WHEN THE STAIN IS ON THE INSIDE: The Self-conscious Suffering of Shame.

Jonathan’s father was a hard man—harsh and hostile—an ex-Navy man whose deployments had no doubt traumatised him, although he never acknowledged that or sought any kind of treatment. He denied most emotions, especially the more vulnerable ones, but he was angry almost all the time. As a result, Jonathan was yelled at most days throughout his childhood, often in the context of his father’s heavy drinking and irrational disinhibition. And the content of the yelling was severely hyper-critical: “You stupid little boy…you’re weak and pathetic…man up for once…you are not my son.”

For years, Jonathan was on the receiving end of constant shaming. He desperately tried to elicit his father’s approval and love by being extra good, working hard and always staying attentive. Nothing ever worked. He struggled at school, found it very difficult to make friends or connect with people, and mostly felt vulnerable, fearful, unsupported and alone. In the end, he coped the best he could, using alcohol and drugs as a teenager, and lying, cheating, stealing and gambling well into his adulthood. For Jonathan, the stain was permanently on the inside, and it felt like there was nothing he could do to remove it.

Jonathan is an example of what it’s like to experience shaming as a child, and the ongoing impact of the memories of that shaming throughout one’s life. Such shame experiences and shame memories can cause a lot of human suffering.

What is Shame?

Shame is a powerful self-conscious and socially-focused emotion that involves feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, unattractiveness, defectiveness, powerlessness and/or self-consciousness, along with a desire to escape, hide or conceal our deficiencies. It is generally regarded as being a particularly intense, painful, and often incapacitating emotion. Sometimes, shame involves us judging ourselves in these powerfully negative ways, an aspect known as internal shame. At other times, shame involves our belief that others are judging us in these powerfully negative ways, which is known as external shame.

Shame experiences occur for us all, and can be present throughout our lives. Shame can occur within ourselves, even in instances when no one else is watching, or it can occur between us and others, or at broader group, social and cultural levels, and is recognised to be critical to our psychosocial development and functioning. Shame can affect our sense of ourselves, how we interact with others, or form and maintain relationships, as well as many life choices and actions we might go on to take. And shame can have profound, negative effects on both individual and relational psychological well-being.

Shame experiences are many and varied, but common examples of shaming are being put down, criticised or humiliated, rejected by parents or friends, bullied by peers, or generally experiencing rejection, failure, and abuse. When we are shamed, especially as children, our threat system is activated, creating a sense of a threatened social self. Shame experiences early in life may also inhibit the development of the affiliative soothing system, and therefore our ability to down-regulate threat through receiving care and connection from others. As a result, we see ourselves as vulnerable, defective, weak, inadequate and unworthy, and at the same time we start to see others as critical, judgmental, unavailable, and dangerous.

Shame as an Evolved Emotion

Over the last few decades, much has been written about the adaptive function of shame from an evolutionary perspective. UK clinical psychologist and researcher, Professor Paul Gilbert, has written extensively on the evolutionary biopsychosocial model of shame (for example, see Gilbert, 2007). The propensity to feel shame is thought to be rooted in our evolved socially competitive motives, and arises from us being a self-aware, identity-forming and highly social species. Shame, therefore, emerges in humans from our innate motives for attachment, group belonging and social status, and our resulting basic needs to appear attractive in the eyes of the others, and to be thought of positively and fondly in the minds of others.

In fact, the uniquely human capacity for social understanding and self-conscious awareness is at once a big part of the success of our species, and a source of human suffering through shame. Our evolved human brains give us self-other awareness and understanding, and in the process force us to confront having our deficits, failures and flaws potentially exposed to, and judged by, others, coupled, of course, with the internal experience of the self as shameful. However, even this is thought to have an adaptive function, in that shame acts as a warning signal that others might be viewing us as having negative qualities, or lacking positive ones, and thus we are at risk of rejection or exclusion, or even persecution. The implications of all that for the prehistoric human are isolation, vulnerability and, ultimately, death.

