Part 1

Understanding What Shame Actually Is

Shame is one of the most painful emotions people bring into psychotherapy. It can affect how a person sees themselves, how they imagine they are seen by others and how confidently they participate in everyday life.

Some patients know exactly what they feel ashamed about. They may remember behaving badly, offending somebody, making a serious mistake or acting in a way that conflicted with their own values. Other patients find it much more difficult to explain. They simply feel inadequate, inferior or unacceptable, even when they cannot identify anything particularly wrong in their behaviour.

Shame can develop around events that appear relatively ordinary. A person may feel ashamed because they said the wrong thing, wore something they later considered inappropriate, failed to join a conversation or behaved awkwardly in a social situation. It can also develop around much more serious experiences, including betrayal, abuse, sexual experiences, addiction, family conflict or behaviour that caused considerable harm to another person.

The external seriousness of the event does not always determine the strength of the shame. What matters psychologically is how the event was experienced and what the person came to believe it revealed about them.

This is why shame cannot be understood through one universal explanation. Ten people may describe feeling ashamed, but each may be referring to a completely different internal experience. One person may feel ashamed of something they did as a child. Another may feel ashamed of their body, illness, family background or financial circumstances. Another may feel ashamed because they believe they have failed as a husband, wife, parent, student or employee.

The emotion may be attached to something that genuinely happened, or it may arise mainly from the person’s interpretation of what happened. In either case, the psychological effect can be severe.

The Relationship Between Guilt and Shame

Shame is closely connected with guilt, but the two emotions are not identical.

Guilt generally begins with the recognition that something has gone wrong. The person believes that they acted badly, neglected a responsibility or caused difficulty for somebody else.

The internal experience is:

I have done something wrong.

Shame personalises the experience.

The person no longer thinks only about the behaviour. They begin making conclusions about their whole personality.

The internal experience becomes:

I have done something wrong because there is something wrong with me.

This difference is crucial.

A person experiencing proportionate guilt may be able to recognise that they behaved badly while still maintaining a broader and more balanced understanding of themselves. They may apologise, attempt to repair the situation and decide to respond differently in the future.

A person overwhelmed by shame may struggle to preserve that distinction. The action becomes evidence that they are stupid, ugly, lazy, worthless, incapable, selfish or fundamentally no good.

The person does not simply regret what happened. They begin attacking themselves.

This self-attack can become oppressive and persecutory. One event is repeatedly used as proof of a much wider negative conclusion. The person may think that they always fail, always embarrass themselves or always create problems for other people.

Guilt may therefore remain connected with responsibility, while shame can spread into identity.

In real life, the two emotions often appear together. A person may initially feel guilty about something they have done and then begin feeling ashamed of the kind of person they believe the behaviour has exposed them to be.

The movement may be very quick.

Somebody says something hurtful during an argument. At first, they recognise that the remark was wrong. They then begin thinking that they are always cruel, that they destroy every close relationship and that nobody could truly love them.

The first part concerns guilt. The second concerns shame.

This is one reason the two experiences are frequently confused, including sometimes within psychotherapy. The patient may say that they feel guilty, but as they describe the experience, it becomes clear that they are condemning their whole self.

Shame as a Normal Human Emotion

Shame is not automatically pathological.

Most people experience shame at different points in life. It can arise when somebody behaves in a way that conflicts with their values, causes discomfort to another person or exposes something they would have preferred to keep private.

A person may feel ashamed because they spoke carelessly at work, behaved badly towards a friend or caused embarrassment during a family gathering. They may wish that they had handled the situation differently.

When the feeling remains proportionate, it can encourage reflection.

The person may recognise that they need to apologise, make changes or take more care in the future. They may feel uncomfortable for a period, but the emotion does not become the only way in which they understand themselves.

Consider a person who is hosting a family gathering. Considerable care has been taken over the table, the food, the cutlery and the presentation. The person accidentally knocks over a glass of juice or spills tea across the tablecloth.

They may feel embarrassed and slightly ashamed. They disrupted the occasion and damaged something that had been carefully prepared.

This is an understandable emotional reaction.

The person may apologise, help clean the table and continue with the gathering. They may still think about the incident afterwards, but it does not become evidence that they are completely incompetent or unfit to be around other people.

