An Intro to Shame

Imagine. You’re walking along. You see a friend on the other side of the street, wave to them. Your friend ignores you. Your stomach churns, your face flushes. You might worry that you did something to make them mad at you. Or maybe you’re just mad at them.

Or you’re on your first day of your new job, talking to your new coworkers and your new boss. Everything seems like it’s going well and you’re fitting in, but that night you analyze everything people said and did to make sure you did everything write. Six months later, after awkward interactions and mistakes made as you learn, you’re pretty sure you’re incompetent at your job and no one wants to be around you. So you might freeze yourself off from them, do your job and nothing more. Or you might go around mad at yourself and at them, trying to do things perfect, and exploding when you, or someone else, leads to problems.

Maybe your thoughts torment you, calling yourself a loser, a wimp, much much worse. Replaying everything bad you ever did or might have done, every regret you have, maybe every slight you’ve given others. You swing between anxiously on edge, trying to accomplish the tasks of life and sometimes succeeding but rarely feeling good about it, and depressed and shut down, too exhausted to do anything. Except for that voice in your head telling you about all the ways that you should be doing better. It’s hard to start anything. It’s hard to make mistakes. It’s hard to try. It’s hard to be.

What these all have in common is shame. There’s a lot of ways to define shame, and those will be talked about in future articles. But one throughline to it is that shame, especially what I call core shame, but you could call chronic or toxic shame, is this deep down felt sense that there is something wrong with us and that we are, at heart, a bad person. Or, for those with less core shame, that we are someone whom others do not want to be around.

So we second guess social interactions and other people’s motives. How could anyone like us? We might put on a mask to hide, often a perfect mask that looks like it has it all together. We’re hyperaware of unspoken rules, because breaking the rules means criticism. Lots of times, people with lots of shame struggle to try things, learn, and change, because the transition process brings up too much shame.

Sometimes people manage to carve out some things that they can do easily: art, athletics, being a good friend. But often those are fragile. Criticism, even kind criticism, leads to overwhelming shame and some kind of response. Imposter syndrome, believing you’re terrible at something despite evidence to the contrary, speaks to consistent core shame.

Core shame clogs us and traps us. I suspect it’s behind a lot of depression and anxiety that are resistant to treatment or that is more intense than you’d expect. Having a history of trauma often induces core shame, but even people with loving, kind, well-meaning parents who grow up in safe environments can and do experience devastating core shame. Anyone can be affected, although not all are.

If this description resonates with you, keep reading to learn more about what core shame is, where it probably comes from, how to recognize it when you’re in it, and, hopefully, how to start working towards healing from it.