Since Our Shame Is Adhesive, Can We Learn to Embrace It?

“Soap won't wash away your shame.” Depeche Mode

Embrace shame? Yuck. Who wants to think about that? We have a natural reluctance to go there. Still, I hope to convince you that there is something good in welcoming the parts of us we try to exile or scrub clean. Being able to sit with shame is one of the most important ways we can be with another person, whether it's counseling a student or helping a friend.

What is shame? Shame refers to a feeling of personal defect. We feel that something is profoundly wrong with us—either we are too little of something or too much of something. Shame is a very visceral feeling often attached to our bodies. It’s an equal opportunity employer—any attribute can become a source of shame: we can feel too short, too tall, too skinny, too heavy, too black, too white, too smart, too dumb, too rich, too poor….You get the idea.

Shame is a natural feeling that is tied to human evolution and our capacity for social relatedness. One key aspect of shame is that it leaves us feeling alone, unvalued, and isolated—it breaks our social connectedness.

Shame and guilt. Guilt is the painful feeling of having done something wrong, of having violated a taboo or an ethical standard. You feel badly because of what you did. With shame you feel awful because of who you are. It’s hard to know what to do about that, except to hide, disappear, strike back, or in some other way take the awful glare of other peoples’ eyes off you.

Shame is much more about the sense of something being fundamentally wrong with us. Guilt leads us toward remorse and repair or restitution (or penance); with shame it’s less clear what to do since we are the problem. So shame leads us toward secrets and hiding. We want to get out of sight, to not be seen. Statements such as, “I wanted to crawl under the rug,” “I wanted to disappear,” I felt as small as a piece of dust,” are shame statements.

An adolescent shame struggle. I know these feelings well. When I was in tenth grade I developed a preoccupation with stuttering. While I did not have a distinctive stutter, I was terrified of speaking in public as I was sure that I would stutter over certain words. As so often happens with preoccupations, I sometimes would have a barely-audible stammer, which only confirmed my insecurity and fear.

I’ve come to realize that much of my adolescent shame was wrapped up with that fear of stuttering. Certain words became my enemy—such as words that began with “C.” I would go to elaborate lengths to avoid them, even “word switching” in my mind (finding synonyms) which sometimes could lead to strange circumlocutions. Many times in school, I just wanted to disappear, and many times I felt small and alone and just plain weird as I tried to avoid stuttering over a word that loomed over me like an avalanche.

One “C” word I could not avoid was the name of the street on which I lived: “Colonial Rd,” in the leafy suburb of New York City where I grew up. One day in our local soda fountain, when I was about fifteen, I wanted to charge a hamburger. (In those days, in small towns before credit cards, such places would keep a running tab and bill your family directly each month.)

“And what is your address?” asked the lady behind the counter. Uh-Oh. I could not speak the name of the street on which I lived. The eyes of everyone in line at the counter to pay their bills were on me, I was sure. The entire world seemed to funnel down directly on to me. I wanted to run out of the store. The older lady looking at me, holding her pencil, ready to write, was like a fire-breathing dragon standing between me and the word, “Colonial.”

Desperate, I slowly spelled out “Colonial,” letter-by- letter, the only way I could avoid the shame of stuttering, I was convinced. When I finished, the woman looked at me grimly: “I know how to spell ‘Colonial’!” What a humiliating moment.

I felt double ashamed and defective. After all, not only was my speech defective, but I had acted in a strange way that the lady made very clear. My defects were obvious—I was certain—to all who were looking.

Only years later did I come to see that my fear of stuttering was connected to feelings about myself, particularly about speaking up and having a voice. I grew up in an anti-semitic town and felt quite different from many of the blond-haired, blue-eyed kids who also inhabited that local soda fountain. My sense of difference was very profound in tenth grade and a lot of it was centered around finding my own voice. Much of my adolescent shyness and awkwardness was wrapped up in my shame about my so-called stutter.

Stealth. The power of shame lies in the way it leads us to isolate ourselves and to feel cut off from others, with a shadow cast over the self. The stealth, almost intolerable, nature of shame leads us to act in ways to disguise and deny the feelings–which is why it’s so important for teachers to understand how to listen for and respond to shame in our students (and ourselves), to try and look beyond the provocative, defensive behaviors that often mask feelings of shame

Here’s an example.

Why holes in our armor are so valuable. Years ago, I was asked to visit a local high-tech company and give a talk to their executives about “work- family dilemmas.” This was an ambitious company whose employees were asked to work long hours. So the topic was a bit fraught for many of the executives (at that time, all male) who devoted long hours to work, often to the detriment of their personal and family lives.

You could say that the topic was a “shameful” one for them, reminding them of what they were not doing particularly well.

During the Q+A, someone asked a question I couldn’t answer. I said, “Wow, that’s a tough one.”

In the back of the room sat an executive in a suit who I later learned was an up and coming force in the company. He’d been silent the entire presentation, arms folded over his chest. Then he said, “So, they don’t have all the answers at Harvard?”

This caught me by surprise, but I fortunately had my wits about me enough to reply: “No, not at all. I need all the help I can get. What are peoples’ thoughts about this question?”

My honest not-knowing response seemed to take some of the tension out of the room and a great discussion followed about the demands of keeping a family life vital while being committed to a demanding career.

After the talk was over, the skeptical rising-star executive came up to me, with a sort of apology. “Didn’t mean to be rude. I was just looking for the holes in your armor.”

