And the Winner of the World’s Most Useless Emotion is: SHAME

"If you don't heal from what hurt you, you'll bleed on people who didn't cut you" – Isabella De Bruno

I once had an argument with a Facebook friend that resulted in him cutting me off after I held up a mirror to a flaw in his thinking. He was not demonstrating an openness to listening to the lived experiences of others and the situation became so irksome that I felt compelled to tell him exactly how I felt in full Jamaican parlance. As a Jamaican himself, he did not take too kindly to what I had to say and unfriended me almost as fast as I could post my comment.

Flash forward three months and lo and behold, I got a friend request from this same person. The therapist in me was curious and empathetic, the Jamaican in me used a choice “B” word preceded by “what the”. However, I chose connection and re-added him. Today, he is one of the most cherished connections I have in my life. Naturally, I wanted to unpack his choice for such a dramatic exit from my life at that point in time. He expressed to me that he found what I said to him highly offensive at the time, that it triggered shame and the desire to run and hide but that eventually, he came to see that I had a point.

It took three whole months for the level of shame from a simple debate – that did not even happen in person – to subside enough to allow for reflection, acknowledgement and the courage to re-engage. He took a huge emotional risk in reaching out as the possibility of me rejecting him was high. However, when we did reconnect and unpacked that experience, he was able to explain what drove the behaviour. Although that experience was over five years ago, the theme of shame has been emerging around me recently so I felt obliged to address it here.

Brené Brown, psychologist and researcher with an emphasis on shame, defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging—something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection”. I refer to Brené Brown’s TED Talk with clients with alarming regularity when we have to address shame in session. I am linking it here so that everyone can take a moment to listen to what her research found about shame.

Alfred Adler, the founder of Individual Psychology to which I subscribe, made a very clear distinction between guilt and guilt feelings, (shame). He pointed out that guilt is an emotion that forces us to take corrective action when we wrong someone else. However, shame makes us far more focused on ourselves thereby undermining the very relationships we want to preserve. Guilt refers to our behaviours, shame refers to our perceived worth as a human being. Since Adler felt that the human striving to belong and the ability to engage in one’s community is the greatest source of healing, it makes sense that the self-absorption of shame would undermine one’s mental and emotional health.

There are many resources available that address shame from the perspective of the person feeling it. However, I want to focus on the impact on the people around the person feeling it. Those people are often being mistreated for reasons that have nothing to do with them which is just plain wrong.

When I sit with people to talk about their shame, one of the consistent patterns of behaviour reported is the tendency to enter a self-protective emotional freeze which blocks out one’s ability to experience the discomfort of guilt. It is meant to save the person from the “threat” of conflict, rejection, criticism and the negative reactions of the party they have wronged. This happens whether these threats are real or imagined. However, what they do not see is the fact that this freeze, and the shame that fuels it, often takes a minimally bad situation and makes it catastrophically worse. They do not realize that shame is a very self-absorbed emotion that is far less likely to benefit anyone in the situation especially the person feeling shame. The choice to avoid guilt means absolving self of taking corrective action. How can not making amends make anything better?

In my therapy sessions, when I ask “how do you think the person you have been avoiding feels about the way you are treating them?” clients usually stop in their tracks and look at me blankly. In truth, they often do not even consider the impact of their actions on the person they hurt. This is a very serious problem. The inability to acknowledge the impact of their withdrawal from the situation is framed mentally as them “protecting themselves” when the other person experiences someone hurting them and then retreating into cold and uncaring silence. Essentially, by focusing wholly and solely on self, they are hurting someone further and demonstrating a complete lack of concern for the impact of their actions.

When someone is in a shame freeze, they do not see how they are hurting themselves because the underlying beliefs driving the freeze are not coming from the other person, they are originating within themselves. What often happens is that they are making the flawed assumption that the other person thinks they are unworthy, flawed, unreliable, and terrible. None of this is often true. What is far more common is that the person on the other side likely wants repair and is bewildered about the level of withdrawal over something that could have been solved in a short, honest conversation and more importantly, an apology for the offending behaviour.

It is important to understand that on the other side of one’s shame spiral is a person who is increasingly hurt by the choice to not engage. Every day that passes has a compounding hurtful impact on the person who is on the other side of the self-absorbed shame spiral. They are often confused by the withdrawal - which feels punitive - for something they did not even do. What is even worse is that they likely feel as though the other person has callously discarded them.

No one has any idea what is going on for another person mentally and therefore, they cannot guess that what is happening for the person who just discarded them. From their perspective, someone chose not to follow through on something they promised to do, they called them out on something that hurt them or, they requested additional effort on a project, and rather than take accountability, the person just disappeared. In a situation like that, the person who vulnerably stepped forward and shared their experience feels abandoned, rejected, disrespected, and hurt. All of these emotions would be perfectly appropriate to the situation in which they found themselves. When someone expresses a need or emotion, they are attempting to make the relationship better. When they are abandoned for doing that, they feel deeply hurt.  Eventually, that becomes reasonable anger and disconnection.

What the person who is sitting in a shame spiral needs to understand is that your sense of time may be distorted but time is time. It continues whether you want to accept that or not. The idea of “I will deal with this later” may appear to work for you but it certainly does not work for the person you hurt. They notice time in a far more accurate manner than you do and experience it in the excruciating pain you caused.

The first step in righting your wrong is understanding that the world is not going to end when you apologize for something you did or failed to do. Thinking that it will is selfish behaviour because you deny the other person the emotional validation that they deserve. Avoiding accountability for the impact of your actions on someone else is childish. Adults apologize because we all make mistakes. Most people respect and admire people who can admit that they are wrong. At the very least, it preserves the possibility of repairing the relationship.

Understand that conflict is inevitable in relationships of all kinds. The important thing is the ability and willingness to repair the relationship. That is the best predictor of long-term health in relationships across areas of life. It is ok to not know how to do this, you can simply tell the other person that you want to repair but do not know how. Most people are willing to tell you what they need from you in order to fix what is bruised. Your responsibility is to make sure that you show up in the way they ask once they have told you what it is that they need.

Ultimately though, you do have to understand that if too much time has passed without attempts at repair, there comes a point at which the other person will give up and have no desire for reconnection. That is the natural consequence of your procrastination. It would not be fair at that point to focus on your surprise that they are no longer interested in fixing the situation with you. That surprise is coming from the self-absorbed idea that people MUST be available when you finally decide to engage with them. They don’t.

Unfortunately, sometimes the price you pay for choosing not to think about the impact of your actions is regret. However, even that presents you with a choice. You can either learn from it and try to be better going forward, or you can return to the shame freeze behaviour and re-enact the whole process into isolating perpetuity. The path you choose is fully up to you.