The emotion remains connected with the event.

In healthy emotional functioning, shame can be tolerated. The person may dislike how they behaved or appeared in one moment without turning the moment into a permanent judgement against the whole self.

The difficulty begins when the shame becomes much larger than the situation.

When Shame Becomes Personalised

Shame becomes more damaging when the person transforms one event into a description of their entire personality.

The person who spilled the drink may begin thinking that they always ruin important occasions. They may imagine that everybody at the gathering regarded them as careless, foolish or socially inadequate.

The event becomes internal evidence:

I cannot do anything properly.

I always embarrass myself.

People must think I am useless.

This personalisation is at the centre of shame.

The person is no longer only concerned with what happened. They are concerned with what the event supposedly proves about who they are.

This can also happen when no identifiable mistake occurred.

Somebody may attend the same family gathering, behave appropriately and cause no difficulty at all. However, they may later feel ashamed because they did not talk as much as other people, did not smile enough or did not join the games and activities.

Nothing externally wrong happened. The person was quiet and perhaps felt tired, anxious or preoccupied.

But internally, they may conclude that they appeared unfriendly, boring or socially incapable.

They begin replaying the gathering and imagining what everybody else must have thought.

The shame is real as an emotional experience, even though the supposed wrongdoing may exist largely within the person’s interpretation.

This distinction is important because telling the person that nothing happened may not immediately help. They already experience their quietness as evidence of failure.

The psychotherapist must therefore understand the internal standard according to which the person is judging themselves.

Why did they believe they had to appear happy?

Why was remaining quiet experienced as unacceptable?

Why did they assume that other people noticed and judged them?

These questions begin to reveal that shame is often connected with much more than one social occasion.

Internal Shame

Internal shame concerns the way the person sees themselves.

They may experience themselves as inferior, unattractive, inadequate, lazy, weak or morally unacceptable. The judgement comes from within, although it may originally have developed through the reactions of parents, teachers, peers, partners or wider society.

The person may feel ashamed even when nobody else is present.

They may remember something they did many years earlier and suddenly feel the same emotional pain. They may imagine that the event revealed their true nature and that nothing they have done since can alter it.

Internal shame can also exist without any identifiable wrongdoing.

A person may feel ashamed of being depressed, anxious, autistic, unemployed, physically unwell or dependent on others. They may believe that these experiences reveal weakness or failure.

They may feel ashamed of their appearance, body, age, educational history, family background or financial circumstances.

The emotion says:

There is something about me that should not be as it is.

The person may then become their own harshest observer. They continually examine themselves for evidence of inadequacy.

A minor mistake confirms incompetence. A moment of tiredness confirms laziness. A disagreement confirms selfishness. A social difficulty confirms that they do not belong.

The mind becomes organised around collecting evidence against the self.

Research has repeatedly linked this global form of shame with low self-esteem, depression and broader psychological distress. This is understandable because the person is not dealing with one isolated criticism. They are living with a negative internal judgement that follows them from one situation to another.

External Shame

External shame concerns how the person believes they are seen by other people.

The person may be preoccupied with the imagined judgement of family members, friends, colleagues, strangers or the wider community.

They may think:

People can see that I am inadequate.

They must think I am stupid.

Everybody noticed how uncomfortable I looked.

If they knew the truth about me, they would reject me.

External shame is therefore closely connected with fear and anxiety.

The person enters a social situation already watching themselves through the imagined eyes of others. They become highly alert to facial expressions, tone of voice and changes in attention.

A neutral expression may be interpreted as disapproval. A delayed response may become evidence of rejection. Somebody looking elsewhere may be experienced as boredom or contempt.

The person may then become increasingly self-conscious.

Instead of participating naturally in the situation, they are monitoring how they are speaking, sitting, moving and appearing. This makes social engagement more difficult and may create the very awkwardness they fear.

External shame is particularly powerful in environments where the person feels exposed to evaluation, including school, university, work, social gatherings and intimate relationships.

The person may worry about clothing, speech, accent, body shape, education or whether they know the correct way to behave.

The audience may be real, but it may also exist mainly in the person’s mind.

Nobody may have criticised them. Nevertheless, they imagine that criticism is taking place.

