Books that might help: Things might go terribly, horribly wrong – Kelly Wilson and Troy Dufrene

Shame is one of the most fascinating emotions I work with, and one of the least understood. Unlike fear or sadness, shame is often invisible even to the person feeling it. Many people come to therapy dealing with panic, anxiety, or a pattern they can’t explain, with no idea that shame is sitting underneath it.

This post is an introduction to what shame actually is, why we have it at all, and what we can do when it becomes a problem rather than a help. I have collected together some of my favourite resources on shame.

What is shame, really?

A good starting point is Brené Brown’s research, which did more than almost anyone’s to bring shame out of the shadows and into public conversation.

The Power of Vulnerability: Brené Brown, TED →

Listening to Shame: Brené Brown, TED →

Between them, these two talks describe shame as something almost everyone experiences but almost no one talks about, and show how much of it operates quietly, shaping our behaviour without our full awareness.

Shame isn’t the enemy: it has a job to do

It would be easy to conclude from this that shame is simply bad, and something to get rid of. In fact, for quite a long time I thought that was what I needed to help people to do. But I would tend to find people were reluctant to let go of shame. Some people were able to tell me that they thought it was important to have shame … and I realised they were right.

Shame does something useful: it helps us understand where the edges are in our relationships and our communities. It’s part of what helps us notice when we might be overstepping a boundary, or at risk of hurting someone, or of putting a relationship at risk. In that sense, shame is a social emotion, one that helps us stay connected to the people around us.

What we want is an adaptive shame response that helps us to function.

This is explored well in a talk by Lisa Etherson, a psychosexual therapist and researcher who has developed something called Shame Containment Theory:

If you want to change your life, change your relationship with shame: Lisa Etherson, TEDxUWS →

This is why we don’t want to try to remove shame altogether, even if that were possible. The problem isn’t that shame exists. It’s what happens when it gets out of hand.

When shame drives panic

Shame is deeply uncomfortable, and that discomfort often makes us want to get away from it as fast as possible. But here’s the difficulty: you cannot get away from an emotion by fighting it. Trying to push shame away doesn’t make it disappear; it tends to do the opposite.

A useful way to picture this is quicksand. If you panic and thrash against it, you sink faster. The instinct to fight is exactly what makes it worse. Emotions, shame included, tend to work the same way: struggling against the feeling is often what tips it over into a full state of fight-or-flight.

This is closely connected to something called experiential avoidance: the general pattern of trying to avoid or escape difficult internal experiences, which so often ends up amplifying them instead.

Contained shame and uncontained shame

One of the most useful things Lisa Etherson’s work offers is a distinction between two different experiences of shame:

• Contained shame is the quieter, more chronic version: things like a persistent sense of not being good enough, imposter feelings, or a nagging self-criticism. It can sit underneath someone’s life for years without ever being named as shame.
• Uncontained shame is the acute, overwhelming version: the “kick to the gut” experience of suddenly feeling exposed, often triggered by an unexpected event. This is the version most closely tied to panic, shutdown, or a sense that everything has fallen apart.

Recognising which one is present, and that shame is present at all, is often the turning point in therapy. Once it’s named, it becomes something we can actually work with.

What we can do about it

Over time, we all develop strategies to manage shame. Many of these strategies genuinely helped us once. The trouble is that we can outgrow them, or they can start to get in the way more than they help.

Often, I find that the shame people are carrying has outlived it’s usefulness.