Why We Feel Shame, and How to Transform It

Shame has got to be one of the most uncomfortable experiences of human life. When I’m working with my clients on shame and I ask them what shame feels like, they might tell me it’s a sickness in their stomach or a thick, sludge-like energy that makes them want to crawl out of their skin. Shame has the power to make you want to do almost anything to get away from that feeling.

And yet, every feeling that we are capable of feeling has a purpose and a reason. Sometimes that reason goes back to our very survival. So, what could be the upside of shame?

Why Shame Happens

While guilt usually draws our focus outward (“I did something bad”), shame draws our focus inward (“I am bad”). The feeling of shame is often incredibly intense, but also vague and hard to articulate. We know something is wrong with us and we fear everyone else knows it too. But if asked what exactly that thing is, we couldn’t tell you. It's an irrational, pure feeling that often goes all the way back to childhood.

Shame Is a Survival Mechanism

When we are children, we know one thing instinctually above all else: We need our caregivers to survive. During our developmental years, our attachment to our caregivers is vital. So when a caregiver is cruel or abusive, we might feel angry or want to run away, but some deep unconscious part of our brains knows we can’t. We have to internalize the abuse or cruelty in order to maintain the relationship.

Even in less extreme examples, shame can help us understand something confusing. If a caregiver is struggling with their emotions; if someone leaves; if someone dies; if there’s stress in the family—shame comes in to help a child make sense of something they can’t understand. Children are often way more sensitive than they get credit for. They can feel when something is wrong, especially if a caregiver is less present or seems more stressed than usual. Without being able to understand the complex emotions of another, shame will help fill in those gaps, giving a reason for the strange behavior and bad feelings.

Of course, stress is a normal and unavoidable part of life. We can’t (and shouldn’t) protect our children from all stress. From an attachment perspective, the key to fostering healthy self-esteem even under periods of stress is simply being present and connected with our children at least some of the time. (Even 30 percent of the time will do the trick, according to some studies!)

Shame Is an Inhibitory Emotion

When shame is present, it’s hard to focus on anything else. This quality makes shame very effective at shutting down other core emotions like anger and grief. If our systems perceive that expressing that emotion could be dangerous or useless, we might unintentionally override the anger with shame, internalizing that energy.

If we don’t have the tools to work intelligently with our core emotions, shame (and often anxiety) will show up to make sure we can’t feel anything else. In my experience, holding shame with gentleness and understanding its protective function usually allows us to be able to see what it’s hiding.

Shame Keeps Us Quiet

Shame is a highly introverted energy. It makes us want to draw inside ourselves like a snail into its shell. Shame drives disconnection and keeps us from cultivating conversation or connection. It tends to make us want to stay in silence and secrecy. While guilt may motivate us to apologize, take accountability, and move toward repair, shame tells us we are such horrible people that there’s no point in talking, connecting, repairing, or trying things in a different way. Shame can be very helpful for maintaining the status quo within silence, especially when our systems perceive that change could be dangerous on some level.

Shame loves silence—in fact, it needs it to exist. When we share what we feel with a compassionate witness and our feelings are held with gentleness, shame often dissolves, which allows for the possibility of healing and change.

Shame Keeps Us from Feeling

Shame can sometimes cause us to try to wiggle out of our bodies and move up into our heads where we can think instead of feel. Thinking, planning, and analyzing can help us feel more in control. Of course, then we can start falling into thought spirals about how we’re bad people and don’t deserve love and will never be good enough and so on, which only pulls us back down toward more shame.

We shouldn’t believe everything we think. Our emotions are real, and they do have important information for us. But our thinking brains don’t always perceive that information accurately, and the stories they tell about those emotions are sometimes way off from reality. It may sound counterintuitive, but getting stuck in familiar spirals of shame, guilt, or anxiety may actually feel safer than going deep into the core emotions we are feeling lower down in our bodies.

What to Do with Shame

With all this in mind, we can see that shame is trying to help us, but the stories it’s telling us may not be true at all. So, what should we do when shame arises?

Practice Body-Based Mindfulness

Mindfulness can help slow us down and notice what’s happening. We can look at what stories we are telling, what is actually happening, maybe even what we are feeling in our bodies.

We can ask ourselves if we’ve done something outside of our integrity and if there’s something to learn here. If there is, you’re likely dealing with healthy guilt, which helps us to live alongside the accepted rules of society and community.

Try Inner Child Work

If the feeling is general and vague, that it’s not about what we’ve done but who we are, it’s likely shame. Sometimes it helps to ask ourselves how old we feel when we tap into that shame. It might bring us back to a time in our lives when we learned to be ashamed or when shame was helpful in some way. If it feels possible and safe, we might even interact with that younger version of ourselves in a therapeutic or meditative setting.

Meet Your Basic Needs

Consider what your body might need right now. Shame can take hold more easily when we are lonely, hungry, exhausted, hungover, or when our hormones are out of balance. Taking gentle care of our bodies can often help soften those feelings if they are a pattern within us.

Connect with Caring Community

It’s often said that the opposite of addiction is connection. This could be because addiction is often driven by a need to numb shame, and shame can’t survive when we’re connected to our community.

So, we begin by honoring and understanding our shame; that it has many functions and purposes, but it does not tell the truth about ourselves. Working in connection with loved ones, a trusted counselor, or even within our relationship with ourselves can help us to move away from the false protection of shame and into a more genuine and authentic state of connection.

Learn more about shame and the primal brain.