Shame Experiences are Long Remembered

Early shame experiences, and the resulting effects on threat system activation and sense of threatened social self, can painfully take hold in the form of shame memories. By way of a little thought experiment right now, see if you can bring to mind an example from your own childhood or adolescence of a mild to moderate shame experience. Perhaps it was feeling foolish on the sporting field, or some sort of social faux pas, or even being excluded or rejected by your peers. When the memory comes to mind, what do you notice? What happens to your body, or your mind?

We all have these experiences. In fact, shame is truly a universal human experience. And so we can do this thought experiment, and we will all largely feel the hot flush to the face, the bowing of the head, and the urge to hide ourselves away, even when the experience itself is from long ago. Shame experiences are very common, and yet they can also be very painful and cause us suffering, including ongoing suffering in the form of shame memories. Recent research has explored the psychological effects of shame memories, and found that shame memories come along with traumatic qualities, become central to self-identity, and can have very negative psychological and emotional consequences.

The Traumatic Qualities and Centrality of Shame Memories

Shame memories can have qualities very similar to those associated with other types of trauma. Some of the psychological consequences of a trauma, for example, a motor vehicle accident, are intrusive symptoms, such as thoughts and images of the accident repeatedly coming to mind, avoidance, such as avoiding talking about, thinking about or being near to anything associated with cars or driving, and hyperarousal, feeling anxious, angry, easily startled, and always on guard whenever near a car, driving or in traffic. Shame memories operate very much like this, with these same kinds of effects, as if the shame experience is itself a trauma. And it is! Shame experiences are, in many ways, social or relational traumas.

Dr Marcela Matos and Professor Jose Pinto-Gouveia and their colleagues at the University of Coimbra in Portugal have studied extensively the phenomenology of shame memories. They have found and described through their research that shame memories may reveal trauma-like qualities and engender a sense of ongoing threat to one’s sense of self and psychological integrity (Matos & Pinto-Gouveia, 2010). We can have shame memories with these traumatic qualities, such as the intrusions, avoidance and hyperarousal symptoms related to the shame experience, and therefore feel and believe that we exist in the mind of the others as unattractive, inferior, defective, unlovable, or inadequate. Other people become the threat, and therefore relational or interpersonal situations are often the trigger for painfully current feelings of shame. We also see and judge ourselves in the same negative and devaluing way.

Furthermore, shame memories can become central to a person’s self-identity. According to research by Pinto-Gouveia and Matos (2011), we begin to define ourselves according to the shame experience and what it means about us and who we are. Out of this we develop very global and unchanging negative views of ourselves: “I am bad…I am no good…I am worthless.” Despite time passing, the shame memories become part of the structure of how we see ourselves, keeping our feelings of shame very much alive.

The Psychological and Emotional Consequences of Shame Memories

Unfortunately, shame memories have been found to significantly increase the risk of negative emotions, such as depression, anxiety and stress. Furthermore, the severity of the traumatic qualities and centrality of the shame memories are associated with severity of psychopathology.

And to make matters worse, Matos and her colleagues (2017) have found that shame memories are an important part of the origins of negative beliefs and fears about receiving care, compassion and love from others, or from oneself. This is the double-bind of shame and shame memories: they increase our risk of psychological distress of one sort or another, plus they reduce our openness to seek and receive the social connection and support we need in order to suffer less.

A Role for Self-Compassion

All of this begs the question, “What can we do to help people work with, and alleviate the suffering, associated with shame memories?”

Part of our work at the University of Queensland Compassionate Mind Research Group is exploring just this question. We teamed up with Dr Matos to explore the role compassion, especially self-compassion, might play in the relationship between shame memories and depression. The results of our study found that self-compassion did indeed play a role in mediating this relationship, namely that our skills and abilities to be compassionate towards ourselves in the face of life difficulties may help to reduce the painful negative effects of traumatic shame memories on psychological wellbeing, and promote feelings of safeness and contentment (Steindl, Matos, & Creed, 2018).

