Look. Shame plays a role in how all of us think of ourselves. We keep our shame hidden. We awkwardly try to navigate around it. We cover up scars. We comb hair over bald spots. Buy thick-heeled shoes to look a couple inches taller.
We all do this.
We all do this.
We wrestle and navigate and worry and stress about our perceived imperfections. I recently walked by a tabloid blaring a headline about an A-list celebrity who weighs herself five times a day. The editors plastered that headline on there because we can all relate to that fear, to being so debilitated by the anxiety and self-consciousness and self-loathing jackhammering in our heads, whispering that we’re not good enough, perfect enough, whole enough.
So how do we lose the shame?
How do we grow out of it?
How do we move past it?
We can’t walk around it.
We have to wade through the swamp.
But it’s not easy.
In his book Overcoming Destructive Anger, the psychologist Bernard Golden wrote, “Some researchers suggest that shame comes about from repeatedly being told, not that we did something bad, but that we are something bad. Shame, like guilt and embarrassment, involves negatively judging ourselves when we believe we’ve failed to live up to either our own standards or the standards of other people.”
My wife Leslie tries to be careful about this with our kids. She never says, “You’re so messy!” Instead, she says, “You haven’t put your books and clothes away yet.” She tries not to say, “You’re so forgetful.” Instead she’ll aim for something like, “You left your backpack at home today.”
Shahram Heshmat, associate professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Springfield, researched addiction for more than twenty years. He said that “in order to experience shame, you must have self-awareness that others are making judgment.”
Sounds sensible. Sounds logical.
When the other kids were laughing so hard about the “half a man” comment that they were slapping music stands, I understood pretty quickly that they were making a judgment.
But here’s a detail that might be just as important.
What if it’s not just others making judgment?
What if it’s us?
Sure, it’s easy to picture a scolding parent or nasty teacher as the enemy. A friend of mine still vividly recalls the angry face his father made when he wet the bed as a kid. And I remember watching my seventh-grade teacher rip up a poor kid’s spelling test after writing down O-D-J-E-K-T in big letters on the blackboard and asking the whole class what planet we all thought he was from since that’s how he spelled “object.”
We know those moments! They are the moments we can point at that create long-lasting shame.
But what if we participate in our own self-shame story, too?
How much do you blame others for your feelings of shame when the person actually internalizing, processing, writing, and repeating those is… you?
What story are you telling you about you?
What shame are you twisting into your brain all by yourself?
Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America states that “Shame is about how the ‘self’ views itself; that is, shame is not caused by concerns about others’ evaluations of the individual.” The researchers are suggesting that if you feel anxiety or worry about what other people think of you, that’s actually a consequence of shame, not a cause of it.
What what what?
In other words, you wouldn’t focus on how others see you unless you were already projecting some self-doubt and insecurities in the first place.
Let’s go back to gym class.
Can we float above that scene and look at it again through this new lens?
While I was sitting in that classroom, I took the joke my gym teacher said and the laughs from my peers and crystallized all of it into a clear, concise message that I internalized on the spot: “My balls are messed up. I’m never going to find a girlfriend. I’m never going to have kids. I have to hide this from everybody forever. In summary: I’m no good.”
I thought that! I’m not saying I got there totally on my own.
What I’m saying is that I was an actor in my shame play.
And maybe I had a lead role.