The person may spend hours after a conversation reviewing what they said and wondering whether they appeared foolish.

External shame can therefore continue long after the social situation has ended.

The Imagined Audience

One of the striking features of shame is that another person does not have to be present for the emotion to remain active.

The person may carry an imagined audience inside them.

They see themselves through the eyes of earlier parents, teachers, peers or partners. The critical response has become internalised.

Somebody who was frequently laughed at in school may continue expecting ridicule decades later. A person who was repeatedly criticised by a parent may experience ordinary disagreement as evidence that others regard them as inadequate.

The external voice has become an internal one.

This helps explain why reassurance often has limited effect.

A friend may say that nobody noticed the mistake. The person may consciously understand this, but emotionally they remain convinced that they were exposed.

The shame is no longer dependent on what people actually thought. It is sustained by what the person expects other people to think.

Research into shame memories supports this understanding. Experiences of humiliation or rejection can become central to the person’s identity. They are remembered not simply as unpleasant incidents but as moments that supposedly revealed the truth about the self.

The person may continue organising later relationships around the fear that the same exposure will occur again.

Real Events and Internally Created Shame

Shame can develop from real events.

A person may genuinely have behaved badly, been unfaithful to a partner, humiliated somebody or acted without sufficient care. They may reasonably feel ashamed of the conduct.

In these situations, psychotherapy should not pretend that the behaviour did not occur.

The person may need to recognise what happened, understand the effect on others and take responsibility.

However, the psychological question does not end there.

The psychotherapist also needs to understand why the behaviour has become connected with such a wide judgement of the self.

A person can acknowledge serious wrongdoing without concluding that every aspect of them is permanently worthless.

At other times, the shame is based mainly on imagined wrongdoing.

The person may believe that they offended somebody when no offence was taken. They may think that remaining quiet at a gathering was a serious social failure. They may feel ashamed because they were unable to appear cheerful while experiencing depression.

The emotional response is genuine, but the responsibility may not be.

In many patients, the two forms become mixed.

A real event occurred, but the person’s internal world greatly expanded its meaning.

Somebody may have made an inappropriate remark. That is real. But they then conclude that everyone now regards them as disgusting and that they should never enter another social situation.

The event and the internal transformation must both be understood.

The psychotherapist cannot work effectively by focusing only on one side.

Simply saying that nothing serious happened may dismiss the patient’s internal experience. Accepting the patient’s total self-condemnation may reinforce a distorted view of reality.

The work lies in understanding how the event became so powerful.

The Difference Between Proportionate and Pathological Shame

There is no simple line dividing normal shame from pathological shame.

The difference often lies in intensity, duration and effect on everyday functioning.

A proportionate feeling of shame remains connected with a particular situation. It may be painful, but the person can reflect, repair what is possible and gradually recover.

Pathological shame becomes intrusive and dominating.

The person cannot think about much else. They repeatedly review the event and attack themselves. The shame begins interfering with sleep, work, relationships and ordinary independence.

A person who drove too quickly through a residential area may feel concerned that they could have endangered somebody. They may recognise that they need to drive more carefully in the future.

That reaction serves a purpose. It leads towards a change in behaviour.

A person experiencing pathological shame may respond very differently.

They may think that the speeding proves they are criminal, dangerous and incapable of responsible behaviour. They may imagine themselves as the worst kind of offender, even though no accident occurred and they have recognised the mistake.

The emotion no longer guides behaviour. It overwhelms the whole personality.

The person may continue punishing themselves long after any reasonable lesson has been learned.

This is the point at which shame becomes toxic. It no longer helps the person act more responsibly. It reduces their ability to function, think and maintain a balanced view of themselves.

Shame, Self-Criticism and Depression

Pathological shame can gradually develop into depression.

The person repeatedly tells themselves that they are inadequate, unattractive, incapable or worthless. Over time, these judgements affect confidence, motivation and hope.

The person may begin withdrawing from activities because they expect failure. They may avoid relationships because they fear exposure. They may stop applying for jobs, pursuing education or taking part in social life because they assume that other people will see their inadequacy.

Their world gradually becomes smaller.

Reduced activity then creates further evidence for the shame.

The person may think that they are lazy because they have become inactive, without recognising that the inactivity has developed partly through depression and fear.