A number of compassion-based interventions have been found to help increase competencies for self-compassion. Dr James Kirby (2017) has written a review of the evidence around the many different approaches. Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT; Gilbert, 2009) was specifically developed to work with individuals who experience high levels of shame, and may help cultivate the competencies necessary to engage with self compassion and act in compassionate ways toward the self. Our research has provided evidence for the added benefit of developing the competencies of self-compassion consistent with the CFT model to work with shame memories.

Try It for Yourself

Bring to mind once again that mild to moderate shame experience you thought of earlier. Allowing that memory to be there, move your body into a compassionate posture, sitting upright but relaxed, with your feet flat on the floor, shoulders back, and chest open. Raise your head a little, soften your brow and relax your jaw.

Slow your breathing; breathing in for a count of five, and out for a count of five. On the out breath say, silently to yourself, “Body is slowing down,” and then on the next out breath say, “Mind is slowing down.” Spend a few moments creating a feeling of groundedness and stillness in the body. Bring a friendly expression to your face, perhaps even a faint smile.

Next, consider, and say silently to yourself, with a warm and friendly voice, the following:

We all just find ourselves here, born with tricky human brains that we didn’t get to choose, and shaped by a whole range of life experiences that we also didn’t get to choose.

All of this means that our minds and bodies are built for us, not by us, and we have a wide range of thoughts and feelings, urges and desires, as well as behaviours and interactions, some of which we don’t want.

But our brains can also learn and change, take responsibility and set compassionate intentions. So, we can develop the strength and courage to acknowledge who we are, forgive those aspects of ourselves that have been most painful, and make a commitment to be helpful to ourselves and others, and certainly not carelessly or purposefully cause harm.

Finally, bring your focus back to your breathing, maintaining that slow, smooth, soothing rhythm, allowing any remaining tension and uneasiness to gradually subside in your body.

Conclusion

Shame experiences are a part of what it is to be a human being. Shame evolved as part of the human need to belong in a group, however, it comes along with a tradeoff: greater psychological suffering. And this suffering can continue long after the shame experience, through shame memories that have traumatic qualities and become central to our self-identities. In fact, shame memories contribute to depression, anxiety and stress, among other negative effects on psychological well-being.

Perhaps developing compassion across all orientations—compassion for others, receiving compassion from others, and self-compassion—will be worthwhile in reducing the suffering associated with shame, although self-compassion has been found to be particularly important.

If you are human, you probably have many memories of shame experiences from early in your life. That’s completely normal! What is also innate in all of us is the motivation to be compassionate, including the potential to be compassionate to ourselves. If we can develop our skills and abilities in self-compassion then this may provide a wonderful contribution to alleviating some of the suffering that can come along with the painful memories of past shame. If you would like to try a range of compassion focused exercises, please feel free to visit The Compassion Initiative at https://soundcloud.com/jamesn-kirby. Let us know what you think!

References

Gilbert, P. (2007). The evolution of shame as a marker for relationship security. In J. L. Tracy, R. W. Robins & J. P. Tangney (Eds.), The self-conscious emotions: Theory and research (pp. 283–309). New York, NY: Guilford.

Gilbert, P. (2009). The compassionate mind: A new approach to life’s challenges. London: Constable & Robinson.

Kirby, J. N. (2017) Compassion interventions: the programmes, the evidence, and implications for research and practice. Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, esearch & ractice, 90(3), 432-455. https://doi.org/10.1111/papt.12104.

Matos, M., Duarte, J., & Pinto-Gouveia, J. (2017). The origins of fears of compassion: Shame and lack of safeness memories, fears of compassion and psychopathology. The Journal of Psychology, 151, 804–819. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.2017.1393380.

Matos, M., & Pinto-Gouveia, J. (2010). Shame as a traumatic memory. Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, 17(4), 299–312. https://doi.org/10.1002/cpp.659.

Pinto-Gouveia, J., & Matos, M. (2011). Can shame memories become a key to identity? The centrality of shame memories predicts psychopathology. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25(2), 281–290. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1689.

Steindl, S. R., Matos, M., & Creed, A. K. (2018). Early shame and safeness memories, and later depressive symptoms and safe affect: The mediating role of self-compassion. Current Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-018-9990-8.