What did he mean? One way of looking at the comment is that the man needed to see my vulnerability before he could really show his. From his perspective, I was up on my Harvard high horse—the expert come to teach them what they were doing wrong. For an executive in a competitive business, the power balance was all wrong. By making his caustic comment to me, he allowed me to level the playing field: You don’t have the answers and I don’t either, but together, talking about this vexing matter of “work-family balance,” maybe we can get somewhere.

Bottom line: get out of the one-up position. I’ve found it really helpful to try and be aware of how power imbalances and up/down hierarchies can create shameful situations for people.

This is particularly important for teachers when dealing with students.

When students feel looked down upon and small, they are in danger of feeling shamed. And when students, like anyone, feel shamed, they will protect themselves—sometimes by becoming angry or accusatory, striking out at you to avoid becoming a target themselves, or by distancing themselves from you. When Ben Franklin observed that, “Whate'ers begun in anger ends in shame,” he had only half the equation: more often what begins with shame ends in anger.

So, learning to tolerate the “one-down” position can be very helpful—eg, “No, I don’t have all the answers. I need all the help I can get with this.”

High school is a factory for shame. Adolescence is a shame-filled time. Teens struggle with the question of who they are at a time when the power of the peer group becomes extraordinarily important. Adolescents’ bodies are changing rapidly and so is their capacity to understand the world. They are trying to make sense of myriad choices and possibilities, they are holding on and letting go of their families, and they are hungry to feel a part of a peer group.

Jennifer Senior has written evocatively of way in which “our self-image from those years…is especially adhesive.”

Since it’s adhesive, why not embrace it? One implication of this is that we struggle ourselves with our own shame as we teach our students and parent our children. Getting to know your own shame—understanding and acknowledging and tolerating it—can be the first step to helping the young with their own. It’s hard to listen for someone else’s sense of defect and not-living-up when we can’t tolerate our own.

Scrubbing yourself clean. We live in a culture that looks at shame and guilt as something to be rooted out, with promises of ways of cleansing ourselves of these pesky feelings. While no one wants to live a shame(or guilt)- filled life, it can be helpful to get our expectations in line with reality. Shame is a part of life and it’s not so easy to free ourselves of it.

Rather, it can be helpful to get to know your shame—what is your sense of how you are not “good-enough”? What have you done that makes you cringe?—and to try and welcome it into your consciousness so that you come to know it and thereby lessen it’s power over you.

And so too with our students. Being able to listen to, and for, their feelings of embarrassment, their fears of not living up, of being the only one who doesn’t get it, can help them to learn how to lessen and live with these very human feelings.

Some more bottom lines.

Welcome your defective feelings as you would a forlorn stranger. Consider being more forgiving of yourself. Try not to be your own worst critic, caught in a foreclosed shame narrative as if that is all you are.

Remember that some shame serves a useful function. We may have let ourselves and/or other people down and so we resolve to do better. That’s manageable shame. Then there is unmanageable shame that casts a shadow over the self.

Avoid making other people into the enemy: we may see our shame in other people’s accusatory eyes. Usually people are neutral towards us, often preoccupied with their own fears and anxieties. A focus on helping to reduce their suffering can reduce our own.

What happened to the stuttering?

Other people may be a key to reducing the toxicity of our shame. My adolescent fear of stuttering in public continued through college. My parents were helpful (my mother once compiled and gave me a list of famous people who stuttered (which included the Greek orator, Demosthenes and Sir Winston Churchill), and talking to a therapist was beneficial, but none of that took my fear and shame away. My struggle continued past college graduation and into the first year of graduate school in Psychology.

That’s when we graduate students spent a weekend studying psychodrama and the instructor asked for a volunteer to recreate a painful childhood scene. I wound up doing a psychodrama about my fear of stuttering, recreating that adolescent scene at the local soda fountain. My graduate school peers participated as actors and witnesses. Making the fear public, among people I trusted, was liberating. Several other people wound up talking about sources of their own shame. After that, over time, my preoccupation with my “shameful secret” soon lost its power.

Sometimes I still may stammer a bit, but now I feel a moment of pride about it, sort of like welcoming an old friend. We’ve been through a lot together. So….

Finding a safe space to express your shame can be helpful. The Top Secret game—using brief stories written on index cards and shared anonymously—can be very helpful in reducing shame, if it takes place in a cohesive group where there are clear boundaries and considerations of safety. Websites such as postsecret.com allow people a chance to post accounts of what is troubling them.

My hunch, though, is that direct rather than digital exposure is important in diluting the toxicity of our shame. We need to feel seen and accepted in the eyes of others.

Making our skeletons dance. Charlie Chaplin observed that, “To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it!” Bernard Shaw suggested: "If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance."

What did they mean? To try and be creative about these adhesive parts of ourselves. Making art, keeping a journal, all the various ways of putting parts of yourself out into the world, can be a crucial part of healing shame. Use your awareness of your shame to help others, deepen your empathy for the suffering of others because you know what they’re going through. You can use your experience of shame to understand what others are going through. Try to develop some humor about your own shame, if possible. If we can get out of our bubble of shameful isolation we can see others more clearly, rather than as watchful, mocking eyes of our imagination.

The good news: exploring our shame can be a powerful way of finding our way into the community of fellow imperfect human beings.