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Embarrassment
Adolescence and the Age of Painful Embarrassment
Growing and changing teenagers are more self-conscious and easily socially hurt.
Posted March 14, 2022 Reviewed by Davia Sills
Key points
- At a more changing and self-conscious age, adolescents can find embarrassment more painful to bear.
- A major source of embarrassment in adolescence is teasing—putting someone down.
- Sometimes, embarrassment at this vulnerable age can lead to feelings of shame.
- Shame can become dangerous in adolescence when this self-loathing is used to justify self-harm.
Parents can make light of what is serious. “It’s so funny to see him act embarrassed!” “She’s too sensitive for her own good!” No and yes.
No, there’s nothing “funny” about embarrassment in adolescence because it can create painful social exposure, attack self-esteem, and arouse acute anxiety: “What a mistake; I’ll never live this down!”
Yes, adolescents can be extremely sensitive to insult when physical changes invite critical attention every day: “Look at how I look: no wonder they make fun of me!” Middle school misery strikes again!
Growth is awkward.
When size and shape and sexual characteristics are changing too slowly or too fast, change can be embarrassing either way: “I’ll never develop!” or “No one else looks this way!” And then there’s social awkwardness, trying and failing to keep up and act older: “I didn’t know what to say!” Unexpected and quickly occurring, embarrassment can cut deep and be long remembered: “It turned out I was the only one dressed this way!” Then there is teasing.
Teasing is embarrassing.
Teasing is the all-purpose way to use words to wounding effect: verbal put-downs with the intent to embarrass. Teasing laughs at, jokes about, insults, pays negative attention, socially labels, and sets the teased apart. Being teased can feel threatening, isolating, and humiliating.
During the entry adolescent years, when social belonging becomes more important, teasing can be a primary way to establish standing, assert dominance, and use words as weapons to claim and defend one’s social place. In general, teasing often says more about the teaser than the teased since people tend to tease what they don’t want to be teased about themselves: “Look who’s acting afraid!” (Look who’s afraid of acting afraid.)
Embarrassment can hurt.
Even when done in fun, if teasing isn’t fun for the person being teased, then it isn’t funny; it is at someone’s hurtful expense. She or he is being mocked for how they look or act, for making a mistake, for not fitting in, for being different, for seeming awkward, for standing out, for failing to measure up.
The target of this unwanted public attention can easily feel embarrassed, caught in the headlights of unwanted public notice. So, when called on in class, the inattentive student felt surprised, got confused, got scared, and fumbled the response. That’s when someone called out: “Good move, answer man!” and the other students laughed. Very funny!
A more painful example comes to mind. Many years ago, while watching a middle school basketball game from the stands, I saw a young, heavy-set student in baggy clothes come and sit down on the lowest riser to watch the action when her smartphone apparently started ringing multiple times. She picked it up, listening and looking but not responding.
Then I thought to glance above me where, on the top riser, three fashionably trim students were all busy with their phones out, each laughingly making some call. Then the connection to the girl below occurred to me. As I watched, at last she put away her phone, slowly got up, and shuffled out with her head down. Was she being teased by the three other girls? Was she feeling unbearably embarrassed? I’ll never know for sure, but I believe she may have felt threatened or demeaned into leaving.
While seeming casual, embarrassment can actually cut very deep. To appreciate its hurtful power in adolescence keep in mind that embarrassment can be only one small step from shame: “I hate how I am!”
Shame cuts deep.
To appreciate the penetrating power of shame, contrast it with another deeply painful state, guilt—intense sorrow and regret over what one did or didn’t do. Guilt is over conduct, wrong doing: “I shouldn’t have acted like that!” There is the pain of remorse. More deeply injurious, however, is shame, which is over one’s identity, or the feeling of wrong being: “I shouldn’t be how I am!” There is the pain of self-rejection.
People can apologize, make amends, forgive and be forgiven to assuage guilt. Shame, however, can be harder to dislodge because it so deeply felt, so despairing, and can be personally damning. Shame is self-rejection carried to a destructive extreme. While people will confess guilt; they will conceal shame. At the very worst, shame can become so agonizing that loss of life becomes preferable to loss of face.
Recovery from shame usually requires acceptance from self-love, which is hard to give when self-loathing is so strongly felt. So as a counselor, I never argued with shame, only gently shifted the focus to inventory what the tormented young person might grudgingly admit liking about their self. It could take a while, but it was usually time well spent, building up a positive emotional counterweight to the damage self-loathing shame had done.
“I guess I don’t have to hate all of my self all the time, is that what you’re telling me?” the teenager might ask at last.
“Yes,” I would reply: “As you find grounds for thinking better of yourself, the old complaints will lose their hurtful power.”
Advice to parents:
Beware embarrassments in your adolescent’s life because, at this sensitive age, such slights can cut painfully deep. Therefore, be sure to keep a safe, tease-free, embarrassment-free home. No ridicule allowed. For sure, never say to your teenager: “We are ashamed of you!”; “You should be ashamed of yourself!”; or “Shame on you!”
In the extreme, there is this danger. Shame can beget self-loathing which, if allowed to continue, can justify self-harm: “I hurt myself because I can't stand how I am!” So don’t teasingly inflict or trivialize embarrassment with your adolescent. From it, shame can find unhappy cause to grow.
