-acting alarm that screams something’s bad about us so we react quickly enough to hide and survive a rejecting group.

We need to honour the slower, more complete story of shame. It’s not actually you that’s the problem. It’s those who reject you.

In their book, Tomboy Survival Guide, trans author Ivan Coyote writes, “I am not trapped in the wrong body; I am trapped in a world that makes very little space for bodies like mine.”

Shame researcher Brené Brown teaches that the antidote to shame is to share these hidden parts of ourselves with others, but only to those who have earned the right to hear it.

So, as a psychiatrist, I can only individually help a patient go so far in healing from the agony of shame. It takes the world around them to be more inclusive and compassionate and curious and kind. Until then, sometimes all I can do is explain, “It’s not you. It’s the world.”