The cycle becomes increasingly difficult to escape.

Shame contributes to withdrawal and reduced motivation. Withdrawal and reduced motivation then deepen the belief that the person is incapable.

The person may also become ashamed of being depressed.

They may believe that they should be stronger, more productive or more grateful. The symptoms themselves become new evidence of personal failure.

Research has found that shame is strongly associated with depression, particularly when the person believes that other people also see them negatively.

This is one reason shame can become so emotionally dangerous. It attacks both the internal sense of self and the expectation of belonging with other people.

The person feels unacceptable from within and imagines rejection from outside.

Shame and Fear

Shame is deeply connected with fear.

The person may fear being seen, exposed, criticised or rejected. They may fear that a private experience will become known or that one mistake will reveal something terrible about them.

This fear can be almost as damaging as the shame itself.

The person begins organising life around preventing exposure.

They may remain quiet, avoid intimacy, withdraw from social situations or try to control every detail of their appearance and behaviour.

They may become highly perfectionistic because making a mistake feels emotionally dangerous.

The underlying aim is not always achievement. It may be protection.

If everything is done perfectly, perhaps nobody will see the inadequacy the person believes is hidden underneath.

This creates enormous pressure.

No human being can remain perfect, and every ordinary limitation then becomes a new threat.

Shame can therefore become similar to jealousy in its destructive intensity. Both emotions can be driven by fear, become repetitive and begin controlling how the person understands relationships and everyday events.

The person may know consciously that the reaction is excessive, but the emotional experience remains stronger than the rational understanding.

Shame as a Common Experience in Psychotherapy

Shame is one of the most frequently encountered painful emotions in psychotherapy, irrespective of the particular therapeutic orientation.

Patients may not always name it directly. They may initially describe depression, anxiety, low self-confidence, social withdrawal or relationship difficulties.

As the work develops, it may become clear that shame is operating beneath many of these complaints.

The patient may feel ashamed of needing psychotherapy. They may believe that seeking help proves they are weak or incapable of managing ordinary adult life.

They may also be ashamed of what they need to disclose.

Some patients have never spoken to anybody about particular experiences. They fear that if the psychotherapist knows the full story, they will be seen differently.

The patient may therefore speak gradually, omit details or describe events from an emotional distance.

This is not necessarily because they are unwilling to engage. They may be trying to discover whether the therapeutic relationship is safe enough to survive being known.

Shame depends heavily on the expectation of judgement.

For this reason, the relationship between the psychotherapist and the patient becomes central to the treatment.

The patient needs to discover whether difficult experiences can be described without immediate humiliation, contempt or rejection.

This does not mean that the psychotherapist approves of every action. It means that the person and the behaviour are not reduced to one simple judgement.

The patient may have behaved badly and still require understanding. They may have imagined wrongdoing and still experience genuine emotional pain.

In both situations, the psychotherapist needs to understand how shame has become attached to the patient’s identity.

Why Shame Is So Difficult to Remove

Patients often enter psychotherapy hoping that shame can simply be removed.

They want to stop thinking about the event, stop feeling inferior and stop fearing how other people see them.

The wish is understandable because the emotion can be extremely painful.

However, shame is rarely resolved through one explanation or simple technique.

The event, memory or internal experience may have become connected with the person’s whole understanding of themselves. It may be linked with childhood, relationships, criticism, social expectations, trauma or the fear of losing connection with important people.

The lived experience cannot be erased.

Psychotherapy cannot remove the fact that something happened or that the person experienced it in a particular way.

The work is to change how the experience continues to operate.

The patient may gradually become able to remember without being completely overwhelmed. They may distinguish one action from their whole identity. They may question the imagined judgement of others and develop a more realistic view of themselves.

The aim is not to create a person who never feels shame.

It is to prevent shame from becoming an internal authority that controls the entire life.

When shame is proportionate, it can encourage reflection. When it becomes pathological, it turns reflection into persecution.

Psychotherapy begins by helping the patient recognise that difference.

The person can then start moving from the conviction that they are fundamentally unacceptable towards a more complex understanding: they may have made mistakes, experienced humiliations or carried painful feelings, but none of these experiences alone contains the whole truth about who they are.

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